# Research Papers — 2026-01 · bundle page 84 of 189

> Full-text markdown of papers #4151–4200 of 9403 published in 2026-01, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 9403-paper 2026-01 archive (50 papers per file).

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### EEG-Titans: Long-Horizon Seizure Forecasting via Dual-Branch Attention and Neural Memory

Authors: Tien-Dat Pham, Xuan-The Tran
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.LG, cs.HC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13748v1

Accurate epileptic seizure prediction from electroencephalography (EEG) remains challenging because pre-ictal dynamics may span long time horizons while clinically relevant signatures can be subtle and transient. Many deep learning models face a persistent trade-off between capturing local spatiotemporal patterns and maintaining informative long-range context when operating on ultralong sequences. We propose EEG-Titans, a dualbranch architecture that incorporates a modern neural memory mechanism for long-context modeling. The model combines sliding-window attention to capture short-term anomalies with a recurrent memory pathway that summarizes slower, progressive trends over time. On the CHB-MIT scalp EEG dataset, evaluated under a chronological holdout protocol, EEG-Titans achieves 99.46% average segment-level sensitivity across 18 subjects. We further analyze safety-first operating points on artifact-prone recordings and show that a hierarchical context strategy extending the receptive field for high-noise subjects can markedly reduce false alarms (down to 0.00 FPR/h in an extreme outlier) without sacrificing sensitivity. These results indicate that memory-augmented long-context modeling can provide robust seizure forecasting under clinically constrained evaluation

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### Variational Dual-path Attention Network for CSI-Based Gesture Recognition

Authors: N. Zhang
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.NI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13745v1

Wi-Fi gesture recognition based on Channel State Information (CSI) is challenged by high-dimensional noise and resource constraints on edge devices. Prevailing end-to-end models tightly couple feature extraction with classification, overlooking the inherent time-frequency sparsity of CSI and leading to redundancy and poor generalization. To address this, this paper proposes a lightweight feature preprocessing module--the Variational Dual-path Attention Network (VDAN). It performs structured feature refinement through frequency-domain filtering and temporal detection. Variational inference is introduced to model the uncertainty in attention weights, thereby enhancing robustness to noise. The design principles of the module are explained from the perspectives of the information bottleneck and regularization. Experiments on a public dataset demonstrate that the learned attention weights align with the physical sparse characteristics of CSI, verifying its interpretability. This work provides an efficient and explainable front-end processing solution for resource-constrained wireless sensing systems.

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### Hearing Between the Lines: Unlocking the Reasoning Power of LLMs for Speech Evaluation

Authors: Arjun Chandra, Kevin Miller, Venkatesh Ravichandran, Constantinos Papayiannis, Venkatesh Saligrama
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13742v2

Large Language Model (LLM) judges exhibit strong reasoning capabilities but are limited to textual content. This leaves current automatic Speech-to-Speech (S2S) evaluation methods reliant on opaque and expensive Audio Language Models (ALMs). In this work, we propose TRACE (Textual Reasoning over Audio Cues for Evaluation), a novel framework that enables LLM judges to reason over audio cues to achieve cost-efficient and human-aligned S2S evaluation. To demonstrate the strength of the framework, we first introduce a Human Chain-of-Thought (HCoT) annotation protocol to improve the diagnostic capability of existing judge benchmarks by separating evaluation into explicit dimensions: content (C), voice quality (VQ), and paralinguistics (P). Using this data, TRACE constructs a textual blueprint of inexpensive audio signals and prompts an LLM to render dimension-wise judgments, fusing them into an overall rating via a deterministic policy. TRACE achieves higher agreement with human raters than ALMs and transcript-only LLM judges while being significantly more cost-effective. We will release the HCoT annotations and the TRACE framework to enable scalable and human-aligned S2S evaluation.

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### Reasoning or Fluency? Dissecting Probabilistic Confidence in Best-of-N Selection

Authors: Hojin Kim, Jaehyung Kim
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13735v2

Probabilistic confidence metrics are increasingly adopted as proxies for reasoning quality in Best-of-N selection, under the assumption that higher confidence reflects higher reasoning fidelity. In this work, we challenge this assumption by investigating whether these metrics truly capture inter-step causal dependencies necessary for valid reasoning. We introduce three classes of inter-step causality perturbations that systematically disrupt dependencies between reasoning steps while preserving local fluency. Surprisingly, across diverse model families and reasoning benchmarks, we find that selection accuracy degrades only marginally under these disruptions. Even severe interventions, such as applying hard attention masks that directly prevent the model from attending to prior reasoning steps, do not substantially reduce selection performance. These findings provide strong evidence that current probabilistic metrics are largely insensitive to logical structure, and primarily capture surface-level fluency or in-distribution priors instead. Motivated by this gap, we propose a contrastive causality metric that explicitly isolates inter-step causal dependencies, and demonstrate that it yields more faithful output selection than existing probability-based approaches.

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### Towards robust long-context understanding of large language model via active recap learning

Authors: Chenyu Hui
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13734v1

In this paper, we propose active recap learning (ARL), a framework for enhancing large language model (LLM) in understanding long contexts. ARL enables models to revisit and summarize earlier content through targeted sequence construction during contined pretraining and retrospective summarization at inference. First, we identify key tokens in prepared long context based on loss gaps between long and short forward contexts and find most revant preceding paragraphs, then summarize them using an LLM. Second, ARL equips models with the ability to autonomously generate and utilize these retrospective summaries during inference, thereby establishing a recursive memory mechanism across paragraphs. Experimental results show substantial gains, with ARL achieving a 26.8% improvement on RULER and a 9.44% improvement on LongBench. Overall, ARL offers a simple yet effective continued pretraining-based approach to strengthen long-context understanding, advancing scalable memory augmentation in LLM

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### Breaking the Data Barrier in Learning Symbolic Computation: A Case Study on Variable Ordering Suggestion for Cylindrical Algebraic Decomposition

Authors: Rui-Juan Jing, Yuegang Zhao, Changbo Chen
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.SC, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13731v2

Symbolic computation, powered by modern computer algebra systems, has important applications in mathematical reasoning through exact deep computations. The efficiency of symbolic computation is largely constrained by such deep computations in high dimension. This creates a fundamental barrier on labelled data acquisition if leveraging supervised deep learning to accelerate symbolic computation. Cylindrical algebraic decomposition (CAD) is a pillar symbolic computation method for reasoning with first-order logic formulas over reals with many applications in formal verification and automatic theorem proving. Variable orderings have a huge impact on its efficiency. Impeded by the difficulty to acquire abundant labelled data, existing learning-based approaches are only competitive with the best expert-based heuristics. In this work, we address this problem by designing a series of intimately connected tasks for which a large amount of annotated data can be easily obtained. We pre-train a Transformer model with these data and then fine-tune it on the datasets for CAD ordering. Experiments on publicly available CAD ordering datasets show that on average the orderings predicted by the new model are significantly better than those suggested by the best heuristic methods.

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### On Temperature-Constrained Non-Deterministic Machine Translation: Potential and Evaluation

Authors: Weichuan Wang, Mingyang Liu, Linqi Song, Chen Ma
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13729v2

In recent years, the non-deterministic properties of language models have garnered considerable attention and have shown a significant influence on real-world applications. However, such properties remain under-explored in machine translation (MT), a complex, non-deterministic NLP task. In this study, we systematically evaluate modern MT systems and identify temperature-constrained Non-Deterministic MT (ND-MT) as a distinct phenomenon. Additionally, we demonstrate that ND-MT exhibits significant potential in addressing the multimodality issue that has long challenged MT research and provides higher-quality candidates than Deterministic MT (D-MT) under temperature constraints. However, ND-MT introduces new challenges in evaluating system performance. Specifically, the evaluation framework designed for D-MT fails to yield consistent evaluation results when applied to ND-MT. We further investigate this emerging challenge by evaluating state-of-the-art ND-MT systems using both lexical-based and semantic-based metrics at varying sampling sizes. The results reveal a Buckets Effect across these systems: the ranking of ND-MT systems is dominated by the worst-quality candidate translation, as shown by automatic evaluation metrics. To mitigate this issue, we propose ExpectoSample, a strategy that first identifies reliable metrics and then enables robust ND-MT system selection for real-world.

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### Facial Spatiotemporal Graphs: Leveraging the 3D Facial Surface for Remote Physiological Measurement

Authors: Sam Cantrill, David Ahmedt-Aristizabal, Lars Petersson, Hanna Suominen, Mohammad Ali Armin
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13724v1

Facial remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) methods estimate physiological signals by modeling subtle color changes on the 3D facial surface over time. However, existing methods fail to explicitly align their receptive fields with the 3D facial surface-the spatial support of the rPPG signal. To address this, we propose the Facial Spatiotemporal Graph (STGraph), a novel representation that encodes facial color and structure using 3D facial mesh sequences-enabling surface-aligned spatiotemporal processing. We introduce MeshPhys, a lightweight spatiotemporal graph convolutional network that operates on the STGraph to estimate physiological signals. Across four benchmark datasets, MeshPhys achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance in both intra- and cross-dataset settings. Ablation studies show that constraining the model's receptive field to the facial surface acts as a strong structural prior, and that surface-aligned, 3D-aware node features are critical for robustly encoding facial surface color. Together, the STGraph and MeshPhys constitute a novel, principled modeling paradigm for facial rPPG, enabling robust, interpretable, and generalizable estimation. Code is available at https://samcantrill.github.io/facial-stgraph-rppg/ .

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### OP-Bench: Benchmarking Over-Personalization for Memory-Augmented Personalized Conversational Agents

Authors: Yulin Hu, Zimo Long, Jiahe Guo, Xingyu Sui, Xing Fu, Weixiang Zhao, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13722v2

Memory-augmented conversational agents enable personalized interactions using long-term user memory and have gained substantial traction. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on whether agents can recall and apply user information, while overlooking whether such personalization is used appropriately. In fact, agents may overuse personal information, producing responses that feel forced, intrusive, or socially inappropriate to users. We refer to this issue as \emph{over-personalization}. In this work, we formalize over-personalization into three types: Irrelevance, Repetition, and Sycophancy, and introduce \textbf{OP-Bench} a benchmark of 1,700 verified instances constructed from long-horizon dialogue histories. Using \textbf{OP-Bench}, we evaluate multiple large language models and memory-augmentation methods, and find that over-personalization is widespread when memory is introduced. Further analysis reveals that agents tend to retrieve and over-attend to user memories even when unnecessary. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{Self-ReCheck}, a lightweight, model-agnostic memory filtering mechanism that mitigates over-personalization while preserving personalization performance. Our work takes an initial step toward more controllable and appropriate personalization in memory-augmented dialogue systems.

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### Hierarchical Long Video Understanding with Audiovisual Entity Cohesion and Agentic Search

Authors: Xinlei Yin, Xiulian Peng, Xiao Li, Zhiwei Xiong, Yan Lu
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.IR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13719v2

Long video understanding presents significant challenges for vision-language models due to extremely long context windows. Existing solutions relying on naive chunking strategies with retrieval-augmented generation, typically suffer from information fragmentation and a loss of global coherence. We present HAVEN, a unified framework for long-video understanding that enables coherent and comprehensive reasoning by integrating audiovisual entity cohesion and hierarchical video indexing with agentic search. First, we preserve semantic consistency by integrating entity-level representations across visual and auditory streams, while organizing content into a structured hierarchy spanning global summary, scene, segment, and entity levels. Then we employ an agentic search mechanism to enable dynamic retrieval and reasoning across these layers, facilitating coherent narrative reconstruction and fine-grained entity tracking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves good temporal coherence, entity consistency, and retrieval efficiency, establishing a new state-of-the-art with an overall accuracy of 84.1% on LVBench. Notably, it achieves outstanding performance in the challenging reasoning category, reaching 80.1%. These results highlight the effectiveness of structured, multimodal reasoning for comprehensive and context-consistent understanding of long-form videos.

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### Simulated Ignorance Fails: A Systematic Study of LLM Behaviors on Forecasting Problems Before Model Knowledge Cutoff

Authors: Zehan Li, Yuxuan Wang, Ali El Lahib, Ying-Jieh Xia, Xinyu Pi
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13717v1

Evaluating LLM forecasting capabilities is constrained by a fundamental tension: prospective evaluation offers methodological rigor but prohibitive latency, while retrospective forecasting (RF) -- evaluating on already-resolved events -- faces rapidly shrinking clean evaluation data as SOTA models possess increasingly recent knowledge cutoffs. Simulated Ignorance (SI), prompting models to suppress pre-cutoff knowledge, has emerged as a potential solution. We provide the first systematic test of whether SI can approximate True Ignorance (TI). Across 477 competition-level questions and 9 models, we find that SI fails systematically: (1) cutoff instructions leave a 52% performance gap between SI and TI; (2) chain-of-thought reasoning fails to suppress prior knowledge, even when reasoning traces contain no explicit post-cutoff references; (3) reasoning-optimized models exhibit worse SI fidelity despite superior reasoning trace quality. These findings demonstrate that prompts cannot reliably "rewind" model knowledge. We conclude that RF on pre-cutoff events is methodologically flawed; we recommend against using SI-based retrospective setups to benchmark forecasting capabilities.

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### MVGD-Net: A Novel Motion-aware Video Glass Surface Detection Method

Authors: Yiwei Lu, Hao Huang, Tao Yan
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13715v2

Glass surface ubiquitous in both daily life and professional environments presents a potential threat to vision-based systems, such as robot and drone navigation. To solve this challenge, most recent studies have shown significant interest in Video Glass Surface Detection (VGSD). We observe that objects in the reflection (or transmission) layer appear farther from the glass surfaces. Consequently, in video motion scenarios, the notable reflected (or transmitted) objects on the glass surface move slower than objects in non-glass regions within the same spatial plane, and this motion inconsistency can effectively reveal the presence of glass surfaces. Based on this observation, we propose a novel network, named MVGD-Net, for detecting glass surfaces in videos by leveraging motion inconsistency cues. Our MVGD-Net features three novel modules: the Cross-scale Multimodal Fusion Module (CMFM) that integrates extracted spatial features and estimated optical flow maps, the History Guided Attention Module (HGAM) and Temporal Cross Attention Module (TCAM), both of which further enhances temporal features. A Temporal-Spatial Decoder (TSD) is also introduced to fuse the spatial and temporal features for generating the glass region mask. Furthermore, for learning our network, we also propose a large-scale dataset, which comprises 312 diverse glass scenarios with a total of 19,268 frames. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our MVGD-Net outperforms relevant state-of-the-art methods.

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### SWE-Tester: Training Open-Source LLMs for Issue Reproduction in Real-World Repositories

Authors: Aditya Bharat Soni, Rajat Ghosh, Vaishnavi Bhargava, Valerie Chen, Debojyoti Dutta
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.SE, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13713v2

Software testing is crucial for ensuring the correctness and reliability of software systems. Automated generation of issue reproduction tests from natural language issue descriptions enhances developer productivity by simplifying root cause analysis, promotes test-driven development -- "test first, write code later", and can be used for improving the effectiveness of automated issue resolution systems like coding agents. Existing methods proposed for this task predominantly rely on closed-source LLMs, with limited exploration of open models. To address this, we propose SWE-Tester -- a novel pipeline for training open-source LLMs to generate issue reproduction tests. First, we curate a high-quality training dataset of 41K instances from 2.6K open-source GitHub repositories and use it to train LLMs of varying sizes and families. The fine-tuned models achieve absolute improvements of up to 10\% in success rate and 21\% in change coverage on SWT-Bench Verified. Further analysis shows consistent improvements with increased inference-time compute, more data, and larger models. These results highlight the effectiveness of our framework for advancing open-source LLMs in this domain.

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### GerAV: Towards New Heights in German Authorship Verification using Fine-Tuned LLMs on a New Benchmark

Authors: Lotta Kiefer, Christoph Leiter, Sotaro Takeshita, Elena Schmidt, Steffen Eger
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13711v2

Authorship verification (AV) is the task of determining whether two texts were written by the same author and has been studied extensively, predominantly for English data. In contrast, large-scale benchmarks and systematic evaluations for other languages remain scarce. We address this gap by introducing GerAV, a comprehensive benchmark for German AV comprising over 400k labeled text pairs. GerAV is built from Twitter and Reddit data, with the Reddit part further divided into in-domain and cross-domain message-based subsets, as well as a profile-based subset. This design enables controlled analysis of the effects of data source, topical domain, and text length. Using the provided training splits, we conduct a systematic evaluation of strong baselines and state-of-the-art models and find that our best approach, a fine-tuned large language model, outperforms recent baselines by up to 0.09 absolute F1 score and surpasses GPT-5 in a zero-shot setting by 0.08. We further observe a trade-off between specialization and generalization: models trained on specific data types perform best under matching conditions but generalize less well across data regimes, a limitation that can be mitigated by combining training sources. Overall, GerAV provides a challenging and versatile benchmark for advancing research on German and cross-domain AV. Our code and information about data access are available on GitHub.

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### Who Benefits From Sinus Surgery? Comparing Generative AI and Supervised Machine Learning for Predicting Surgical Outcomes in Chronic Rhinosinusitis

Authors: Sayeed Shafayet Chowdhury, Snehasis Mukhopadhyay, Shiaofen Fang, Vijay R. Ramakrishnan
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13710v2

Artificial intelligence has reshaped medical imaging, yet the use of AI on clinical data for prospective decision support remains limited. We study pre-operative prediction of clinically meaningful improvement in chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS), defining success as a more than 8.9-point reduction in SNOT-22 at 6 months (MCID). In a prospectively collected cohort where all patients underwent surgery, we ask whether models using only pre-operative clinical data could have identified those who would have poor outcomes, i.e. those who should have avoided surgery. We benchmark supervised ML (logistic regression, tree ensembles, and an in-house MLP) against generative AI (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity), giving each the same structured inputs and constraining outputs to binary recommendations with confidence. Our best ML model (MLP) achieves 85 % accuracy with superior calibration and decision-curve net benefit. GenAI models underperform on discrimination and calibration across zero-shot setting. Notably, GenAI justifications align with clinician heuristics and the MLP's feature importance, repeatedly highlighting baseline SNOT-22, CT/endoscopy severity, polyp phenotype, and physchology/pain comorbidities. We provide a reproducible tabular-to-GenAI evaluation protocol and subgroup analyses. Findings support an ML-first, GenAI- augmented workflow: deploy calibrated ML for primary triage of surgical candidacy, with GenAI as an explainer to enhance transparency and shared decision-making.

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### Hidden in Plain Text: Measuring LLM Deception Quality Against Human Baselines Using Social Deduction Games

Authors: Christopher Kao, Vanshika Vats, James Davis
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CY, cs.HC, cs.SI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13709v1

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly used in many applications, raising concerns about their safety. While previous work has shown that LLMs can deceive in controlled tasks, less is known about their ability to deceive using natural language in social contexts. In this paper, we study deception in the Social Deduction Game (SDG) Mafia, where success is dependent on deceiving others through conversation. Unlike previous SDG studies, we use an asynchronous multi-agent framework which better simulates realistic social contexts. We simulate 35 Mafia games with GPT-4o LLM agents. We then create a Mafia Detector using GPT-4-Turbo to analyze game transcripts without player role information to predict the mafia players. We use prediction accuracy as a surrogate marker for deception quality. We compare this prediction accuracy to that of 28 human games and a random baseline. Results show that the Mafia Detector's mafia prediction accuracy is lower on LLM games than on human games. The result is consistent regardless of the game days and the number of mafias detected. This indicates that LLMs blend in better and thus deceive more effectively. We also release a dataset of LLM Mafia transcripts to support future research. Our findings underscore both the sophistication and risks of LLM deception in social contexts.

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### Generative Adversarial Networks for Resource State Generation

Authors: Shahbaz Shaik, Sourav Chatterjee, Sayantan Pramanik, Indranil Chakrabarty
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: quant-ph, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13708v2

We introduce a physics-informed Generative Adversarial Network framework that recasts quantum resource-state generation as an inverse-design task. By embedding task-specific utility functions into training, the model learns to generate valid two-qubit states optimized for teleportation and entanglement broadcasting. Comparing decomposition-based and direct-generation architectures reveals that structural enforcement of Hermiticity, trace-one, and positivity yields higher fidelity and training stability than loss-only approaches. The framework reproduces theoretical resource boundaries for Werner-like and Bell-diagonal states with fidelities exceeding ~98%, establishing adversarial learning as a lightweight yet effective method for constraint-driven quantum-state discovery. This approach provides a scalable foundation for automated design of tailored quantum resources for information-processing applications, exemplified with teleportation and broadcasting of entanglement, and it opens up the possibility of using such states in efficient quantum network design.

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### Attention-space Contrastive Guidance for Efficient Hallucination Mitigation in LVLMs

Authors: Yujin Jo, Sangyoon Bae, Taesup Kim
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13707v2

Hallucinations in large vision--language models (LVLMs) often arise when language priors dominate over visual evidence, leading to object misidentification and visually inconsistent descriptions. We address this problem by framing hallucination mitigation as contrastive guidance that steers generation toward visually grounded and semantically faithful text. We propose Attention-space Contrastive Guidance (ACG), a training-free, single-pass method that operates directly in self-attention layers, where hallucination-inducing cross-modal biases emerge. ACG constructs both image-conditioned and approximate text-only attention paths within a single forward pass, enabling efficient guidance before errors accumulate at the output layer. Because this masking-based surrogate can introduce approximation bias, we further apply a lightweight orthogonal projection that suppresses components aligned with the text-only path, yielding a more visually grounded correction. Experiments on CHAIR and POPE show that ACG improves faithfulness over existing training-free baselines while maintaining caption quality, reducing latency by up to $2\times$ compared to multi-pass contrastive decoding methods.

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### ParkingTwin: Training-Free Streaming 3D Reconstruction for Parking-Lot Digital Twins

Authors: Xinhao Liu, Yu Wang, Xiansheng Guo, Gordon Owusu Boateng, Yu Cao, Haonan Si, Xingchen Guo, Nirwan Ansari
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13706v1

High-fidelity parking-lot digital twins provide essential priors for path planning, collision checking, and perception validation in Automated Valet Parking (AVP). Yet robot-oriented reconstruction faces a trilemma: sparse forward-facing views cause weak parallax and ill-posed geometry; dynamic occlusions and extreme lighting hinder stable texture fusion; and neural rendering typically needs expensive offline optimization, violating edge-side streaming constraints. We propose ParkingTwin, a training-free, lightweight system for online streaming 3D reconstruction. First, OSM-prior-driven geometric construction uses OpenStreetMap semantic topology to directly generate a metric-consistent TSDF, replacing blind geometric search with deterministic mapping and avoiding costly optimization. Second, geometry-aware dynamic filtering employs a quad-modal constraint field (normal/height/depth consistency) to reject moving vehicles and transient occlusions in real time. Third, illumination-robust fusion in CIELAB decouples luminance and chromaticity via adaptive L-channel weighting and depth-gradient suppression, reducing seams under abrupt lighting changes. ParkingTwin runs at 30+ FPS on an entry-level GTX 1660. On a 68,000 m^2 real-world dataset, it achieves SSIM 0.87 (+16.0%), delivers about 15x end-to-end speedup, and reduces GPU memory by 83.3% compared with state-of-the-art 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) that typically requires high-end GPUs (RTX 4090D). The system outputs explicit triangle meshes compatible with Unity/Unreal digital-twin pipelines. Project page: https://mihoutao-liu.github.io/ParkingTwin/

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### Reasoning or Pattern Matching? Probing Large Vision-Language Models with Visual Puzzles

Authors: Maria Lymperaiou, Vasileios Karampinis, Giorgos Filandrianos, Angelos Vlachos, Chrysoula Zerva, Athanasios Voulodimos
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13705v1

Puzzles have long served as compact and revealing probes of human cognition, isolating abstraction, rule discovery, and systematic reasoning with minimal reliance on prior knowledge. Leveraging these properties, visual puzzles have recently emerged as a powerful diagnostic tool for evaluating the reasoning abilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), offering controlled, verifiable alternatives to open-ended multimodal benchmarks. This survey provides a unified perspective of visual puzzle reasoning in LVLMs. We frame visual puzzles through a common abstraction and organize existing benchmarks by the reasoning mechanisms they target (inductive, analogical, algorithmic, deductive, and geometric/spatial), thereby linking puzzle design to the cognitive operations required for solving. Synthesizing empirical evidence across these categories, we identify consistent limitations in current models, including brittle generalization, tight entanglement between perception and reasoning, and a persistent gap between fluent explanations and faithful execution. By framing visual puzzles as diagnostic instruments rather than task formats, this survey elaborates on the state of LVLM reasoning and outlines key directions for future benchmarks and reasoning-aware multimodal systems.

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### Performance and Complexity Trade-off Optimization of Speech Models During Training

Authors: Esteban Gómez, Tom Bäckström
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI, cs.LG, eess.AS
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13704v4

In speech machine learning, neural network models are typically designed by choosing an architecture with fixed layer sizes and structure. These models are then trained to maximize performance on metrics aligned with the task's objective. While the overall architecture is usually guided by prior knowledge of the task, the sizes of individual layers are often chosen heuristically. However, this approach does not guarantee an optimal trade-off between performance and computational complexity; consequently, post hoc methods such as weight quantization or model pruning are typically employed to reduce computational cost. This occurs because stochastic gradient descent (SGD) methods can only optimize differentiable functions, while factors influencing computational complexity, such as layer sizes and floating-point operations per second (FLOP/s), are non-differentiable and require modifying the model structure during training. We propose a reparameterization technique based on feature noise injection that enables joint optimization of performance and computational complexity during training using SGD-based methods. Unlike traditional pruning methods, our approach allows the model size to be dynamically optimized for a target performance-complexity trade-off, without relying on heuristic criteria to select which weights or structures to remove. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through three case studies, including a synthetic example and two practical real-world applications: voice activity detection and audio anti-spoofing. The code related to our work is publicly available to encourage further research.

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### Does Privacy Always Harm Fairness? Data-Dependent Trade-offs via Chernoff Information Neural Estimation

Authors: Arjun Nichani, Hsiang Hsu, Chun-Fu, Chen, Haewon Jeong
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.IT, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13698v2

Fairness and privacy are two vital pillars of trustworthy machine learning. Despite extensive research on these individual topics, their relationship has received significantly less attention. In this paper, we utilize an information-theoretic measure Chernoff Information to characterize the fundamental trade-off between fairness, privacy, and accuracy, as induced by the input data distribution. We first propose Chernoff Difference, a notion of data fairness, along with its noisy variant, Noisy Chernoff Difference, which allows us to analyze both fairness and privacy simultaneously. Through simple Gaussian examples, we show that Noisy Chernoff Difference exhibits three qualitatively distinct behaviors depending on the underlying data distribution. To extend this analysis beyond synthetic settings, we develop the Chernoff Information Neural Estimator (CINE), the first neural network-based estimator of Chernoff Information for unknown distributions. We apply CINE to analyze the Noisy Chernoff Difference on real-world datasets. Together, this work fills a critical gap in the literature by providing a principled, data-dependent characterization of the fairness-privacy interaction.

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### Uncertainty-Aware Gradient Signal-to-Noise Data Selection for Instruction Tuning

Authors: Zhihang Yuan, Chengyu Yue, Long Huang, Litu Ou, Lei Shi
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13697v1

Instruction tuning is a standard paradigm for adapting large language models (LLMs), but modern instruction datasets are large, noisy, and redundant, making full-data fine-tuning costly and often unnecessary. Existing data selection methods either build expensive gradient datastores or assign static scores from a weak proxy, largely ignoring evolving uncertainty, and thus missing a key source of LLM interpretability. We propose GRADFILTERING, an objective-agnostic, uncertainty-aware data selection framework that utilizes a small GPT-2 proxy with a LoRA ensemble and aggregates per-example gradients into a Gradient Signal-to-Noise Ratio (G-SNR) utility. Our method matches or surpasses random subsets and strong baselines in most LLM-as-a-judge evaluations as well as in human assessment. Moreover, GRADFILTERING-selected subsets converge faster than competitive filters under the same compute budget, reflecting the benefit of uncertainty-aware scoring.

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### OptiSQL: Executable SQL Generation from Optical Tokens

Authors: Sifan Li, Hongkai Chen, Yujun Cai, Liyang Chen, Qingwen Ye, Yiwei Wang
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13695v2

Executable SQL generation is typically studied in text-to-SQL settings, where tables are provided as fully linearized textual schemas and contents. While effective, this formulation assumes access to structured text and incurs substantial token overhead, which is misaligned with many real-world scenarios where tables appear as visual artifacts in documents or webpages. We investigate whether compact optical representations can serve as an efficient interface for executable semantic parsing. We present OptiSQL, a vision-driven framework that generates executable SQL directly from table images and natural language questions using compact optical tokens. OptiSQL leverages an OCR-oriented visual encoder to compress table structure and content into a small set of optical tokens and fine-tunes a pretrained decoder for SQL generation while freezing the encoder to isolate representation sufficiency. Experiments on a visualized version of Spider 2.0-Snow show that OptiSQL retains strong execution accuracy while reducing table input tokens by an order of magnitude. Robustness analyses further demonstrate that optical tokens preserve essential structural information under visual perturbations.

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### End-to-End Reverse Screening Identifies Protein Targets of Small Molecules Using HelixFold3

Authors: Shengjie Xu, Xianbin Ye, Mengran Zhu, Xiaonan Zhang, Shanzhuo Zhang, Xiaomin Fang
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: q-bio.BM, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13693v1

Identifying protein targets for small molecules, or reverse screening, is essential for understanding drug action, guiding compound repurposing, predicting off-target effects, and elucidating the molecular mechanisms of bioactive compounds. Despite its critical role, reverse screening remains challenging because accurately capturing interactions between a small molecule and structurally diverse proteins is inherently complex, and conventional step-wise workflows often propagate errors across decoupled steps such as target structure modeling, pocket identification, docking, and scoring. Here, we present an end-to-end reverse screening strategy leveraging HelixFold3, a high-accuracy biomolecular structure prediction model akin to AlphaFold3, which simultaneously models the folding of proteins from a protein library and the docking of small-molecule ligands within a unified framework. We validate this approach on a diverse and representative set of approximately one hundred small molecules. Compared with conventional reverse docking, our method improves screening accuracy and demonstrates enhanced structural fidelity, binding-site precision, and target prioritization. By systematically linking small molecules to their protein targets, this framework establishes a scalable and straightforward platform for dissecting molecular mechanisms, exploring off-target interactions, and supporting rational drug discovery.

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### Dr. Assistant: Enhancing Clinical Diagnostic Inquiry via Structured Diagnostic Reasoning Data and Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Yue Guo, Fanfu Wang, Jianwei Lv, Xincheng Shi, Yuchen Li, Youya Wang, Yunsheng Zeng, Yujing Liu, Yunhao Qiao, Gen Li, Junfeng Wang, Bo Yuan
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13690v2

Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSSs) provide reasoning and inquiry guidance for physicians, yet they face notable challenges, including high maintenance costs and low generalization capability. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely adopted in healthcare due to their extensive knowledge reserves, retrieval, and communication capabilities. While LLMs show promise and excel at medical benchmarks, their diagnostic reasoning and inquiry skills are constrained. To mitigate this issue, we propose (1) Clinical Diagnostic Reasoning Data (CDRD) structure to capture abstract clinical reasoning logic, and a pipeline for its construction, and (2) the Dr. Assistant, a clinical diagnostic model equipped with clinical reasoning and inquiry skills. Its training involves a two-stage process: SFT, followed by RL with a tailored reward function. We also introduce a benchmark to evaluate both diagnostic reasoning and inquiry. Our experiments demonstrate that the Dr. Assistant outperforms open-source models and achieves competitive performance to closed-source models, providing an effective solution for clinical diagnostic inquiry guidance. Project information can be found at: https://github.com/YGswu/Dr.-Assistant .

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### Understanding Mental States to Guide Social Influence in Multi-Person Group Dialogue

Authors: Zhichao Liang, Satoshi Nakamura
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13687v2

Existing dynamic Theory of Mind (ToM) benchmarks mostly place language models in a passive role: the model reads a sequence of connected scenarios and reports what people believe, feel, intend, and do as these states change. In real social interaction, ToM is also used for action: a speaker plans what to say in order to shift another person's mental-state trajectory toward a goal. We introduce SocialMindChange, a benchmark that moves from tracking minds to changing minds in social interaction. Each instance defines a social context with 4 characters and five connected scenes. The model plays one character and generates dialogue across the five scenes to reach the target while remaining consistent with the evolving states of all participants. SocialMindChange also includes selected higher-order states. Using a structured four-step framework, we construct 1,200 social contexts, covering 6000 scenarios and over 90,000 questions, each validated for realism and quality. Evaluations on ten state-of-the-art LLMs show that their average performance is 54.2% below human performance. This gap suggests that current LLMs still struggle to maintain and change mental-state representations across long, linked interactions.

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### HeteroCache: A Dynamic Retrieval Approach to Heterogeneous KV Cache Compression for Long-Context LLM Inference

Authors: Zhiyuan Shi, Qibo Qiu, Feng Xue, Zhonglin Jiang, Li Yu, Jian Jiang, Xiaofei He, Wenxiao Wang
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13684v2

The linear memory growth of the KV cache poses a significant bottleneck for LLM inference in long-context tasks. Existing static compression methods often fail to preserve globally important information. Although recent dynamic retrieval approaches attempt to address this issue, they typically suffer from coarse-grained caching strategies and incur high I/O overhead. To overcome these limitations, we propose HeteroCache, a training-free dynamic compression framework. Our method is built on two key insights: attention heads exhibit diverse temporal heterogeneity, and there is significant spatial redundancy among heads within the same layer. Guided by these insights, HeteroCache categorizes heads based on stability and similarity, applying a fine-grained weighting strategy that allocates larger cache budgets to heads with rapidly shifting attention to capture context changes. Furthermore, it features a hierarchical storage mechanism where representative heads monitor attention drift to trigger asynchronous, on-demand context retrieval, thereby hiding I/O latency. Experiments demonstrate that HeteroCache achieves state-of-the-art performance on long-context benchmarks and accelerates decoding by up to $3\times$ compared to the original model with a 224K context. Our code is available at https://github.com/ponytaill/HeteroCache.

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### Dynamic Differential Linear Attention: Enhancing Linear Diffusion Transformer for High-Quality Image Generation

Authors: Boyuan Cao, Xingbo Yao, Chenhui Wang, Jiaxin Ye, Yujie Wei, Hongming Shan
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13683v1

Diffusion transformers (DiTs) have emerged as a powerful architecture for high-fidelity image generation, yet the quadratic cost of self-attention poses a major scalability bottleneck. To address this, linear attention mechanisms have been adopted to reduce computational cost; unfortunately, the resulting linear diffusion transformers (LiTs) models often come at the expense of generative performance, frequently producing over-smoothed attention weights that limit expressiveness. In this work, we introduce Dynamic Differential Linear Attention (DyDiLA), a novel linear attention formulation that enhances the effectiveness of LiTs by mitigating the oversmoothing issue and improving generation quality. Specifically, the novelty of DyDiLA lies in three key designs: (i) dynamic projection module, which facilitates the decoupling of token representations by learning with dynamically assigned knowledge; (ii) dynamic measure kernel, which provides a better similarity measurement to capture fine-grained semantic distinctions between tokens by dynamically assigning kernel functions for token processing; and (iii) token differential operator, which enables more robust query-to-key retrieval by calculating the differences between the tokens and their corresponding information redundancy produced by dynamic measure kernel. To capitalize on DyDiLA, we introduce a refined LiT, termed DyDi-LiT, that systematically incorporates our advancements. Extensive experiments show that DyDi-LiT consistently outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) models across multiple metrics, underscoring its strong practical potential.

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### Finally Outshining the Random Baseline: A Simple and Effective Solution for Active Learning in 3D Biomedical Imaging

Authors: Carsten T. Lüth, Jeremias Traub, Kim-Celine Kahl, Till J. Bungert, Lukas Klein, Lars Krämer, Paul F. Jäger, Klaus Maier-Hein, Fabian Isensee
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13677v1

Active learning (AL) has the potential to drastically reduce annotation costs in 3D biomedical image segmentation, where expert labeling of volumetric data is both time-consuming and expensive. Yet, existing AL methods are unable to consistently outperform improved random sampling baselines adapted to 3D data, leaving the field without a reliable solution. We introduce Class-stratified Scheduled Power Predictive Entropy (ClaSP PE), a simple and effective query strategy that addresses two key limitations of standard uncertainty-based AL methods: class imbalance and redundancy in early selections. ClaSP PE combines class-stratified querying to ensure coverage of underrepresented structures and log-scale power noising with a decaying schedule to enforce query diversity in early-stage AL and encourage exploitation later. In our evaluation on 24 experimental settings using four 3D biomedical datasets within the comprehensive nnActive benchmark, ClaSP PE is the only method that generally outperforms improved random baselines in terms of both segmentation quality with statistically significant gains, whilst remaining annotation efficient. Furthermore, we explicitly simulate the real-world application by testing our method on four previously unseen datasets without manual adaptation, where all experiment parameters are set according to predefined guidelines. The results confirm that ClaSP PE robustly generalizes to novel tasks without requiring dataset-specific tuning. Within the nnActive framework, we present compelling evidence that an AL method can consistently outperform random baselines adapted to 3D segmentation, in terms of both performance and annotation efficiency in a realistic, close-to-production scenario. Our open-source implementation and clear deployment guidelines make it readily applicable in practice. Code is at https://github.com/MIC-DKFZ/nnActive.

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### Autoregressive deep learning for real-time simulation of soft tissue dynamics during virtual neurosurgery

Authors: Fabian Greifeneder, Wolfgang Fenz, Benedikt Alkin, Johannes Brandstetter, Michael Giretzlehner, Philipp Moser
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13676v1

Accurate simulation of brain deformation is a key component for developing realistic, interactive neurosurgical simulators, as complex nonlinear deformations must be captured to ensure realistic tool-tissue interactions. However, traditional numerical solvers often fall short in meeting real-time performance requirements. To overcome this, we introduce a deep learning-based surrogate model that efficiently simulates transient brain deformation caused by continuous interactions between surgical instruments and the virtual brain geometry. Building on Universal Physics Transformers, our approach operates directly on large-scale mesh data and is trained on an extensive dataset generated from nonlinear finite element simulations, covering a broad spectrum of temporal instrument-tissue interaction scenarios. To reduce the accumulation of errors in autoregressive inference, we propose a stochastic teacher forcing strategy applied during model training. Specifically, training consists of short stochastic rollouts in which the proportion of ground truth inputs is gradually decreased in favor of model-generated predictions. Our results show that the proposed surrogate model achieves accurate and efficient predictions across a range of transient brain deformation scenarios, scaling to meshes with up to 150,000 nodes. The introduced stochastic teacher forcing technique substantially improves long-term rollout stability, reducing the maximum prediction error from 6.7 mm to 3.5 mm. We further integrate the trained surrogate model into an interactive neurosurgical simulation environment, achieving runtimes below 10 ms per simulation step on consumer-grade inference hardware. Our proposed deep learning framework enables rapid, smooth and accurate biomechanical simulations of dynamic brain tissue deformation, laying the foundation for realistic surgical training environments.

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### The Orchestration of Multi-Agent Systems: Architectures, Protocols, and Enterprise Adoption

Authors: Apoorva Adimulam, Rajesh Gupta, Sumit Kumar
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.MA, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13671v1

Orchestrated multi-agent systems represent the next stage in the evolution of artificial intelligence, where autonomous agents collaborate through structured coordination and communication to achieve complex, shared objectives. This paper consolidates and formalizes the technical composition of such systems, presenting a unified architectural framework that integrates planning, policy enforcement, state management, and quality operations into a coherent orchestration layer. Another primary contribution of this work is the in-depth technical delineation of two complementary communication protocols - the Model Context Protocol, which standardizes how agents access external tools and contextual data, and the Agent2Agent protocol, which governs peer coordination, negotiation, and delegation. Together, these protocols establish an interoperable communication substrate that enables scalable, auditable, and policy-compliant reasoning across distributed agent collectives. Beyond protocol design, the paper details how orchestration logic, governance frameworks, and observability mechanisms collectively sustain system coherence, transparency, and accountability. By synthesizing these elements into a cohesive technical blueprint, this paper provides comprehensive treatments of orchestrated multi-agent systems - bridging conceptual architectures with implementation-ready design principles for enterprise-scale AI ecosystems.

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### CommunityBench: Benchmarking Community-Level Alignment across Diverse Groups and Tasks

Authors: Jiayu Lin, Zhongyu Wei
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13669v1

Large language models (LLMs) alignment ensures model behaviors reflect human value. Existing alignment strategies primarily follow two paths: one assumes a universal value set for a unified goal (i.e., one-size-fits-all), while the other treats every individual as unique to customize models (i.e., individual-level). However, assuming a monolithic value space marginalizes minority norms, while tailoring individual models is prohibitively expensive. Recognizing that human society is organized into social clusters with high intra-group value alignment, we propose community-level alignment as a "middle ground". Practically, we introduce CommunityBench, the first large-scale benchmark for community-level alignment evaluation, featuring four tasks grounded in Common Identity and Common Bond theory. With CommunityBench, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of various foundation models on CommunityBench, revealing that current LLMs exhibit limited capacity to model community-specific preferences. Furthermore, we investigate the potential of community-level alignment in facilitating individual modeling, providing a promising direction for scalable and pluralistic alignment.

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### Transformer based Multi-task Fusion Network for Food Spoilage Detection and Shelf life Forecasting

Authors: Mounika Kanulla, Rajasree Dadigi, Sailaja Thota, Vivek Yelleti
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13665v1

Food wastage is one of the critical challenges in the agricultural supply chain, and accurate and effective spoilage detection can help to reduce it. Further, it is highly important to forecast the spoilage information. This aids the longevity of the supply chain management in the agriculture field. This motivated us to propose fusion based architectures by combining CNN with LSTM and DeiT transformer for the following multi-tasks simultaneously: (i) vegetable classification, (ii) food spoilage detection, and (iii) shelf life forecasting. We developed a dataset by capturing images of vegetables from their fresh state until they were completely spoiled. From the experimental analysis it is concluded that the proposed fusion architectures CNN+CNN-LSTM and CNN+DeiT Transformer outperformed several deep learning models such as CNN, VGG16, ResNet50, Capsule Networks, and DeiT Transformers. Overall, CNN + DeiT Transformer yielded F1-score of 0.98 and 0.61 in vegetable classification and spoilage detection respectively and mean squared error (MSE) and symmetric mean absolute percentage error (SMAPE) of 3.58, and 41.66% respectively in spoilage forecasting. Further, the reliability of the fusion models was validated on noisy images and integrated with LIME to visualize the model decisions.

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### VIAFormer: Voxel-Image Alignment Transformer for High-Fidelity Voxel Refinement

Authors: Tiancheng Fang, Bowen Pan, Lingxi Chen, Jiangjing Lyu, Chengfei Lyu, Chaoyue Niu, Fan Wu
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13664v2

We propose VIAFormer, a Voxel-Image Alignment Transformer model designed for Multi-view Conditioned Voxel Refinement--the task of repairing incomplete noisy voxels using calibrated multi-view images as guidance. Its effectiveness stems from a synergistic design: an Image Index that provides explicit 3D spatial grounding for 2D image tokens, a Correctional Flow objective that learns a direct voxel-refinement trajectory, and a Hybrid Stream Transformer that enables robust cross-modal fusion. Experiments show that VIAFormer establishes a new state of the art in correcting both severe synthetic corruptions and realistic artifacts on the voxel shape obtained from powerful Vision Foundation Models. Beyond benchmarking, we demonstrate VIAFormer as a practical and reliable bridge in real-world 3D creation pipelines, paving the way for voxel-based methods to thrive in large-model, big-data wave.

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### Reinforcement Learning for Opportunistic Routing in Software-Defined LEO-Terrestrial Systems

Authors: Sivaram Krishnan, Zhouyou Gu, Jihong Park, Sung-Min Oh, Jinho Choi
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.NI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13662v1

The proliferation of large-scale low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations is driving the need for intelligent routing strategies that can effectively deliver data to terrestrial networks under rapidly time-varying topologies and intermittent gateway visibility. Leveraging the global control capabilities of a geostationary (GEO)-resident software-defined networking (SDN) controller, we introduce opportunistic routing, which aims to minimize delivery delay by forwarding packets to any currently available ground gateways rather than fixed destinations. This makes it a promising approach for achieving low-latency and robust data delivery in highly dynamic LEO networks. Specifically, we formulate a constrained stochastic optimization problem and employ a residual reinforcement learning framework to optimize opportunistic routing for reducing transmission delay. Simulation results over multiple days of orbital data demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements in queue length reduction compared to classical backpressure and other well-known queueing algorithms.

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### Temporal-Spatial Decouple before Act: Disentangled Representation Learning for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Authors: Chunlei Meng, Ziyang Zhou, Lucas He, Xiaojing Du, Chun Ouyang, Zhongxue Gan
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.MM
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13659v1

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis integrates Linguistic, Visual, and Acoustic. Mainstream approaches based on modality-invariant and modality-specific factorization or on complex fusion still rely on spatiotemporal mixed modeling. This ignores spatiotemporal heterogeneity, leading to spatiotemporal information asymmetry and thus limited performance. Hence, we propose TSDA, Temporal-Spatial Decouple before Act, which explicitly decouples each modality into temporal dynamics and spatial structural context before any interaction. For every modality, a temporal encoder and a spatial encoder project signals into separate temporal and spatial body. Factor-Consistent Cross-Modal Alignment then aligns temporal features only with their temporal counterparts across modalities, and spatial features only with their spatial counterparts. Factor specific supervision and decorrelation regularization reduce cross factor leakage while preserving complementarity. A Gated Recouple module subsequently recouples the aligned streams for task. Extensive experiments show that TSDA outperforms baselines. Ablation analysis studies confirm the necessity and interpretability of the design.

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### Beyond Known Facts: Generating Unseen Temporal Knowledge to Address Data Contamination in LLM Evaluation

Authors: Arthur Amalvy, Hen-Hsen Huang
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13658v1

The automatic extraction of information is important for populating large web knowledge bases such as Wikidata. The temporal version of that task, temporal knowledge graph extraction (TKGE), involves extracting temporally grounded facts from text, represented as semantic quadruples (subject, relation, object, timestamp). Many recent systems take advantage of large language models (LLMs), which are becoming a new cornerstone of the web due to their performance on many tasks across the natural language processing (NLP) field. Despite the importance of TKGE, existing datasets for training and evaluation remain scarce, and contamination of evaluation data is an unaddressed issue, potentially inflating LLMs' perceived performance due to overlaps between training and evaluation sets. To mitigate these challenges, we propose a novel synthetic evaluation dataset constructed from predicted future, previously unseen temporal facts, thereby eliminating contamination and enabling robust and unbiased benchmarking. Our dataset creation involves a two-step approach: (1) Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting (TKGF) generates plausible future quadruples, which are subsequently filtered to adhere to the original knowledge base schema; (2) LLMs perform quadruple-to-text generation, creating semantically aligned textual descriptions. We benchmark Extract, Define and Canonicalize (EDC), a state-of-the-art LLM-based extraction framework, demonstrating that LLM performance decreases when evaluated on our dataset compared to a dataset of known facts. We publicly release our dataset consisting of 4.2K future quadruples and corresponding textual descriptions, along with the generation methodology, enabling continuous creation of unlimited future temporal datasets to serve as long-term, contamination-free benchmarks for TKGE.

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### Communication-Free Collective Navigation for a Swarm of UAVs via LiDAR-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Myong-Yol Choi, Hankyoul Ko, Hanse Cho, Changseung Kim, Seunghwan Kim, Jaemin Seo, Hyondong Oh
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.MA
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13657v1

This paper presents a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based controller for collective navigation of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms in communication-denied environments, enabling robust operation in complex, obstacle-rich environments. Inspired by biological swarms where informed individuals guide groups without explicit communication, we employ an implicit leader-follower framework. In this paradigm, only the leader possesses goal information, while follower UAVs learn robust policies using only onboard LiDAR sensing, without requiring any inter-agent communication or leader identification. Our system utilizes LiDAR point clustering and an extended Kalman filter for stable neighbor tracking, providing reliable perception independent of external positioning systems. The core of our approach is a DRL controller, trained in GPU-accelerated Nvidia Isaac Sim, that enables followers to learn complex emergent behaviors - balancing flocking and obstacle avoidance - using only local perception. This allows the swarm to implicitly follow the leader while robustly addressing perceptual challenges such as occlusion and limited field-of-view. The robustness and sim-to-real transfer of our approach are confirmed through extensive simulations and challenging real-world experiments with a swarm of five UAVs, which successfully demonstrated collective navigation across diverse indoor and outdoor environments without any communication or external localization.

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### Why Does the LLM Stop Computing: An Empirical Study of User-Reported Failures in Open-Source LLMs

Authors: Guangba Yu, Zirui Wang, Yujie Huang, Renyi Zhong, Yuedong Zhong, Yilun Wang, Michael R. Lyu
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.DC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13655v1

The democratization of open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) allows users to fine-tune and deploy models on local infrastructure but exposes them to a First Mile deployment landscape. Unlike black-box API consumption, the reliability of user-managed orchestration remains a critical blind spot. To bridge this gap, we conduct the first large-scale empirical study of 705 real-world failures from the open-source DeepSeek, Llama, and Qwen ecosystems. Our analysis reveals a paradigm shift: white-box orchestration relocates the reliability bottleneck from model algorithmic defects to the systemic fragility of the deployment stack. We identify three key phenomena: (1) Diagnostic Divergence: runtime crashes distinctively signal infrastructure friction, whereas incorrect functionality serves as a signature for internal tokenizer defects. (2) Systemic Homogeneity: Root causes converge across divergent series, confirming reliability barriers are inherent to the shared ecosystem rather than specific architectures. (3) Lifecycle Escalation: Barriers escalate from intrinsic configuration struggles during fine-tuning to compounded environmental incompatibilities during inference. Supported by our publicly available dataset, these insights provide actionable guidance for enhancing the reliability of the LLM landscape.

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### TimeART: Towards Agentic Time Series Reasoning via Tool-Augmentation

Authors: Xingjian Wu, Junkai Lu, Zhengyu Li, Xiangfei Qiu, Jilin Hu, Chenjuan Guo, Christian S. Jensen, Bin Yang
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13653v1

Time series data widely exist in real-world cyber-physical systems. Though analyzing and interpreting them contributes to significant values, e.g, disaster prediction and financial risk control, current workflows mainly rely on human data scientists, which requires significant labor costs and lacks automation. To tackle this, we introduce TimeART, a framework fusing the analytical capability of strong out-of-the-box tools and the reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), which serves as a fully agentic data scientist for Time Series Question Answering (TSQA). To teach the LLM-based Time Series Reasoning Models (TSRMs) strategic tool-use, we also collect a 100k expert trajectory corpus called TimeToolBench. To enhance TSRMs' generalization capability, we then devise a four-stage training strategy, which boosts TSRMs through learning from their own early experiences and self-reflections. Experimentally, we train an 8B TSRM on TimeToolBench and equip it with the TimeART framework, and it achieves consistent state-of-the-art performance on multiple TSQA tasks, which pioneers a novel approach towards agentic time series reasoning.

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### Face-Voice Association with Inductive Bias for Maximum Class Separation

Authors: Marta Moscati, Oleksandr Kats, Mubashir Noman, Muhammad Zaigham Zaheer, Yufang Hou, Markus Schedl, Shah Nawaz
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13651v1

Face-voice association is widely studied in multimodal learning and is approached representing faces and voices with embeddings that are close for a same person and well separated from those of others. Previous work achieved this with loss functions. Recent advancements in classification have shown that the discriminative ability of embeddings can be strengthened by imposing maximum class separation as inductive bias. This technique has never been used in the domain of face-voice association, and this work aims at filling this gap. More specifically, we develop a method for face-voice association that imposes maximum class separation among multimodal representations of different speakers as an inductive bias. Through quantitative experiments we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showing that it achieves SOTA performance on two task formulation of face-voice association. Furthermore, we carry out an ablation study to show that imposing inductive bias is most effective when combined with losses for inter-class orthogonality. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first that applies and demonstrates the effectiveness of maximum class separation as an inductive bias in multimodal learning; it hence paves the way to establish a new paradigm.

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### Fairness or Fluency? An Investigation into Language Bias of Pairwise LLM-as-a-Judge

Authors: Xiaolin Zhou, Zheng Luo, Yicheng Gao, Qixuan Chen, Xiyang Hu, Yue Zhao, Ruishan Liu
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13649v1

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have incentivized the development of LLM-as-a-judge, an application of LLMs where they are used as judges to decide the quality of a certain piece of text given a certain context. However, previous studies have demonstrated that LLM-as-a-judge can be biased towards different aspects of the judged texts, which often do not align with human preference. One of the identified biases is language bias, which indicates that the decision of LLM-as-a-judge can differ based on the language of the judged texts. In this paper, we study two types of language bias in pairwise LLM-as-a-judge: (1) performance disparity between languages when the judge is prompted to compare options from the same language, and (2) bias towards options written in major languages when the judge is prompted to compare options of two different languages. We find that for same-language judging, there exist significant performance disparities across language families, with European languages consistently outperforming African languages, and this bias is more pronounced in culturally-related subjects. For inter-language judging, we observe that most models favor English answers, and that this preference is influenced more by answer language than question language. Finally, we investigate whether language bias is in fact caused by low-perplexity bias, a previously identified bias of LLM-as-a-judge, and we find that while perplexity is slightly correlated with language bias, language bias cannot be fully explained by perplexity only.

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### Fusion Segment Transformer: Bi-Directional Attention Guided Fusion Network for AI-Generated Music Detection

Authors: Yumin Kim, Seonghyeon Go
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13647v1

With the rise of generative AI technology, anyone can now easily create and deploy AI-generated music, which has heightened the need for technical solutions to address copyright and ownership issues. While existing works mainly focused on short-audio, the challenge of full-audio detection, which requires modeling long-term structure and context, remains insufficiently explored. To address this, we propose an improved version of the Segment Transformer, termed the Fusion Segment Transformer. As in our previous work, we extract content embeddings from short music segments using diverse feature extractors. Furthermore, we enhance the architecture for full-audio AI-generated music detection by introducing a Gated Fusion Layer that effectively integrates content and structural information, enabling the capture of long-term context. Experiments on the SONICS and AIME datasets show that our approach outperforms the previous model and recent baselines, achieving state-of-the-art results in AI-generated music detection.

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### Quadratic Upper Bound for Boosting Robustness

Authors: Euijin You, Hyang-Won Lee
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13645v1

Fast adversarial training (FAT) aims to enhance the robustness of models against adversarial attacks with reduced training time, however, FAT often suffers from compromised robustness due to insufficient exploration of adversarial space. In this paper, we develop a loss function to mitigate the problem of degraded robustness under FAT. Specifically, we derive a quadratic upper bound (QUB) on the adversarial training (AT) loss function and propose to utilize the bound with existing FAT methods. Our experimental results show that applying QUB loss to the existing methods yields significant improvement of robustness. Furthermore, using various metrics, we demonstrate that this improvement is likely to result from the smoothened loss landscape of the resulting model.

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### Towards Token-Level Text Anomaly Detection

Authors: Yang Cao, Bicheng Yu, Sikun Yang, Ming Liu, Yujiu Yang
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13644v1

Despite significant progress in text anomaly detection for web applications such as spam filtering and fake news detection, existing methods are fundamentally limited to document-level analysis, unable to identify which specific parts of a text are anomalous. We introduce token-level anomaly detection, a novel paradigm that enables fine-grained localization of anomalies within text. We formally define text anomalies at both document and token-levels, and propose a unified detection framework that operates across multiple levels. To facilitate research in this direction, we collect and annotate three benchmark datasets spanning spam, reviews and grammar errors with token-level labels. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework get better performance than other 6 baselines, opening new possibilities for precise anomaly localization in text. All the codes and data are publicly available on https://github.com/charles-cao/TokenCore.

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### Sample Complexity of Average-Reward Q-Learning: From Single-agent to Federated Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Yuchen Jiao, Jiin Woo, Gen Li, Gauri Joshi, Yuejie Chi
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13642v1

Average-reward reinforcement learning offers a principled framework for long-term decision-making by maximizing the mean reward per time step. Although Q-learning is a widely used model-free algorithm with established sample complexity in discounted and finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs), its theoretical guarantees for average-reward settings remain limited. This work studies a simple but effective Q-learning algorithm for average-reward MDPs with finite state and action spaces under the weakly communicating assumption, covering both single-agent and federated scenarios. For the single-agent case, we show that Q-learning with carefully chosen parameters achieves sample complexity $\widetilde{O}\left(\frac{|\mathcal{S}||\mathcal{A}|\|h^{\star}\|_{\mathsf{sp}}^3}{\varepsilon^3}\right)$, where $\|h^{\star}\|_{\mathsf{sp}}$ is the span norm of the bias function, improving previous results by at least a factor of $\frac{\|h^{\star}\|_{\mathsf{sp}}^2}{\varepsilon^2}$. In the federated setting with $M$ agents, we prove that collaboration reduces the per-agent sample complexity to $\widetilde{O}\left(\frac{|\mathcal{S}||\mathcal{A}|\|h^{\star}\|_{\mathsf{sp}}^3}{M\varepsilon^3}\right)$, with only $\widetilde{O}\left(\frac{\|h^{\star}\|_{\mathsf{sp}}}{\varepsilon}\right)$ communication rounds required. These results establish the first federated Q-learning algorithm for average-reward MDPs, with provable efficiency in both sample and communication complexity.

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### EGM: Efficient Visual Grounding Language Models

Authors: Guanqi Zhan, Changye Li, Zhijian Liu, Yao Lu, Yi Wu, Song Han, Ligeng Zhu
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13633v3

Visual grounding is an essential capability of Visual Language Models (VLMs) to understand the real physical world. Previous state-of-the-art grounding visual language models usually have large model sizes, making them heavy for deployment and slow for inference. However, we notice that the sizes of visual encoders are nearly the same for small and large VLMs and the major difference is the sizes of the language models. Small VLMs fall behind larger VLMs in grounding because of the difference in language understanding capability rather than visual information handling. To mitigate the gap, we introduce 'Efficient visual Grounding language Models' (EGM): generate many mid-quality tokens (from small models) to match the performance of large VLMs with few high-quality but expensive tokens. This method is deployment-friendly, and yields better end-to-end latency: On the RefCOCO benchmark, our EGM-Qwen3-VL-8B demonstrates 91.4 IoU with an average of 737ms (5.9x faster) latency while Qwen3-VL-235B demands 4,320ms to reach 90.5 IoU. To validate our approach's generality, we further set up a new amodal grounding setting that requires the model to predict both the visible and occluded parts of the objects. Experiments show our method consistently improves both vanilla and amodal grounding capabilities of small models to match or outperform larger models, thereby improving efficiency for visual grounding.

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### Resilient Routing: Risk-Aware Dynamic Routing in Smart Logistics via Spatiotemporal Graph Learning

Authors: Zhiming Xue, Sichen Zhao, Yalun Qi, Xianling Zeng, Zihan Yu
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13632v2

With the rapid development of the e-commerce industry, the logistics network is experiencing unprecedented pressure. The traditional static routing strategy most time cannot tolerate the traffic congestion and fluctuating retail demand. In this paper, we propose a Risk-Aware Dynamic Routing(RADR) framework which integrates Spatiotemporal Graph Neural Networks (ST-GNN) with combinatorial optimization. We first construct a logistics topology graph by using the discrete GPS data using spatial clustering methods. Subsequently, a hybrid deep learning model combining Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) is adopted to extract spatial correlations and temporal dependencies for predicting future congestion risks. These prediction results are then integrated into a dynamic edge weight mechanism to perform path planning. We evaluated the framework on the Smart Logistics Dataset 2024, which contains real-world Internet of Things(IoT) sensor data. The experimental results show that the RADR algorithm significantly enhances the resilience of the supply chain. Particularly in the case study of high congestion scenarios, our method reduces the potential congestion risk exposure by 19.3% while only increasing the transportation distance by 2.1%. This empirical evidence confirms that the proposed data-driven approach can effectively balance delivery efficiency and operational safety.

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### Activation-Space Anchored Access Control for Multi-Class Permission Reasoning in Large Language Models

Authors: Zhaopeng Zhang, Pengcheng Sun, Lan Zhang, Chen Tang, Jiewei Lai, Yunhao Wang, Hui Jin
Published: 2026-01-20
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13630v1

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed over knowledge bases for efficient knowledge retrieval and question answering. However, LLMs can inadvertently answer beyond a user's permission scope, leaking sensitive content, thus making it difficult to deploy knowledge-base QA under fine-grained access control requirements. In this work, we identify a geometric regularity in intermediate activations: for the same query, representations induced by different permission scopes cluster distinctly and are readily separable. Building on this separability, we propose Activation-space Anchored Access Control (AAAC), a training-free framework for multi-class permission control. AAAC constructs an anchor bank, with one permission anchor per class, from a small offline sample set and requires no fine-tuning. At inference time, a multi-anchor steering mechanism redirects each query's activations toward the anchor-defined authorized region associated with the current user, thereby suppressing over-privileged generations by design. Finally, extensive experiments across three LLM families demonstrate that AAAC reduces permission violation rates by up to 86.5% and prompt-based attack success rates by 90.7%, while improving response usability with minor inference overhead compared to baselines.

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