# Research Papers — 2026-01 · bundle page 87 of 189

> Full-text markdown of papers #4301–4350 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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### Who Endorsed It? Measuring Authority Bias Across Expertise Levels in Language Models

Authors: Priyanka Mary Mammen, Emil Joswin, Shankar Venkitachalam
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13433v4

Prior research demonstrates that performance of language models on reasoning tasks can be influenced by suggestions, hints and endorsements. However, the influence of endorsement source credibility remains underexplored. We investigate whether language models exhibit systematic bias based on the perceived expertise of the provider of the endorsement. Across 4 datasets spanning mathematical, legal, and medical reasoning, we evaluate 11 models using personas representing four expertise levels per domain. Our results reveal that models are increasingly susceptible to incorrect/misleading endorsements as source expertise increases, with higher-authority sources inducing not only accuracy degradation but also increased confidence in wrong answers. We also show that this authority bias is mechanistically encoded within the model and a model can be steered away from the bias, thereby improving its performance even when an expert gives a misleading endorsement.

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### TrustEnergy: A Unified Framework for Accurate and Reliable User-level Energy Usage Prediction

Authors: Dahai Yu, Rongchao Xu, Dingyi Zhuang, Yuheng Bu, Shenhao Wang, Guang Wang
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13422v1

Energy usage prediction is important for various real-world applications, including grid management, infrastructure planning, and disaster response. Although a plethora of deep learning approaches have been proposed to perform this task, most of them either overlook the essential spatial correlations across households or fail to scale to individualized prediction, making them less effective for accurate fine-grained user-level prediction. In addition, due to the dynamic and uncertain nature of energy usage caused by various factors such as extreme weather events, quantifying uncertainty for reliable prediction is also significant, but it has not been fully explored in existing work. In this paper, we propose a unified framework called TrustEnergy for accurate and reliable user-level energy usage prediction. There are two key technical components in TrustEnergy, (i) a Hierarchical Spatiotemporal Representation module to efficiently capture both macro and micro energy usage patterns with a novel memory-augmented spatiotemporal graph neural network, and (ii) an innovative Sequential Conformalized Quantile Regression module to dynamically adjust uncertainty bounds to ensure valid prediction intervals over time, without making strong assumptions about the underlying data distribution. We implement and evaluate our TrustEnergy framework by working with an electricity provider in Florida, and the results show our TrustEnergy can achieve a 5.4% increase in prediction accuracy and 5.7% improvement in uncertainty quantification compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

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### SGW-GAN: Sliced Gromov-Wasserstein Guided GANs for Retinal Fundus Image Enhancement

Authors: Yujian Xiong, Xuanzhao Dong, Wenhui Zhu, Xin Li, Oana Dumitrascu, Yalin Wang
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13417v1

Retinal fundus photography is indispensable for ophthalmic screening and diagnosis, yet image quality is often degraded by noise, artifacts, and uneven illumination. Recent GAN- and diffusion-based enhancement methods improve perceptual quality by aligning degraded images with high-quality distributions, but our analysis shows that this focus can distort intra-class geometry: clinically related samples become dispersed, disease-class boundaries blur, and downstream tasks such as grading or lesion detection are harmed. The Gromov Wasserstein (GW) discrepancy offers a principled solution by aligning distributions through internal pairwise distances, naturally preserving intra-class structure, but its high computational cost restricts practical use. To overcome this, we propose SGW-GAN, the first framework to incorporate Sliced GW (SGW) into retinal image enhancement. SGW approximates GW via random projections, retaining relational fidelity while greatly reducing cost. Experiments on public datasets show that SGW-GAN produces visually compelling enhancements, achieves superior diabetic retinopathy grading, and reports the lowest GW discrepancy across disease labels, demonstrating both efficiency and clinical fidelity for unpaired medical image enhancement.

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### Diffusion Representations for Fine-Grained Image Classification: A Marine Plankton Case Study

Authors: A. Nieto Juscafresa, Á. Mazcuñán Herreros, J. Sullivan
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13416v1

Diffusion models have emerged as state-of-the-art generative methods for image synthesis, yet their potential as general-purpose feature encoders remains underexplored. Trained for denoising and generation without labels, they can be interpreted as self-supervised learners that capture both low- and high-level structure. We show that a frozen diffusion backbone enables strong fine-grained recognition by probing intermediate denoising features across layers and timesteps and training a linear classifier for each pair. We evaluate this in a real-world plankton-monitoring setting with practical impact, using controlled and comparable training setups against established supervised and self-supervised baselines. Frozen diffusion features are competitive with supervised baselines and outperform other self-supervised methods in both balanced and naturally long-tailed settings. Out-of-distribution evaluations on temporally and geographically shifted plankton datasets further show that frozen diffusion features maintain strong accuracy and Macro F1 under substantial distribution shift.

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### Using deep learning for predicting cleansing quality of colon capsule endoscopy images

Authors: Puneet Sharma, Kristian Dalsbø Hindberg, Benedicte Schelde-Olesen, Ulrik Deding, Esmaeil S. Nadimi, Jan-Matthias Braun
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13412v1

In this study, we explore the application of deep learning techniques for predicting cleansing quality in colon capsule endoscopy (CCE) images. Using a dataset of 500 images labeled by 14 clinicians on the Leighton-Rex scale (Poor, Fair, Good, and Excellent), a ResNet-18 model was trained for classification, leveraging stratified K-fold cross-validation to ensure robust performance. To optimize the model, structured pruning techniques were applied iteratively, achieving significant sparsity while maintaining high accuracy. Explainability of the pruned model was evaluated using Grad-CAM, Grad-CAM++, Eigen-CAM, Ablation-CAM, and Random-CAM, with the ROAD method employed for consistent evaluation. Our results indicate that for a pruned model, we can achieve a cross-validation accuracy of 88% with 79% sparsity, demonstrating the effectiveness of pruning in improving efficiency from 84% without compromising performance. We also highlight the challenges of evaluating cleansing quality of CCE images, emphasize the importance of explainability in clinical applications, and discuss the challenges associated with using the ROAD method for our task. Finally, we employ a variant of adaptive temperature scaling to calibrate the pruned models for an external dataset.

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### Classifiers in High Dimensional Hilbert Metrics

Authors: Aditya Acharya, Auguste H. Gezalyan, David M. Mount
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CG, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13410v1

Classifying points in high dimensional spaces is a fundamental geometric problem in machine learning. In this paper, we address classifying points in the $d$-dimensional Hilbert polygonal metric. The Hilbert metric is a generalization of the Cayley-Klein hyperbolic distance to arbitrary convex bodies and has a diverse range of applications in machine learning and convex geometry. We first present an efficient LP-based algorithm in the metric for the large-margin SVM problem. Our algorithm runs in time polynomial to the number of points, bounding facets, and dimension. This is a significant improvement on previous works, which either provide no theoretical guarantees on running time, or suffer from exponential runtime. We also consider the closely related Funk metric. We also present efficient algorithms for the soft-margin SVM problem and for nearest neighbor-based classification in the Hilbert metric.

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### Integrating Virtual Reality and Large Language Models for Team-Based Non-Technical Skills Training and Evaluation in the Operating Room

Authors: Jacob Barker, Doga Demirel, Cullen Jackson, Anna Johansson, Robbin Miraglia, Darian Hoagland, Stephanie B. Jones, John Mitchell, Daniel B. Jones, Suvranu De
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13406v1

Although effective teamwork and communication are critical to surgical safety, structured training for non-technical skills (NTS) remains limited compared with technical simulation. The ACS/APDS Phase III Team-Based Skills Curriculum calls for scalable tools that both teach and objectively assess these competencies during laparoscopic emergencies. We introduce the Virtual Operating Room Team Experience (VORTeX), a multi-user virtual reality (VR) platform that integrates immersive team simulation with large language model (LLM) analytics to train and evaluate communication, decision-making, teamwork, and leadership. Team dialogue is analyzed using structured prompts derived from the Non-Technical Skills for Surgeons (NOTSS) framework, enabling automated classification of behaviors and generation of directed interaction graphs that quantify communication structure and hierarchy. Two laparoscopic emergency scenarios, pneumothorax and intra-abdominal bleeding, were implemented to elicit realistic stress and collaboration. Twelve surgical professionals completed pilot sessions at the 2024 SAGES conference, rating VORTeX as intuitive, immersive, and valuable for developing teamwork and communication. The LLM consistently produced interpretable communication networks reflecting expected operative hierarchies, with surgeons as central integrators, nurses as initiators, and anesthesiologists as balanced intermediaries. By integrating immersive VR with LLM-driven behavioral analytics, VORTeX provides a scalable, privacy-compliant framework for objective assessment and automated, data-informed debriefing across distributed training environments.

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### Local-to-Global Logical Explanations for Deep Vision Models

Authors: Bhavan Vasu, Giuseppe Raffa, Prasad Tadepalli
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13404v1

While deep neural networks are extremely effective at classifying images, they remain opaque and hard to interpret. We introduce local and global explanation methods for black-box models that generate explanations in terms of human-recognizable primitive concepts. Both the local explanations for a single image and the global explanations for a set of images are cast as logical formulas in monotone disjunctive-normal-form (MDNF), whose satisfaction guarantees that the model yields a high score on a given class. We also present an algorithm for explaining the classification of examples into multiple classes in the form of a monotone explanation list over primitive concepts. Despite their simplicity and interpretability we show that the explanations maintain high fidelity and coverage with respect to the blackbox models they seek to explain in challenging vision datasets.

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### Reasoning with Pixel-level Precision: QVLM Architecture and SQuID Dataset for Quantitative Geospatial Analytics

Authors: Peter A. Massih, Eric Cosatto
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13401v1

Current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) fail at quantitative spatial reasoning because their architectures destroy pixel-level information required for counting and measurements. Vision encoders compress images through patch embeddings, reducing spatial indexing and losing the precise pixel-level tracking required for accurate counting. We present two contributions to address this fundamental limitation. First, we introduce SQuID (Satellite Quantitative Intelligence Dataset), a benchmark of 2,000 satellite image Question-Answer pairs with both numerical range and categorical answers, designed to evaluate quantitative spatial reasoning. The dataset spans three difficulty tiers with annotations automatically generated from human labels and their learned variability. Second, we propose QVLM (Quantitative Vision-Language Model), a code-generation architecture that maintains pixel precision by decoupling language understanding from visual analysis. Instead of encoding images into embeddings, QVLM generates executable code that first calls a segmentation model to obtain pixel-level masks, then operates directly on these masks, preserving spatial indexing throughout the reasoning process. Our experiments show that QVLM using GPT-5 as coder achieves 42.0% accuracy on SQuID compared to 28.1% for a VLM prompted with image-question pairs. Our work reveals that, for quantitative spatial reasoning, architectural decoupling enables better accuracy on quantitative tasks.

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### Deep Image Prior with L0 Gradient Regularizer for Image Smoothing

Authors: Nhat Thanh Tran, Kevin Bui, Jack Xin
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13400v1

Image smoothing is a fundamental image processing operation that preserves the underlying structure, such as strong edges and contours, and removes minor details and textures in an image. Many image smoothing algorithms rely on computing local window statistics or solving an optimization problem. Recent state-of-the-art methods leverage deep learning, but they require a carefully curated training dataset. Because constructing a proper training dataset for image smoothing is challenging, we propose DIP-$\ell_0$, a deep image prior framework that incorporates the $\ell_0$ gradient regularizer. This framework can perform high-quality image smoothing without any training data. To properly minimize the associated loss function that has the nonconvex, nonsmooth $\ell_0$ ``norm", we develop an alternating direction method of multipliers algorithm that utilizes an off-the-shelf $\ell_0$ gradient minimization solver. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed DIP-$\ell_0$ outperforms many image smoothing algorithms in edge-preserving image smoothing and JPEG artifact removal.

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### Can LLMs Compress (and Decompress)? Evaluating Code Understanding and Execution via Invertibility

Authors: Nickil Maveli, Antonio Vergari, Shay B. Cohen
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.PL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13398v2

LLMs demonstrate strong performance on code benchmarks, yet consistent reasoning across forward and backward execution remains elusive. We present RoundTripCodeEval (RTCE), a benchmark of four code execution reasoning tasks that evaluates round-trip consistency through execution-free, exact-match assessment of bijection fidelity across four lossless compression algorithms. We evaluate state-of-the-art Code-LLMs under zero-shot prompting, supervised fine-tuning on execution traces, and iterative self-reflection. All approaches yield only modest improvements and none closes the gap, revealing that current LLMs lack the internal coherence required for reliable bidirectional code reasoning. RTCE surfaces findings invisible to existing benchmarks: models frequently pass individual forward and backward tasks yet fail the combined round-trip, exposing mutually inconsistent internal representations; SFT and self-reflection saturate after one revision round, indicating they cannot repair fundamental algorithmic misunderstandings; and failures persist even on simple bijections such as RLE, suggesting that algorithmic complexity is not the sole root cause.\footnote{Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Nickil21/round-trip-code-compression.

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### Beyond Memorization: Testing LLM Reasoning on Unseen Theory of Computation Tasks

Authors: Shlok Shelat, Jay Raval, Souvik Roy, Manas Gaur
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.FL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13392v1

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on formal language tasks, yet whether this reflects genuine symbolic reasoning or pattern matching on familiar constructions remains unclear. We introduce a benchmark for deterministic finite automata (DFA) construction from regular languages, comprising factual knowledge questions, seen construction problems from public sources, and two types of unseen problems: hand-crafted instances with multiple interacting constraints and systematically generated problems via Arden's theorem. Models achieve perfect accuracy on factual questions and 84-90% on seen tasks. However, accuracy drops sharply on unseen problems (by 30-64%), with failures stemming from systematic misinterpretation of language constraints, incorrect handling of Kleene-star semantics, and a failure to preserve global consistency. We evaluate a three-stage hint protocol that enables correction of shallow errors but does not reliably resolve globally inconsistent or structurally flawed automata. Our analysis across multiple prompting strategies (direct, Chain-of-Thought, Tree-of-Thought) reveals that errors persist regardless of prompting approach, exposing a fundamental gap between LLMs' ability to generate syntactically plausible DFAs and their capacity for semantically correct formal reasoning.

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### Structured Insight from Unstructured Data: Large Language Models for SDOH-Driven Diabetes Risk Prediction

Authors: Sasha Ronaghi, Prerit Choudhary, David H Rehkopf, Bryant Lin
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13388v1

Social determinants of health (SDOH) play a critical role in Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) management but are often absent from electronic health records and risk prediction models. Most individual-level SDOH data is collected through structured screening tools, which lack the flexibility to capture the complexity of patient experiences and unique needs of a clinic's population. This study explores the use of large language models (LLMs) to extract structured SDOH information from unstructured patient life stories and evaluate the predictive value of both the extracted features and the narratives themselves for assessing diabetes control. We collected unstructured interviews from 65 T2D patients aged 65 and older, focused on their lived experiences, social context, and diabetes management. These narratives were analyzed using LLMs with retrieval-augmented generation to produce concise, actionable qualitative summaries for clinical interpretation and structured quantitative SDOH ratings for risk prediction modeling. The structured SDOH ratings were used independently and in combination with traditional laboratory biomarkers as inputs to linear and tree-based machine learning models (Ridge, Lasso, Random Forest, and XGBoost) to demonstrate how unstructured narrative data can be applied in conventional risk prediction workflows. Finally, we evaluated several LLMs on their ability to predict a patient's level of diabetes control (low, medium, high) directly from interview text with A1C values redacted. LLMs achieved 60% accuracy in predicting diabetes control levels from interview text. This work demonstrates how LLMs can translate unstructured SDOH-related data into structured insights, offering a scalable approach to augment clinical risk models and decision-making.

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### Confidence over Time: Confidence Calibration with Temporal Logic for Large Language Model Reasoning

Authors: Zhenjiang Mao, Anirudhh Venkat, Artem Bisliouk, Akshat Kothiyal, Sindhura Kumbakonam Subramanian, Saithej Singhu, Ivan Ruchkin
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13387v1

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on long-form, multi-step reasoning to solve complex tasks such as mathematical problem solving and scientific question answering. Despite strong performance, existing confidence estimation methods typically reduce an entire reasoning process to a single scalar score, ignoring how confidence evolves throughout the generation. As a result, these methods are often sensitive to superficial factors such as response length or verbosity, and struggle to distinguish correct reasoning from confidently stated errors. We propose to characterize the stepwise confidence signal using Signal Temporal Logic (STL). Using a discriminative STL mining procedure, we discover temporal formulas that distinguish confidence signals of correct and incorrect responses. Our analysis found that the STL patterns generalize across tasks, and numeric parameters exhibit sensitivity to individual questions. Based on these insights, we develop a confidence estimation approach that informs STL blocks with parameter hypernetworks. Experiments on multiple reasoning tasks show our confidence scores are more calibrated than the baselines.

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### Leveraging Transformer Decoder for Automotive Radar Object Detection

Authors: Changxu Zhang, Zhaoze Wang, Tai Fei, Christopher Grimm, Yi Jin, Claas Tebruegge, Ernst Warsitz, Markus Gardill
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CV, eess.SP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13386v1

In this paper, we present a Transformer-based architecture for 3D radar object detection that uses a novel Transformer Decoder as the prediction head to directly regress 3D bounding boxes and class scores from radar feature representations. To bridge multi-scale radar features and the decoder, we propose Pyramid Token Fusion (PTF), a lightweight module that converts a feature pyramid into a unified, scale-aware token sequence. By formulating detection as a set prediction problem with learnable object queries and positional encodings, our design models long-range spatial-temporal correlations and cross-feature interactions. This approach eliminates dense proposal generation and heuristic post-processing such as extensive non-maximum suppression (NMS) tuning. We evaluate the proposed framework on the RADDet, where it achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art radar-only baselines.

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### Organ-Aware Attention Improves CT Triage and Classification

Authors: Lavsen Dahal, Yubraj Bhandari, Geoffrey D. Rubin, Joseph Y. Lo
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13385v1

There is an urgent need for triage and classification of high-volume medical imaging modalities such as computed tomography (CT), which can improve patient care and mitigate radiologist burnout. Study-level CT triage requires calibrated predictions with localized evidence; however, off-the-shelf Vision Language Models (VLM) struggle with 3D anatomy, protocol shifts, and noisy report supervision. This study used the two largest publicly available chest CT datasets: CT-RATE and RADCHEST-CT (held-out external test set). Our carefully tuned supervised baseline (instantiated as a simple Global Average Pooling head) establishes a new supervised state of the art, surpassing all reported linear-probe VLMs. Building on this baseline, we present ORACLE-CT, an encoder-agnostic, organ-aware head that pairs Organ-Masked Attention (mask-restricted, per-organ pooling that yields spatial evidence) with Organ-Scalar Fusion (lightweight fusion of normalized volume and mean-HU cues). In the chest setting, ORACLE-CT masked attention model achieves AUROC 0.86 on CT-RATE; in the abdomen setting, on MERLIN (30 findings), our supervised baseline exceeds a reproduced zero-shot VLM baseline obtained by running publicly released weights through our pipeline, and adding masked attention plus scalar fusion further improves performance to AUROC 0.85. Together, these results deliver state-of-the-art supervised classification performance across both chest and abdomen CT under a unified evaluation protocol. The source code is available at https://github.com/lavsendahal/oracle-ct.

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### From Completion to Editing: Unlocking Context-Aware Code Infilling via Search-and-Replace Instruction Tuning

Authors: Jiajun Zhang, Zeyu Cui, Jiaxi Yang, Lei Zhang, Yuheng Jing, Zeyao Ma, Tianyi Bai, Zilei Wang, Qiang Liu, Liang Wang, Binyuan Hui, Junyang Lin
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.SE, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13384v1

The dominant Fill-in-the-Middle (FIM) paradigm for code completion is constrained by its rigid inability to correct contextual errors and reliance on unaligned, insecure Base models. While Chat LLMs offer safety and Agentic workflows provide flexibility, they suffer from performance degradation and prohibitive latency, respectively. To resolve this dilemma, we propose Search-and-Replace Infilling (SRI), a framework that internalizes the agentic verification-and-editing mechanism into a unified, single-pass inference process. By structurally grounding edits via an explicit search phase, SRI harmonizes completion tasks with the instruction-following priors of Chat LLMs, extending the paradigm from static infilling to dynamic context-aware editing. We synthesize a high-quality dataset, SRI-200K, and fine-tune the SRI-Coder series. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that with minimal data (20k samples), SRI-Coder enables Chat models to surpass the completion performance of their Base counterparts. Crucially, unlike FIM-style tuning, SRI preserves general coding competencies and maintains inference latency comparable to standard FIM. We empower the entire Qwen3-Coder series with SRI, encouraging the developer community to leverage this framework for advanced auto-completion and assisted development.

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### A Lightweight Modular Framework for Constructing Autonomous Agents Driven by Large Language Models: Design, Implementation, and Applications in AgentForge

Authors: Akbar Anbar Jafari, Cagri Ozcinar, Gholamreza Anbarjafari
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13383v1

The emergence of LLMs has catalyzed a paradigm shift in autonomous agent development, enabling systems capable of reasoning, planning, and executing complex multi-step tasks. However, existing agent frameworks often suffer from architectural rigidity, vendor lock-in, and prohibitive complexity that impedes rapid prototyping and deployment. This paper presents AgentForge, a lightweight, open-source Python framework designed to democratize the construction of LLM-driven autonomous agents through a principled modular architecture. AgentForge introduces three key innovations: (1) a composable skill abstraction that enables fine-grained task decomposition with formally defined input-output contracts, (2) a unified LLM backend interface supporting seamless switching between cloud-based APIs and local inference engines, and (3) a declarative YAML-based configuration system that separates agent logic from implementation details. We formalize the skill composition mechanism as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) and prove its expressiveness for representing arbitrary sequential and parallel task workflows. Comprehensive experimental evaluation across four benchmark scenarios demonstrates that AgentForge achieves competitive task completion rates while reducing development time by 62% compared to LangChain and 78% compared to direct API integration. Latency measurements confirm sub-100ms orchestration overhead, rendering the framework suitable for real-time applications. The modular design facilitates extension: we demonstrate the integration of six built-in skills and provide comprehensive documentation for custom skill development. AgentForge addresses a critical gap in the LLM agent ecosystem by providing researchers and practitioners with a production-ready foundation for constructing, evaluating, and deploying autonomous agents without sacrificing flexibility or performance.

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### Practical Insights into Semi-Supervised Object Detection Approaches

Authors: Chaoxin Wang, Bharaneeshwar Balasubramaniyam, Anurag Sangem, Nicolais Guevara, Doina Caragea
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13380v2

Learning in data-scarce settings has recently gained significant attention in the research community. Semi-supervised object detection(SSOD) aims to improve detection performance by leveraging a large number of unlabeled images alongside a limited number of labeled images(a.k.a.,few-shot learning). In this paper, we present a comprehensive comparison of three state-of-the-art SSOD approaches, including MixPL, Semi-DETR and Consistent-Teacher, with the goal of understanding how performance varies with the number of labeled images. We conduct experiments using the MS-COCO and Pascal VOC datasets, two popular object detection benchmarks which allow for standardized evaluation. In addition, we evaluate the SSOD approaches on a custom Beetle dataset which enables us to gain insights into their performance on specialized datasets with a smaller number of object categories. Our findings highlight the trade-offs between accuracy, model size, and latency, providing insights into which methods are best suited for low-data regimes.

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### Bounded Minds, Generative Machines: Envisioning Conversational AI that Works with Human Heuristics and Reduces Bias Risk

Authors: Jiqun Liu
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.ET, cs.AI, cs.HC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13376v1

Conversational AI is rapidly becoming a primary interface for information seeking and decision making, yet most systems still assume idealized users. In practice, human reasoning is bounded by limited attention, uneven knowledge, and reliance on heuristics that are adaptive but bias-prone. This article outlines a research pathway grounded in bounded rationality, and argues that conversational AI should be designed to work with human heuristics rather than against them. It identifies key directions for detecting cognitive vulnerability, supporting judgment under uncertainty, and evaluating conversational systems beyond factual accuracy, toward decision quality and cognitive robustness.

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### A Lightweight Model-Driven 4D Radar Framework for Pervasive Human Detection in Harsh Conditions

Authors: Zhenan Liu, Amir Khajepour, George Shaker
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13373v1

Pervasive sensing in industrial and underground environments is severely constrained by airborne dust, smoke, confined geometry, and metallic structures, which rapidly degrade optical and LiDAR based perception. Elevation resolved 4D mmWave radar offers strong resilience to such conditions, yet there remains a limited understanding of how to process its sparse and anisotropic point clouds for reliable human detection in enclosed, visibility degraded spaces. This paper presents a fully model-driven 4D radar perception framework designed for real-time execution on embedded edge hardware. The system uses radar as its sole perception modality and integrates domain aware multi threshold filtering, ego motion compensated temporal accumulation, KD tree Euclidean clustering with Doppler aware refinement, and a rule based 3D classifier. The framework is evaluated in a dust filled enclosed trailer and in real underground mining tunnels, and in the tested scenarios the radar based detector maintains stable pedestrian identification as camera and LiDAR modalities fail under severe visibility degradation. These results suggest that the proposed model-driven approach provides robust, interpretable, and computationally efficient perception for safety-critical applications in harsh industrial and subterranean environments.

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### Spherical Geometry Diffusion: Generating High-quality 3D Face Geometry via Sphere-anchored Representations

Authors: Junyi Zhang, Yiming Wang, Yunhong Lu, Qichao Wang, Wenzhe Qian, Xiaoyin Xu, David Gu, Min Zhang
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13371v1

A fundamental challenge in text-to-3D face generation is achieving high-quality geometry. The core difficulty lies in the arbitrary and intricate distribution of vertices in 3D space, making it challenging for existing models to establish clean connectivity and resulting in suboptimal geometry. To address this, our core insight is to simplify the underlying geometric structure by constraining the distribution onto a simple and regular manifold, a topological sphere. Building on this, we first propose the Spherical Geometry Representation, a novel face representation that anchors geometric signals to uniform spherical coordinates. This guarantees a regular point distribution, from which the mesh connectivity can be robustly reconstructed. Critically, this canonical sphere can be seamlessly unwrapped into a 2D map, creating a perfect synergy with powerful 2D generative models. We then introduce Spherical Geometry Diffusion, a conditional diffusion framework built upon this 2D map. It enables diverse and controllable generation by jointly modeling geometry and texture, where the geometry explicitly conditions the texture synthesis process. Our method's effectiveness is demonstrated through its success in a wide range of tasks: text-to-3D generation, face reconstruction, and text-based 3D editing. Extensive experiments show that our approach substantially outperforms existing methods in geometric quality, textual fidelity, and inference efficiency.

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### Recurrent Confidence Chain: Temporal-Aware Uncertainty Quantification in Large Language Models

Authors: Zhenjiang Mao, Anirudhh Venkat
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13368v1

As reasoning modules, such as the chain-of-thought mechanism, are applied to large language models, they achieve strong performance on various tasks such as answering common-sense questions and solving math problems. The main challenge now is to assess the uncertainty of answers, which can help prevent misleading or serious hallucinations for users. Although current methods analyze long reasoning sequences by filtering unrelated tokens and examining potential connections between nearby tokens or sentences, the temporal spread of confidence is often overlooked. This oversight can lead to inflated overall confidence, even when earlier steps exhibit very low confidence. To address this issue, we propose a novel method that incorporates inter-step attention to analyze semantic correlations across steps. For handling long-horizon responses, we introduce a hidden confidence mechanism to retain historical confidence information, which is then combined with stepwise confidence to produce a more accurate overall estimate. We evaluate our method on the GAOKAO math benchmark and the CLadder causal reasoning dataset using mainstream open-source large language models. Our approach is shown to outperform state-of-the-art methods by achieving a superior balance between predictive quality and calibration, demonstrated by strong performance on both Negative Log-Likelihood and Expected Calibration Error.

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### CausationEntropy: Pythonic Optimal Causation Entropy

Authors: Kevin Slote, Jeremie Fish, Erik Bollt
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.LG, physics.data-an
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13365v1

Optimal Causation Entropy (oCSE) is a robust causal network modeling technique that reveals causal networks from dynamical systems and coupled oscillators, distinguishing direct from indirect paths. CausationEntropy is a Python package that implements oCSE and several of its significant optimizations and methodological extensions. In this paper, we introduce the version 1.1 release of CausationEntropy, which includes new synthetic data generators, plotting tools, and several advanced information-theoretical causal network discovery algorithms with criteria for estimating Gaussian, k-nearest neighbors (kNN), geometric k-nearest neighbors (geometric-kNN), kernel density (KDE) and Poisson entropic estimators. The package is easy to install from the PyPi software repository, is thoroughly documented, supplemented with extensive code examples, and is modularly structured to support future additions. The entire codebase is released under the MIT license and is available on GitHub and through PyPi Repository. We expect this package to serve as a benchmark tool for causal discovery in complex dynamical systems.

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### Real-Time 4D Radar Perception for Robust Human Detection in Harsh Enclosed Environments

Authors: Zhenan Liu, Yaodong Cui, Amir Khajepour, George Shaker
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13364v1

This paper introduces a novel methodology for generating controlled, multi-level dust concentrations in a highly cluttered environment representative of harsh, enclosed environments, such as underground mines, road tunnels, or collapsed buildings, enabling repeatable mm-wave propagation studies under severe electromagnetic constraints. We also present a new 4D mmWave radar dataset, augmented by camera and LiDAR, illustrating how dust particles and reflective surfaces jointly impact the sensing functionality. To address these challenges, we develop a threshold-based noise filtering framework leveraging key radar parameters (RCS, velocity, azimuth, elevation) to suppress ghost targets and mitigate strong multipath reflections at the raw data level. Building on the filtered point clouds, a cluster-level, rule-based classification pipeline exploits radar semantics-velocity, RCS, and volumetric spread-to achieve reliable, real-time pedestrian detection without extensive domainspecific training. Experimental results confirm that this integrated approach significantly enhances clutter mitigation, detection robustness, and overall system resilience in dust-laden mining environments.

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### Improving Geopolitical Forecasts with Bayesian Networks

Authors: Matthew Martin
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: stat.AP, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13362v1

This study explores how Bayesian networks (BNs) can improve forecast accuracy compared to logistic regression and recalibration and aggregation methods, using data from the Good Judgment Project. Regularized logistic regression models and a baseline recalibrated aggregate were compared to two types of BNs: structure-learned BNs with arcs between predictors, and naive BNs. Four predictor variables were examined: absolute difference from the aggregate, forecast value, days prior to question close, and mean standardized Brier score. Results indicated the recalibrated aggregate achieved the highest accuracy (AUC = 0.985), followed by both types of BNs, then the logistic regression models. Performance of the BNs was likely harmed by reduced information from the discretization process and violation of the assumption of linearity likely harmed the logistic regression models. Future research should explore hybrid approaches combining BNs with logistic regression, examine additional predictor variables, and account for hierarchical data dependencies.

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### Sockpuppetting: Jailbreaking LLMs by Combining Prefilling with Optimization

Authors: Asen Dotsinski, Panagiotis Eustratiadis
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CL, cs.CR, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13359v3

Prefill attacks are an effective and low-cost jailbreaking method, as they directly insert an acceptance sequence (e.g., "Sure, here is...") at the start of an LLM's output and lead the model to continue the response. We make two contributions to this prior work. First, we show that an unsophisticated adversary can improve the well-known prefill attacks by ensembling a small number of prefill variants. Running three easy-to-generate prefills yields a combined attack success rate (ASR) of 22%, 90%, and 99% on Gemma-7B, Llama-3.1-8B, and Qwen3-8B respectively, an up to 38 percentage point improvement over the standard "Sure, here's..." prefill and up to 82 percentage points over our reproduction of GCG (Zou et al., 2023). Second, we introduce "sockpuppetting", a hybrid attack that optimizes an adversarial suffix placed inside the "assistant" message block of the chat template, rather than within the user prompt. The rolling variant of this attack, RollingSockpuppetGCG, increases prompt-agnostic ASR by up to 64 percentage points over our universal GCG baseline on Llama-3.1-8B. An ablation indicates that part of this gain stems from the choice of acceptance sequence rather than suffix placement alone (Appendix F). Both findings highlight the need for defences against output-prefix injection in open-weight models. Code: https://gitlab.com/asendotsinski/sockpuppetting

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### The Geometry of Thought: How Scale Restructures Reasoning In Large Language Models

Authors: Samuel Cyrenius Anderson
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13358v2

Scale does not uniformly improve reasoning - it restructures it. Analyzing 25,000+ chain-of-thought trajectories across four domains (Law, Science, Code, Math) and two scales (8B, 70B parameters), we discover that neural scaling laws trigger domain-specific phase transitions rather than uniform capability gains. Legal reasoning undergoes Crystallization: 45% collapse in representational dimensionality (d95: 501 -> 274), 31% increase in trajectory alignment, and 10x manifold untangling. Scientific and mathematical reasoning remain Liquid - geometrically invariant despite 9x parameter increase. Code reasoning forms a discrete Lattice of strategic modes (silhouette: 0.13 -> 0.42). This geometry predicts learnability. We introduce Neural Reasoning Operators - learned mappings from initial to terminal hidden states. In crystalline legal reasoning, our operator achieves 63.6% accuracy on held-out tasks via probe decoding, predicting reasoning endpoints without traversing intermediate states. We further identify a universal oscillatory signature (coherence ~ -0.4) invariant across domains and scales, suggesting attention and feedforward layers drive reasoning through opposing dynamics. These findings establish that the cost of thought is determined not by task difficulty but by manifold geometry - offering a blueprint for inference acceleration where topology permits.

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### On the Relation of State Space Models and Hidden Markov Models

Authors: Aydin Ghojogh, M. Hadi Sepanj, Benyamin Ghojogh
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL, eess.AS, eess.SY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13357v1

State Space Models (SSMs) and Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are foundational frameworks for modeling sequential data with latent variables and are widely used in signal processing, control theory, and machine learning. Despite their shared temporal structure, they differ fundamentally in the nature of their latent states, probabilistic assumptions, inference procedures, and training paradigms. Recently, deterministic state space models have re-emerged in natural language processing through architectures such as S4 and Mamba, raising new questions about the relationship between classical probabilistic SSMs, HMMs, and modern neural sequence models. In this paper, we present a unified and systematic comparison of HMMs, linear Gaussian state space models, Kalman filtering, and contemporary NLP state space models. We analyze their formulations through the lens of probabilistic graphical models, examine their inference algorithms -- including forward-backward inference and Kalman filtering -- and contrast their learning procedures via Expectation-Maximization and gradient-based optimization. By highlighting both structural similarities and semantic differences, we clarify when these models are equivalent, when they fundamentally diverge, and how modern NLP SSMs relate to classical probabilistic models. Our analysis bridges perspectives from control theory, probabilistic modeling, and modern deep learning.

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### LLM-as-RNN: A Recurrent Language Model for Memory Updates and Sequence Prediction

Authors: Yuxing Lu, J. Ben Tamo, Weichen Zhao, Nan Sun, Yishan Zhong, Wenqi Shi, Jinzhuo Wang, May D. Wang
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.MA
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13352v1

Large language models are strong sequence predictors, yet standard inference relies on immutable context histories. After making an error at generation step t, the model lacks an updatable memory mechanism that improves predictions for step t+1. We propose LLM-as-RNN, an inference-only framework that turns a frozen LLM into a recurrent predictor by representing its hidden state as natural-language memory. This state, implemented as a structured system-prompt summary, is updated at each timestep via feedback-driven text rewrites, enabling learning without parameter updates. Under a fixed token budget, LLM-as-RNN corrects errors and retains task-relevant patterns, effectively performing online learning through language. We evaluate the method on three sequential benchmarks in healthcare, meteorology, and finance across Llama, Gemma, and GPT model families. LLM-as-RNN significantly outperforms zero-shot, full-history, and MemPrompt baselines, improving predictive accuracy by 6.5% on average, while producing interpretable, human-readable learning traces absent in standard context accumulation.

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### Beyond Mapping : Domain-Invariant Representations via Spectral Embedding of Optimal Transport Plans

Authors: Abdel Djalil Sad Saoud, Fred Maurice Ngolè Mboula, Hanane Slimani
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13350v2

Distributional shifts between training and inference time data remain a central challenge in machine learning, often leading to poor performance. It motivated the study of principled approaches for domain alignment, such as optimal transport based unsupervised domain adaptation, that relies on approximating Monge map using transport plans, which is sensitive to the transport problem regularization strategy and hyperparameters, and might yield biased domains alignment. In this work, we propose to interpret smoothed transport plans as adjacency matrices of bipartite graphs connecting source to target domain and derive domain-invariant samples' representations through spectral embedding. We evaluate our approach on acoustic adaptation benchmarks for music genre recognition, music-speech discrimination, as well as electrical cable defect detection and classification tasks using time domain reflection in different diagnosis settings, achieving overall strong performances.

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### The AI Genie Phenomenon and Three Types of AI Chatbot Addiction: Escapist Roleplays, Pseudosocial Companions, and Epistemic Rabbit Holes

Authors: M. Karen Shen, Jessica Huang, Olivia Liang, Ig-Jae Kim, Dongwook Yoon
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13348v1

Recent reports on generative AI chatbot use raise concerns about its addictive potential. An in-depth understanding is imperative to minimize risks, yet AI chatbot addiction remains poorly understood. This study examines how to characterize AI chatbot addiction--why users become addicted, the symptoms commonly reported, and the distinct types it comprises. We conducted a thematic analysis of Reddit entries (n=334) across 14 subreddits where users narrated their experiences with addictive AI chatbot use, followed by an exploratory data analysis. We found: (1) users' dependence tied to the "AI Genie" phenomenon--users can get exactly anything they want with minimal effort--and marked by symptoms that align with addiction literature, (2) three distinct addiction types: Escapist Roleplay, Pseudosocial Companion, and Epistemic Rabbit Hole, (3) sexual content involved in multiple cases, and (4) recovery strategies' perceived helpfulness differ between addiction types. Our work lays empirical groundwork to inform future strategies for prevention, diagnosis, and intervention.

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### AfroScope: A Framework for Studying the Linguistic Landscape of Africa

Authors: Sang Yun Kwon, AbdelRahim Elmadany, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13346v3

Language Identification (LID), the task of determining the language of a given text, is a fundamental preprocessing step that shapes the reliability of downstream NLP applications. While recent work has expanded African LID, existing systems remain limited in both language coverage and fine-grained discrimination among closely related languages and varieties. We introduce AfroScope, a unified framework for African LID that includes AfroScope-Data, a dataset covering 640 languages, and AfroScope-Models, a suite of strong LID models with broad African language coverage. To address persistent confusions among closely related languages, we propose a hierarchical classification approach that leverages AfroScope-Mirror, a specialized embedding model for targeted disambiguation, improving macro-F1 by 1.57 points on the confusable subset compared to our best base model. We further analyze cross-lingual transfer and domain effects, showing how language-family structure, script compatibility, and domain coverage shape LID performance. We position African LID as an enabling technology for large-scale measurement of Africa's linguistic landscape in digital text, and release AfroScope-Data and AfroScope-Models online.

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### MultiST: A Cross-Attention-Based Multimodal Model for Spatial Transcriptomic

Authors: Wei Wang, Quoc-Toan Ly, Chong Yu, Jun Bai
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13331v1

Spatial transcriptomics (ST) enables transcriptome-wide profiling while preserving the spatial context of tissues, offering unprecedented opportunities to study tissue organization and cell-cell interactions in situ. Despite recent advances, existing methods often lack effective integration of histological morphology with molecular profiles, relying on shallow fusion strategies or omitting tissue images altogether, which limits their ability to resolve ambiguous spatial domain boundaries. To address this challenge, we propose MultiST, a unified multimodal framework that jointly models spatial topology, gene expression, and tissue morphology through cross-attention-based fusion. MultiST employs graph-based gene encoders with adversarial alignment to learn robust spatial representations, while integrating color-normalized histological features to capture molecular-morphological dependencies and refine domain boundaries. We evaluated the proposed method on 13 diverse ST datasets spanning two organs, including human brain cortex and breast cancer tissue. MultiST yields spatial domains with clearer and more coherent boundaries than existing methods, leading to more stable pseudotime trajectories and more biologically interpretable cell-cell interaction patterns. The MultiST framework and source code are available at https://github.com/LabJunBMI/MultiST.git.

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### RegCheck: A tool for structured comparisons between study registrations and papers

Authors: Jamie Cummins, Beth Clarke, Ian Hussey, Malte Elson
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13330v2

Across the social and medical sciences, researchers recognize that specifying planned research activities (i.e., 'registration') prior to the commencement of research has benefits for both the transparency and rigour of science. Despite this, evidence suggests that study registrations frequently go unexamined, minimizing their effectiveness. In a way this is no surprise: manually checking registrations against papers is labour- and time-intensive, requiring careful reading across formats and expertise across domains. The advent of AI unlocks new possibilities in facilitating this activity. We present RegCheck, a modular LLM-assisted tool designed to help researchers, reviewers, and editors from across scientific disciplines compare study registrations with their corresponding papers. Importantly, RegCheck keeps human expertise and judgement in the loop by (i) ensuring that users are the ones who determine which features should be compared, and (ii) presenting the most relevant text associated with each feature to the user, facilitating (rather than replacing) human discrepancy judgements. RegCheck also generates shareable reports with unique RegCheck IDs, enabling them to be easily shared and verified by other users. RegCheck is designed to be adaptable across scientific domains, as well as registration and publication formats. In this paper we provide an overview of the motivation, workflow, and design principles of RegCheck, and we discuss its potential as an extensible infrastructure for reproducible science with an example use case.

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### Reducing Tokenization Premiums for Low-Resource Languages

Authors: Geoffrey Churchill, Steven Skiena
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13328v1

Relative to English, low-resource languages suffer from substantial tokenization premiums in modern LMs, meaning that it generally requires several times as many tokens to encode a sentence in a low-resource language than to encode the analogous sentence in English. This tokenization premium results in increased API and energy costs and reduced effective context windows for these languages. In this paper we analyze the tokenizers of ten popular LMs to better understand their designs and per-language tokenization premiums. We also propose a mechanism to reduce tokenization premiums in pre-trained models, by post-hoc additions to the token vocabulary that coalesce multi-token characters into single tokens. We apply this methodology to 12 low-resource languages, demonstrating that the original and compressed inputs often have similar last hidden states when run through the Llama 3.2 1B model.

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### PepEDiff: Zero-Shot Peptide Binder Design via Protein Embedding Diffusion

Authors: Po-Yu Liang, Tibo Duran, Jun Bai
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13327v2

We present PepEDiff, a novel peptide binder generator that designs binding sequences given a target receptor protein sequence and its pocket residues. Peptide binder generation is critical in therapeutic and biochemical applications, yet many existing methods rely heavily on intermediate structure prediction, adding complexity and limiting sequence diversity. Our approach departs from this paradigm by generating binder sequences directly in a continuous latent space derived from a pretrained protein embedding model, without relying on predicted structures, thereby improving structural and sequence diversity. To encourage the model to capture binding-relevant features rather than memorizing known sequences, we perform latent-space exploration and diffusion-based sampling, enabling the generation of peptides beyond the limited distribution of known binders. This zero-shot generative strategy leverages the global protein embedding manifold as a semantic prior, allowing the model to propose novel peptide sequences in previously unseen regions of the protein space. We evaluate PepEDiff on TIGIT, a challenging target with a large, flat protein-protein interaction interface that lacks a druggable pocket. Despite its simplicity, our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across benchmark tests and in the TIGIT case study, demonstrating its potential as a general, structure-free framework for zero-shot peptide binder design. The code for this research is available at GitHub: https://github.com/LabJunBMI/PepEDiff-An-Peptide-binder-Embedding-Diffusion-Model

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### Arab Voices: Mapping Standard and Dialectal Arabic Speech Technology

Authors: Peter Sullivan, AbdelRahim Elmadany, Alcides Alcoba Inciarte, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13319v2

Dialectal Arabic (DA) speech data vary widely in domain coverage, dialect labeling practices, and recording conditions, complicating cross-dataset comparison and model evaluation. To characterize this landscape, we conduct a computational analysis of linguistic ``dialectness'' alongside objective proxies of audio quality on the training splits of widely used DA corpora. We find substantial heterogeneity both in acoustic conditions and in the strength and consistency of dialectal signals across datasets, underscoring the need for standardized characterization beyond coarse labels. To reduce fragmentation and support reproducible evaluation, we introduce Arab Voices, a standardized framework for DA ASR. Arab Voices provides unified access to 31 datasets spanning 14 dialects, with harmonized metadata and evaluation utilities. We further benchmark a range of recent ASR systems, establishing strong baselines for modern DA ASR.

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### Paid Voices vs. Public Feeds: Interpretable Cross-Platform Theme-Based Analysis of Climate Discourse

Authors: Samantha Sudhoff, Pranav Perumal, Zhaoqing Wu, Tunazzina Islam
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.LG, cs.SI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13317v2

Climate discourse online shapes public understanding of climate change and informs political and policy debate, yet it unfolds across structurally different environments: paid advertising platforms host targeted, institutionally produced messaging, while public social media reflects largely organic, user-driven discussion. We present a comparative analysis of climate discourse across paid advertisements on Meta (previously Facebook) and public posts on Bluesky from July 2024 to September 2025. To support it, we develop an interpretable thematic discovery pipeline that clusters texts by semantic similarity and uses large language models (LLMs) to label clusters with concise, human-interpretable themes, requiring no predefined topic inventory or seed set. Using these themes, we find the two environments diverge systematically: paid advertising centers on strategic promotion of specific solutions in a formal, forward-looking register, whereas organic discourse centers on systemic critique in a crisis-oriented, scientifically grounded one. We also evaluate the utility of the discovered themes through downstream stance prediction and theme-guided retrieval tasks. While our analysis focuses on climate communication, the framework generalizes to comparative thematic analysis across heterogeneous communication environments.

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### Scaling laws for amplitude surrogates

Authors: Henning Bahl, Victor Bresó-Pla, Anja Butter, Joaquín Iturriza Ramirez
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: hep-ph, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13308v1

Scaling laws describing the dependence of neural network performance on the amount of training data, the spent compute, and the network size have emerged across a huge variety of machine learning task and datasets. In this work, we systematically investigate these scaling laws in the context of amplitude surrogates for particle physics. We show that the scaling coefficients are connected to the number of external particles of the process. Our results demonstrate that scaling laws are a useful tool to achieve desired precision targets.

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### CausalSpatial: A Benchmark for Object-Centric Causal Spatial Reasoning

Authors: Wenxin Ma, Chenlong Wang, Ruisheng Yuan, Hao Chen, Nanru Dai, S. Kevin Zhou, Yijun Yang, Alan Yuille, Jieneng Chen
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13304v1

Humans can look at a static scene and instantly predict what happens next -- will moving this object cause a collision? We call this ability Causal Spatial Reasoning. However, current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) cannot do this, as they remain largely restricted to static spatial perception, struggling to answer "what-if" questions in a 3D scene. We introduce CausalSpatial, a diagnostic benchmark evaluating whether models can anticipate consequences of object motions across four tasks: Collision, Compatibility, Occlusion, and Trajectory. Results expose a severe gap: humans score 84% while GPT-5 achieves only 54%. Why do MLLMs fail? Our analysis uncovers a fundamental deficiency: models over-rely on textual chain-of-thought reasoning that drifts from visual evidence, producing fluent but spatially ungrounded hallucinations. To address this, we propose the Causal Object World model (COW), a framework that externalizes the simulation process by generating videos of hypothetical dynamics. With explicit visual cues of causality, COW enables models to ground their reasoning in physical reality rather than linguistic priors. We make the dataset and code publicly available here: https://github.com/CausalSpatial/CausalSpatial

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### On the Extreme Variance of Certified Local Robustness Across Model Seeds

Authors: Minh Le, Phuong Cao
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13303v2

Robustness verification of neural networks, referring to formally proving that neural networks satisfy robustness properties, is of crucial importance in safety-critical applications, where model failures can result in loss of human life or million-dollar damages. However, the dependability of verification results may be questioned due to sources of randomness in machine learning, and although this has been widely investigated for accuracy, its impact on robustness verification remains unknown. In this paper, we demonstrate a concerning result: Models that differ only in random seeds during training exhibit extreme variance in their certified robustness, with a standard deviation that is statistically larger than the marginal robustness improvements reported in recent machine learning papers. In addition, we also show that certified robustness generalization to unseen data varies significantly across datasets, falling short of the dependability expectations for safety-critical tasks. Our findings are major concerns because: (i) machine learning results in certified robustness are likely unconvincing due to extreme variance in certified robustness, and (ii) a ``lucky'' model seed in a test set cannot be guaranteed to maintain its higher certified robustness under a different test set. In light of these results, we urge researchers to increase the reporting of confidence intervals for certified robustness, and we urge those verifying neural networks to be more comprehensive in verification by using large-scale, diverse, and unseen data.

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### OI-Bench: An Option Injection Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Susceptibility to Directive Interference

Authors: Yow-Fu Liou, Yu-Chien Tang, Yu-Hsiang Liu, An-Zi Yen
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13300v2

Benchmarking large language models (LLMs) is critical for understanding their capabilities, limitations, and robustness. In addition to interface artifacts, prior studies have shown that LLM decisions can be influenced by directive signals such as social cues, framing, and instructions. In this work, we introduce option injection, a benchmarking approach that augments the multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) interface with an additional option containing a misleading directive, leveraging standardized choice structure and scalable evaluation. We construct OI-Bench, a benchmark of 3,000 questions spanning knowledge, reasoning, and commonsense tasks, with 16 directive types covering social compliance, bonus framing, threat framing, and instructional interference. This setting combines manipulation of the choice interface with directive-based interference, enabling systematic assessment of model susceptibility. We evaluate 12 LLMs to analyze attack success rates, behavioral responses, and further investigate mitigation strategies ranging from inference-time prompting to post-training alignment. Experimental results reveal substantial vulnerabilities and heterogeneous robustness across models. OI-Bench is expected to support more systematic evaluation of LLM robustness to directive interference within choice-based interfaces.

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### Enginuity: Building an Open Multi-Domain Dataset of Complex Engineering Diagrams

Authors: Ethan Seefried, Prahitha Movva, Naga Harshita Marupaka, Tilak Kasturi, Tirthankar Ghosal
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13299v1

We propose Enginuity - the first open, large-scale, multi-domain engineering diagram dataset with comprehensive structural annotations designed for automated diagram parsing. By capturing hierarchical component relationships, connections, and semantic elements across diverse engineering domains, our proposed dataset would enable multimodal large language models to address critical downstream tasks including structured diagram parsing, cross-modal information retrieval, and AI-assisted engineering simulation. Enginuity would be transformative for AI for Scientific Discovery by enabling artificial intelligence systems to comprehend and manipulate the visual-structural knowledge embedded in engineering diagrams, breaking down a fundamental barrier that currently prevents AI from fully participating in scientific workflows where diagram interpretation, technical drawing analysis, and visual reasoning are essential for hypothesis generation, experimental design, and discovery.

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### CooperBench: Why Coding Agents Cannot be Your Teammates Yet

Authors: Arpandeep Khatua, Hao Zhu, Peter Tran, Arya Prabhudesai, Frederic Sadrieh, Johann K. Lieberwirth, Xinkai Yu, Yicheng Fu, Michael J. Ryan, Jiaxin Pei, Diyi Yang
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.MA, cs.SI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13295v2

Resolving team conflicts requires not only task-specific competence, but also social intelligence to find common ground and build consensus. As AI agents increasingly collaborate on complex work, they must develop coordination capabilities to function as effective teammates. Yet we hypothesize that current agents lack these capabilities. To test this, we introduce CooperBench, a benchmark of over 600 collaborative coding tasks across 12 libraries in 4 programming languages. Each task assigns two agents different features that can be implemented independently but may conflict without proper coordination. Tasks are grounded in real open-source repositories with expert-written tests. Evaluating state-of-the-art coding agents, we observe the curse of coordination: agents achieve on average 30% lower success rates when working together compared to performing both tasks individually. This contrasts sharply with human teams, where adding teammates typically improves productivity. Our analysis reveals three key issues: (1) communication channels become jammed with vague, ill-timed, and inaccurate messages; (2) even with effective communication, agents deviate from their commitments; and (3) agents often hold incorrect expectations about others' plans and communication. Through large-scale simulation, we also observe rare but interesting emergent coordination behavior including role division, resource division, and negotiation. Our research presents a novel benchmark for collaborative coding and calls for a shift from pursuing individual agent capability to developing social intelligence.

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### The Tag is the Signal: URL-Agnostic Credibility Scoring for Messages on Telegram

Authors: Yipeng Wang, Huy Gia Han Vu, Mohit Singhal
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.SI, cs.CY, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13294v1

Telegram has become one of the leading platforms for disseminating misinformational messages. However, many existing pipelines still classify each message's credibility based on the reputation of its associated domain names or its lexical features. Such methods work well on traditional long-form news articles published by well-known sources, but high-risk posts on Telegram are short and URL-sparse, leading to failures for link-based and standard TF-IDF models. To this end, we propose the TAG2CRED pipeline, a method designed for such short, convoluted messages. Our model will directly score each post based on the tags assigned to the text. We designed a concise label system that covers the dimensions of theme, claim type, call to action, and evidence. The fine-tuned large language model (LLM) assigns tags to messages and then maps these tags to calibrated risk scores in the (0,1) interval through L2-regularized logistic regression. We evaluated 87,936 Telegram messages associated with Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC), using URL masking and domain disjoint splits. The results showed that the ROC-AUC of the TAG2CRED model reached 0.871, the macro-F1 value was 0.787, and the Brier score was 0.167, outperforming the baseline TF-IDF (macro-F1 value 0.737, Brier score 0.248); at the same time, the number of features used in this model is much smaller, and the generalization ability on infrequent domains is stronger. The performance of the stacked ensemble model (TF-IDF + TAG2CRED + SBERT) was further improved over the baseline SBERT. ROC-AUC reached 0.901, and the macro-F1 value was 0.813 (Brier score 0.114). This indicates that style labels and lexical features may capture different but complementary dimensions of information risk.

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### A BERTology View of LLM Orchestrations: Token- and Layer-Selective Probes for Efficient Single-Pass Classification

Authors: Gonzalo Ariel Meyoyan, Luciano Del Corro
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13288v2

Production LLM systems often rely on separate models for safety and other classification-heavy steps, increasing latency, VRAM footprint, and operational complexity. We instead reuse computation already paid for by the serving LLM: we train lightweight probes on its hidden states and predict labels in the same forward pass used for generation. We frame classification as representation selection over the full token-layer hidden-state tensor, rather than committing to a fixed token or fixed layer (e.g., first-token logits or final-layer pooling). To implement this, we introduce a two-stage aggregator that (i) summarizes tokens within each layer and (ii) aggregates across layer summaries to form a single representation for classification. We instantiate this template with direct pooling, a 100K-parameter scoring-attention gate, and a downcast multi-head self-attention (MHA) probe with up to 35M trainable parameters. Across safety and sentiment benchmarks our probes improve over logit-only reuse (e.g., MULI) and are competitive with substantially larger task-specific baselines, while preserving near-serving latency and avoiding the VRAM and latency costs of a separate guard-model pipeline. Multi-backbone experiments on dense and mixture-of-experts architectures (Llama-3.2-3B, GPT-OSS-20B, Qwen3-30B-A3B) confirm that these findings generalize beyond a single model family.

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### AI Skills Improve Job Prospects: Causal Evidence from a Hiring Experiment

Authors: Fabian Stephany, Ole Teutloff, Angelo Leone
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: econ.GN, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13286v2

The growing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has heightened interest in the labor market value of AI related skills, yet causal evidence on their role in hiring decisions remains scarce. This study examines whether AI skills serve as a positive hiring signal and whether they can offset conventional disadvantages such as older age or lower formal education. We conducted an experimental survey with 1,725 recruiters from the United Kingdom, the United States and Germany. Using a paired conjoint design, recruiters evaluated hypothetical candidates represented by synthetically designed resumes. Across three occupations of graphic design, office assistance, and software engineering, AI skills significantly increase interview invitation probabilities by approximately 8 to 15 percentage points, compared with candidates without such skills. AI credentials, such as university or company backed skill certificates, only lead to a moderate increase in invitation probabilities compared with self declaration of AI skills. AI skills also partially or fully offset disadvantages related to age and lower education, with effects strongest for office assistants, for whom formal AI certificates play a significant additional compensatory role. Effects are weaker for graphic designers, consistent with more skeptical recruiter attitudes toward AI in creative work. Finally, recruiters own background and AI usage significantly moderate these effects. Overall, the findings demonstrate that AI skills function as a powerful hiring signal and can mitigate traditional labor market disadvantages, with implications for workers skill acquisition strategies and firms recruitment practices.

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### Balancing Classification and Calibration Performance in Decision-Making LLMs via Calibration Aware Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Duygu Nur Yaldiz, Evangelia Spiliopoulou, Zheng Qi, Siddharth Varia, Srikanth Doss, Nikolaos Pappas
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13284v1

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in decision-making tasks, where not only accuracy but also reliable confidence estimates are essential. Well-calibrated confidence enables downstream systems to decide when to trust a model and when to defer to fallback mechanisms. In this work, we conduct a systematic study of calibration in two widely used fine-tuning paradigms: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). We show that while RLVR improves task performance, it produces extremely overconfident models, whereas SFT yields substantially better calibration, even under distribution shift, though with smaller performance gains. Through targeted experiments, we diagnose RLVR's failure, showing that decision tokens act as extraction steps of the decision in reasoning traces and do not carry confidence information, which prevents reinforcement learning from surfacing calibrated alternatives. Based on this insight, we propose a calibration-aware reinforcement learning formulation that directly adjusts decision-token probabilities. Our method preserves RLVR's accuracy level while mitigating overconfidence, reducing ECE scores up to 9 points.

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### Multi-level Monte Carlo Dropout for Efficient Uncertainty Quantification

Authors: Aaron Pim, Tristan Pryer
Published: 2026-01-19
Categories: cs.LG, stat.CO, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13272v1

We develop a multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) framework for uncertainty quantification with Monte Carlo dropout. Treating dropout masks as a source of epistemic randomness, we define a fidelity hierarchy by the number of stochastic forward passes used to estimate predictive moments. We construct coupled coarse--fine estimators by reusing dropout masks across fidelities, yielding telescoping MLMC estimators for both predictive means and predictive variances that remain unbiased for the corresponding dropout-induced quantities while reducing sampling variance at fixed evaluation budget. We derive explicit bias, variance and effective cost expressions, together with sample-allocation rules across levels. Numerical experiments on forward and inverse PINNs--Uzawa benchmarks confirm the predicted variance rates and demonstrate efficiency gains over single-level MC-dropout at matched cost.

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