# Research Papers — 2026-01 · bundle page 75 of 189 > Full-text markdown of papers #3701–3750 of 9403 published in 2026-01, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 9403-paper 2026-01 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-01/page/75 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-01/page/74.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-01/page/76.md) ### CLEANER: Self-Purified Trajectories Boost Agentic Reinforcement Learning Authors: Tianshi Xu, Yuteng Chen, Meng Li Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15141v2 Agentic Reinforcement Learning (RL) has empowered Large Language Models (LLMs) to utilize tools like Python interpreters for complex problem-solving. However, for parameter-constrained models (e.g., 4B--7B), the exploration phase is often plagued by frequent execution failures, creating noisy trajectories that hinder policy optimization. Under standard outcome-based reward settings, this noise leads to a critical credit assignment issue, where erroneous actions are inadvertently reinforced alongside successful outcomes. Existing mitigations face a dilemma: dense rewards often trigger reward hacking, while supersampling incurs prohibitive computational costs. To address these challenges, we propose CLEANER. Distinct from external filtering methods, CLEANER exploits the model's intrinsic self-correction capabilities to eliminate error-contaminated context directly during data collection. At its core, the Similarity-Aware Adaptive Rollback (SAAR) mechanism autonomously constructs clean, purified trajectories by retrospectively replacing failures with successful self-corrections. Based on semantic similarity, SAAR adaptively regulates replacement granularity from shallow execution repairs to deep reasoning substitutions. By training on these self-purified paths, the model internalizes correct reasoning patterns rather than error-recovery loops. Empirical results on AIME24/25, GPQA, and LiveCodeBench show average accuracy gains of 6%, 3%, and 5% over baselines. Notably, CLEANER matches state-of-the-art performance using only one-third of the training steps, highlighting trajectory purification as a scalable solution for efficient agentic RL. Our models and code are available at GitHub --- ### Building Deep Graph Predictors with Graph Imitation Learning Authors: André Eberhard, Gerhard Neumann, Pascal Friederich Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15133v3 Recent years have seen substantial progress in neural generation of text, images, and audio, supported by mature training pipelines and large-scale optimization. For graphs, however, comparable progress has been more limited. We attribute this gap to graph-specific optimization and representation challenges that undermine the effectiveness of training neural networks with backpropagation and gradient descent. We argue that representing graphs on a fixed-size Euclidean grid, as is common in recently proposed models for supervised graph prediction, may not be the optimal choice in these settings. To support our view, we provide an analysis of neural graph generation methods and identify theoretical challenges that lead to pitfalls when training neural networks to produce graphs as their output. Motivated by this analysis, we introduce \textbf{GRA}ph~\textbf{I}mitation~\textbf{L}earning~(GRAIL), a framework for training neural networks in supervised settings in which the supervision signal is a graph. GRAIL generates graphs sequentially through a Markov decision process over embeddings of partial graphs, thereby avoiding the representation issues associated with fixed-size grid graph representations. We empirically show that GRAIL achieves competitive results on supervised graph prediction across a comprehensive suite of 18 benchmarks, matching or surpassing state-of-the-art methods in several settings. --- ### Vehicle Routing with Finite Time Horizon using Deep Reinforcement Learning with Improved Network Embedding Authors: Ayan Maity, Sudeshna Sarkar Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15131v1 In this paper, we study the vehicle routing problem with a finite time horizon. In this routing problem, the objective is to maximize the number of customer requests served within a finite time horizon. We present a novel routing network embedding module which creates local node embedding vectors and a context-aware global graph representation. The proposed Markov decision process for the vehicle routing problem incorporates the node features, the network adjacency matrix and the edge features as components of the state space. We incorporate the remaining finite time horizon into the network embedding module to provide a proper routing context to the embedding module. We integrate our embedding module with a policy gradient-based deep Reinforcement Learning framework to solve the vehicle routing problem with finite time horizon. We trained and validated our proposed routing method on real-world routing networks, as well as synthetically generated Euclidean networks. Our experimental results show that our method achieves a higher customer service rate than the existing routing methods. Additionally, the solution time of our method is significantly lower than that of the existing methods. --- ### The Plausibility Trap: Using Probabilistic Engines for Deterministic Tasks Authors: Ivan Carrera, Daniel Maldonado-Ruiz Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15130v1 The ubiquity of Large Language Models (LLMs) is driving a paradigm shift where user convenience supersedes computational efficiency. This article defines the "Plausibility Trap": a phenomenon where individuals with access to Artificial Intelligence (AI) models deploy expensive probabilistic engines for simple deterministic tasks-such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or basic verification-resulting in significant resource waste. Through micro-benchmarks and case studies on OCR and fact-checking, we quantify the "efficiency tax"-demonstrating a ~6.5x latency penalty-and the risks of algorithmic sycophancy. To counter this, we introduce Tool Selection Engineering and the Deterministic-Probabilistic Decision Matrix, a framework to help developers determine when to use Generative AI and, crucially, when to avoid it. We argue for a curriculum shift, emphasizing that true digital literacy relies not only in knowing how to use Generative AI, but also on knowing when not to use it. --- ### RSNA Large Language Model Benchmark Dataset for Chest Radiographs of Cardiothoracic Disease: Radiologist Evaluation and Validation Enhanced by AI Labels (REVEAL-CXR) Authors: Yishu Wei, Adam E. Flanders, Errol Colak, John Mongan, Luciano M Prevedello, Po-Hao Chen, Henrique Min Ho Lee, Gilberto Szarf, Hamilton Shoji, Jason Sho, Katherine Andriole, Tessa Cook et al. Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15129v1 Multimodal large language models have demonstrated comparable performance to that of radiology trainees on multiple-choice board-style exams. However, to develop clinically useful multimodal LLM tools, high-quality benchmarks curated by domain experts are essential. To curate released and holdout datasets of 100 chest radiographic studies each and propose an artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted expert labeling procedure to allow radiologists to label studies more efficiently. A total of 13,735 deidentified chest radiographs and their corresponding reports from the MIDRC were used. GPT-4o extracted abnormal findings from the reports, which were then mapped to 12 benchmark labels with a locally hosted LLM (Phi-4-Reasoning). From these studies, 1,000 were sampled on the basis of the AI-suggested benchmark labels for expert review; the sampling algorithm ensured that the selected studies were clinically relevant and captured a range of difficulty levels. Seventeen chest radiologists participated, and they marked "Agree all", "Agree mostly" or "Disagree" to indicate their assessment of the correctness of the LLM suggested labels. Each chest radiograph was evaluated by three experts. Of these, at least two radiologists selected "Agree All" for 381 radiographs. From this set, 200 were selected, prioritizing those with less common or multiple finding labels, and divided into 100 released radiographs and 100 reserved as the holdout dataset. The holdout dataset is used exclusively by RSNA to independently evaluate different models. A benchmark of 200 chest radiographic studies with 12 benchmark labels was created and made publicly available https://imaging.rsna.org, with each chest radiograph verified by three radiologists. In addition, an AI-assisted labeling procedure was developed to help radiologists label at scale, minimize unnecessary omissions, and support a semicollaborative environment. --- ### DeepFedNAS: Efficient Hardware-Aware Architecture Adaptation for Heterogeneous IoT Federations via Pareto-Guided Supernet Training Authors: Bostan Khan, Masoud Daneshtalab Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV, cs.DC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15127v4 Deploying federated learning across heterogeneous IoT device fleets requires tailored neural network architectures for each device class, yet existing Federated Neural Architecture Search (FedNAS) methods suffer from unguided supernet training and prohibitively costly post-training search pipelines that validate thousands of subnets to construct learned accuracy predictors. We introduce DeepFedNAS, a two-phase framework built on a multi-objective fitness function that synthesizes information-theoretic network metrics with architectural heuristics. In the first phase, Federated Pareto Optimal Supernet Training replaces random subnet sampling with a pre-computed cache of elite, high-fitness architectures, yielding a superior supernet. In the second phase, a Predictor-Free Search uses the structural fitness function as an accuracy proxy without constructing a learned subnet-accuracy predictor. In our CIFAR-10 benchmark, preparing the baseline predictor requires evaluating 10,000 subnets over the 5,000-image validation split, totaling 50 million image-level forward evaluations. DeepFedNAS eliminates these evaluations and selects a hardware-optimized architecture in $\sim$20 seconds on a CPU. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and CINIC-10 demonstrate state-of-the-art accuracy and robust performance under extreme non-IID conditions ($α=0.1$). On CIFAR-100, DeepFedNAS provides an average 2.12-percentage-point gain across the four computation-budget intervals. Under the lowest evaluated computation budget, its mean result exceeds SuperFedNAS's best mean accuracy while using $2.95\times$ fewer parameters. These results make DeepFedNAS practical for scalable, communication-constrained IoT federations. Source code: https://github.com/bostankhan6/DeepFedNAS --- ### RAG-GFM: Overcoming In-Memory Bottlenecks in Graph Foundation Models via Retrieval-Augmented Generation Authors: Haonan Yuan, Qingyun Sun, Jiacheng Tao, Xingcheng Fu, Jianxin Li Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15124v2 Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) have emerged as a frontier in graph learning, which are expected to deliver transferable representations across diverse tasks. However, GFMs remain constrained by in-memory bottlenecks: they attempt to encode knowledge into model parameters, which limits semantic capacity, introduces heavy lossy compression with conflicts, and entangles graph representation with the knowledge in ways that hinder efficient adaptation, undermining scalability and interpretability. In this work,we propose RAG-GFM, a Retrieval-Augmented Generation aided Graph Foundation Model that offloads knowledge from parameters and complements parameterized learning. To externalize graph knowledge, we build a dual-modal unified retrieval module, where a semantic store from prefix-structured text and a structural store from centrality-based motif. To preserve heterogeneous information, we design a dual-view alignment objective that contrasts both modalities to capture both content and relational patterns. To enable efficient downstream adaptation, we perform in-context augmentation to enrich supporting instances with retrieved texts and motifs as contextual evidence. Extensive experiments on five benchmark graph datasets demonstrate that RAG-GFM consistently outperforms 13 state-of-the-art baselines in both cross-domain node and graph classification, achieving superior effectiveness and efficiency. --- ### BREPS: Bounding-Box Robustness Evaluation of Promptable Segmentation Authors: Andrey Moskalenko, Danil Kuznetsov, Irina Dudko, Anastasiia Iasakova, Nikita Boldyrev, Denis Shepelev, Andrei Spiridonov, Andrey Kuznetsov, Vlad Shakhuro Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15123v1 Promptable segmentation models such as SAM have established a powerful paradigm, enabling strong generalization to unseen objects and domains with minimal user input, including points, bounding boxes, and text prompts. Among these, bounding boxes stand out as particularly effective, often outperforming points while significantly reducing annotation costs. However, current training and evaluation protocols typically rely on synthetic prompts generated through simple heuristics, offering limited insight into real-world robustness. In this paper, we investigate the robustness of promptable segmentation models to natural variations in bounding box prompts. First, we conduct a controlled user study and collect thousands of real bounding box annotations. Our analysis reveals substantial variability in segmentation quality across users for the same model and instance, indicating that SAM-like models are highly sensitive to natural prompt noise. Then, since exhaustive testing of all possible user inputs is computationally prohibitive, we reformulate robustness evaluation as a white-box optimization problem over the bounding box prompt space. We introduce BREPS, a method for generating adversarial bounding boxes that minimize or maximize segmentation error while adhering to naturalness constraints. Finally, we benchmark state-of-the-art models across 10 datasets, spanning everyday scenes to medical imaging. Code - https://github.com/emb-ai/BREPS. --- ### Emerging from Ground: Addressing Intent Deviation in Tool-Using Agents via Deriving Real Calls into Virtual Trajectories Authors: Qian Xiong, Yuekai Huang, Bo Yang, Yujia Zheng, Tianhao Li, Ziyou Jiang, Zhiyuan Chang, Zhaoyang Li, Huanxiang Feng, Mingyang Li Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15120v2 LLMs have advanced tool-using agents for real-world applications, yet they often lead to unexpected behaviors or results. Beyond obvious failures, the subtle issue of "intent deviation" severely hinders reliable evaluation and performance improvement. Existing post-training methods generally leverage either real system samples or virtual data simulated by LLMs. However, the former is costly due to reliance on hand-crafted user requests, while the latter suffers from distribution shift from the real tools in the wild. Additionally, both methods lack negative samples tailored to intent deviation scenarios, hindering effective guidance on preference learning. We introduce RISE, a "Real-to-Virtual" method designed to mitigate intent deviation. Anchoring on verified tool primitives, RISE synthesizes virtual trajectories and generates diverse negative samples through mutation on critical parameters. With synthetic data, RISE fine-tunes backbone LLMs via the two-stage training for intent alignment. Evaluation results demonstrate that data synthesized by RISE achieve promising results in eight metrics covering user requires, execution trajectories and agent responses. Integrating with training, RISE achieves an average 35.28% improvement in Acctask (task completion) and 23.27% in Accintent (intent alignment), outperforming SOTA baselines by 1.20--42.09% and 1.17--54.93% respectively. --- ### Vision Models for Medical Imaging: A Hybrid Approach for PCOS Detection from Ultrasound Scans Authors: Md Mahmudul Hoque, Md Mehedi Hassain, Muntakimur Rahaman, Md. Towhidul Islam, Shaista Rani, Md Sharif Mollah Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15119v1 Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) is the most familiar endocrine illness in women of reproductive age. Many Bangladeshi women suffer from PCOS disease in their older age. The aim of our research is to identify effective vision-based medical image analysis techniques and evaluate hybrid models for the accurate detection of PCOS. We introduced two novel hybrid models combining convolutional and transformer-based approaches. The training and testing data were organized into two categories: "infected" (PCOS-positive) and "noninfected" (healthy ovaries). In the initial stage, our first hybrid model, 'DenConST' (integrating DenseNet121, Swin Transformer, and ConvNeXt), achieved 85.69% accuracy. The final optimized model, 'DenConREST' (incorporating Swin Transformer, ConvNeXt, DenseNet121, ResNet18, and EfficientNetV2), demonstrated superior performance with 98.23% accuracy. Among all evaluated models, DenConREST showed the best performance. This research highlights an efficient solution for PCOS detection from ultrasound images, significantly improving diagnostic accuracy while reducing detection errors. --- ### WavLink: Compact Audio-Text Embeddings with a Global Whisper Token Authors: Gokul Karthik Kumar, Ludovick Lepauloux, Hakim Hacid Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.SD, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15118v2 Whisper has become the de-facto encoder for extracting general-purpose audio features in large audio-language models, where a 30-second clip is typically represented by 1500 frame features projected into an LLM. In contrast, audio-text embedding models like CLAP-based models have largely relied on alternative audio encoders (e.g., HTS-AT, PaSST), and have not leveraged Whisper effectively. We present WavLink, a compact audio-text embedding model that augments Whisper encoder with a learnable global token, trained jointly with a text encoder. Through a systematic study of design choices, including pretrained text encoders, loss functions, training modes, and data mixtures, we identify configurations that yield state-of-the-art retrieval performance. Our two-stage training recipe across three model sizes, combined with Matryoshka-style supervision, improves scalability, enabling 8x smaller embeddings with minimal performance drop. WavLink also demonstrates competitive performance on AIR-Bench with MCQs and zero-shot classification. --- ### Training-Free and Interpretable Hateful Video Detection via Multi-stage Adversarial Reasoning Authors: Shuonan Yang, Yuchen Zhang, Zeyu Fu Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15115v1 Hateful videos pose serious risks by amplifying discrimination, inciting violence, and undermining online safety. Existing training-based hateful video detection methods are constrained by limited training data and lack of interpretability, while directly prompting large vision-language models often struggle to deliver reliable hate detection. To address these challenges, this paper introduces MARS, a training-free Multi-stage Adversarial ReaSoning framework that enables reliable and interpretable hateful content detection. MARS begins with the objective description of video content, establishing a neutral foundation for subsequent analysis. Building on this, it develops evidence-based reasoning that supports potential hateful interpretations, while in parallel incorporating counter-evidence reasoning to capture plausible non-hateful perspectives. Finally, these perspectives are synthesized into a conclusive and explainable decision. Extensive evaluation on two real-world datasets shows that MARS achieves up to 10% improvement under certain backbones and settings compared to other training-free approaches and outperforms state-of-the-art training-based methods on one dataset. In addition, MARS produces human-understandable justifications, thereby supporting compliance oversight and enhancing the transparency of content moderation workflows. The code is available at https://github.com/Multimodal-Intelligence-Lab-MIL/MARS. --- ### Auditing Language Model Unlearning via Information Decomposition Authors: Anmol Goel, Alan Ritter, Iryna Gurevych Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15111v1 We expose a critical limitation in current approaches to machine unlearning in language models: despite the apparent success of unlearning algorithms, information about the forgotten data remains linearly decodable from internal representations. To systematically assess this discrepancy, we introduce an interpretable, information-theoretic framework for auditing unlearning using Partial Information Decomposition (PID). By comparing model representations before and after unlearning, we decompose the mutual information with the forgotten data into distinct components, formalizing the notions of unlearned and residual knowledge. Our analysis reveals that redundant information, shared across both models, constitutes residual knowledge that persists post-unlearning and correlates with susceptibility to known adversarial reconstruction attacks. Leveraging these insights, we propose a representation-based risk score that can guide abstention on sensitive inputs at inference time, providing a practical mechanism to mitigate privacy leakage. Our work introduces a principled, representation-level audit for unlearning, offering theoretical insight and actionable tools for safer deployment of language models. --- ### Pb4U-GNet: Resolution-Adaptive Garment Simulation via Propagation-before-Update Graph Network Authors: Aoran Liu, Kun Hu, Clinton Ansun Mo, Qiuxia Wu, Wenxiong Kang, Zhiyong Wang Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15110v1 Garment simulation is fundamental to various applications in computer vision and graphics, from virtual try-on to digital human modelling. However, conventional physics-based methods remain computationally expensive, hindering their application in time-sensitive scenarios. While graph neural networks (GNNs) offer promising acceleration, existing approaches exhibit poor cross-resolution generalisation, demonstrating significant performance degradation on higher-resolution meshes beyond the training distribution. This stems from two key factors: (1) existing GNNs employ fixed message-passing depth that fails to adapt information aggregation to mesh density variation, and (2) vertex-wise displacement magnitudes are inherently resolution-dependent in garment simulation. To address these issues, we introduce Propagation-before-Update Graph Network (Pb4U-GNet), a resolution-adaptive framework that decouples message propagation from feature updates. Pb4U-GNet incorporates two key mechanisms: (1) dynamic propagation depth control, adjusting message-passing iterations based on mesh resolution, and (2) geometry-aware update scaling, which scales predictions according to local mesh characteristics. Extensive experiments show that even trained solely on low-resolution meshes, Pb4U-GNet exhibits strong generalisability across diverse mesh resolutions, addressing a fundamental challenge in neural garment simulation. --- ### An Agentic Operationalization of DISARM for FIMI Investigation on Social Media Authors: Kevin Tseng, Juan Carlos Toledano, Bart De Clerck, Yuliia Dukach, Phil Tinn Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.SI, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.HC, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15109v3 Interoperable data and intelligence flows among allied partners and operational end-users remain essential to NATO's collective defense across both conventional and hybrid threat environments. Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) increasingly spans multiple societal domains and information ecosystems, complicating threat characterization, persistent situational awareness, and coordinated response. Concurrent advances in AI have further lowered the barrier to conducting large-scale, AI-augmented FIMI activities -- including automated generation, personalization, and amplification of manipulative content. While frameworks such as DISARM offer a standardized analytical and metadata schema for characterizing FIMI incidents, their practical application for automating large-scale detection remains challenging. We present a framework-agnostic, agent-based operationalization of DISARM piloted to support FIMI investigation on social platforms. Our agent coordination pipeline integrates general agentic AI components that (1) identify candidate manipulative behaviors in social-media data and (2) map these behaviors to DISARM taxonomies through transparent, auditable reasoning steps. Evaluation on two practitioner-annotated, real-world datasets demonstrates that our approach can effectively scale analytic workflows that are currently manual, time-intensive, and interpretation-heavy. Notably, the experiment surfaced more than 30 previously undetected Russian bot accounts -- deployed for the 2025 election in Moldova -- during the prior non-agentic investigation. By enhancing analytic throughput, interoperability, and explainability, the proposed approach provides a direct contribution to defense policy and planning needs for improved situational awareness, cross-partner data integration, and rapid assessment of information-environment threats. --- ### One scale to rule them all: interpretable multi-scale Deep Learning for predicting cell survival after proton and carbon ion irradiation Authors: Giulio Bordieri, Giorgio Cartechini, Anna Bianchi, Anna Selva, Valeria Conte, Marta Missiaggia, Francesco G. Cordoni Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: physics.bio-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15106v1 The relationship between the physical characteristics of the radiation field and biological damage is central to both radiotherapy and radioprotection, yet the link between spatial scales of energy deposition and biological effects remains not entirely understood. To address this, we developed an interpretable deep learning model that predicts cell survival after proton and carbon ion irradiation, leveraging sequential attention to highlight relevant features and provide insight into the contribution of different energy deposition scales. Trained and tested on the PIDE dataset, our model incorporates, beside LET, nanodosimetric and microdosimetric quantities simulated with MC-Startrack and Open-TOPAS, enabling multi-scale characterization. While achieving high predictive accuracy, our approach also emphasizes transparency in decision-making. We demonstrate high accuracy in predicting RBE for in vitro experiments. Multiple scales are utilized concurrently, with no single spatial scale being predominant. Quantities defined at smaller spatial domains generally have a greater influence, whereas the LET plays a lesser role. --- ### Field-Space Autoencoder for Scalable Climate Emulators Authors: Johannes Meuer, Maximilian Witte, Étiénne Plésiat, Thomas Ludwig, Christopher Kadow Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.LG, eess.IV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15102v1 Kilometer-scale Earth system models are essential for capturing local climate change. However, these models are computationally expensive and produce petabyte-scale outputs, which limits their utility for applications such as probabilistic risk assessment. Here, we present the Field-Space Autoencoder, a scalable climate emulation framework based on a spherical compression model that overcomes these challenges. By utilizing Field-Space Attention, the model efficiently operates on native climate model output and therefore avoids geometric distortions caused by forcing spherical data onto Euclidean grids. This approach preserves physical structures significantly better than convolutional baselines. By producing a structured compressed field, it serves as a good baseline for downstream generative emulation. In addition, the model can perform zero-shot super-resolution that maps low-resolution large ensembles and scarce high-resolution data into a shared representation. We train a generative diffusion model on these compressed fields. The model can simultaneously learn internal variability from abundant low-resolution data and fine-scale physics from sparse high-resolution data. Our work bridges the gap between the high volume of low-resolution ensemble statistics and the scarcity of high-resolution physical detail. --- ### Three-dimensional visualization of X-ray micro-CT with large-scale datasets: Efficiency and accuracy for real-time interaction Authors: Yipeng Yin, Rao Yao, Qingying Li, Dazhong Wang, Hong Zhou, Zhijun Fang, Jianing Chen, Longjie Qian, Mingyue Wu Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15098v1 As Micro-CT technology continues to refine its characterization of material microstructures, industrial CT ultra-precision inspection is generating increasingly large datasets, necessitating solutions to the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency in the 3D characterization of defects during ultra-precise detection. This article provides a unique perspective on recent advances in accurate and efficient 3D visualization using Micro-CT, tracing its evolution from medical imaging to industrial non-destructive testing (NDT). Among the numerous CT reconstruction and volume rendering methods, this article selectively reviews and analyzes approaches that balance accuracy and efficiency, offering a comprehensive analysis to help researchers quickly grasp highly efficient and accurate 3D reconstruction methods for microscopic features. By comparing the principles of computed tomography with advancements in microstructural technology, this article examines the evolution of CT reconstruction algorithms from analytical methods to deep learning techniques, as well as improvements in volume rendering algorithms, acceleration, and data reduction. Additionally, it explores advanced lighting models for high-accuracy, photorealistic, and efficient volume rendering. Furthermore, this article envisions potential directions in CT reconstruction and volume rendering. It aims to guide future research in quickly selecting efficient and precise methods and developing new ideas and approaches for real-time online monitoring of internal material defects through virtual-physical interaction, for applying digital twin model to structural health monitoring (SHM). --- ### Circadian Modulation of Semantic Exploration in Social Media Language Authors: Vuong Hung Truong, Mariana Gabrielle Cangco Reyes, Masatoshi Koizumi, Jihwan Myung Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CY, cs.SI, q-bio.NC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15091v1 Human cognition exhibits strong circadian modulation, yet its influence on high-dimensional semantic behavior remains poorly understood. Using large-scale Reddit data, we quantify time-of-day variation in language use by embedding text into a pretrained transformer model and measuring semantic entropy as an index of linguistic exploration-exploitation, for which we show a robust circadian rhythmicity that could be entrained by seasonal light cues. Distinguishing between local and global semantic entropy reveals a systematic temporal dissociation: local semantic exploration peaks in the morning, reflecting broader exploration of semantic space, whereas global semantic diversity peaks later in the day as submissions accumulate around already established topics, consistent with "rich-get-richer" dynamics. These patterns are not explained by sentiment or affective valence, indicating that semantic exploration captures a cognitive dimension distinct from mood. The observed temporal structure aligns with known diurnal patterns in neuromodulatory systems, suggesting that biological circadian rhythms extend to the semantic domain. --- ### Memory Retention Is Not Enough to Master Memory Tasks in Reinforcement Learning Authors: Oleg Shchendrigin, Egor Cherepanov, Alexey K. Kovalev, Aleksandr I. Panov Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15086v1 Effective decision-making in the real world depends on memory that is both stable and adaptive: environments change over time, and agents must retain relevant information over long horizons while also updating or overwriting outdated content when circumstances shift. Existing Reinforcement Learning (RL) benchmarks and memory-augmented agents focus primarily on retention, leaving the equally critical ability of memory rewriting largely unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce a benchmark that explicitly tests continual memory updating under partial observability, i.e. the natural setting where an agent must rely on memory rather than current observations, and use it to compare recurrent, transformer-based, and structured memory architectures. Our experiments reveal that classic recurrent models, despite their simplicity, demonstrate greater flexibility and robustness in memory rewriting tasks than modern structured memories, which succeed only under narrow conditions, and transformer-based agents, which often fail beyond trivial retention cases. These findings expose a fundamental limitation of current approaches and emphasize the necessity of memory mechanisms that balance stable retention with adaptive updating. Our work highlights this overlooked challenge, introduces benchmarks to evaluate it, and offers insights for designing future RL agents with explicit and trainable forgetting mechanisms. Code: https://quartz-admirer.github.io/Memory-Rewriting/ --- ### Bangla Music Genre Classification Using Bidirectional LSTMS Authors: Muntakimur Rahaman, Md Mahmudul Hoque, Md Mehedi Hassain Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.SD, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15083v1 Bangla music is enrich in its own music cultures. Now a days music genre classification is very significant because of the exponential increase in available music, both in digital and physical formats. It is necessary to index them accordingly to facilitate improved retrieval. Automatically classifying Bangla music by genre is essential for efficiently locating specific pieces within a vast and diverse music library. Prevailing methods for genre classification predominantly employ conventional machine learning or deep learning approaches. This work introduces a novel music dataset comprising ten distinct genres of Bangla music. For the task of audio classification, we utilize a recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture. Specifically, a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network is implemented to train the model and perform the classification. Feature extraction represents a foundational stage in audio data processing. This study utilizes Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) to transform raw audio waveforms into a compact and representative set of features. The proposed framework facilitates music genre classification by leveraging these extracted features. Experimental results demonstrate a classification accuracy of 78%, indicating the system's strong potential to enhance and streamline the organization of Bangla music genres. --- ### LoRAP: Low-Rank Aggregation Prompting for Quantized Graph Neural Networks Training Authors: Chenyu Liu, Haige Li, Luca Rossi Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.LG, cs.SI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15079v1 Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are neural networks that aim to process graph data, capturing the relationships and interactions between nodes using the message-passing mechanism. GNN quantization has emerged as a promising approach for reducing model size and accelerating inference in resource-constrained environments. Compared to quantization in LLMs, quantizing graph features is more emphasized in GNNs. Inspired by the above, we propose to leverage prompt learning, which manipulates the input data, to improve the performance of quantization-aware training (QAT) for GNNs. To mitigate the issue that prompting the node features alone can only make part of the quantized aggregation result optimal, we introduce Low-Rank Aggregation Prompting (LoRAP), which injects lightweight, input-dependent prompts into each aggregated feature to optimize the results of quantized aggregations. Extensive evaluations on 4 leading QAT frameworks over 9 graph datasets demonstrate that LoRAP consistently enhances the performance of low-bit quantized GNNs while introducing a minimal computational overhead. --- ### Multi-Agent Constraint Factorization Reveals Latent Invariant Solution Structure Authors: Christopher Scofield Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15077v1 Multi-agent systems (MAS) composed of large language models often exhibit improved problem-solving performance despite operating on identical information. In this work, we provide a formal explanation for this phenomenon grounded in operator theory and constrained optimization. We model each agent as enforcing a distinct family of validity constraints on a shared solution state, and show that a MAS implements a factorized composition of constraint-enforcement operators. Under mild conditions, these dynamics converge to invariant solution sets defined by the intersection of agent constraint sets. Such invariant structures are generally not dynamically accessible to a single agent applying all constraints simultaneously, even when expressive capacity and information are identical. We extend this result from exact constraint enforcement to soft constraints via proximal operators, and apply the formalism to contemporary text-based dialog systems. --- ### The Why Behind the Action: Unveiling Internal Drivers via Agentic Attribution Authors: Chen Qian, Peng Wang, Dongrui Liu, Junyao Yang, Dadi Guo, Ling Tang, Jilin Mei, Qihan Ren, Shuai Shao, Yong Liu, Jie Fu, Jing Shao et al. Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15075v2 Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents are widely used in real-world applications such as customer service, web navigation, and software engineering. As these systems become more autonomous and are deployed at scale, understanding why an agent takes a particular action becomes increasingly important for accountability and governance. However, existing research predominantly focuses on \textit{failure attribution} to localize explicit errors in unsuccessful trajectories, which is insufficient for explaining \textbf{the reason behind agent behaviors}. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel framework for \textbf{general agentic attribution}, designed to identify the internal factors driving agent actions regardless of the task outcome. Our framework operates hierarchically to manage the complexity of agent interactions. Specifically, at the \textit{component level}, we employ temporal likelihood dynamics to identify critical interaction steps; then at the \textit{sentence level}, we refine this localization using perturbation-based analysis to isolate the specific textual evidence. We validate our framework across a diverse suite of agentic scenarios, including standard tool use and subtle reliability risks like memory-induced bias. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework reliably pinpoints pivotal historical events and sentences behind the agent behavior, offering a critical step toward safer and more accountable agentic systems. Codes are available at https://github.com/AI45Lab/AgentDoG. --- ### SmartOracle -- An Agentic Approach to Mitigate Noise in Differential Oracles Authors: Srinath Srinivasan, Tim Menzies, Marcelo D'Amorim Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.SE, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15074v1 Differential fuzzers detect bugs by executing identical inputs across distinct implementations of the same specification, such as JavaScript interpreters. Validating the outputs requires an oracle and for differential testing of JavaScript, these are constructed manually, making them expensive, time-consuming, and prone to false positives. Worse, when the specification evolves, this manual effort must be repeated. Inspired by the success of agentic systems in other SE domains, this paper introduces SmartOracle. SmartOracle decomposes the manual triage workflow into specialized Large Language Model (LLM) sub-agents. These agents synthesize independently gathered evidence from terminal runs and targeted specification queries to reach a final verdict. For historical benchmarks, SmartOracle achieves 0.84 recall with an 18% false positive rate. Compared to a sequential Gemini 2.5 Pro baseline, it improves triage accuracy while reducing analysis time by 4$\times$ and API costs by 10$\times$. In active fuzzing campaigns, SmartOracle successfully identified and reported previously unknown specification-level issues across major engines, including bugs in V8, JavaScriptCore, and GraalJS. The success of SmartOracle's agentic architecture on Javascript suggests it might be useful other software systems- a research direction we will explore in future work. --- ### The Pictorial Cortex: Zero-Shot Cross-Subject fMRI-to-Image Reconstruction via Compositional Latent Modeling Authors: Jingyang Huo, Yikai Wang, Yanwei Fu, Jianfeng Feng Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15071v1 Decoding visual experiences from human brain activity remains a central challenge at the intersection of neuroscience, neuroimaging, and artificial intelligence. A critical obstacle is the inherent variability of cortical responses: neural activity elicited by the same visual stimulus differs across individuals and trials due to anatomical, functional, cognitive, and experimental factors, making fMRI-to-image reconstruction non-injective. In this paper, we tackle a challenging yet practically meaningful problem: zero-shot cross-subject fMRI-to-image reconstruction, where the visual experience of a previously unseen individual must be reconstructed without subject-specific training. To enable principled evaluation, we present a unified cortical-surface dataset -- UniCortex-fMRI, assembled from multiple visual-stimulus fMRI datasets to provide broad coverage of subjects and stimuli. Our UniCortex-fMRI is particularly processed by standardized data formats to make it possible to explore this possibility in the zero-shot scenario of cross-subject fMRI-to-image reconstruction. To tackle the modeling challenge, we propose PictorialCortex, which models fMRI activity using a compositional latent formulation that structures stimulus-driven representations under subject-, dataset-, and trial-related variability. PictorialCortex operates in a universal cortical latent space and implements this formulation through a latent factorization-composition module, reinforced by paired factorization and re-factorizing consistency regularization. During inference, surrogate latents synthesized under multiple seen-subject conditions are aggregated to guide diffusion-based image synthesis for unseen subjects. Extensive experiments show that PictorialCortex improves zero-shot cross-subject visual reconstruction, highlighting the benefits of compositional latent modeling and multi-dataset training. --- ### Enhancing Few-Shot Out-of-Distribution Detection via the Refinement of Foreground and Background Authors: Tianyu Li, Zongqian Wu, Songyue Cai, Ping Hu, Xiaofeng Zhu Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15065v2 CLIP-based foreground-background (FG-BG) decomposition methods have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in improving few-shot out-of-distribution (OOD) detection performance. However, existing approaches still suffer from several limitations. For background regions obtained from decomposition, existing methods adopt a uniform suppression strategy for all patches, overlooking the varying contributions of different patches to the prediction. For foreground regions, existing methods fail to adequately consider that some local patches may exhibit appearance or semantic similarity to other classes, which may mislead the training process. To address these issues, we propose a new plug-and-play framework. This framework consists of three core components: (1) a Foreground-Background Decomposition module, which follows previous FG-BG methods to separate an image into foreground and background regions; (2) an Adaptive Background Suppression module, which adaptively weights patch classification entropy; and (3) a Confusable Foreground Rectification module, which identifies and rectifies confusable foreground patches. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed plug-and-play framework significantly improves the performance of existing FG-BG decomposition methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/lounwb/FoBoR. --- ### Incentive-Tuning: Understanding and Designing Incentives for Empirical Human-AI Decision-Making Studies Authors: Simran Kaur, Sara Salimzadeh, Ujwal Gadiraju Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.GT, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15064v1 AI has revolutionised decision-making across various fields. Yet human judgement remains paramount for high-stakes decision-making. This has fueled explorations of collaborative decision-making between humans and AI systems, aiming to leverage the strengths of both. To explore this dynamic, researchers conduct empirical studies, investigating how humans use AI assistance for decision-making and how this collaboration impacts results. A critical aspect of conducting these studies is the role of participants, often recruited through crowdsourcing platforms. The validity of these studies hinges on the behaviours of the participants, hence effective incentives that can potentially affect these behaviours are a key part of designing and executing these studies. In this work, we aim to address the critical role of incentive design for conducting empirical human-AI decision-making studies, focusing on understanding, designing, and documenting incentive schemes. Through a thematic review of existing research, we explored the current practices, challenges, and opportunities associated with incentive design for human-AI decision-making empirical studies. We identified recurring patterns, or themes, such as what comprises the components of an incentive scheme, how incentive schemes are manipulated by researchers, and the impact they can have on research outcomes. Leveraging the acquired understanding, we curated a set of guidelines to aid researchers in designing effective incentive schemes for their studies, called the Incentive-Tuning Framework, outlining how researchers can undertake, reflect on, and document the incentive design process. By advocating for a standardised yet flexible approach to incentive design and contributing valuable insights along with practical tools, we hope to pave the way for more reliable and generalizable knowledge in the field of human-AI decision-making. --- ### Differential Privacy Image Generation with Reconstruction Loss and Noise Injection Using an Error Feedback SGD Authors: Qiwei Ma, Jun Zhang Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15061v1 Traditional data masking techniques such as anonymization cannot achieve the expected privacy protection while ensuring data utility for privacy-preserving machine learning. Synthetic data plays an increasingly important role as it generates a large number of training samples and prevents information leakage in real data. The existing methods suffer from the repeating trade-off processes between privacy and utility. We propose a novel framework for differential privacy generation, which employs an Error Feedback Stochastic Gradient Descent(EFSGD) method and introduces a reconstruction loss and noise injection mechanism into the training process. We generate images with higher quality and usability under the same privacy budget as the related work. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our proposed framework for both grayscale and RGB images. We achieve state-of-the-art results over almost all metrics on three benchmarks: MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CelebA. --- ### The Responsibility Vacuum: Organizational Failure in Scaled Agent Systems Authors: Oleg Romanchuk, Roman Bondar Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.AI, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15059v1 Modern CI/CD pipelines integrating agent-generated code exhibit a structural failure in responsibility attribution. Decisions are executed through formally correct approval processes, yet no entity possesses both the authority to approve those decisions and the epistemic capacity to meaningfully understand their basis. We define this condition as responsibility vacuum: a state in which decisions occur, but responsibility cannot be attributed because authority and verification capacity do not coincide. We show that this is not a process deviation or technical defect, but a structural property of deployments where decision generation throughput exceeds bounded human verification capacity. We identify a scaling limit under standard deployment assumptions, including parallel agent generation, CI-based validation, and individualized human approval gates. Beyond a throughput threshold, verification ceases to function as a decision criterion and is replaced by ritualized approval based on proxy signals. Personalized responsibility becomes structurally unattainable in this regime. We further characterize a CI amplification dynamic, whereby increasing automated validation coverage raises proxy signal density without restoring human capacity. Under fixed time and attention constraints, this accelerates cognitive offloading in the broad sense and widens the gap between formal approval and epistemic understanding. Additional automation therefore amplifies, rather than mitigates, the responsibility vacuum. We conclude that unless organizations explicitly redesign decision boundaries or reassign responsibility away from individual decisions toward batch- or system-level ownership, responsibility vacuum remains an invisible but persistent failure mode in scaled agent deployments. --- ### SpooFL: Spoofing Federated Learning Authors: Isaac Baglin, Xiatian Zhu, Simon Hadfield Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.CR, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15055v1 Traditional defenses against Deep Leakage (DL) attacks in Federated Learning (FL) primarily focus on obfuscation, introducing noise, transformations or encryption to degrade an attacker's ability to reconstruct private data. While effective to some extent, these methods often still leak high-level information such as class distributions or feature representations, and are frequently broken by increasingly powerful denoising attacks. We propose a fundamentally different perspective on FL defense: framing it as a spoofing problem.We introduce SpooFL (Figure 1), a spoofing-based defense that deceives attackers into believing they have recovered the true training data, while actually providing convincing but entirely synthetic samples from an unrelated task. Unlike prior synthetic-data defenses that share classes or distributions with the private data and thus still leak semantic information, SpooFL uses a state-of-the-art generative model trained on an external dataset with no class overlap. As a result, attackers are misled into recovering plausible yet completely irrelevant samples, preventing meaningful data leakage while preserving FL training integrity. We implement the first example of such a spoofing defense, and evaluate our method against state-of-the-art DL defenses and demonstrate that it successfully misdirects attackers without compromising model performance significantly. --- ### Beyond Factual Accuracy: Evaluating Global Reasoning Integrity in RAG Systems with LogicScore Authors: Zhichao Yan, Yunxiao Zhao, Jiapu Wang, Jiaoyan Chen, Xiaoli Li, Ru Li, Jeff Z. Pan Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15050v5 Current evaluation methods for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) suffer from \textit{factual myopia}: they relentlessly emphasize factual accuracy yet neglect global logical integrity in long-form answer generation. This drives models to force unnatural connections, producing factually grounded yet logically incoherent responses with unaddressed gaps, ambiguous links, or redundant premises. To mitigate this, we present \textsc{LogicScore}, shifting from local, fact-by-fact assessment to rigorous global reasoning scrutiny. Grounded in Horn Rules, our approach integrates a backward verification mechanism to systematically evaluate three key reasoning dimensions: \textit{Completeness} (logically sound deduction), \textit{Essentiality} (non-redundancy), and \textit{Determinateness} (consistent answer entailment). Extensive experiments across three multi-hop QA datasets (HotpotQA, MusiQue, and 2WikiMultiHopQA) and over 20 LLMs (including GPT-5, Gemini-3-Pro, LLaMA3, and task-specific tuned models) reveal a critical capability gap: leading models often achieve high factual accuracy (e.g., 92.85\% precision for Gemini-3 Pro) but struggle with global reasoning quality (e.g., 35.11\% Essentiality for Gemini-3 Pro). Our work establishes a robust standard for logical evaluation, highlighting the need to prioritize reasoning coherence alongside factual grounding in LLM development. --- ### Deep Leakage with Generative Flow Matching Denoiser Authors: Isaac Baglin, Xiatian Zhu, Simon Hadfield Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15049v1 Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for decentralized model training, yet it remains vulnerable to deep leakage (DL) attacks that reconstruct private client data from shared model updates. While prior DL methods have demonstrated varying levels of success, they often suffer from instability, limited fidelity, or poor robustness under realistic FL settings. We introduce a new DL attack that integrates a generative Flow Matching (FM) prior into the reconstruction process. By guiding optimization toward the distribution of realistic images (represented by a flow matching foundation model), our method enhances reconstruction fidelity without requiring knowledge of the private data. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and target models demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art attacks across pixel-level, perceptual, and feature-based similarity metrics. Crucially, the method remains effective across different training epochs, larger client batch sizes, and under common defenses such as noise injection, clipping, and sparsification. Our findings call for the development of new defense strategies that explicitly account for adversaries equipped with powerful generative priors. --- ### Federated Transformer-GNN for Privacy-Preserving Brain Tumor Localization with Modality-Level Explainability Authors: Andrea Protani, Riccardo Taiello, Marc Molina Van Den Bosch, Luigi Serio Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15042v1 Deep learning models for brain tumor analysis require large and diverse datasets that are often siloed across healthcare institutions due to privacy regulations. We present a federated learning framework for brain tumor localization that enables multi-institutional collaboration without sharing sensitive patient data. Our method extends a hybrid Transformer-Graph Neural Network architecture derived from prior decoder-free supervoxel GNNs and is deployed within CAFEIN\textsuperscript{\textregistered}, CERN's federated learning platform designed for healthcare environments. We provide an explainability analysis through Transformer attention mechanisms that reveals which MRI modalities drive the model predictions. Experiments on the BraTS dataset demonstrate a key finding: while isolated training on individual client data triggers early stopping well before reaching full training capacity, federated learning enables continued model improvement by leveraging distributed data, ultimately matching centralized performance. This result provides strong justification for federated learning when dealing with complex tasks and high-dimensional input data, as aggregating knowledge from multiple institutions significantly benefits the learning process. Our explainability analysis, validated through rigorous statistical testing on the full test set (paired t-tests with Bonferroni correction), reveals that deeper network layers significantly increase attention to T2 and FLAIR modalities ($p<0.001$, Cohen's $d$=1.50), aligning with clinical practice. --- ### HyperNet-Adaptation for Diffusion-Based Test Case Generation Authors: Oliver Weißl, Vincenzo Riccio, Severin Kacianka, Andrea Stocco Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.LG, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15041v2 The increasing deployment of deep learning systems requires systematic evaluation of their reliability in real-world scenarios. Traditional gradient-based adversarial attacks introduce small perturbations that rarely correspond to realistic failures and mainly assess robustness rather than functional behavior. Generative test generation methods offer an alternative but are often limited to simple datasets or constrained input domains. Although diffusion models enable high-fidelity image synthesis, their computational cost and limited controllability restrict their applicability to large-scale testing. We present HyNeA, a generative testing method that enables direct and efficient control over diffusion-based generation. HyNeA provides dataset-free controllability through hypernetworks, allowing targeted manipulation of the generative process without relying on architecture-specific conditioning mechanisms or dataset-driven adaptations such as fine-tuning. HyNeA employs a distinct training strategy that supports instance-level tuning to identify failure-inducing test cases without requiring datasets that explicitly contain examples of similar failures. This approach enables the targeted generation of realistic failure cases at substantially lower computational cost than search-based methods. Experimental results show that HyNeA improves controllability and test diversity compared to existing generative test generators and generalizes to domains where failure-labeled training data is unavailable. --- ### A Curriculum-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for the Electric Vehicle Routing Problem Authors: Mertcan Daysalilar, Fuat Uyguroglu, Gabriel Nicolosi, Adam Meyers Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15038v1 The electric vehicle routing problem with time windows (EVRPTW) is a complex optimization problem in sustainable logistics, where routing decisions must minimize total travel distance, fleet size, and battery usage while satisfying strict customer time constraints. Although deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has shown great potential as an alternative to classical heuristics and exact solvers, existing DRL models often struggle to maintain training stability-failing to converge or generalize when constraints are dense. In this study, we propose a curriculum-based deep reinforcement learning (CB-DRL) framework designed to resolve this instability. The framework utilizes a structured three-phase curriculum that gradually increases problem complexity: the agent first learns distance and fleet optimization (Phase A), then battery management (Phase B), and finally the full EVRPTW (Phase C). To ensure stable learning across phases, the framework employs a modified proximal policy optimization algorithm with phase-specific hyperparameters, value and advantage clipping, and adaptive learning-rate scheduling. The policy network is built upon a heterogeneous graph attention encoder enhanced by global-local attention and feature-wise linear modulation. This specialized architecture explicitly captures the distinct properties of depots, customers, and charging stations. Trained exclusively on small instances with N=10 customers, the model demonstrates robust generalization to unseen instances ranging from N=5 to N=100, significantly outperforming standard baselines on medium-scale problems. Experimental results confirm that this curriculum-guided approach achieves high feasibility rates and competitive solution quality on out-of-distribution instances where standard DRL baselines fail, effectively bridging the gap between neural speed and operational reliability. --- ### Knowledge Restoration-driven Prompt Optimization: Unlocking LLM Potential for Open-Domain Relational Triplet Extraction Authors: Xiaonan Jing, Gongqing Wu, Xingrui Zhuo, Lang Sun, Jiapu Wang Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15037v2 Open-domain Relational Triplet Extraction (ORTE) aims to mine structured knowledge without predefined relation schemas. Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced ORTE toward a prompt-driven paradigm through powerful in-context learning. However, adapting their extraction behavior to varying open-domain contexts remains challenging. Existing methods typically rely on manually crafted prompts that remain fixed across inputs, despite substantial variation in linguistic expressions and contextual structures. This mismatch may lead to unsupported triplets, while the absence of ground-truth annotations makes such deficiencies difficult to identify and correct. Moreover, free-form relation generation produces non-canonical relation surface forms, undermining knowledge graph consistency. To address these challenges, we propose Knowledge Restoration-driven Prompt Optimization (KRPO), a framework for label-free target-corpus adaptation. KRPO restores extracted triplets into textual statements and evaluates their semantic consistency with the source inputs, deriving intrinsic feedback without gold annotations. This feedback is transformed into natural-language optimization guidance for batch-wise prompt optimization and adaptation. KRPO further introduces a Memory-augmented Relation Canonicalizer that aligns free-form relations with a dynamically updated schema memory, improving relation consistency. Experiments on three ORTE benchmarks with multiple LLM backbones demonstrate strong overall performance, with KRPO achieving the best average F1 score across the evaluated settings. --- ### Factorizable joint shift revisited Authors: Dirk Tasche Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15036v4 Factorizable joint shift (FJS) represents a type of distribution shift (or dataset shift) that comprises both covariate and label shift. Recently, it has been observed that FJS actually arises from consecutive label and covariate (or vice versa) shifts. Research into FJS so far has been confined mostly to the case of categorical labels. We propose a framework for analysing distribution shift in the case of a general label space, thus covering both classification and regression models. Based on the framework, we generalise existing results on FJS to general label spaces and present and analyse a related extension to label distribution estimation of the expectation maximisation (EM) algorithm for class prior probabilities. We also take a fresh look at generalized label shift (GLS) in the case of a general label space. --- ### Visual and Cognitive Demands of a Large Language Model-Powered In-vehicle Conversational Agent Authors: Chris Monk, Allegra Ayala, Christine S. P. Yu, Gregory M. Fitch, Dara Gruber Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15034v1 Driver distraction remains a leading contributor to motor vehicle crashes, necessitating rigorous evaluation of new in-vehicle technologies. This study assessed the visual and cognitive demands associated with an advanced Large Language Model (LLM) conversational agent (Gemini Live) during on-road driving, comparing it against handsfree phone calls, visual turn-by-turn guidance (low load baseline), and the Operation Span (OSPAN) task (high load anchor). Thirty-two licensed drivers completed five secondary tasks while visual and cognitive demands were measured using the Detection Response Task (DRT) for cognitive load, eye-tracking for visual attention, and subjective workload ratings. Results indicated that Gemini Live interactions (both single-turn and multi-turn) and hands-free phone calls shared similar levels of cognitive load, between that of visual turn-by-turn guidance and OSPAN. Exploratory analysis showed that cognitive load remained stable across extended multi-turn conversations. All tasks maintained mean glance durations well below the well-established 2-second safety threshold, confirming low visual demand. Furthermore, drivers consistently dedicated longer glances to the roadway between brief off-road glances toward the device during task completion, particularly during voice-based interactions, rendering longer total-eyes-off-road time findings less consequential. Subjective ratings mirrored objective data, with participants reporting low effort, demands, and perceived distraction for Gemini Live. These findings demonstrate that advanced LLM conversational agents, when implemented via voice interfaces, impose cognitive and visual demands comparable to established, low-risk hands-free benchmarks, supporting their safe deployment in the driving environment. --- ### Emergent, not Immanent: A Baradian Reading of Explainable AI Authors: Fabio Morreale, Joan Serrà, Yuki Mitsufuji Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15029v2 Explainable AI (XAI) is frequently positioned as a technical problem of revealing the inner workings of an AI model. This position is affected by unexamined onto-epistemological assumptions: meaning is treated as immanent to the model, the explainer is positioned outside the system, and a causal structure is presumed recoverable through computational techniques. In this paper, we draw on Barad's agential realism to develop an alternative onto-epistemology of XAI. We propose that interpretations are material-discursive performances that emerge from situated entanglements of the AI model with humans, context, and the interpretative apparatus. To develop this position, we read a comprehensive set of XAI methods through agential realism and reveal the assumptions and limitations that underpin several of these methods. We then articulate the framework's ethical dimension and propose design directions for XAI interfaces that support emergent interpretation, using a speculative text-to-music interface as a case study. --- ### ExPrIS: Knowledge-Level Expectations as Priors for Object Interpretation from Sensor Data Authors: Marian Renz, Martin Günther, Felix Igelbrink, Oscar Lima, Martin Atzmueller Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15025v1 While deep learning has significantly advanced robotic object recognition, purely data-driven approaches often lack semantic consistency and fail to leverage valuable, pre-existing knowledge about the environment. This report presents the ExPrIS project, which addresses this challenge by investigating how knowledge-level expectations can serve as to improve object interpretation from sensor data. Our approach is based on the incremental construction of a 3D Semantic Scene Graph (3DSSG). We integrate expectations from two sources: contextual priors from past observations and semantic knowledge from external graphs like ConceptNet. These are embedded into a heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (GNN) to create an expectation-biased inference process. This method moves beyond static, frame-by-frame analysis to enhance the robustness and consistency of scene understanding over time. The report details this architecture, its evaluation, and outlines its planned integration on a mobile robotic platform. --- ### Mixture-of-Experts Models in Vision: Routing, Optimization, and Generalization Authors: Adam Rokah, Daniel Veress, Caleb Caulk, Sourav Sharan Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15021v1 Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures enable conditional computation by routing inputs to multiple expert subnetworks and are often motivated as a mechanism for scaling large language models. In this project, we instead study MoE behavior in an image classification setting, focusing on predictive performance, expert utilization, and generalization. We compare dense, SoftMoE, and SparseMoE classifier heads on the CIFAR10 dataset under comparable model capacity. Both MoE variants achieve slightly higher validation accuracy than the dense baseline while maintaining balanced expert utilization through regularization, avoiding expert collapse. To analyze generalization, we compute Hessian-based sharpness metrics at convergence, including the largest eigenvalue and trace of the loss Hessian, evaluated on both training and test data. We find that SoftMoE exhibits higher sharpness by these metrics, while Dense and SparseMoE lie in a similar curvature regime, despite all models achieving comparable generalization performance. Complementary loss surface perturbation analyses reveal qualitative differences in non-local behavior under finite parameter perturbations between dense and MoE models, which help contextualize curvature-based measurements without directly explaining validation accuracy. We further evaluate empirical inference efficiency and show that naively implemented conditional routing does not yield inference speedups on modern hardware at this scale, highlighting the gap between theoretical and realized efficiency in sparse MoE models. --- ### SpatialV2A: Visual-Guided High-fidelity Spatial Audio Generation Authors: Yanan Wang, Linjie Ren, Zihao Li, Junyi Wang, Tian Gan Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15017v2 While video-to-audio generation has achieved remarkable progress in semantic and temporal alignment, most existing studies focus solely on these aspects, paying limited attention to the spatial perception and immersive quality of the synthesized audio. This limitation stems largely from current models' reliance on mono audio datasets, which lack the binaural spatial information needed to learn visual-to-spatial audio mappings. To address this gap, we introduce two key contributions: we construct BinauralVGGSound, the first large-scale video-binaural audio dataset designed to support spatially aware video-to-audio generation; and we propose a end-to-end spatial audio generation framework guided by visual cues, which explicitly models spatial features. Our framework incorporates a visual-guided audio spatialization module that ensures the generated audio exhibits realistic spatial attributes and layered spatial depth while maintaining semantic and temporal alignment. Experiments show that our approach substantially outperforms state-of-the-art models in spatial fidelity and delivers a more immersive auditory experience, without sacrificing temporal or semantic consistency. The demo page can be accessed at https://github.com/renlinjie868-web/SpatialV2A. --- ### LiViBench: An Omnimodal Benchmark for Interactive Livestream Video Understanding Authors: Xiaodong Wang, Langling Huang, Zhirong Wu, Xu Zhao, Teng Xu, Xuhong Xia, Peixi Peng Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15016v1 The development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has advanced general video understanding. However, existing video evaluation benchmarks primarily focus on non-interactive videos, such as movies and recordings. To fill this gap, this paper proposes the first omnimodal benchmark for interactive livestream videos, LiViBench. It features a diverse set of 24 tasks, highlighting the perceptual, reasoning, and livestream-specific challenges. To efficiently construct the dataset, we design a standardized semi-automatic annotation workflow that incorporates the human-in-the-loop at multiple stages. The workflow leverages multiple MLLMs to form a multi-agent system for comprehensive video description and uses a seed-question-driven method to construct high-quality annotations. All interactive videos in the benchmark include audio, speech, and real-time comments modalities. To enhance models' understanding of interactive videos, we design tailored two-stage instruction-tuning and propose a Video-to-Comment Retrieval (VCR) module to improve the model's ability to utilize real-time comments. Based on these advancements, we develop LiVi-LLM-7B, an MLLM with enhanced knowledge of interactive livestreams. Experiments show that our model outperforms larger open-source models with up to 72B parameters, narrows the gap with leading proprietary models on LiViBench, and achieves enhanced performance on general video benchmarks, including VideoMME, LongVideoBench, MLVU, and VideoEval-Pro. --- ### Plug-and-Play Benchmarking of Reinforcement Learning Algorithms for Large-Scale Flow Control Authors: Jannis Becktepe, Aleksandra Franz, Nils Thuerey, Sebastian Peitz Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15015v2 Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promising results in active flow control (AFC), yet progress in the field remains difficult to assess as existing studies rely on heterogeneous observation and actuation schemes, numerical setups, and evaluation protocols. Current AFC benchmarks attempt to address these issues but heavily rely on external computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solvers, are not fully differentiable, and provide limited 3D and multi-agent support. To overcome these limitations, we introduce FluidGym, the first standalone, fully differentiable benchmark suite for RL in AFC. Built entirely in PyTorch on top of the GPU-accelerated PICT solver, FluidGym runs in a single Python stack, requires no external CFD software, and provides standardized evaluation protocols. We present baseline results with PPO, SAC, DPC, and TD-MPC, and release all environments, datasets, and trained models as public resources. FluidGym enables systematic comparison of control methods, establishes a scalable foundation for future research in learning-based flow control, and is available at github.com/safe-autonomous-systems/fluidgym. --- ### Efficient and Minimax Optimal In-context Nonparametric Regression with Transformers Authors: Michelle Ching, Ioana Popescu, Nico Smith, Tianyi Ma, William G. Underwood, Richard J. Samworth Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.ST arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15014v2 We study in-context learning for nonparametric regression with $α$-Hölder smooth regression functions, for some $α>0$. We prove that, with $n$ in-context examples and $d$-dimensional regression covariates, a pretrained transformer with $Θ(\log n)$ parameters and $Ω\bigl(n^{2α/(2α+d)}\log^3 n\bigr)$ pretraining sequences can achieve the minimax optimal rate of convergence $O\bigl(n^{-2α/(2α+d)}\bigr)$ in mean squared error. Our result requires substantially fewer transformer parameters and pretraining sequences than previous results in the literature. This is achieved by showing that transformers are able to approximate local polynomial estimators efficiently by implementing a kernel-weighted polynomial basis and then running gradient descent. --- ### RadixMLP -- Intra-batch Deduplication for Causal Transformers Authors: Michael Feil, Julius Lipp Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.LG, cs.DC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15013v1 Batch inference workloads for causal transformer models frequently process sequences that share common prefixes, such as system prompts, few-shot examples, or shared queries. Standard inference engines treat each sequence independently, redundantly recomputing identical MLP activations for every copy of the shared prefix. We introduce RadixMLP, a technique that exploits the position-wise nature of MLPs, LayerNorms, linear projections, and embeddings to eliminate this redundancy. RadixMLP dynamically maps batches to a prefix trie, gathering shared segments into a compressed representation for position-wise computation and scattering results back only at attention boundaries. RadixMLP is stateless and operates within a single forward pass. In end-to-end serving benchmarks on MS~MARCO v1.1 with Qwen3 models (0.6B to 8B parameters), RadixMLP achieves 1.44-1.59$\times$ speedups in realistic reranking workloads, with up to $5\times$ speedups on synthetic benchmarks with longer shared prefixes. Our code is available at https://github.com/michaelfeil/radix-mlp. --- ### Lineup Regularized Adjusted Plus-Minus (L-RAPM): Basketball Lineup Ratings with Informed Priors Authors: Christos Petridis, Konstantinos Pelechrinis Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15000v1 Identifying combinations of players (that is, lineups) in basketball - and other sports - that perform well when they play together is one of the most important tasks in sports analytics. One of the main challenges associated with this task is the frequent substitutions that occur during a game, which results in highly sparse data. In particular, a National Basketball Association (NBA) team will use more than 600 lineups during a season, which translates to an average lineup having seen the court in approximately 25-30 possessions. Inevitably, any statistics that one collects for these lineups are going to be noisy, with low predictive value. Yet, there is no existing work (in the public at least) that addresses this problem. In this work, we propose a regression-based approach that controls for the opposition faced by each lineup, while it also utilizes information about the players making up the lineups. Our experiments show that L-RAPM provides improved predictive power than the currently used baseline, and this improvement increases as the sample size for the lineups gets smaller. --- ### Filtered 2D Contour-Based Reconstruction of 3D STL Model from CT-DICOM Images Authors: K. Punnam Chandar, Y. Ravi Kumar Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14997v1 Reconstructing a 3D Stereo-lithography (STL) Model from 2D Contours of scanned structure in Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) images is crucial to understand the geometry and deformity. Computed Tomography (CT) images are processed to enhance the contrast, reduce the noise followed by smoothing. The processed CT images are segmented using thresholding technique. 2D contour data points are extracted from segmented CT images and are used to construct 3D STL Models. The 2D contour data points may contain outliers as a result of segmentation of low resolution images and the geometry of the constructed 3D structure deviate from the actual. To cope with the imperfections in segmentation process, in this work we propose to use filtered 2D contour data points to reconstruct 3D STL Model. The filtered 2D contour points of each image are delaunay triangulated and joined layer-by-layer to reconstruct the 3D STL model. The 3D STL Model reconstruction is verified on i) 2D Data points of basic shapes and ii) Region of Interest (ROI) of human pelvic bone and are presented as case studies. The 3D STL model constructed from 2D contour data points of ROI of segmented pelvic bone with and without filtering are presented. The 3D STL model reconstructed from filtered 2D data points improved the geometry of model compared to the model reconstructed without filtering 2D data points. --- ### Obscuring Data Contamination Through Translation: Evidence from Arabic Corpora Authors: Chaymaa Abbas, Nour Shamaa, Mariette Awad Published: 2026-01-21 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14994v1 Data contamination undermines the validity of Large Language Model evaluation by enabling models to rely on memorized benchmark content rather than true generalization. While prior work has proposed contamination detection methods, these approaches are largely limited to English benchmarks, leaving multilingual contamination poorly understood. In this work, we investigate contamination dynamics in multilingual settings by fine-tuning several open-weight LLMs on varying proportions of Arabic datasets and evaluating them on original English benchmarks. To detect memorization, we extend the Tested Slot Guessing method with a choice-reordering strategy and incorporate Min-K% probability analysis, capturing both behavioral and distributional contamination signals. Our results show that translation into Arabic suppresses conventional contamination indicators, yet models still benefit from exposure to contaminated data, particularly those with stronger Arabic capabilities. This effect is consistently reflected in rising Mink% scores and increased cross-lingual answer consistency as contamination levels grow. To address this blind spot, we propose Translation-Aware Contamination Detection, which identifies contamination by comparing signals across multiple translated benchmark variants rather than English alone. The Translation-Aware Contamination Detection reliably exposes contamination even when English-only methods fail. Together, our findings highlight the need for multilingual, translation-aware evaluation pipelines to ensure fair, transparent, and reproducible assessment of LLMs. ---