# Research Papers — 2026-01 · bundle page 99 of 189 > Full-text markdown of papers #4901–4950 of 9403 published in 2026-01, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 9403-paper 2026-01 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-01/page/99 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-01/page/98.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-01/page/100.md) ### Utilizing Metadata for Better Retrieval-Augmented Generation Authors: Raquib Bin Yousuf, Shengzhe Xu, Mandar Sharma, Andrew Neeser, Chris Latimer, Naren Ramakrishnan Published: 2026-01-17 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.CE, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11863v1 Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems depend on retrieving semantically relevant document chunks to support accurate, grounded outputs from large language models. In structured and repetitive corpora such as regulatory filings, chunk similarity alone often fails to distinguish between documents with overlapping language. Practitioners often flatten metadata into input text as a heuristic, but the impact and trade-offs of this practice remain poorly understood. We present a systematic study of metadata-aware retrieval strategies, comparing plain-text baselines with approaches that embed metadata directly. Our evaluation spans metadata-as-text (prefix and suffix), a dual-encoder unified embedding that fuses metadata and content in a single index, dual-encoder late-fusion retrieval, and metadata-aware query reformulation. Across multiple retrieval metrics and question types, we find that prefixing and unified embeddings consistently outperform plain-text baselines, with the unified at times exceeding prefixing while being easier to maintain. Beyond empirical comparisons, we analyze embedding space, showing that metadata integration improves effectiveness by increasing intra-document cohesion, reducing inter-document confusion, and widening the separation between relevant and irrelevant chunks. Field-level ablations show that structural cues provide strong disambiguating signals. Our code, evaluation framework, and the RAGMATE-10K dataset are publicly hosted. --- ### Adversarial Drift-Aware Predictive Transfer: Toward Durable Clinical AI Authors: Xin Xiong, Zijian Guo, Haobo Zhu, Chuan Hong, Jordan W Smoller, Tianxi Cai, Molei Liu Published: 2026-01-17 Categories: stat.AP, cs.LG, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11860v2 Clinical AI systems frequently suffer performance decay post-deployment due to temporal data shifts, such as evolving populations, diagnostic coding updates (e.g., ICD-9 to ICD-10), and systemic shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic. Addressing this ``aging'' effect via frequent retraining is often impractical due to computational costs and privacy constraints. To overcome these hurdles, we introduce Adversarial Drift-Aware Predictive Transfer (ADAPT), a novel framework designed to confer durability against temporal drift with minimal retraining. ADAPT innovatively constructs an uncertainty set of plausible future models by combining historical source models and limited current data. By optimizing worst-case performance over this set, it balances current accuracy with robustness against degradation due to future drifts. Crucially, ADAPT requires only summary-level model estimators from historical periods, preserving data privacy and ensuring operational simplicity. Validated on longitudinal suicide risk prediction using electronic health records from Mass General Brigham (2005--2021) and Duke University Health Systems, ADAPT demonstrated superior stability across coding transitions and pandemic-induced shifts. By minimizing annual performance decay without labeling or retraining future data, ADAPT offers a scalable pathway for sustaining reliable AI in high-stakes healthcare environments. --- ### Cascaded Transformer for Robust and Scalable SLA Decomposition via Amortized Optimization Authors: Cyril Shih-Huan Hsu Published: 2026-01-17 Categories: cs.NI, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11859v1 The evolution toward 6G networks increasingly relies on network slicing to provide tailored, End-to-End (E2E) logical networks over shared physical infrastructures. A critical challenge is effectively decomposing E2E Service Level Agreements (SLAs) into domain-specific SLAs, which current solutions handle through computationally intensive, iterative optimization processes that incur substantial latency and complexity. To address this, we introduce Casformer, a cascaded Transformer architecture designed for fast, optimization-free SLA decomposition. Casformer leverages historical domain feedback encoded through domain-specific Transformer encoders in its first layer, and integrates cross-domain dependencies using a Transformer-based aggregator in its second layer. The model is trained under a learning paradigm inspired by Domain-Informed Neural Networks (DINNs), incorporating risk-informed modeling and amortized optimization to learn a stable, forward-only SLA decomposition policy. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Casformer achieves improved SLA decomposition quality against state-of-the-art optimization-based frameworks, while exhibiting enhanced scalability and robustness under volatile and noisy network conditions. In addition, its forward-only design reduces runtime complexity and simplifies deployment and maintenance. These insights reveal the potential of combining amortized optimization with Transformer-based sequence modeling to advance network automation, providing a scalable and efficient solution suitable for real-time SLA management in advanced 5G-and-beyond network environments. --- ### ATOD: An Evaluation Framework and Benchmark for Agentic Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems Authors: Yifei Zhang, Hooshang Nayyeri, Rinat Khaziev, Emine Yilmaz, Gokhan Tur, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Hari Thadakamalla Published: 2026-01-17 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11854v2 Recent advances in task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, driven by large language models (LLMs) with extensive API and tool integration, have enabled conversational agents to coordinate interleaved goals, maintain long-horizon context, and act proactively through asynchronous execution. These capabilities extend beyond traditional TOD systems, yet existing benchmarks lack systematic support for evaluating such agentic behaviors. To address this gap, we introduce ATOD, a benchmark and synthetic dialogue generation pipeline that produces richly annotated conversations requiring long-term reasoning. ATOD captures key characteristics of advanced TOD, including multi-goal coordination, dependency management, memory, adaptability, and proactivity. Building on ATOD, we propose ATOD-Eval, a holistic evaluation framework that translates these dimensions into fine-grained metrics and supports reproducible offline and online evaluation. We further present a strong agentic memory-based evaluator for benchmarking on ATOD. Experiments show that ATOD-Eval enables comprehensive assessment across task completion, agentic capability, and response quality, and that the proposed evaluator offers a better accuracy-efficiency tradeoff compared to existing memory- and LLM-based approaches under this evaluation setting. --- ### Human-AI Collaborative Inductive Thematic Analysis: AI Guided Analysis and Human Interpretive Authority Authors: Matthew Nyaaba, Min SungEun, Mary Abiswin Apam, Kwame Owoahene Acheampong, Emmanuel Dwamena, Xiaoming Zhai Published: 2026-01-17 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11850v1 The increasing use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in qualitative research raises important questions about analytic practice and interpretive authority. This study examines how researchers interact with an Inductive Thematic Analysis GPT (ITA-GPT), a purpose-built AI tool designed to support inductive thematic analysis through structured, semi-automated prompts aligned with reflexive thematic analysis and verbatim coding principles. Guided by a Human-Artificial Intelligence Collaborative Inductive Thematic Analysis (HACITA) framework, the study focuses on analytic process rather than substantive findings. Three experienced qualitative researchers conducted ITA-GPT assisted analyses of interview transcripts from education research in the Ghanaian teacher education context. The tool supported familiarization, verbatim in vivo coding, gerund-based descriptive coding, and theme development, while enforcing trace to text integrity, coverage checks, and auditability. Data sources included interaction logs, AI-generated tables, researcher revisions, deletions, insertions, comments, and reflexive memos. Findings show that ITA-GPT functioned as a procedural scaffold that structured analytic workflow and enhanced transparency. However, interpretive authority remained with human researchers, who exercised judgment through recurrent analytic actions including modification, deletion, rejection, insertion, and commenting. The study demonstrates how inductive thematic analysis is enacted through responsible human AI collaboration. --- ### The Third VoicePrivacy Challenge: Preserving Emotional Expressiveness and Linguistic Content in Voice Anonymization Authors: Natalia Tomashenko, Xiaoxiao Miao, Pierre Champion, Sarina Meyer, Michele Panariello, Xin Wang, Nicholas Evans, Emmanuel Vincent, Junichi Yamagishi, Massimiliano Todisco Published: 2026-01-17 Categories: cs.CL, cs.SD, eess.AS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11846v1 We present results and analyses from the third VoicePrivacy Challenge held in 2024, which focuses on advancing voice anonymization technologies. The task was to develop a voice anonymization system for speech data that conceals a speaker's voice identity while preserving linguistic content and emotional state. We provide a systematic overview of the challenge framework, including detailed descriptions of the anonymization task and datasets used for both system development and evaluation. We outline the attack model and objective evaluation metrics for assessing privacy protection (concealing speaker voice identity) and utility (content and emotional state preservation). We describe six baseline anonymization systems and summarize the innovative approaches developed by challenge participants. Finally, we provide key insights and observations to guide the design of future VoicePrivacy challenges and identify promising directions for voice anonymization research. --- ### Imandra CodeLogician: Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning for Precise Analysis of Software Logic Authors: Hongyu Lin, Samer Abdallah, Makar Valentinov, Paul Brennan, Elijah Kagan, Christoph M. Wintersteiger, Denis Ignatovich, Grant Passmore Published: 2026-01-17 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LO, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11840v2 Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong performance on code understanding tasks, yet they fundamentally lack the ability to perform precise, exhaustive mathematical reasoning about program behavior. Existing benchmarks either focus on mathematical proof automation, largely disconnected from real-world software, or on engineering tasks that do not require semantic rigor. We present CodeLogician, a neurosymbolic agent for precise analysis of software logic, integrated with ImandraX, an industrial automated reasoning engine deployed in financial markets and safety-critical systems. Unlike prior approaches that use formal methods primarily to validate LLM outputs, CodeLogician uses LLMs to construct explicit formal models of software systems, enabling automated reasoning to answer rich semantic questions beyond binary verification outcomes. To rigorously evaluate mathematical reasoning about software logic, we introduce code-logic-bench, a benchmark targeting the middle ground between theorem proving and software engineering benchmarks. It measures reasoning correctness about program state spaces, control flow, coverage constraints, and edge cases, with ground truth defined via formal modeling and region decomposition. Comparing LLM-only reasoning against LLMs augmented with CodeLogician, formal augmentation yields substantial improvements, closing a 41-47 percentage point gap in reasoning accuracy. These results demonstrate that neurosymbolic integration is essential for scaling program analysis toward rigorous, autonomous software understanding. --- ### Domain-Specific Query Understanding for Automotive Applications: A Modular and Scalable Approach Authors: Isha Motiyani, Abhishek Kumar, Tilak Kasturi Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.16301v1 Despite the growing prevalence of large language models (LLMs) in domain-specific applications, the challenge of query understanding in the automotive sector still remains underexplored. This domain presents unique complexities due to its specialized vocabulary and the diverse range of user intents it encompasses. Unlike general-purpose assistants, automotive systems must precisely interpret user queries and route them to appropriate underlying tool, each designed to fulfill a distinct task such as part recommendations, repair procedures, or regulatory lookups. Moreover, these systems must extract structured inputs precisely aligned with the schema required by each tool. In this study, we present a novel two-step system for domain-specific query interpretation in the automotive context that achieves an effective balance between responsiveness, reliability, and scalability. Our initial single-step approach, which jointly performed classification and entity extraction, exhibited moderate performance and higher latency. By decomposing the task into a lightweight classification stage followed by targeted entity extraction using smaller, specialized prompts, our system achieves substantial gains in both efficiency and accuracy. Due to the niche nature of the automotive domain, we also curated a high-quality dataset by combining manually annotated and synthetically generated samples, all reviewed by domain experts. Overall, our findings demonstrate that decomposing query understanding into modular subtasks leads to a scalable, accurate, and latency-efficient solution. This approach establishes a strong ground for practical deployment in real-world automotive query understanding systems. --- ### Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models for Evidence-Informed Guidance on Cannabidiol Use in Older Adults Authors: Ali Abedi, Charlene H. Chu, Shehroz S. Khan Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.09548v1 Older adults commonly experience chronic conditions such as pain and sleep disturbances and may consider cannabidiol for symptom management. Safe use requires appropriate dosing, careful titration, and awareness of drug interactions, yet stigma and limited health literacy often limit understanding. Conversational artificial intelligence systems based on large language models and retrieval-augmented generation may support cannabidiol education, but their safety and reliability remain insufficiently evaluated. This study developed a retrieval-augmented large language model framework that combines structured prompt engineering with curated cannabidiol evidence to generate context-aware guidance for older adults, including those with cognitive impairment. We also proposed an automated, annotation-free evaluation framework to benchmark leading standalone and retrieval-augmented models in the absence of standardized benchmarks. Sixty-four diverse user scenarios were generated by varying symptoms, preferences, cognitive status, demographics, comorbidities, medications, cannabis history, and caregiver support. Multiple state-of-the-art models were evaluated, including a novel ensemble retrieval architecture that integrates multiple retrieval systems. Across three automated evaluation strategies, retrieval-augmented models consistently produced more cautious and guideline-aligned recommendations than standalone models, with the ensemble approach performing best. These findings demonstrate that structured retrieval improves the reliability and safety of AI-driven cannabidiol education and provide a reproducible framework for evaluating AI tools used in sensitive health contexts. --- ### VerifAI: A Verifiable Open-Source Search Engine for Biomedical Question Answering Authors: Miloš Košprdić, Adela Ljajić, Bojana Bašaragin, Darija Medvecki, Lorenzo Cassano, Nikola Milošević Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08549v1 We introduce VerifAI, an open-source expert system for biomedical question answering that integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with a novel post-hoc claim verification mechanism. Unlike standard RAG systems, VerifAI ensures factual consistency by decomposing generated answers into atomic claims and validating them against retrieved evidence using a fine-tuned natural language inference (NLI) engine. The system comprises three modular components: (1) a hybrid Information Retrieval (IR) module optimized for biomedical queries (MAP@10 of 42.7%), (2) a citation-aware Generative Component fine-tuned on a custom dataset to produce referenced answers, and (3) a Verification Component that detects hallucinations with state-of-the-art accuracy, outperforming GPT-4 on the HealthVer benchmark. Evaluations demonstrate that VerifAI significantly reduces hallucinated citations compared to zero-shot baselines and provides a transparent, verifiable lineage for every claim. The full pipeline, including code, models, and datasets, is open-sourced to facilitate reliable AI deployment in high-stakes domains. --- ### Bridging the Knowledge Void: Inference-time Acquisition of Unfamiliar Programming Languages for Coding Tasks Authors: Chen Shen, Wei Cheng, Jingyue Yang, Huan Zhang, Yuhan Wu, Wei Hu Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.PL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06976v1 The proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) in coding tasks is often a reflection of their extensive pre-training corpora, which typically collapses when confronted with previously unfamiliar programming languages. Departing from data-intensive finetuning, we investigate the paradigm of Inference-time Language Acquisition (ILA), where an LLM masters an unfamiliar language through dynamic interaction with limited external resources. In this paper, we propose ILA-agent, a general ILA framework that equips LLMs with a set of behavioral primitives. By modeling essential human-like behaviors as a suite of tools, ILA-agent enables LLMs to incrementally explore, apply, and verify language knowledge through structured interactions with the official documentation and execution environment. To provide a rigorous evaluation in a low-resource setting, we construct Cangjie-bench, a multi-task benchmark based on the novel statically-typed language Cangjie. We instantiate ILA-agent for Cangjie and evaluate its performance across code generation, translation, and program repair tasks. Results using diverse LLMs demonstrate that ILA-agent significantly outperforms retrieval-augmented baselines. Further analysis of agent trajectories characterizes the emergent behavior patterns while highlighting persisting performance gaps. --- ### BiomechAgent: AI-Assisted Biomechanical Analysis Through Code-Generating Agents Authors: R. James Cotton, Thomas Leonard Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06975v1 Markerless motion capture is making quantitative movement analysis increasingly accessible, yet analyzing the resulting data remains a barrier for clinicians without programming expertise. We present BiomechAgent, a code-generating AI agent that enables biomechanical analysis through natural language and allows users to querying databases, generating visualizations, and even interpret data without requiring users to write code. To evaluate BiomechAgent's capabilities, we developed a systematic benchmark spanning data retrieval, visualization, activity classification, temporal segmentation, and clinical reasoning. BiomechAgent achieved robust accuracy on data retrieval and visualization tasks and demonstrated emerging clinical reasoning capabilities. We used our dataset to systematically evaluate several of our design decisions. Biomechanically-informed, domain-specific instructions significantly improved performance over generic prompts, and integrating validated specialized tools for gait event detection substantially boosted accuracy on challenging spatiotemporal analysis where the base agent struggled. We also tested BiomechAgent using a local open-weight model instead of a frontier cloud based LLM and found that perform was substantially diminished in most domains other than database retrieval. In short, BiomechAgent makes the data from accessible motion capture and much more useful and accessible to end users. --- ### Are we chasing ghosts? Quantifying unattributable polarization, and attributing the rest to annotator groups Authors: Dimitris Tsirmpas, John Pavlopoulos Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06055v2 Standard agreement metrics often fail to capture systematic differences in opinion between minority and majority-group annotators, jeopardizing tasks such as hate speech and toxicity detection. Polarization has recently been proposed as a more robust way of distinguishing minor disagreements from systematic differences in opinion, but existing approaches do not provide practical tools for attributing it to specific annotator groups. We evaluate current methods and identify two major limitations in realistic settings: (1) the presence of ``inherent'' polarization that cannot be attributed to any known or latent groups, and (2) opposing polarization effects canceling each other out in aggregated annotations. To address these issues, we introduce a new metric that measures and tests the statistical significance of polarization attribution for annotator groups while avoiding these limitations, as well as an open-source Python library implementation, finding that no more than 20 annotators are needed per comment for reliable estimation. We apply our method to four subjective NLP datasets and find that gender and race consistently explain polarization patterns, while differences between annotator groups become stronger as the groups are further apart. --- ### Measurement for Opaque Systems: Multi-source Triangulation with Interpretable Machine Learning Authors: Margaret Foster Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00022v1 We propose a measurement framework for difficult-to-access contexts that uses indirect data traces, interpretable machine-learning models, and theory-guided triangulation to fill inaccessible measurement spaces. Many high-stakes systems of scientific and policy interest are difficult, if not impossible, to reach directly: dynamics of interest are unobservable, data are indirect and fragmented across sources, and ground truth is absent or concealed. In these settings, available data often do not support conventional strategies for analysis, such as statistical inference on a single authoritative data stream or model validation against labeled outcomes. To address this problem, we introduce a general framework for measurement in data regimes characterized by structurally missing or adversarial data. We propose combining multi-source triangulation with interpretable machine learning models. Rather than relying on accuracy against unobservable, unattainable ideal data, our framework seeks consistency across separate, partially informative models. This allows users to draw defensible conclusions about the state of the world based on cross-signal consistency or divergence from an expected state. Our framework provides an analytical workflow tailored to quantitative characterization in the absence of data sufficient for conventional statistical or causal inference. We demonstrate our approach and explicitly surface inferential limits through an empirical analysis of organizational growth and internal pressure dynamics in a clandestine militant organization, drawing on multiple observational signals that individually provide incomplete and biased views of the underlying process. The results show how triangulated, interpretable ML can recover substantively meaningful variation. --- ### Early Warning Signals Appear Long Before Dropping Out: An Idiographic Approach Grounded in Complex Dynamic Systems Theory Authors: Mohammed Saqr, Sonsoles López-Pernas, Santtu Tikka, Markus Wolfgang Hermann Spitzer Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00021v1 The ability to sustain engagement and recover from setbacks (i.e., resilience) -- is fundamental for learning. When resilience weakens, students are at risk of disengagement and may drop out and miss on opportunities. Therefore, predicting disengagement long before it happens during the window of hope is important. In this article, we test whether early warning signals of resilience loss, grounded in the concept of critical slowing down (CSD) can forecast disengagement before dropping out. CSD has been widely observed across ecological, climate, and neural systems, where it precedes tipping points into catastrophic failure (dropping out in our case). Using 1.67 million practice attempts from 9,401 students who used a digital math learning environment, we computed CSD indicators: autocorrelation, return rate, variance, skewness, kurtosis, and coefficient of variation. We found that 88.2% of students exhibited CSD signals prior to disengagement, with warnings clustering late in activity and before practice ceased (dropping out). Our results provide the first evidence of CSD in education, suggesting that universal resilience dynamics also govern social systems such as human learning. These findings offer a practical indicator for early detection of vulnerability and supporting learners across different applications and contexts long before critical events happen. Most importantly, CSD indicators arise universally, independent of the mechanisms that generate the data, offering new opportunities for portability across contexts, data types, and learning environments. --- ### Beyond Static Question Banks: Dynamic Knowledge Expansion via LLM-Automated Graph Construction and Adaptive Generation Authors: Yingquan Wang, Tianyu Wei, Qinsi Li, Li Zeng Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00020v2 Personalized education systems increasingly rely on structured knowledge representations to support adaptive learning and question generation. However, existing approaches face two fundamental limitations. First, constructing and maintaining knowledge graphs for educational content largely depends on manual curation, resulting in high cost and poor scalability. Second, most personalized education systems lack effective support for state-aware and systematic reasoning over learners' knowledge, and therefore rely on static question banks with limited adaptability. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Generative GraphRAG framework for automated knowledge modeling and personalized exercise generation. It consists of two core modules. The first module, Automated Hierarchical Knowledge Graph Constructor (Auto-HKG), leverages LLMs to automatically construct hierarchical knowledge graphs that capture structured concepts and their semantic relations from educational resources. The second module, Cognitive GraphRAG (CG-RAG), performs graph-based reasoning over a learner mastery graph and combines it with retrieval-augmented generation to produce personalized exercises that adapt to individual learning states. The proposed framework has been deployed in real-world educational scenarios, where it receives favorable user feedback, suggesting its potential to support practical personalized education systems. --- ### AutoBinder Agent: An MCP-Based Agent for End-to-End Protein Binder Design Authors: Fukang Ge, Jiarui Zhu, Linjie Zhang, Haowen Xiao, Xiangcheng Bao, Fangnan Xie, Danyang Chen, Yanrui Lu, Yuting Wang, Ziqian Guan, Lin Gu, Jinhao Bi et al. Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: q-bio.BM, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00019v1 Modern AI technologies for drug discovery are distributed across heterogeneous platforms-including web applications, desktop environments, and code libraries-leading to fragmented workflows, inconsistent interfaces, and high integration overhead. We present an agentic end-to-end drug design framework that leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) in conjunction with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to dynamically coordinate access to biochemical databases, modular toolchains, and task-specific AI models. The system integrates four state-of-the-art components: MaSIF (MaSIF-site and MaSIF-seed-search) for geometric deep learning-based identification of protein-protein interaction (PPI) sites, Rosetta for grafting protein fragments onto protein backbones to form mini proteins, ProteinMPNN for amino acid sequences redesign, and AlphaFold3 for near-experimental accuracy in complex structure prediction. Starting from a target structure, the framework supports de novo binder generation via surface analysis, scaffold grafting and pose construction, sequence optimization, and structure prediction. Additionally, by replacing rigid, script-based workflows with a protocol-driven, LLM-coordinated architecture, the framework improves reproducibility, reduces manual overhead, and ensures extensibility, portability, and auditability across the entire drug design process. --- ### STAER: Temporal Aligned Rehearsal for Continual Spiking Neural Network Authors: Matteo Gianferrari, Omayma Moussadek, Riccardo Salami, Cosimo Fiorini, Lorenzo Tartarini, Daniela Gandolfi, Simone Calderara Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.NE, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20870v1 Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are inherently suited for continuous learning due to their event-driven temporal dynamics; however, their application to Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) has been hindered by catastrophic forgetting and the temporal misalignment of spike patterns. In this work, we introduce Spiking Temporal Alignment with Experience Replay (STAER), a novel framework that explicitly preserves temporal structure to bridge the performance gap between SNNs and ANNs. Our approach integrates a differentiable Soft-DTW alignment loss to maintain spike timing fidelity and employs a temporal expansion and contraction mechanism on output logits to enforce robust representation learning. Implemented on a deep ResNet19 spiking backbone, STAER achieves state-of-the-art performance on Sequential-MNIST and Sequential-CIFAR10. Empirical results demonstrate that our method matches or outperforms strong ANN baselines (ER, DER++) while preserving biologically plausible dynamics. Ablation studies further confirm that explicit temporal alignment is critical for representational stability, positioning STAER as a scalable solution for spike-native lifelong learning. Code is available at https://github.com/matteogianferrari/staer. --- ### Integrating Color Histogram Analysis and Convolutional Neural Network for Skin Lesion Classification Authors: M. A. Rasel, Sameem Abdul Kareem, Unaizah Obaidellah Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: q-bio.QM, cs.AI, eess.IV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20869v1 The color of skin lesions is an important diagnostic feature for identifying malignant melanoma and other skin diseases. Typical colors associated with melanocytic lesions include tan, brown, black, red, white, and blue gray. This study introduces a novel feature: the number of colors present in a lesion, which can indicate the severity of disease and help distinguish melanomas from benign lesions. We propose a color histogram analysis method to examine lesion pixel values from three publicly available datasets: PH2, ISIC2016, and Med Node. The PH2 dataset contains ground truth annotations of lesion colors, while ISIC2016 and Med Node do not; our algorithm estimates the ground truth using color histogram analysis based on PH2. We then design and train a 19 layer Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with residual skip connections to classify lesions into three categories based on the number of colors present. DeepDream visualization is used to interpret features learned by the network, and multiple CNN configurations are tested. The best model achieves a weighted F1 score of 75 percent. LIME is applied to identify important regions influencing model decisions. The results show that the number of colors in a lesion is a significant feature for describing skin conditions, and the proposed CNN with three skip connections demonstrates strong potential for clinical diagnostic support. --- ### Emergent Specialization in Learner Populations: Competition as the Source of Diversity Authors: Yuhao Li Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19943v1 How can populations of learners develop coordinated, diverse behaviors without explicit communication or diversity incentives? We demonstrate that competition alone is sufficient to induce emergent specialization -- learners spontaneously partition into specialists for different environmental regimes through competitive dynamics, consistent with ecological niche theory. We introduce the NichePopulation algorithm, a simple mechanism combining competitive exclusion with niche affinity tracking. Validated across six real-world domains (cryptocurrency trading, commodity prices, weather forecasting, solar irradiance, urban traffic, and air quality), our approach achieves a mean Specialization Index of 0.75 with effect sizes of Cohen's d > 20. Key findings: (1) At lambda=0 (no niche bonus), learners still achieve SI > 0.30, proving specialization is genuinely emergent; (2) Diverse populations outperform homogeneous baselines by +26.5% through method-level division of labor; (3) Our approach outperforms MARL baselines (QMIX, MAPPO, IQL) by 4.3x while being 4x faster. --- ### Latent Object Permanence: Topological Phase Transitions, Free-Energy Principles, and Renormalization Group Flows in Deep Transformer Manifolds Authors: Faruk Alpay, Bugra Kilictas Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19942v1 We study the emergence of multi-step reasoning in deep Transformer language models through a geometric and statistical-physics lens. Treating the hidden-state trajectory as a flow on an implicit Riemannian manifold, we analyze the layerwise covariance spectrum of activations, where $C^{(\ell)}=\mathbb{E}(h^{(\ell)}h^{(\ell)\top})$, and track deviations from a random-matrix bulk. Across model scales (1.5B--30B), we observe a sharp reduction in effective dimensionality consistent with a phase transition: an order parameter based on sparsity/localization, $Ω(h)=1-\|h\|_1/(\sqrt{d}\|h\|_2)$, exhibits a discontinuity near a critical normalized depth $γ_c\approx 0.42$ in sufficiently large models. We formalize the forward pass as a discrete coarse-graining map and relate the appearance of stable "concept basins" to fixed points of this renormalization-like dynamics. The resulting low-entropy regime is characterized by a spectral tail collapse and by the formation of transient, reusable object-like structures in representation space, which we call Transient Class Objects (TCOs). We provide theoretical conditions connecting logical separability to spectral decay and validate the predicted signatures with layerwise probes on multiple open-weight model families. --- ### Bench4HLS: End-to-End Evaluation of LLMs in High-Level Synthesis Code Generation Authors: M Zafir Sadik Khan, Kimia Azar, Hadi Kamali Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.AR, cs.AI, cs.PL, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19941v1 In last two years, large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in code generation, including hardware design at register-transfer level (RTL). While their use in high-level synthesis (HLS) remains comparatively less mature, the ratio of HLS- to RTL-focused studies has shifted from 1:10 to 2:10 in the past six months, indicating growing interest in leveraging LLMs for high-level design entry while relying on downstream synthesis for optimization. This growing trend highlights the need for a comprehensive benchmarking and evaluation framework dedicated to LLM-based HLS. To address this, We present Bench4HLS for evaluating LLM-generated HLS designs. Bench4HLS comprises 170 manually drafted and validated case studies, spanning small kernels to complex accelerators, curated from widely used public repositories. The framework supports fully automated assessment of compilation success, functional correctness via simulation, and synthesis feasibility/optimization. Crucially, Bench4HLS integrates a pluggable API for power, performance, and area (PPA) analysis across various HLS toolchains and architectures, demonstrated here with Xilinx Vitis HLS and validated on Catapult HLS. By providing a structured, extensible, and plug-and-play testbed, Bench4HLS establishes a foundational methodology for benchmarking LLMs in HLS workflows. --- ### Continuous-Flow Data-Rate-Aware CNN Inference on FPGA Authors: Tobias Habermann, Michael Mecik, Zhenyu Wang, César David Vera, Martin Kumm, Mario Garrido Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.AR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19940v2 Among hardware accelerators for deep-learning inference, data flow implementations offer low latency and high throughput capabilities. In these architectures, each neuron is mapped to a dedicated hardware unit, making them well-suited for field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation. Previous unrolled implementations mostly focus on fully connected networks because of their simplicity, although it is well known that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) require fewer computations for the same accuracy. When observing the data flow in CNNs, pooling layers and convolutional layers with a stride larger than one, the number of data at their output is reduced with respect to their input. This data reduction strongly affects the data rate in a fully parallel implementation, making hardware units heavily underutilized unless it is handled properly. This work addresses this issue by analyzing the data flow of CNNs and presents a novel approach to designing data-rate-aware, continuous-flow CNN architectures. The proposed approach ensures a high hardware utilization close to 100% by interleaving low data rate signals and sharing hardware units, as well as using the right parallelization to achieve the throughput of a fully parallel implementation. The results show that a significant amount of the arithmetic logic can be saved, which allows implementing complex CNNs like MobileNet on a single FPGA with high throughput. --- ### oculomix: Hierarchical Sampling for Retinal-Based Systemic Disease Prediction Authors: Hyunmin Kim, Yukun Zhou, Rahul A. Jonas, Lie Ju, Sunjin Hwang, Pearse A. Keane, Siegfried K. Wagner Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19939v1 Oculomics - the concept of predicting systemic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease and dementia, through retinal imaging - has advanced rapidly due to the data efficiency of transformer-based foundation models like RETFound. Image-level mixed sample data augmentations, such as CutMix and MixUp, are frequently used for training transformers, yet these techniques perturb patient-specific attributes, such as medical comorbidity and clinical factors, since they only account for images and labels. To address this limitation, we propose a hierarchical sampling strategy, Oculomix, for mixed sample augmentations. Our method is based on two clinical priors. First (exam level), images acquired from the same patient at the same time point share the same attributes. Second (patient level), images acquired from the same patient at different time points have a soft temporal trend, as morbidity generally increases over time. Guided by these priors, our method constrains the mixing space to the patient and exam levels to better preserve patient-specific characteristics and leverages their hierarchical relationships. The proposed method is validated using ViT models on a five-year prediction of major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) in a large ethnically diverse population (Alzeye). We show that Oculomix consistently outperforms image-level CutMix and MixUp by up to 3% in AUROC, demonstrating the necessity and value of the proposed method in oculomics. --- ### DecHW: Heterogeneous Decentralized Federated Learning Exploiting Second-Order Information Authors: Adnan Ahmad, Chiara Boldrini, Lorenzo Valerio, Andrea Passarella, Marco Conti Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.DC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19938v1 Decentralized Federated Learning (DFL) is a serverless collaborative machine learning paradigm where devices collaborate directly with neighbouring devices to exchange model information for learning a generalized model. However, variations in individual experiences and different levels of device interactions lead to data and model initialization heterogeneities across devices. Such heterogeneities leave variations in local model parameters across devices that leads to slower convergence. This paper tackles the data and model heterogeneity by explicitly addressing the parameter level varying evidential credence across local models. A novel aggregation approach is introduced that captures these parameter variations in local models and performs robust aggregation of neighbourhood local updates. Specifically, consensus weights are generated via approximation of second-order information of local models on their local datasets. These weights are utilized to scale neighbourhood updates before aggregating them into global neighbourhood representation. In extensive experiments with computer vision tasks, the proposed approach shows strong generalizability of local models at reduced communication costs. --- ### Gap-K%: Measuring Top-1 Prediction Gap for Detecting Pretraining Data Authors: Minseo Kwak, Jaehyung Kim Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19936v2 The opacity of massive pretraining corpora in Large Language Models (LLMs) raises significant privacy and copyright concerns, making pretraining data detection a critical challenge. Existing state-of-the-art methods typically rely on token likelihoods, yet they often overlook the gap between the target token and the model's top-1 prediction, as well as local correlations between adjacent tokens. In this work, we propose Gap-K%, a novel pretraining data detection method grounded in the optimization dynamics of LLM pretraining. By analyzing the next-token prediction objective, we observe that discrepancies between the model's top-1 prediction and the target token induce strong gradient signals, which are explicitly penalized during training. Motivated by this, Gap-K% leverages the log probability gap between the top-1 predicted token and the target token, incorporating a sliding window strategy to capture local correlations and mitigate token-level fluctuations. Extensive experiments on the WikiMIA and MIMIR benchmarks demonstrate that Gap-K% achieves state-of-the-art performance, consistently outperforming prior baselines across various model sizes and input lengths. --- ### Ensuring Computer Science Learning in the AI Era: Open Generative AI Policies and Assignment-Driven Written Quizzes Authors: Chan-Jin Chung Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17024v1 The widespread availability of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has created a pressing challenge in computer science (CS) education: how to incorporate powerful AI tools into programming coursework without undermining student learning through cognitive offloading. This paper presents an assessment model that permits the use of generative AI for take-home programming assignments while enforcing individual mastery through immediate, assignment-driven written quizzes. To promote authentic learning, these in-class, closed-book assessments are weighted more heavily than the assignments themselves and are specifically designed to verify the student's comprehension of the algorithms, structure, and implementation details of their submitted code. Preliminary empirical data were collected from an upper-level computer science course to examine the relationship between self-reported GenAI usage and performance on AI-free quizzes, exams, and final course grades. Statistical analyses revealed no meaningful linear correlation between GenAI usage levels and assessment outcomes, with Pearson correlation coefficients consistently near zero. These preliminary results suggest that allowing GenAI for programming assignments does not diminish students' mastery of course concepts when learning is verified through targeted, assignment-driven quizzes. Although limited by a small sample size, this study provides preliminary evidence that the risks of cognitive offloading can be mitigated by allowing AI-assisted programming practice while verifying understanding through assignment-driven, AI-free quizzes. The findings support the responsible adoption of open GenAI policies in upper-level CS courses, when paired with rigorous, independent assessment mechanisms. --- ### AI-based System for Transforming text and sound to Educational Videos Authors: M. E. ElAlami, S. M. Khater, M. El. R. Rehan Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.MM, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17022v1 Technological developments have produced methods that can generate educational videos from input text or sound. Recently, the use of deep learning techniques for image and video generation has been widely explored, particularly in education. However, generating video content from conditional inputs such as text or speech remains a challenging area. In this paper, we introduce a novel method to the educational structure, Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), which develop frame-for-frame frameworks and are able to create full educational videos. The proposed system is structured into three main phases In the first phase, the input (either text or speech) is transcribed using speech recognition. In the second phase, key terms are extracted and relevant images are generated using advanced models such as CLIP and diffusion models to enhance visual quality and semantic alignment. In the final phase, the generated images are synthesized into a video format, integrated with either pre-recorded or synthesized sound, resulting in a fully interactive educational video. The proposed system is compared with other systems such as TGAN, MoCoGAN, and TGANS-C, achieving a Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) score of 28.75%, which indicates improved visual quality and better over existing methods. --- ### Regret-Driven Portfolios: LLM-Guided Smart Clustering for Optimal Allocation Authors: Muhammad Abro, Hassan Jaleel Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: q-fin.PM, cs.LG, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17021v1 We attempt to mitigate the persistent tradeoff between risk and return in medium- to long-term portfolio management. This paper proposes a novel LLM-guided no-regret portfolio allocation framework that integrates online learning dynamics, market sentiment indicators, and large language model (LLM)-based hedging to construct high-Sharpe ratio portfolios tailored for risk-averse investors and institutional fund managers. Our approach builds on a follow-the-leader approach, enriched with sentiment-based trade filtering and LLM-driven downside protection. Empirical results demonstrate that our method outperforms a SPY buy-and-hold baseline by 69% in annualized returns and 119% in Sharpe ratio. --- ### ES4R: Speech Encoding Based on Prepositive Affective Modeling for Empathetic Response Generation Authors: Zhuoyue Gao, Xiaohui Wang, Xiaocui Yang, Wen Zhang, Daling Wang, Shi Feng, Yifei Zhang Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: eess.AS, cs.AI, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16225v1 Empathetic speech dialogue requires not only understanding linguistic content but also perceiving rich paralinguistic information such as prosody, tone, and emotional intensity for affective understandings. Existing speech-to-speech large language models either rely on ASR transcription or use encoders to extract latent representations, often weakening affective information and contextual coherence in multi-turn dialogues. To address this, we propose \textbf{ES4R}, a framework for speech-based empathetic response generation. Our core innovation lies in explicitly modeling structured affective context before speech encoding, rather than relying on implicit learning by the encoder or explicit emotion supervision. Specifically, we introduce a dual-level attention mechanism to capture turn-level affective states and dialogue-level affective dynamics. The resulting affective representations are then integrated with textual semantics through speech-guided cross-modal attention to generate empathetic responses. For speech output, we employ energy-based strategy selection and style fusion to achieve empathetic speech synthesis. ES4R consistently outperforms strong baselines in both automatic and human evaluations and remains robust across different LLM backbones. --- ### Large Language Models as Simulative Agents for Neurodivergent Adult Psychometric Profiles Authors: Francesco Chiappone, Davide Marocco, Nicola Milano Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: q-bio.NC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15319v1 Adult neurodivergence, including Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), high-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and Cognitive Disengagement Syndrome (CDS), is marked by substantial symptom overlap that limits the discriminant sensitivity of standard psychometric instruments. While recent work suggests that Large Language Models (LLMs) can simulate human psychometric responses from qualitative data, it remains unclear whether they can accurately and stably model neurodevelopmental traits rather than broad personality characteristics. This study examines whether LLMs can generate psychometric responses that approximate those of real individuals when grounded in a structured qualitative interview, and whether such simulations are sensitive to variations in trait intensity. Twenty-six adults completed a 29-item open-ended interview and four standardized self-report measures (ASRS, BAARS-IV, AQ, RAADS-R). Two LLMs (GPT-4o and Qwen3-235B-A22B) were prompted to infer an individual psychological profile from interview content and then respond to each questionnaire in-role. Accuracy, reliability, and sensitivity were assessed using group-level comparisons, error metrics, exact-match scoring, and a randomized baseline. Both models outperformed random responses across instruments, with GPT-4o showing higher accuracy and reproducibility. Simulated responses closely matched human data for ASRS, BAARS-IV, and RAADS-R, while the AQ revealed subscale-specific limitations, particularly in Attention to Detail. Overall, the findings indicate that interview-grounded LLMs can produce coherent and above-chance simulations of neurodevelopmental traits, supporting their potential use as synthetic participants in early-stage psychometric research, while highlighting clear domain-specific constraints. --- ### The Paradigm Shift: A Comprehensive Survey on Large Vision Language Models for Multimodal Fake News Detection Authors: Wei Ai, Yilong Tan, Yuntao Shou, Tao Meng, Haowen Chen, Zhixiong He, Keqin Li Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15316v1 In recent years, the rapid evolution of large vision-language models (LVLMs) has driven a paradigm shift in multimodal fake news detection (MFND), transforming it from traditional feature-engineering approaches to unified, end-to-end multimodal reasoning frameworks. Early methods primarily relied on shallow fusion techniques to capture correlations between text and images, but they struggled with high-level semantic understanding and complex cross-modal interactions. The emergence of LVLMs has fundamentally changed this landscape by enabling joint modeling of vision and language with powerful representation learning, thereby enhancing the ability to detect misinformation that leverages both textual narratives and visual content. Despite these advances, the field lacks a systematic survey that traces this transition and consolidates recent developments. To address this gap, this paper provides a comprehensive review of MFND through the lens of LVLMs. We first present a historical perspective, mapping the evolution from conventional multimodal detection pipelines to foundation model-driven paradigms. Next, we establish a structured taxonomy covering model architectures, datasets, and performance benchmarks. Furthermore, we analyze the remaining technical challenges, including interpretability, temporal reasoning, and domain generalization. Finally, we outline future research directions to guide the next stage of this paradigm shift. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive survey to systematically document and analyze the transformative role of LVLMs in combating multimodal fake news. The summary of existing methods mentioned is in our Github: \href{https://github.com/Tan-YiLong/Overview-of-Fake-News-Detection}{https://github.com/Tan-YiLong/Overview-of-Fake-News-Detection}. --- ### Guardrails for trust, safety, and ethical development and deployment of Large Language Models (LLM) Authors: Anjanava Biswas, Wrick Talukdar Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14298v1 The AI era has ushered in Large Language Models (LLM) to the technological forefront, which has been much of the talk in 2023, and is likely to remain as such for many years to come. LLMs are the AI models that are the power house behind generative AI applications such as ChatGPT. These AI models, fueled by vast amounts of data and computational prowess, have unlocked remarkable capabilities, from human-like text generation to assisting with natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. They have quickly become the foundation upon which countless applications and software services are being built, or at least being augmented with. However, as with any groundbreaking innovations, the rise of LLMs brings forth critical safety, privacy, and ethical concerns. These models are found to have a propensity to leak private information, produce false information, and can be coerced into generating content that can be used for nefarious purposes by bad actors, or even by regular users unknowingly. Implementing safeguards and guardrailing techniques is imperative for applications to ensure that the content generated by LLMs are safe, secure, and ethical. Thus, frameworks to deploy mechanisms that prevent misuse of these models via application implementations is imperative. In this study, wepropose a Flexible Adaptive Sequencing mechanism with trust and safety modules, that can be used to implement safety guardrails for the development and deployment of LLMs. --- ### Epistemic Constitutionalism Or: how to avoid coherence bias Authors: Michele Loi Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14295v4 Large language models increasingly function as artificial reasoners: they evaluate arguments, assign credibility, and express confidence. Yet their belief-forming behavior is governed by implicit, uninspected epistemic policies. This paper argues for an epistemic constitution for AI: explicit, contestable meta-norms that regulate how systems form and express beliefs. Source attribution bias provides the motivating case: I show that frontier models enforce identity-stance coherence, penalizing arguments attributed to sources whose expected ideological position conflicts with the argument's content. When models detect systematic testing, these effects collapse, revealing that systems treat source-sensitivity as bias to suppress rather than as a capacity to execute well. I distinguish two constitutional approaches: the Platonic, which mandates formal correctness and default source-independence from a privileged standpoint, and the Liberal, which refuses such privilege, specifying procedural norms that protect conditions for collective inquiry while allowing principled source-attending grounded in epistemic vigilance. I argue for the Liberal approach, sketch a constitutional core of eight principles and four orientations, and propose that AI epistemic governance requires the same explicit, contestable structure we now expect for AI ethics. --- ### Karhunen-Loève Expansion-Based Residual Anomaly Map for Resource-Efficient Glioma MRI Segmentation Authors: Anthony Hur Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: q-bio.QM, cs.CV, cs.LG, eess.IV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11833v2 Accurate segmentation of brain tumors is essential for clinical diagnosis and treatment planning. Deep learning is currently the state-of-the-art for brain tumor segmentation, yet it requires either large datasets or extensive computational resources that are inaccessible in most areas. This makes the problem increasingly difficult: state-of-the-art models use thousands of training cases and vast computational power, where performance drops sharply when either is limited. The top performer in the Brats GLI 2023 competition relied on supercomputers trained on over 92,000 augmented MRI scans using an AMD EPYC 7402 CPU, six NVIDIA RTX 6000 GPUs (48GB VRAM each), and 1024GB of RAM over multiple weeks. To address this, the Karhunen--Loève Expansion (KLE) was implemented as a feature extraction step on downsampled, z-score normalized MRI volumes. Each 240$\times$240$\times$155 multi-modal scan is reduced to four $48^3$ channels and compressed into 32 KL coefficients. The resulting approximate reconstruction enables a residual-based anomaly map, which is upsampled and added as a fifth channel to a compact 3D U-Net. All experiments were run on a consumer workstation (AMD Ryzen 5 7600X CPU, RTX 4060Ti (8GB VRAM), and 64GB RAM while using far fewer training cases. This model achieves post-processed Dice scores of 0.929 (WT), 0.856 (TC), and 0.821 (ET), with HD95 distances of 2.93, 6.78, and 10.35 voxels. These results are significantly better than the winning BraTS 2023 methodology for HD95 distances and WT dice scores. This demonstrates that a KLE-based residual anomaly map can dramatically reduce computational cost and data requirements while retaining state-of-the-art performance. --- ### Shortest-Path Flow Matching with Mixture-Conditioned Bases for OOD Generalization to Unseen Conditions Authors: Andrea Rubbi, Amir Akbarnejad, Mohammad Vali Sanian, Aryan Yazdan Parast, Hesam Asadollahzadeh, Arian Amani, Naveed Akhtar, Sarah Cooper, Andrew Bassett, Pietro Liò, Lassi Paavolainen, Sattar Vakili et al. Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV, eess.IV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11827v2 Robust generalization under distribution shift remains a key challenge for conditional generative modeling: conditional flow-based methods often fit the training conditions well but fail to extrapolate to unseen ones. We introduce SP-FM, a shortest-path flow-matching framework that improves out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization by conditioning both the base distribution and the flow field on the condition. Specifically, SP-FM learns a condition-dependent base distribution parameterized as a flexible, learnable mixture, together with a condition-dependent vector field trained via shortest-path flow matching. Conditioning the base allows the model to adapt its starting distribution across conditions, enabling smooth interpolation and more reliable extrapolation beyond the observed training range. We provide theoretical insights into the resulting conditional transport and show how mixture-conditioned bases enhance robustness under shift. Empirically, SP-FM is effective across heterogeneous domains, including predicting responses to unseen perturbations in single-cell transcriptomics and modeling treatment effects in high-content microscopy--based drug screening. Overall, SP-FM provides a simple yet effective plug-in strategy for improving conditional generative modeling and OOD generalization across diverse domains. --- ### AI Co-Scientist for Knowledge Synthesis in Medical Contexts: A Proof of Concept Authors: Arya Rahgozar, Pouria Mortezaagha Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.AI, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11825v1 Research waste in biomedical science is driven by redundant studies, incomplete reporting, and the limited scalability of traditional evidence synthesis workflows. We present an AI co-scientist for scalable and transparent knowledge synthesis based on explicit formalization of Population, Intervention, Comparator, Outcome, and Study design (PICOS). The platform integrates relational storage, vector-based semantic retrieval, and a Neo4j knowledge graph. Evaluation was conducted on dementia-sport and non-communicable disease corpora. Automated PICOS compliance and study design classification from titles and abstracts were performed using a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory baseline and a transformer-based multi-task classifier fine-tuned from PubMedBERT. Full-text synthesis employed retrieval-augmented generation with hybrid vector and graph retrieval, while BERTopic was used to identify thematic structure, redundancy, and evidence gaps. The transformer model achieved 95.7% accuracy for study design classification with strong agreement against expert annotations, while the Bi-LSTM achieved 87% accuracy for PICOS compliance detection. Retrieval-augmented generation outperformed non-retrieval generation for queries requiring structured constraints, cross-study integration, and graph-based reasoning, whereas non-retrieval approaches remained competitive for high-level summaries. Topic modeling revealed substantial thematic redundancy and identified underexplored research areas. These results demonstrate that PICOS-aware and explainable natural language processing can improve the scalability, transparency, and efficiency of evidence synthesis. The proposed architecture is domain-agnostic and offers a practical framework for reducing research waste across biomedical disciplines. --- ### RAPID-Serve: Resource-efficient and Accelerated P/D Intra-GPU Disaggregation Authors: Amna Masood, Pratishtha Gaur, Nuwan Jayasena Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.DC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11822v1 Two widely adopted techniques for LLM inference serving systems today are hybrid batching and disaggregated serving. A hybrid batch combines prefill and decode tokens of different requests in the same batch to improve resource utilization and throughput at the cost of increased latency per token. In contrast, disaggregated serving decouples compute-bound prefill and bandwidth-bound decode phases to optimize for service level objectives (SLOs) at the cost of resource under-utilization and KV-cache transfer overheads. To address the limitations of these techniques, we propose RAPID-Serve: a technique to concurrently execute prefill and decode on the same GPU(s) to meet latency SLOs while maintaining high throughput and efficient resource utilization. Furthermore, we propose Adaptive Resource Management for runtime compute resource allocation, optionally leveraging CU masking (a fine-grained Compute Unit partitioning feature on AMD Instinct\textsuperscript{TM} GPUs). RAPID-Serve provides up to 4.1x (average 1.7x) unconstrained throughput improvement and 32x and higher (average 4.9x) throughput improvement under SLO constraints, showing it as an effective strategy compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, particularly in resource-constrained environments. --- ### Shapelets-Enriched Selective Forecasting using Time Series Foundation Models Authors: Shivani Tomar, Seshu Tirupathi, Elizabeth Daly, Ivana Dusparic Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11821v1 Time series foundation models have recently gained a lot of attention due to their ability to model complex time series data encompassing different domains including traffic, energy, and weather. Although they exhibit strong average zero-shot performance on forecasting tasks, their predictions on certain critical regions of the data are not always reliable, limiting their usability in real-world applications, especially when data exhibits unique trends. In this paper, we propose a selective forecasting framework to identify these critical segments of time series using shapelets. We learn shapelets using shift-invariant dictionary learning on the validation split of the target domain dataset. Utilizing distance-based similarity to these shapelets, we facilitate the user to selectively discard unreliable predictions and be informed of the model's realistic capabilities. Empirical results on diverse benchmark time series datasets demonstrate that our approach leveraging both zero-shot and full-shot fine-tuned models reduces the overall error by an average of 22.17% for zero-shot and 22.62% for full-shot fine-tuned model. Furthermore, our approach using zero-shot and full-shot fine-tuned models, also outperforms its random selection counterparts by up to 21.41% and 21.43% on one of the datasets. --- ### TWeddit : A Dataset of Triggering Stories Predominantly Shared by Women on Reddit Authors: Shirlene Rose Bandela, Sanjeev Parthasarathy, Vaibhav Garg Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11819v1 Warning: This paper may contain examples and topics that may be disturbing to some readers, especially survivors of miscarriage and sexual violence. People affected by abortion, miscarriage, or sexual violence often share their experiences on social media to express emotions and seek support. On public platforms like Reddit, where users can post long, detailed narratives (up to 40,000 characters), readers may be exposed to distressing content. Although Reddit allows manual trigger warnings, many users omit them due to limited awareness or uncertainty about which categories apply. There is scarcity of datasets on Reddit stories labeled for triggering experiences. We propose a curated Reddit dataset, TWeddit, covering triggering experiences related to issues majorly faced by women. Our linguistic analyses show that annotated stories in TWeddit express distinct topics and moral foundations, making the dataset useful for a wide range of future research. --- ### POLARIS: Typed Planning and Governed Execution for Agentic AI in Back-Office Automation Authors: Zahra Moslemi, Keerthi Koneru, Yen-Ting Lee, Sheethal Kumar, Ramesh Radhakrishnan Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11816v1 Enterprise back office workflows require agentic systems that are auditable, policy-aligned, and operationally predictable, capabilities that generic multi-agent setups often fail to deliver. We present POLARIS (Policy-Aware LLM Agentic Reasoning for Integrated Systems), a governed orchestration framework that treats automation as typed plan synthesis and validated execution over LLM agents. A planner proposes structurally diverse, type checked directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), a rubric guided reasoning module selects a single compliant plan, and execution is guarded by validator gated checks, a bounded repair loop, and compiled policy guardrails that block or route side effects before they occur. Applied to document centric finance tasks, POLARIS produces decision grade artifacts and full execution traces while reducing human intervention. Empirically, POLARIS achieves a micro F1 of 0.81 on the SROIE dataset and, on a controlled synthetic suite, achieves 0.95 to 1.00 precision for anomaly routing with preserved audit trails. These evaluations constitute an initial benchmark for governed Agentic AI. POLARIS provides a methodological and benchmark reference for policy-aligned Agentic AI. Keywords Agentic AI, Enterprise Automation, Back-Office Tasks, Benchmarks, Governance, Typed Planning, Evaluation --- ### Multi-agent DRL-based Lane Change Decision Model for Cooperative Platooning in Mixed Traffic Authors: Zeyu Mu, Shangtong Zhang, B. Brian Park Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11809v2 Connected automated vehicles (CAVs) possess the ability to communicate and coordinate with one another, enabling cooperative platooning that enhances both energy efficiency and traffic flow. However, during the initial stage of CAV deployment, the sparse distribution of CAVs among human-driven vehicles reduces the likelihood of forming effective cooperative platoons. To address this challenge, this study proposes a hybrid multi-agent lane change decision model aimed at increasing CAV participation in cooperative platooning and maximizing its associated benefits. The proposed model employs the QMIX framework, integrating traffic data processed through a convolutional neural network (CNN-QMIX). This architecture addresses a critical issue in dynamic traffic scenarios by enabling CAVs to make optimal decisions irrespective of the varying number of CAVs present in mixed traffic. Additionally, a trajectory planner and a model predictive controller are designed to ensure smooth and safe lane-change execution. The proposed model is trained and evaluated within a microsimulation environment under varying CAV market penetration rates. The results demonstrate that the proposed model efficiently manages fluctuating traffic agent numbers, significantly outperforming the baseline rule-based models. Notably, it enhances cooperative platooning rates up to 26.2\%, showcasing its potential to optimize CAV cooperation and traffic dynamics during the early stage of deployment. --- ### RobotDesignGPT: Automated Robot Design Synthesis using Vision Language Models Authors: Nitish Sontakke, K. Niranjan Kumar, Sehoon Ha Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11801v1 Robot design is a nontrivial process that involves careful consideration of multiple criteria, including user specifications, kinematic structures, and visual appearance. Therefore, the design process often relies heavily on domain expertise and significant human effort. The majority of current methods are rule-based, requiring the specification of a grammar or a set of primitive components and modules that can be composed to create a design. We propose a novel automated robot design framework, RobotDesignGPT, that leverages the general knowledge and reasoning capabilities of large pre-trained vision-language models to automate the robot design synthesis process. Our framework synthesizes an initial robot design from a simple user prompt and a reference image. Our novel visual feedback approach allows us to greatly improve the design quality and reduce unnecessary manual feedback. We demonstrate that our framework can design visually appealing and kinematically valid robots inspired by nature, ranging from legged animals to flying creatures. We justify the proposed framework by conducting an ablation study and a user study. --- ### Physics-Constrained Denoising Autoencoders for Data-Scarce Wildfire UAV Sensing Authors: Abdelrahman Ramadan, Zahra Dorbeigi Namaghi, Emily Taylor, Lucas Edwards, Xan Giuliani, David S. McLagan, Sidney Givigi, Melissa Greeff Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11794v1 Wildfire monitoring requires high-resolution atmospheric measurements, yet low-cost sensors on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) exhibit baseline drift, cross-sensitivity, and response lag that corrupt concentration estimates. Traditional deep learning denoising approaches demand large datasets impractical to obtain from limited UAV flight campaigns. We present PC$^2$DAE, a physics-informed denoising autoencoder that addresses data scarcity by embedding physical constraints directly into the network architecture. Non-negative concentration estimates are enforced via softplus activations and physically plausible temporal smoothing, ensuring outputs are physically admissible by construction rather than relying on loss function penalties. The architecture employs hierarchical decoder heads for Black Carbon, Gas, and CO$_2$ sensor families, with two variants: PC$^2$DAE-Lean (21k parameters) for edge deployment and PC$^2$DAE-Wide (204k parameters) for offline processing. We evaluate on 7,894 synchronized 1 Hz samples collected from UAV flights during prescribed burns in Saskatchewan, Canada (approximately 2.2 hours of flight data), two orders of magnitude below typical deep learning requirements. PC$^2$DAE-Lean achieves 67.3\% smoothness improvement and 90.7\% high-frequency noise reduction with zero physics violations. Five baselines (LSTM-AE, U-Net, Transformer, CBDAE, DeSpaWN) produce 15--23\% negative outputs. The lean variant outperforms wide (+5.6\% smoothness), suggesting reduced capacity with strong inductive bias prevents overfitting in data-scarce regimes. Training completes in under 65 seconds on consumer hardware. --- ### A self-evolving multi-role collaborative framework with fine-grained difficulty guidance for innovative mathematical problem generation Authors: Yifei Sun, Yongan Li, A. K. Qin, Sicheng Hou, Tamas Pflanzner Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11792v1 Mathematical problem generation (MPG) is a significant research direction in the field of intelligent education. In recent years, the rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has enabled new technological approaches to problem-generation tasks. Although existing LLMs can achieve high correctness rates, they generally lack innovation and exhibit poor discrimination. In this paper, we propose the task of innovative math problem generation (IMPG). To solve the IMPG task, this paper proposes a self-evolving, multi-role collaborative framework with fine-grained difficulty guidance. First, a multi-role collaborative mechanism comprising a sampler, generator, evaluator, state machine, and memory is constructed, ensuring the correctness of generated problems through iterative optimization informed by self-assessment and external feedback. Second, we introduce an improved difficulty model to quantify difficulty and provide fine-grained guidance. We adopt the data-driven association-guided path sampling (DAPS) algorithm to enhance the semantic rationality of sampled encodings. Third, we construct the HSM3K-CN dataset, which comprises high-quality high school math problems. A multi-stage training pipeline is adopted, incorporating continual pre-training (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and group relative policy optimization (GRPO), to enhance the generation and evaluation capabilities of the base model. Finally, system self-evolution is achieved by transferring evaluation capabilities from the expert model to the apprentice model via distillation. Experiments show that, compared to baseline models, our proposed method significantly improves the innovation of the generated problems while maintaining a high correctness rate. --- ### Beyond Tokens: Concept-Level Training Objectives for LLMs Authors: Laya Iyer, Pranav Somani, Alice Guo, Dan Jurafsky, Chen Shani Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11791v2 The next-token prediction (NTP) objective has been foundational in the development of modern large language models (LLMs), driving advances in fluency and generalization. However, NTP operates at the \textit{token} level, treating deviations from a single reference continuation as errors even when alternative continuations are equally plausible or semantically equivalent (e.g., ``mom'' vs. ``mother''). As a result, token-level loss can penalize valid abstractions, paraphrases, or conceptually correct reasoning paths, biasing models toward surface form rather than underlying meaning. This mismatch between the training signal and semantic correctness motivates learning objectives that operate over higher-level representations. We propose a shift from token-level to concept-level prediction, where concepts group multiple surface forms of the same idea (e.g., ``mom,'' ``mommy,'' ``mother'' $\rightarrow$ \textit{MOTHER}). We introduce various methods for integrating conceptual supervision into LLM training and show that concept-aware models achieve lower perplexity, improved robustness under domain shift, and stronger performance than NTP-based models on diverse NLP benchmarks. This suggests \textit{concept-level supervision} as an improved training signal that better aligns LLMs with human semantic abstractions. --- ### Gradient-based Active Learning with Gaussian Processes for Global Sensitivity Analysis Authors: Guerlain Lambert, Céline Helbert, Claire Lauvernet Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11790v1 Global sensitivity analysis of complex numerical simulators is often limited by the small number of model evaluations that can be afforded. In such settings, surrogate models built from a limited set of simulations can substantially reduce the computational burden, provided that the design of computer experiments is enriched efficiently. In this context, we propose an active learning approach that, for a fixed evaluation budget, targets the most informative regions of the input space to improve sensitivity analysis accuracy. More specifically, our method builds on recent advances in active learning for sensitivity analysis (Sobol' indices and derivative-based global sensitivity measures, DGSM) that exploit derivatives obtained from a Gaussian process (GP) surrogate. By leveraging the joint posterior distribution of the GP gradient, we develop acquisition functions that better account for correlations between partial derivatives and their impact on the response surface, leading to a more comprehensive and robust methodology than existing DGSM-oriented criteria. The proposed approach is first compared to state-of-the-art methods on standard benchmark functions, and is then applied to a real environmental model of pesticide transfers. --- ### Suspicious Alignment of SGD: A Fine-Grained Step Size Condition Analysis Authors: Shenyang Deng, Boyao Liao, Zhuoli Ouyang, Tianyu Pang, Minhak Song, Yaoqing Yang Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11789v2 This paper explores the suspicious alignment phenomenon in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) under ill-conditioned optimization, where the Hessian spectrum splits into dominant and bulk subspaces. This phenomenon describes the behavior of gradient alignment in SGD updates. Specifically, during the initial phase of SGD updates, the alignment between the gradient and the dominant subspace tends to decrease. Subsequently, it enters a rising phase and eventually stabilizes in a high-alignment phase. The alignment is considered ``suspicious'' because, paradoxically, the projected gradient update along this highly-aligned dominant subspace proves ineffective at reducing the loss. The focus of this work is to give a fine-grained analysis in a high-dimensional quadratic setup about how step size selection produces this phenomenon. Our main contribution can be summarized as follows: We propose a step-size condition revealing that in low-alignment regimes, an adaptive critical step size $η_t^*$ separates alignment-decreasing ($η_t < η_t^*$) from alignment-increasing ($η_t > η_t^*$) regimes, whereas in high-alignment regimes, the alignment is self-correcting and decreases regardless of the step size. We further show that under sufficient ill-conditioning, a step size interval exists where projecting the SGD updates to the bulk space decreases the loss while projecting them to the dominant space increases the loss, which explains a recent empirical observation that projecting gradient updates to the dominant subspace is ineffective. Finally, based on this adaptive step-size theory, we prove that for a constant step size and large initialization, SGD exhibits this distinct two-phase behavior: an initial alignment-decreasing phase, followed by stabilization at high alignment. --- ### The Stability Trap: Evaluating the Reliability of LLM-Based Instruction Adherence Auditing Authors: Murtuza N. Shergadwala Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.SE, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11783v1 The enterprise governance of Generative AI (GenAI) in regulated sectors, such as Human Resources (HR), demands scalable yet reproducible auditing mechanisms. While Large Language Model (LLM)-as-a-Judge approaches offer scalability, their reliability in evaluating adherence of different types of system instructions remains unverified. This study asks: To what extent does the instruction type of an Application Under Test (AUT) influence the stability of judge evaluations? To address this, we introduce the Scoped Instruction Decomposition Framework to classify AUT instructions into Objective and Subjective types, isolating the factors that drive judge instability. We applied this framework to two representative HR GenAI applications, evaluating the stability of four judge architectures over variable runs. Our results reveal a ``Stability Trap'' characterized by a divergence between Verdict Stability and Reasoning Stability. While judges achieved near-perfect verdict agreement ($>99\%$) for both objective and subjective evaluations, their accompanying justification traces diverged significantly. Objective instructions requiring quantitative analysis, such as word counting, exhibited reasoning stability as low as $\approx19\%$, driven by variances in numeric justifications. Similarly, reasoning stability for subjective instructions varied widely ($35\%$--$83\%$) based on evidence granularity, with feature-specific checks failing to reproduce consistent rationale. Conversely, objective instructions focusing on discrete entity extraction achieved high reasoning stability ($>90\%$). These findings demonstrate that high verdict stability can mask fragile reasoning. Thus, we suggest that auditors scope automated evaluation protocols strictly: delegate all deterministically verifiable logic to code, while reserving LLM judges for complex semantic evaluation. --- ### Risk-Aware Human-in-the-Loop Framework with Adaptive Intrusion Response for Autonomous Vehicles Authors: Dawood Wasif, Terrence J. Moore, Seunghyun Yoon, Hyuk Lim, Dan Dongseong Kim, Frederica F. Nelson, Jin-Hee Cho Published: 2026-01-16 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11781v1 Autonomous vehicles must remain safe and effective when encountering rare long-tailed scenarios or cyber-physical intrusions during driving. We present RAIL, a risk-aware human-in-the-loop framework that turns heterogeneous runtime signals into calibrated control adaptations and focused learning. RAIL fuses three cues (curvature actuation integrity, time-to-collision proximity, and observation-shift consistency) into an Intrusion Risk Score (IRS) via a weighted Noisy-OR. When IRS exceeds a threshold, actions are blended with a cue-specific shield using a learned authority, while human override remains available; when risk is low, the nominal policy executes. A contextual bandit arbitrates among shields based on the cue vector, improving mitigation choices online. RAIL couples Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) with risk-prioritized replay and dual rewards so that takeovers and near misses steer learning while nominal behavior remains covered. On MetaDrive, RAIL achieves a Test Return (TR) of 360.65, a Test Success Rate (TSR) of 0.85, a Test Safety Violation (TSV) of 0.75, and a Disturbance Rate (DR) of 0.0027, while logging only 29.07 training safety violations, outperforming RL, safe RL, offline/imitation learning, and prior HITL baselines. Under Controller Area Network (CAN) injection and LiDAR spoofing attacks, it improves Success Rate (SR) to 0.68 and 0.80, lowers the Disengagement Rate under Attack (DRA) to 0.37 and 0.03, and reduces the Attack Success Rate (ASR) to 0.34 and 0.11. In CARLA, RAIL attains a TR of 1609.70 and TSR of 0.41 with only 8000 steps. ---