# Research Papers — 2026-02 · bundle page 126 of 210

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### Comprehensive Comparison of RAG Methods Across Multi-Domain Conversational QA

Authors: Klejda Alushi, Jan Strich, Chris Biemann, Martin Semmann
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.IR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09552v1

Conversational question answering increasingly relies on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to ground large language models (LLMs) in external knowledge. Yet, most existing studies evaluate RAG methods in isolation and primarily focus on single-turn settings. This paper addresses the lack of a systematic comparison of RAG methods for multi-turn conversational QA, where dialogue history, coreference, and shifting user intent substantially complicate retrieval. We present a comprehensive empirical study of vanilla and advanced RAG methods across eight diverse conversational QA datasets spanning multiple domains. Using a unified experimental setup, we evaluate retrieval quality and answer generation using generator and retrieval metrics, and analyze how performance evolves across conversation turns. Our results show that robust yet straightforward methods, such as reranking, hybrid BM25, and HyDE, consistently outperform vanilla RAG. In contrast, several advanced techniques fail to yield gains and can even degrade performance below the No-RAG baseline. We further demonstrate that dataset characteristics and dialogue length strongly influence retrieval effectiveness, explaining why no single RAG strategy dominates across settings. Overall, our findings indicate that effective conversational RAG depends less on method complexity than on alignment between the retrieval strategy and the dataset structure. We publish the code used.\footnote{\href{https://github.com/Klejda-A/exp-rag.git}{GitHub Repository}}

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### Scalpel: Fine-Grained Alignment of Attention Activation Manifolds via Mixture Gaussian Bridges to Mitigate Multimodal Hallucination

Authors: Ziqiang Shi, Rujie Liu, Shanshan Yu, Satoshi Munakata, Koichi Shirahata
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09541v1

Rapid progress in large vision-language models (LVLMs) has achieved unprecedented performance in vision-language tasks. However, due to the strong prior of large language models (LLMs) and misaligned attention across modalities, LVLMs often generate outputs inconsistent with visual content - termed hallucination. To address this, we propose \textbf{Scalpel}, a method that reduces hallucination by refining attention activation distributions toward more credible regions. Scalpel predicts trusted attention directions for each head in Transformer layers during inference and adjusts activations accordingly. It employs a Gaussian mixture model to capture multi-peak distributions of attention in trust and hallucination manifolds, and uses entropic optimal transport (equivalent to Schrödinger bridge problem) to map Gaussian components precisely. During mitigation, Scalpel dynamically adjusts intervention strength and direction based on component membership and mapping relationships between hallucination and trust activations. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and benchmarks demonstrate that Scalpel effectively mitigates hallucinations, outperforming previous methods and achieving state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, Scalpel is model- and data-agnostic, requiring no additional computation, only a single decoding step.

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### UniARM: Towards a Unified Autoregressive Reward Model for Multi-Objective Test-Time Alignment

Authors: Hongyan Xie, Yikun Ban, Ruiyu Fang, Zixuan Huang, Deqing Wang, Jianxin Li, Yitong Yao, Chao Wang, Shuangyong Song
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09538v1

Multi-objective alignment aims to align LLM responses with multiple human preference objectives. Among existing methods, guiding the generation of frozen LLMs through autoregressive reward models (ARMs) to accomplish multi-objective test-time alignment is a low-cost solution. However, these methods typically rely on independent parameters for each preference objective, either by training ARMs independently across preference dimensions, which neglects interactions among preference features, or by training a single ARM with separate feature extraction modules for each preference, which can cause feature entanglement. Both strategies can result in misalignment between generated outputs and user preferences. To address this limitation, we propose Preference-Modulated \& Shared Low-Rank Adaptation (MoSLoRA) for ARM training, which first extracts shared features via a preference-agnostic module and then applies affine transformations to shared features via a preference modulation module conditioned on mixed preference vectors. This design mitigates feature entanglement and enables precise control over preference trade-offs during inference. Building on this, we introduce the Unified Autoregressive Reward Model (UniARM), a novel framework for multi-objective test-time alignment. UniARM jointly models all preference dimensions in a single parameter space, eliminating the need for independent parameters for each preference objective. es on larger-scale LLMs, enhancing its practical usability.

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### AUHead: Realistic Emotional Talking Head Generation via Action Units Control

Authors: Jiayi Lyu, Leigang Qu, Wenjing Zhang, Hanyu Jiang, Kai Liu, Zhenglin Zhou, Xiaobo Xia, Jian Xue, Tat-Seng Chua
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09534v2

Realistic talking-head video generation is critical for virtual avatars, film production, and interactive systems. Current methods struggle with nuanced emotional expressions due to the lack of fine-grained emotion control. To address this issue, we introduce a novel two-stage method (AUHead) to disentangle fine-grained emotion control, i.e. , Action Units (AUs), from audio and achieve controllable generation. In the first stage, we explore the AU generation abilities of large audio-language models (ALMs), by spatial-temporal AU tokenization and an "emotion-then-AU" chain-of-thought mechanism. It aims to disentangle AUs from raw speech, effectively capturing subtle emotional cues. In the second stage, we propose an AU-driven controllable diffusion model that synthesizes realistic talking-head videos conditioned on AU sequences. Specifically, we first map the AU sequences into the structured 2D facial representation to enhance spatial fidelity, and then model the AU-vision interaction within cross-attention modules. To achieve flexible AU-quality trade-off control, we introduce an AU disentanglement guidance strategy during inference, further refining the emotional expressiveness and identity consistency of the generated videos. Results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance in emotional realism, accurate lip synchronization, and visual coherence, significantly surpassing existing techniques. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/laura990501/AUHead_ICLR

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### Autoregressive Direct Preference Optimization

Authors: Masanari Oi, Mahiro Ukai, Masahiro Kaneko, Naoaki Okazaki, Nakamasa Inoue
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09533v2

Direct preference optimization (DPO) has emerged as a promising approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, the widespread reliance on the response-level Bradley-Terry (BT) model may limit its full potential, as the reference and learnable models are assumed to be autoregressive only after deriving the objective function. Motivated by this limitation, we revisit the theoretical foundations of DPO and propose a novel formulation that explicitly introduces the autoregressive assumption prior to applying the BT model. By reformulating and extending DPO, we derive a novel variant, termed Autoregressive DPO (ADPO), that explicitly integrates autoregressive modeling into the preference optimization framework. Without violating the theoretical foundations, the derived loss takes an elegant form: it shifts the summation operation in the DPO objective outside the log-sigmoid function. Furthermore, through theoretical analysis of ADPO, we show that there exist two length measures to be considered when designing DPO-based algorithms: the token length $μ$ and the feedback length $μ'$. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explicitly distinguish these two measures and analyze their implications for preference optimization in LLMs.

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### RAD: Retrieval-Augmented Monocular Metric Depth Estimation for Underrepresented Classes

Authors: Michael Baltaxe, Dan Levi, Sagie Benaim
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09532v2

Monocular Metric Depth Estimation (MMDE) is essential for physically intelligent systems, yet accurate depth estimation for underrepresented classes in complex scenes remains a persistent challenge. To address this, we propose RAD, a retrieval-augmented framework that approximates the benefits of multi-view stereo by utilizing retrieved neighbors as structural geometric proxies. Our method first employs an uncertainty-aware retrieval mechanism to identify low-confidence regions in the input and retrieve RGB-D context samples containing semantically similar content. We then process both the input and retrieved context via a dual-stream network and fuse them using a matched cross-attention module, which transfers geometric information only at reliable point correspondences. Evaluations on NYU Depth v2, KITTI, and Cityscapes demonstrate that RAD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on underrepresented classes, reducing relative absolute error by 29.2% on NYU Depth v2, 13.3% on KITTI, and 7.2% on Cityscapes, while maintaining competitive performance on standard in-domain benchmarks.

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### DR.Experts: Differential Refinement of Distortion-Aware Experts for Blind Image Quality Assessment

Authors: Bohan Fu, Guanyi Qin, Fazhan Zhang, Zihao Huang, Mingxuan Li, Runze Hu
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09531v1

Blind Image Quality Assessment, aiming to replicate human perception of visual quality without reference, plays a key role in vision tasks, yet existing models often fail to effectively capture subtle distortion cues, leading to a misalignment with human subjective judgments. We identify that the root cause of this limitation lies in the lack of reliable distortion priors, as methods typically learn shallow relationships between unified image features and quality scores, resulting in their insensitive nature to distortions and thus limiting their performance. To address this, we introduce DR.Experts, a novel prior-driven BIQA framework designed to explicitly incorporate distortion priors, enabling a reliable quality assessment. DR.Experts begins by leveraging a degradation-aware vision-language model to obtain distortion-specific priors, which are further refined and enhanced by the proposed Distortion-Saliency Differential Module through distinguishing them from semantic attentions, thereby ensuring the genuine representations of distortions. The refined priors, along with semantics and bridging representation, are then fused by a proposed mixture-of-experts style module named the Dynamic Distortion Weighting Module. This mechanism weights each distortion-specific feature as per its perceptual impact, ensuring that the final quality prediction aligns with human perception. Extensive experiments conducted on five challenging BIQA benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of DR.Experts over current methods and showcase its excellence in terms of generalization and data efficiency.

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### Learning to Discover Iterative Spectral Algorithms

Authors: Zihang Liu, Oleg Balabanov, Yaoqing Yang, Michael W. Mahoney
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, math.NA
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09530v2

We introduce AutoSpec, a neural network framework for discovering iterative spectral algorithms for large-scale numerical linear algebra and numerical optimization. Our self-supervised models adapt to input operators using coarse spectral information (e.g., eigenvalue estimates and residual norms), and predict recurrence coefficients for computing or applying a matrix polynomial tailored to a downstream task. The effectiveness of AutoSpec relies on three ingredients: an architecture whose inference pass implements short, executable numerical linear algebra recurrences; efficient training on small synthetic problems with transfer to large-scale real-world operators; and task-defined objectives that enforce the desired approximation or preconditioning behavior across the range of spectral profiles represented in the training set. We apply AutoSpec to discovering algorithms for representative tasks on spd matrices: accelerating matrix function approximation; accelerating sparse linear solvers; and spectral filtering/preconditioning for eigenvalue computations. On real-world matrices, the learned procedures deliver up to order-of-magnitude improvements in accuracy and/or reductions in iteration count, relative to spectrum-agnostic baselines. We find clear connections to classical theory: the induced polynomials may exhibit equioscillation behavior characteristic of Chebyshev polynomial approximation. The code is available at: https://github.com/zihanghliu/AutoSpec .

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### SCA-Net: Spatial-Contextual Aggregation Network for Enhanced Small Building and Road Change Detection

Authors: Emad Gholibeigi, Abbas Koochari, Azadeh ZamaniFar
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09529v1

Automated change detection in remote sensing imagery is critical for urban management, environmental monitoring, and disaster assessment. While deep learning models have advanced this field, they often struggle with challenges like low sensitivity to small objects and high computational costs. This paper presents SCA-Net, an enhanced architecture built upon the Change-Agent framework for precise building and road change detection in bi-temporal images. Our model incorporates several key innovations: a novel Difference Pyramid Block for multi-scale change analysis, an Adaptive Multi-scale Processing module combining shape-aware and high-resolution enhancement blocks, and multi-level attention mechanisms (PPM and CSAGate) for joint contextual and detail processing. Furthermore, a dynamic composite loss function and a four-phase training strategy are introduced to stabilize training and accelerate convergence. Comprehensive evaluations on the LEVIR-CD and LEVIR-MCI datasets demonstrate SCA-Net's superior performance over Change-Agent and other state-of-the-art methods. Our approach achieves a significant 2.64% improvement in mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) on LEVIR-MCI and a remarkable 57.9% increase in IoU for small buildings, while reducing the training time by 61%. This work provides an efficient, accurate, and robust solution for practical change detection applications.

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### SchröMind: Mitigating Hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models via Solving the Schrödinger Bridge Problem

Authors: Ziqiang Shi, Rujie Liu, Shanshan Yu, Satoshi Munakata, Koichi Shirahata
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09528v1

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved significant success across various domains. However, their use in high-stakes fields like healthcare remains limited due to persistent hallucinations, where generated text contradicts or ignores visual input. We contend that MLLMs can comprehend images but struggle to produce accurate token sequences. Minor perturbations can shift attention from truthful to untruthful states, and the autoregressive nature of text generation often prevents error correction. To address this, we propose SchröMind-a novel framework reducing hallucinations via solving the Schrödinger bridge problem. It establishes a token-level mapping between hallucinatory and truthful activations with minimal transport cost through lightweight training, while preserving the model's original capabilities. Extensive experiments on the POPE and MME benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of Schrödinger, which achieves state-of-the-art performance while introducing only minimal computational overhead.

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### HLGFA: High-Low Resolution Guided Feature Alignment for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Authors: Han Zhou, Yuxuan Gao, Yinchao Du, Xuezhe Zheng
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09524v3

Unsupervised industrial anomaly detection (UAD) is essential for modern manufacturing inspection, where defect samples are scarce and reliable detection is required. In this paper, we propose HLGFA, a high-low resolution guided feature alignment framework that learns normality by modeling cross-resolution feature consistency between high-resolution and low-resolution representations of normal samples, instead of relying on pixel-level reconstruction. Dual-resolution inputs are processed by a shared frozen backbone to extract multi-level features, and high-resolution representations are decomposed into structure and detail priors to guide the refinement of low-resolution features through conditional modulation and gated residual correction. During inference, anomalies are naturally identified as regions where cross-resolution alignment breaks down. In addition, a noise-aware data augmentation strategy is introduced to suppress nuisance-induced responses commonly observed in industrial environments. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of HLGFA, achieving 97.9% pixel-level AUROC and 97.5% image-level AUROC on the MVTec AD dataset, outperforming representative reconstruction-based and feature-based methods.

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### Singpath-VL Technical Report

Authors: Zhen Qiu, Kaiwen Xiao, Zhengwei Lu, Xiangyu Liu, Lei Zhao, Hao Zhang
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09523v2

We present Singpath-VL, a vision-language large model, to fill the vacancy of AI assistant in cervical cytology. Recent advances in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have significantly propelled the field of computational pathology. However, their application in cytopathology, particularly cervical cytology, remains underexplored, primarily due to the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality annotated datasets. To bridge this gap, we first develop a novel three-stage pipeline to synthesize a million-scale image-description dataset. The pipeline leverages multiple general-purpose MLLMs as weak annotators, refines their outputs through consensus fusion and expert knowledge injection, and produces high-fidelity descriptions of cell morphology. Using this dataset, we then fine-tune the Qwen3-VL-4B model via a multi-stage strategy to create a specialized cytopathology MLLM. The resulting model, named Singpath-VL, demonstrates superior performance in fine-grained morphological perception and cell-level diagnostic classification. To advance the field, we will open-source a portion of the synthetic dataset and benchmark.

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### Attention to details, logits to truth: visual-aware attention and logits enhancement to mitigate hallucinations in LVLMs

Authors: Jingyi Wang, Fei Li, Rujie Liu
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09521v1

Existing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit insufficient visual attention, leading to hallucinations. To alleviate this problem, some previous studies adjust and amplify visual attention. These methods present a limitation that boosting attention for all visual tokens inevitably increases attention to task irrelevant tokens. To tackle this challenge, we propose a training free attentional intervention algorithm to enhance the attention of task-relevant tokens based on the argument that task-relevant tokens generally demonstrate high visual-textual similarities. Specifically, the vision-text cross-attention submatrices, which represent visual-textual correlations, are extracted to construct the reweighting matrices to reallocate attention. Besides, to enhance the contribution of visual tokens, we inject visual attention values into the beam search decoding to identify solutions with higher visual attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this method significantly reduces hallucinations across mainstream LVLMs, while preserving the accuracy and coherence of generated content.

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### Rashomon Sets and Model Multiplicity in Federated Learning

Authors: Xenia Heilmann, Luca Corbucci, Mattia Cerrato
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.LG, cs.DC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09520v3

The Rashomon set captures the collection of models that achieve near-identical empirical performance yet may differ substantially in their decision boundaries. Understanding the differences among these models, i.e., their multiplicity, is recognized as a crucial step toward model transparency, fairness, and robustness, as it reveals decision boundaries instabilities that standard metrics obscure. However, the existing definitions of Rashomon set and multiplicity metrics assume centralized learning and do not extend naturally to decentralized, multi-party settings like Federated Learning (FL). In FL, multiple clients collaboratively train models under a central server's coordination without sharing raw data, which preserves privacy but introduces challenges from heterogeneous client data distribution and communication constraints. In this setting, the choice of a single best model may homogenize predictive behavior across diverse clients, amplify biases, or undermine fairness guarantees. In this work, we provide the first formalization of Rashomon sets in FL.First, we adapt the Rashomon set definition to FL, distinguishing among three perspectives: (I) a global Rashomon set defined over aggregated statistics across all clients, (II) a t-agreement Rashomon set representing the intersection of local Rashomon sets across a fraction t of clients, and (III) individual Rashomon sets specific to each client's local distribution.Second, we show how standard multiplicity metrics can be estimated under FL's privacy constraints. Finally, we introduce a multiplicity-aware FL pipeline and conduct an empirical study on standard FL benchmark datasets. Our results demonstrate that all three proposed federated Rashomon set definitions offer valuable insights, enabling clients to deploy models that better align with their local data, fairness considerations, and practical requirements.

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### A Universal Action Space for General Behavior Analysis

Authors: Hung-Shuo Chang, Yue-Cheng Yang, Yu-Hsi Chen, Wei-Hsin Chen, Chien-Yao Wang, James C. Liao, Chien-Chang Chen, Hen-Hsen Huang, Hong-Yuan Mark Liao
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09518v1

Analyzing animal and human behavior has long been a challenging task in computer vision. Early approaches from the 1970s to the 1990s relied on hand-crafted edge detection, segmentation, and low-level features such as color, shape, and texture to locate objects and infer their identities-an inherently ill-posed problem. Behavior analysis in this era typically proceeded by tracking identified objects over time and modeling their trajectories using sparse feature points, which further limited robustness and generalization. A major shift occurred with the introduction of ImageNet by Deng and Li in 2010, which enabled large-scale visual recognition through deep neural networks and effectively served as a comprehensive visual dictionary. This development allowed object recognition to move beyond complex low-level processing toward learned high-level representations. In this work, we follow this paradigm to build a large-scale Universal Action Space (UAS) using existing labeled human-action datasets. We then use this UAS as the foundation for analyzing and categorizing mammalian and chimpanzee behavior datasets. The source code is released on GitHub at https://github.com/franktpmvu/Universal-Action-Space.

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### Knowledge Integration Decay in Search-Augmented Reasoning of Large Language Models

Authors: Sangwon Yu, Ik-hwan Kim, Donghun Kang, Bongkyu Hwang, Junhwa Choi, Suk-hoon Jung, Seungki Hong, Taehee Lee, Sungroh Yoon
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09517v1

Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex tasks by employing search-augmented reasoning to incorporate external knowledge into long chains of thought. However, we identify a critical yet underexplored bottleneck in this paradigm, termed Knowledge Integration Decay (KID). Specifically, we observe that as the length of reasoning generated before search grows, models increasingly fail to integrate retrieved evidence into subsequent reasoning steps, limiting performance even when relevant information is available. To address this, we propose Self-Anchored Knowledge Encoding (SAKE), a training-free inference-time strategy designed to stabilize knowledge utilization. By anchoring retrieved knowledge at both the beginning and end of the reasoning process, SAKE prevents it from being overshadowed by prior context, thereby preserving its semantic integrity. Extensive experiments on multi-hop QA and complex reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that SAKE significantly mitigates KID and improves performance, offering a lightweight yet effective solution for knowledge integration in agentic LLMs.

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### The CLEF-2026 CheckThat! Lab: Advancing Multilingual Fact-Checking

Authors: Julia Maria Struß, Sebastian Schellhammer, Stefan Dietze, Venktesh V, Vinay Setty, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Preslav Nakov, Avishek Anand, Primakov Chungkham, Salim Hafid, Dhruv Sahnan, Konstantin Todorov
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09516v1

The CheckThat! lab aims to advance the development of innovative technologies combating disinformation and manipulation efforts in online communication across a multitude of languages and platforms. While in early editions the focus has been on core tasks of the verification pipeline (check-worthiness, evidence retrieval, and verification), in the past three editions, the lab added additional tasks linked to the verification process. In this year's edition, the verification pipeline is at the center again with the following tasks: Task 1 on source retrieval for scientific web claims (a follow-up of the 2025 edition), Task 2 on fact-checking numerical and temporal claims, which adds a reasoning component to the 2025 edition, and Task 3, which expands the verification pipeline with generation of full-fact-checking articles. These tasks represent challenging classification and retrieval problems as well as generation challenges at the document and span level, including multilingual settings.

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### Energy-Efficient Fast Object Detection on Edge Devices for IoT Systems

Authors: Mas Nurul Achmadiah, Afaroj Ahamad, Chi-Chia Sun, Wen-Kai Kuo
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09515v1

This paper presents an Internet of Things (IoT) application that utilizes an AI classifier for fast-object detection using the frame difference method. This method, with its shorter duration, is the most efficient and suitable for fast-object detection in IoT systems, which require energy-efficient applications compared to end-to-end methods. We have implemented this technique on three edge devices: AMD AlveoT M U50, Jetson Orin Nano, and Hailo-8T M AI Accelerator, and four models with artificial neural networks and transformer models. We examined various classes, including birds, cars, trains, and airplanes. Using the frame difference method, the MobileNet model consistently has high accuracy, low latency, and is highly energy-efficient. YOLOX consistently shows the lowest accuracy, lowest latency, and lowest efficiency. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has improved the average accuracy gain by 28.314%, the average efficiency gain by 3.6 times, and the average latency reduction by 39.305% compared to the end-to-end method. Of all these classes, the faster objects are trains and airplanes. Experiments show that the accuracy percentage for trains and airplanes is lower than other categories. So, in tasks that require fast detection and accurate results, end-to-end methods can be a disaster because they cannot handle fast object detection. To improve computational efficiency, we designed our proposed method as a lightweight detection algorithm. It is well suited for applications in IoT systems, especially those that require fast-moving object detection and higher accuracy.

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### EcoGym: Evaluating LLMs for Long-Horizon Plan-and-Execute in Interactive Economies

Authors: Xavier Hu, Jinxiang Xia, Shengze Xu, Kangqi Song, Yishuo Yuan, Guibin Zhang, JinCheng Ren, Boyu Feng, Li Lu, Tieyong Zeng, Jiaheng Liu, Minghao Liu et al.
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09514v3

Long-horizon planning is widely recognized as a core capability of autonomous LLM-based agents; however, current evaluation frameworks suffer from being largely episodic, domain-specific, or insufficiently grounded in persistent economic dynamics. We introduce EcoGym, a generalizable benchmark for continuous plan-and-execute decision making in interactive economies. EcoGym comprises three diverse environments: Vending (adapted from the closed-source Vending-Bench, with full open-source release), Freelance (new), and Operation (new), implemented in a unified decision-making process with standardized interfaces, and budgeted actions over an effectively unbounded horizon (1000+ steps if 365 day-loops for evaluation). The evaluation of EcoGym is based on business-relevant outcomes (e.g., net worth, income, and DAU), targeting long-term strategic coherence and robustness under partial observability and stochasticity. Experiments across eleven leading LLMs expose a systematic tension: no single model dominates across all three scenarios. Critically, we find that models exhibit significant suboptimality in either high-level strategies or efficient actions executions. EcoGym is released as an open, extensible testbed for transparent long-horizon agent evaluation and for studying controllability utility trade-offs in economic settings.

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### Robust Depth Super-Resolution via Adaptive Diffusion Sampling

Authors: Kun Wang, Yun Zhu, Pan Zhou, Na Zhao
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09510v1

We propose AdaDS, a generalizable framework for depth super-resolution that robustly recovers high-resolution depth maps from arbitrarily degraded low-resolution inputs. Unlike conventional approaches that directly regress depth values and often exhibit artifacts under severe or unknown degradation, AdaDS capitalizes on the contraction property of Gaussian smoothing: as noise accumulates in the forward process, distributional discrepancies between degraded inputs and their pristine high-quality counterparts diminish, ultimately converging to isotropic Gaussian prior. Leveraging this, AdaDS adaptively selects a starting timestep in the reverse diffusion trajectory based on estimated refinement uncertainty, and subsequently injects tailored noise to position the intermediate sample within the high-probability region of the target posterior distribution. This strategy ensures inherent robustness, enabling generative prior of a pre-trained diffusion model to dominate recovery even when upstream estimations are imperfect. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic benchmarks demonstrate AdaDS's superior zero-shot generalization and resilience to diverse degradation patterns compared to state-of-the-art methods.

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### Beyond Student: An Asymmetric Network for Neural Network Inheritance

Authors: Yiyun Zhou, Jingwei Shi, Mingjing Xu, Zhonghua Jiang, Jingyuan Chen
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09509v2

Knowledge Distillation (KD) has emerged as a powerful technique for model compression, enabling lightweight student networks to benefit from the performance of redundant teacher networks. However, the inherent capacity gap often limits the performance of student networks. Inspired by the expressiveness of pretrained teacher networks, a compelling research question arises: is there a type of network that can not only inherit the teacher's structure but also maximize the inheritance of its knowledge? Furthermore, how does the performance of such an inheriting network compare to that of student networks, all benefiting from the same teacher network? To further explore this question, we propose InherNet, a neural network inheritance method that performs asymmetric low-rank decomposition on the teacher's weights and reconstructs a lightweight yet expressive network without significant architectural disruption. By leveraging Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) for initialization to ensure the inheritance of principal knowledge, InherNet effectively balances depth, width, and compression efficiency. Experimental results across unimodal and multimodal tasks demonstrate that InherNet achieves higher performance compared to student networks of similar parameter sizes. Our findings reveal a promising direction for future research in efficient model compression beyond traditional distillation.

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### Towards Uniformity and Alignment for Multimodal Representation Learning

Authors: Wenzhe Yin, Pan Zhou, Zehao Xiao, Jie Liu, Shujian Yu, Jan-Jakob Sonke, Efstratios Gavves
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09507v1

Multimodal representation learning aims to construct a shared embedding space in which heterogeneous modalities are semantically aligned. Despite strong empirical results, InfoNCE-based objectives introduce inherent conflicts that yield distribution gaps across modalities. In this work, we identify two conflicts in the multimodal regime, both exacerbated as the number of modalities increases: (i) an alignment-uniformity conflict, whereby the repulsion of uniformity undermines pairwise alignment, and (ii) an intra-alignment conflict, where aligning multiple modalities induces competing alignment directions. To address these issues, we propose a principled decoupling of alignment and uniformity for multimodal representations, providing a conflict-free recipe for multimodal learning that simultaneously supports discriminative and generative use cases without task-specific modules. We then provide a theoretical guarantee that our method acts as an efficient proxy for a global Hölder divergence over multiple modality distributions, and thus reduces the distribution gap among modalities. Extensive experiments on retrieval and UnCLIP-style generation demonstrate consistent gains.

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### Equilibrium contrastive learning for imbalanced image classification

Authors: Sumin Roh, Harim Kim, Ho Yun Lee, Il Yong Chun
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09506v3

Contrastive learning (CL) is a predominant technique in image classification, but they showed limited performance with an imbalanced dataset. Recently, several supervised CL methods have been proposed to promote an ideal regular simplex geometric configuration in the representation space-characterized by intra-class feature collapse and uniform inter-class mean spacing, especially for imbalanced datasets. In particular, existing prototype-based methods include class prototypes, as additional samples to consider all classes. However, the existing CL methods suffer from two limitations. First, they do not consider the alignment between the class means/prototypes and classifiers, which could lead to poor generalization. Second, existing prototype-based methods treat prototypes as only one additional sample per class, making their influence depend on the number of class instances in a batch and causing unbalanced contributions across classes. To address these limitations, we propose Equilibrium Contrastive Learning (ECL), a supervised CL framework designed to promote geometric equilibrium, where class features, means, and classifiers are harmoniously balanced under data imbalance. The proposed ECL framework uses two main components. First, ECL promotes the representation geometric equilibrium (i.e., a regular simplex geometry characterized by collapsed class samples and uniformly distributed class means), while balancing the contributions of class-average features and class prototypes. Second, ECL establishes a classifier-class center geometric equilibrium by aligning classifier weights and class prototypes. We ran experiments with three long-tailed datasets, the CIFAR-10(0)-LT, ImageNet-LT, and the two imbalanced medical datasets, the ISIC 2019 and our constructed LCCT dataset. Results show that ECL outperforms existing SOTA supervised CL methods designed for imbalanced classification.

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### Seeing the Goal, Missing the Truth: Human Accountability for AI Bias

Authors: Sean Cao, Wei Jiang, Hui Xu
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: q-fin.GN, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09504v2

This research explores how human-defined goals influence the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) through purpose-conditioned cognition. Using financial prediction tasks, we show that revealing the downstream use (e.g., predicting stock returns or earnings) of LLM outputs leads the LLM to generate biased sentiment and competition measures, even though these measures are intended to be downstream task-independent. Goal-aware prompting shifts these intermediate measures toward the disclosed downstream objective, producing in-sample overfitting. Specifically, purpose leakage improves performance on data prior to the LLM's knowledge cutoff, but provides no advantage after the cutoff. This bias is strong enough that regularization of prompt instructions cannot fully address this form of overfitting. We further show that the bias can arise from users' unintentional conversational context that hints at the purpose. Overall, we document that AI bias due to "seeing the goal" is not an algorithmic flaw, but stems from human accountability in research design.

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### Improved Approximate Regret for Decentralized Online Continuous Submodular Maximization via Reductions

Authors: Yuanyu Wan, Yu Shen, Dingzhi Yu, Bo Xue, Mingli Song
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09502v1

To expand the applicability of decentralized online learning, previous studies have proposed several algorithms for decentralized online continuous submodular maximization (D-OCSM) -- a non-convex/non-concave setting with continuous DR-submodular reward functions. However, there exist large gaps between their approximate regret bounds and the regret bounds achieved in the convex setting. Moreover, if focusing on projection-free algorithms, which can efficiently handle complex decision sets, they cannot even recover the approximate regret bounds achieved in the centralized setting. In this paper, we first demonstrate that for D-OCSM over general convex decision sets, these two issues can be addressed simultaneously. Furthermore, for D-OCSM over downward-closed decision sets, we show that the second issue can be addressed while significantly alleviating the first issue. Our key techniques are two reductions from D-OCSM to decentralized online convex optimization (D-OCO), which can exploit D-OCO algorithms to improve the approximate regret of D-OCSM in these two cases, respectively.

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### Where-to-Unmask: Ground-Truth-Guided Unmasking Order Learning for Masked Diffusion Language Models

Authors: Hikaru Asano, Tadashi Kozuno, Kuniaki Saito, Yukino Baba
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09501v1

Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) generate text by iteratively filling masked tokens, requiring two coupled decisions at each step: which positions to unmask (where-to-unmask) and which tokens to place (what-to-unmask). While standard MDLM training directly optimizes token prediction (what-to-unmask), inference-time unmasking orders (where-to-unmask) are typically determined by heuristic confidence measures or trained through reinforcement learning with costly on-policy rollouts. To address this, we introduce Gt-Margin, a position-wise score derived from ground-truth tokens, defined as the probability margin between the correct token and its strongest alternative. Gt-Margin yields an oracle unmasking order that prioritizes easier positions first under each partially masked state. We demonstrate that leveraging this oracle unmasking order significantly enhances final generation quality, particularly on logical reasoning benchmarks. Building on this insight, we train a supervised unmasking planner via learning-to-rank to imitate the oracle ordering from masked contexts. The resulting planner integrates into standard MDLM sampling to select where-to-unmask, improving reasoning accuracy without modifying the token prediction model.

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### Computationally Efficient Replicable Learning of Parities and Applications

Authors: Moshe Noivirt, Jessica Sorrell, Eliad Tsfadia
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09499v2

We study the computational relationship between replicability (Impagliazzo et al. (STOC `22), Ghazi et al. (NeurIPS `21)) and other stability notions. Specifically, we focus on replicable PAC learning and its connections to differential privacy (Dwork et al. (TCC 2006)) and to the statistical query (SQ) model (Kearns (JACM `98)). Statistically, it was known that differentially private learning and replicable learning are equivalent and strictly more powerful than SQ-learning. Yet, computationally, all previously known efficient (i.e., polynomial-time) replicable learning algorithms were confined to SQ-learnable tasks or restricted distributions, in contrast to differentially private learning. Our main contribution is the first computationally efficient replicable algorithm for realizable learning of parities over arbitrary distributions, a task that is known to be hard in the SQ-model, but possible under differential privacy. This result provides the first evidence that efficient replicable learning over general distributions strictly extends efficient SQ-learning, and is closer in power to efficient differentially private learning, despite computational separations between replicability and privacy. Additionally, we leverage our parity learner to prove that, assuming $RP \neq NP$, converting replicability to pure differential privacy requires a strict loss in sample complexity. Our main building block is a new, efficient, and replicable algorithm that, given a set of vectors, outputs a subspace of their linear span that covers most of them.

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### OSI: One-step Inversion Excels in Extracting Diffusion Watermarks

Authors: Yuwei Chen, Zhenliang He, Jia Tang, Meina Kan, Shiguang Shan
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09494v1

Watermarking is an important mechanism for provenance and copyright protection of diffusion-generated images. Training-free methods, exemplified by Gaussian Shading, embed watermarks into the initial noise of diffusion models with negligible impact on the quality of generated images. However, extracting this type of watermark typically requires multi-step diffusion inversion to obtain precise initial noise, which is computationally expensive and time-consuming. To address this issue, we propose One-step Inversion (OSI), a significantly faster and more accurate method for extracting Gaussian Shading style watermarks. OSI reformulates watermark extraction as a learnable sign classification problem, which eliminates the need for precise regression of the initial noise. Then, we initialize the OSI model from the diffusion backbone and finetune it on synthesized noise-image pairs with a sign classification objective. In this manner, the OSI model is able to accomplish the watermark extraction efficiently in only one step. Our OSI substantially outperforms the multi-step diffusion inversion method: it is 20x faster, achieves higher extraction accuracy, and doubles the watermark payload capacity. Extensive experiments across diverse schedulers, diffusion backbones, and cryptographic schemes consistently show improvements, demonstrating the generality of our OSI framework.

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### Beware of the Batch Size: Hyperparameter Bias in Evaluating LoRA

Authors: Sangyoon Lee, Jaeho Lee
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09492v2

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is a standard approach for fine-tuning large language models, yet its many variants report conflicting empirical gains, often on the same benchmarks. We show that these contradictions arise from a single overlooked factor: the batch size. When properly tuned, vanilla LoRA often matches the performance of more complex variants. We further propose a proxy-based, cost-efficient strategy for batch size tuning, revealing the impact of rank, dataset size, and model capacity on the optimal batch size. Our findings elevate batch size from a minor implementation detail to a first-order design parameter, reconciling prior inconsistencies and enabling more reliable evaluations of LoRA variants.

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### Robust Trust

Authors: Piotr Dworczak, Alex Smolin
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: econ.TH, cs.AI, cs.GT
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09490v2

An agent chooses an action based on her private information and a recommendation from an informed but potentially misaligned adviser. With a known probability, the adviser truthfully reports his signal; with the remaining probability, he can send any message. We characterize optimal robust decision rules that maximize the agent's worst-case expected payoff. Every optimal rule is equivalent to a trust-region policy in belief space: the adviser's reported beliefs are taken at face value if they fall within the trust region but are otherwise clipped to the trust region's boundary. We derive alignment thresholds above which advice is strictly valuable and fully characterize the solution in both binary-state and binary-action environments.

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### Computing Conditional Shapley Values Using Tabular Foundation Models

Authors: Lars Henry Berge Olsen, Dennis Christensen
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09489v1

Shapley values have become a cornerstone of explainable AI, but they are computationally expensive to use, especially when features are dependent. Evaluating them requires approximating a large number of conditional expectations, either via Monte Carlo integration or regression. Until recently it has not been possible to fully exploit deep learning for the regression approach, because retraining for each conditional expectation takes too long. Tabular foundation models such as TabPFN overcome this computational hurdle by leveraging in-context learning, so each conditional expectation can be approximated without any re-training. In this paper, we compute Shapley values with multiple variants of TabPFN and compare their performance with state-of-the-art methods on both simulated and real datasets. In most cases, TabPFN yields the best performance; where it does not, it is only marginally worse than the best method, at a fraction of the runtime. We discuss further improvements and how tabular foundation models can be better adapted specifically for conditional Shapley value estimation.

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### Adaptive recurrent flow map operator learning for reaction diffusion dynamics

Authors: Huseyin Tunc
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.LG, math.NA
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09487v1

Reaction-diffusion (RD) equations underpin pattern formation across chemistry, biology, and physics, yet learning stable operators that forecast their long-term dynamics from data remains challenging. Neural-operator surrogates provide resolution-robust prediction, but autoregressive rollouts can drift due to the accumulation of error, and out-of-distribution (OOD) initial conditions often degrade accuracy. Physics-based numerical residual objectives can regularize operator learning, although they introduce additional assumptions, sensitivity to discretization and loss design, and higher training cost. Here we develop a purely data-driven operator learner with adaptive recurrent training (DDOL-ART) using a robust recurrent strategy with lightweight validation milestones that early-exit unproductive rollout segments and redirect optimization. Trained only on a single in-distribution toroidal Gaussian family over short horizons, DDOL-ART learns one-step operators that remain stable under long rollouts and generalize zero-shot to strong morphology shifts across FitzHugh-Nagumo (FN), Gray-Scott (GS), and Lambda-Omega (LO) systems. Across these benchmarks, DDOL-ART delivers a strong accuracy and cost trade-off. It is several-fold faster than a physics-based numerical-loss operator learner (NLOL) under matched settings, and it remains competitive on both in-distribution stability and OOD robustness. Training-dynamics diagnostics show that adaptivity strengthens the correlation between validation error and OOD test error performance, acting as a feedback controller that limits optimization drift. Our results indicate that feedback-controlled recurrent training of DDOL-ART generates robust flow-map surrogates without PDE residuals, while simultaneously maintaining competitiveness with NLOL at significantly reduced training costs.

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### Listen to the Layers: Mitigating Hallucinations with Inter-Layer Disagreement

Authors: Koduvayur Subbalakshmi, Sabbir Hossain Ujjal, Venkata Krishna Teja Mangichetty, Nastaran Jamalipour Soofi
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09486v2

Pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to generating fluent yet factually incorrect text-a phenomenon known as hallucinations, undermining their reliability and utility in downstream tasks. We hypothesize that a generated text span's factuality is correlated with its representational instability across the model's internal layers. Based on this, we propose the CoCoA (Confusion and Consistency Aware) decoder, a novel, training-free decoding algorithm that mitigates hallucinations at inference time by listening to these signals in the middle layers. We propose two metrics to quantify this instability in the middle layers and use it to penalize outputs that exhibit high internal confusion, thereby steering the model towards more internally consistent and factually grounded outputs. We further propose a self-information gated variant, CoCoA-SIG, that dynamically modulates this penalty to selectively target high-surprise, unstable generations. Extensive experiments on diverse tasks, including question-answering, summarization, mathematical reasoning and code generation, demonstrate that CoCoA significantly improves factual correctness across multiple model families (e.g., Llama-3, Qwen-2.5, Mistral). By leveraging model-intrinsic signals, CoCoA offers an effective and broadly applicable method for enhancing the trustworthiness of LLMs at inference time, without requiring any model retraining.

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### Bridging Efficiency and Transparency: Explainable CoT Compression in Multimodal Large Reasoning Models

Authors: Yizhi Wang, Linan Yue, Min-Ling Zhang
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09485v1

Long chains of thought (Long CoTs) are widely employed in multimodal reasoning models to tackle complex tasks by capturing detailed visual information. However, these Long CoTs are often excessively lengthy and contain redundant reasoning steps, which can hinder inference efficiency. Compressing these long CoTs is a natural solution, yet existing approaches face two major challenges: (1) they may compromise the integrity of visual-textual reasoning by removing essential alignment cues, and (2) the compression process lacks explainability, making it difficult to discern which information is critical. To address these problems, we propose XMCC, an eXplainable Multimodal CoT Compressor that formulates compression as a sequential decision-making process optimized via reinforcement learning. XMCC can effectively shorten reasoning trajectories while preserving key reasoning steps and answer correctness, and simultaneously generates natural-language explanations for its compression decisions. Extensive experiments on representative multimodal reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that XMCC not only reduces reasoning length but also provides explainable explanations, validating its effectiveness.

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### Beyond Next-Token Alignment: Distilling Multimodal Large Language Models via Token Interactions

Authors: Lin Chen, Xiaoke Zhao, Kun Ding, Weiwei Feng, Changtao Miao, Zili Wang, Wenxuan Guo, Ying Wang, Kaiyuan Zheng, Bo Zhang, Zhe Li, Shiming Xiang
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09483v1

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive cross-modal capabilities, yet their substantial size poses significant deployment challenges. Knowledge distillation (KD) is a promising solution for compressing these models, but existing methods primarily rely on static next-token alignment, neglecting the dynamic token interactions, which embed essential capabilities for multimodal understanding and generation. To this end, we introduce Align-TI, a novel KD framework designed from the perspective of Token Interactions. Our approach is motivated by the insight that MLLMs rely on two primary interactions: vision-instruction token interactions to extract relevant visual information, and intra-response token interactions for coherent generation. Accordingly, Align-TI introduces two components: IVA enables the student model to imitate the teacher's instruction-relevant visual information extract capability by aligning on salient visual regions. TPA captures the teacher's dynamic generative logic by aligning the sequential token-to-token transition probabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate Align-TI's superiority. Notably, our approach achieves $2.6\%$ relative improvement over Vanilla KD, and our distilled Align-TI-2B even outperforms LLaVA-1.5-7B (a much larger MLLM) by $7.0\%$, establishing a new state-of-the-art distillation framework for training parameter-efficient MLLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/lchen1019/Align-TI.

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### Weakly Supervised Contrastive Learning for Histopathology Patch Embeddings

Authors: Bodong Zhang, Xiwen Li, Hamid Manoochehri, Xiaoya Tang, Deepika Sirohi, Beatrice S. Knudsen, Tolga Tasdizen
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09477v2

Digital histopathology whole slide images (WSIs) provide gigapixel-scale high-resolution images that are highly useful for disease diagnosis. However, digital histopathology image analysis faces significant challenges due to the limited training labels, since manually annotating specific regions or small patches cropped from large WSIs requires substantial time and effort. Weakly supervised multiple instance learning (MIL) offers a practical and efficient solution by requiring only bag-level (slide-level) labels, while each bag typically contains multiple instances (patches). Most MIL methods directly use frozen image patch features generated by various image encoders as inputs and primarily focus on feature aggregation. However, feature representation learning for encoder pretraining in MIL settings has largely been neglected. In our work, we propose a novel feature representation learning framework called weakly supervised contrastive learning (WeakSupCon) that incorporates bag-level label information during training. Our method does not rely on instance-level pseudo-labeling, yet it effectively separates patches with different labels in the feature space. Experimental results demonstrate that the image features generated by our WeakSupCon method lead to improved downstream MIL performance compared to self-supervised contrastive learning approaches in three datasets. Our related code is available at github.com/BzhangURU/Paper_WeakSupCon_for_MIL

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### FD-DB: Frequency-Decoupled Dual-Branch Network for Unpaired Synthetic-to-Real Domain Translation

Authors: Chuanhai Zang, Jiabao Hu, XW Song
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09476v2

Synthetic data provide low-cost, accurately annotated samples for geometry-sensitive vision tasks, but appearance and imaging differences between synthetic and real domains cause severe domain shift and degrade downstream performance. Unpaired synthetic-to-real translation can reduce this gap without paired supervision, yet existing methods often face a trade-off between photorealism and structural stability: unconstrained generation may introduce deformation or spurious textures, while overly rigid constraints limit adaptation to real-domain statistics. We propose FD-DB, a frequency-decoupled dual-branch model that separates appearance transfer into low-frequency interpretable editing and high-frequency residual compensation. The interpretable branch predicts physically meaningful editing parameters (white balance, exposure, contrast, saturation, blur, and grain) to build a stable low-frequency appearance base with strong content preservation. The free branch complements fine details through residual generation, and a gated fusion mechanism combines the two branches under explicit frequency constraints to limit low-frequency drift. We further adopt a two-stage training schedule that first stabilizes the editing branch and then releases the residual branch to improve optimization stability. Experiments on the YCB-V dataset show that FD-DB improves real-domain appearance consistency and significantly boosts downstream semantic segmentation performance while preserving geometric and semantic structures.

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### ArtifactLens: Hundreds of Labels Are Enough for Artifact Detection with VLMs

Authors: James Burgess, Rameen Abdal, Dan Stoddart, Sergey Tulyakov, Serena Yeung-Levy, Kuan-Chieh Jackson Wang
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09475v1

Modern image generators produce strikingly realistic images, where only artifacts like distorted hands or warped objects reveal their synthetic origin. Detecting these artifacts is essential: without detection, we cannot benchmark generators or train reward models to improve them. Current detectors fine-tune VLMs on tens of thousands of labeled images, but this is expensive to repeat whenever generators evolve or new artifact types emerge. We show that pretrained VLMs already encode the knowledge needed to detect artifacts - with the right scaffolding, this capability can be unlocked using only a few hundred labeled examples per artifact category. Our system, ArtifactLens, achieves state-of-the-art on five human artifact benchmarks (the first evaluation across multiple datasets) while requiring orders of magnitude less labeled data. The scaffolding consists of a multi-component architecture with in-context learning and text instruction optimization, with novel improvements to each. Our methods generalize to other artifact types - object morphology, animal anatomy, and entity interactions - and to the distinct task of AIGC detection.

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### Online Learning in MDPs with Partially Adversarial Transitions and Losses

Authors: Ofir Schlisselberg, Tal Lancewicki, Yishay Mansour
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09474v2

We study reinforcement learning in MDPs whose transition function is stochastic at most steps but may behave adversarially at a fixed subset of $Λ$ steps per episode. This model captures environments that are stable except at a few vulnerable points. We introduce \emph{conditioned occupancy measures}, which remain stable across episodes even with adversarial transitions, and use them to design two algorithms. The first handles arbitrary adversarial steps and achieves regret $\tilde{O}(H S^Λ\sqrt{K S A^{Λ+1}})$, where $K$ is the number of episodes, $S$ is the number of state, $A$ is the number of actions and $H$ is the episode's horizon. The second, assuming the adversarial steps are consecutive, improves the dependence on $S$ to $\tilde{O}(H\sqrt{K S^{3} A^{Λ+1}})$. We further give a $K^{2/3}$-regret reduction that removes the need to know which steps are the $Λ$ adversarial steps. We also characterize the regret of adversarial MDPs in the \emph{fully adversarial} setting ($Λ=H-1$) both for full-information and bandit feedback, and provide almost matching upper and lower bounds (slightly strengthen existing lower bounds, and clarify how different feedback structures affect the hardness of learning).

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### LLM-Grounded Dynamic Task Planning with Hierarchical Temporal Logic for Human-Aware Multi-Robot Handover

Authors: Shuyuan Hu, Tao Lin, Kai Ye, Tianwei Zhang
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09472v2

Large Language Models (LLMs) enable non-experts to specify open-world multi-robot tasks, but the generated plans are often kinematically infeasible and inefficient in long-horizon settings. Formal methods such as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) offer correctness and optimality guarantees, yet they are typically offline and scale poorly. To bridge this gap, we propose a neuro-symbolic framework that grounds human instructions into hierarchical LTLf specifications (i.e., LTL on finite traces) and solves the resulting Simultaneous Task Allocation and Planning (STAP) problem. Unlike static approaches, our system handles stochastic environmental changes-such as user motion or updated instructions-through a receding horizon planning (RHP) loop with real-time perception, dynamically refining plans over a hierarchical state space. Experiments in simulation and on real robots demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms baseline methods in success rate and interaction fluency while reducing replanning overhead.

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### NOWJ @BioCreative IX ToxHabits: An Ensemble Deep Learning Approach for Detecting Substance Use and Contextual Information in Clinical Texts

Authors: Huu-Huy-Hoang Tran, Gia-Bao Duong, Quoc-Viet-Anh Tran, Thi-Hai-Yen Vuong, Hoang-Quynh Le
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09469v1

Extracting drug use information from unstructured Electronic Health Records remains a major challenge in clinical Natural Language Processing. While Large Language Models demonstrate advancements, their use in clinical NLP is limited by concerns over trust, control, and efficiency. To address this, we present NOWJ submission to the ToxHabits Shared Task at BioCreative IX. This task targets the detection of toxic substance use and contextual attributes in Spanish clinical texts, a domain-specific, low-resource setting. We propose a multi-output ensemble system tackling both Subtask 1 - ToxNER and Subtask 2 - ToxUse. Our system integrates BETO with a CRF layer for sequence labeling, employs diverse training strategies, and uses sentence filtering to boost precision. Our top run achieved 0.94 F1 and 0.97 precision for Trigger Detection, and 0.91 F1 for Argument Detection.

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### AlgoVeri: An Aligned Benchmark for Verified Code Generation on Classical Algorithms

Authors: Haoyu Zhao, Ziran Yang, Jiawei Li, Deyuan He, Zenan Li, Chi Jin, Venugopal V. Veeravalli, Aarti Gupta, Sanjeev Arora
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09464v2

Vericoding refers to the generation of formally verified code from rigorous specifications. Recent AI models show promise in vericoding, but a unified methodology for cross-paradigm evaluation is lacking. Existing benchmarks test only individual languages/tools (e.g., Dafny, Verus, and Lean) and each covers very different tasks, so the performance numbers are not directly comparable. We address this gap with AlgoVeri, a benchmark that evaluates vericoding of $77$ classical algorithms in Dafny, Verus, and Lean. By enforcing identical functional contracts, AlgoVeri reveals critical capability gaps in verification systems. While frontier models achieve tractable success in Dafny ($40.3$% for Gemini-3 Flash), where high-level abstractions and SMT automation simplify the workflow, performance collapses under the systems-level memory constraints of Verus ($24.7$%) and the explicit proof construction required by Lean (7.8%). Beyond aggregate metrics, we uncover a sharp divergence in test-time compute dynamics: Gemini-3 effectively utilizes iterative repair to boost performance (e.g., tripling pass rates in Dafny), whereas GPT-OSS saturates early. Finally, our error analysis shows that language design affects the refinement trajectory: while Dafny allows models to focus on logical correctness, Verus and Lean trap models in persistent syntactic and semantic barriers. All data and evaluation code can be found at https://github.com/haoyuzhao123/algoveri.

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### SpotAgent: Grounding Visual Geo-localization in Large Vision-Language Models through Agentic Reasoning

Authors: Furong Jia, Ling Dai, Wenjin Deng, Fan Zhang, Chen Hu, Daxin Jiang, Yu Liu
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09463v3

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities in geo-localization, yet they often struggle in real-world scenarios where visual cues are sparse, long-tailed, and highly ambiguous. Previous approaches, bound by internal knowledge, often fail to provide verifiable results, yielding confident but ungrounded predictions when faced with confounded evidence. To address these challenges, we propose SpotAgent, a framework that formalizes geo-localization into an agentic reasoning process that leverages expert-level reasoning to synergize visual interpretation with tool-assisted verification. SpotAgent actively explores and verifies visual cues by leveraging external tools (e.g., web search, maps) through a ReAct diagram. We introduce a 3-stage post-training pipeline starting with a Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) stage for basic alignment, followed by an Agentic Cold Start phase utilizing high-quality trajectories synthesized via a Multi-Agent framework, aiming to instill tool-calling expertise. Subsequently, the model's reasoning capabilities are refined through Reinforcement Learning. We propose a Spatially-Aware Dynamic Filtering strategy to enhance the efficiency of the RL stage by prioritizing learnable samples based on spatial difficulty. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that SpotAgent achieves state-of-the-art performance, effectively mitigating hallucinations while delivering precise and verifiable geo-localization.

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### Scalable and Reliable State-Aware Inference of High-Impact N-k Contingencies

Authors: Lihao Mai, Chenhan Xiao, Yang Weng
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09461v1

Increasing penetration of inverter-based resources, flexible loads, and rapidly changing operating conditions make higher-order $N\!-\!k$ contingency assessment increasingly important but computationally prohibitive. Exhaustive evaluation of all outage combinations using AC power-flow or ACOPF is infeasible in routine operation. This fact forces operators to rely on heuristic screening methods whose ability to consistently retain all critical contingencies is not formally established. This paper proposes a scalable, state-aware contingency inference framework designed to directly generate high-impact $N\!-\!k$ outage scenarios without enumerating the combinatorial contingency space. The framework employs a conditional diffusion model to produce candidate contingencies tailored to the current operating state, while a topology-aware graph neural network trained only on base and $N\!-\!1$ cases efficiently constructs high-risk training samples offline. Finally, the framework is developed to provide controllable coverage guarantees for severe contingencies, allowing operators to explicitly manage the risk of missing critical events under limited AC power-flow evaluation budgets. Experiments on IEEE benchmark systems show that, for a given evaluation budget, the proposed approach consistently evaluates higher-severity contingencies than uniform sampling. This allows critical outages to be identified more reliably with reduced computational effort.

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### From Average Sensitivity to Small-Loss Regret Bounds under Random-Order Model

Authors: Shinsaku Sakaue, Yuichi Yoshida
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: stat.ML, cs.DS, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09457v2

We study online learning in the random-order model, where the multiset of loss functions is chosen adversarially but revealed in a uniformly random order. By extending the batch-to-online transformation of Dong and Yoshida (2023), we show that if an offline algorithm enjoys a $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation guarantee, an average sensitivity bound controlled by a function $\varphi(\varepsilon)$, and stability with respect to $\varepsilon$, then we can obtain a small-loss regret bound typically of order $\tilde O(\varphi^{\star}(\mathrm{OPT}_T))$, where $\varphi^{\star}$ is the concave conjugate of $\varphi$, $\mathrm{OPT}_T$ is the offline optimum over $T$ rounds, and $\tilde O$ hides polylogarithmic factors in $T$. Our result refines their original $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximate regret guarantee and applies to a broad class of problems, including online $k$-means clustering and online low-rank approximation. We further apply our approach to online submodular function minimization using $(1\pm\varepsilon)$-cut sparsifiers of submodular hypergraphs, obtaining a small-loss regret bound of $\tilde O(n^3 + n^{3/4}\mathrm{OPT}_T^{3/4})$, where $n$ is the ground-set size; we also demonstrate its applicability to online $\ell_1$ regression. Our work sheds light on the power of sparsification and related algorithmic techniques in achieving small-loss regret bounds in the random-order model, without requiring structural assumptions on loss functions, such as linearity or smoothness.

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### Taming the Monster Every Context: Complexity Measure and Unified Framework for Offline-Oracle Efficient Contextual Bandits

Authors: Hao Qin, Chicheng Zhang
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09456v2

We propose an algorithmic framework, Offline Estimation to Decisions (OE2D), that efficiently reduces contextual bandit learning with general reward function approximation to offline regression. The framework allows near-optimal regret for contextual bandits with large action spaces with $O(\log T)$ calls to an offline regression oracle over $T$ rounds, and makes $O(\log\log T)$ calls when $T$ is known. The design of OE2D algorithm generalizes Falcon~\citep{simchi2022bypassing} and its linear reward version~\citep()(Section 4){xu2020upper} in that it finds an action distribution that we term ``exploitative F-design'' that simultaneously guarantees low regret and good coverage, striking a balance between exploration and exploitation. Central to our regret analysis is a new complexity measure, the Decision-Offline Estimation Coefficient (DOEC), which we show is small in many settings, including bounded Eluder dimension per-context and the smoothed regret setting. We also establish a relationship between DOEC and Decision Estimation Coefficient (DEC)~\citep{foster2021statistical}, bridging the design principles of offline- and online-oracle efficient contextual bandit algorithms for the first time.

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### Enhancing Affine Maximizer Auctions with Correlation-Aware Payment

Authors: Haoran Sun, Xuanzhi Xia, Xu Chu, Xiaotie Deng
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.GT, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09455v2

Affine Maximizer Auctions (AMAs), a generalized mechanism family from VCG, are widely used in automated mechanism design due to their inherent dominant-strategy incentive compatibility (DSIC) and individual rationality (IR). However, as the payment form is fixed, AMA's expressiveness is restricted, especially in distributions where bidders' valuations are correlated. In this paper, we propose Correlation-Aware AMA (CA-AMA), a novel framework that augments AMA with a new correlation-aware payment. We show that any CA-AMA preserves the DSIC property and formalize finding optimal CA-AMA as a constraint optimization problem subject to the IR constraint. Then, we theoretically characterize scenarios where classic AMAs can perform arbitrarily poorly compared to the optimal revenue, while the CA-AMA can reach the optimal revenue. For optimizing CA-AMA, we design a practical two-stage training algorithm. We derive that the target function's continuity and the generalization bound on the degree of deviation from strict IR. Finally, extensive experiments showcase that our algorithm can find an approximate optimal CA-AMA in various distributions with improved revenue and a low degree of violation of IR.

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### Enhancing Affine Maximizer Auctions with Correlation-Aware Payment

Authors: Haoran Sun, Xuanzhi Xia, Xu Chu, Xiaotie Deng
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.GT, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09455v1

Affine Maximizer Auctions (AMAs), a generalized mechanism family from VCG, are widely used in automated mechanism design due to their inherent dominant-strategy incentive compatibility (DSIC) and individual rationality (IR). However, as the payment form is fixed, AMA's expressiveness is restricted, especially in distributions where bidders' valuations are correlated. In this paper, we propose Correlation-Aware AMA (CA-AMA), a novel framework that augments AMA with a new correlation-aware payment. We show that any CA-AMA preserves the DSIC property and formalize finding optimal CA-AMA as a constraint optimization problem subject to the IR constraint. Then, we theoretically characterize scenarios where classic AMAs can perform arbitrarily poorly compared to the optimal revenue, while the CA-AMA can reach the optimal revenue. For optimizing CA-AMA, we design a practical two-stage training algorithm. We derive that the target function's continuity and the generalization bound on the degree of deviation from strict IR. Finally, extensive experiments showcase that our algorithm can find an approximate optimal CA-AMA in various distributions with improved revenue and a low degree of violation of IR.

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### Look-Ahead and Look-Back Flows: Training-Free Image Generation with Trajectory Smoothing

Authors: Yan Luo, Henry Huang, Todd Y. Zhou, Mengyu Wang
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09449v1

Recent advances have reformulated diffusion models as deterministic ordinary differential equations (ODEs) through the framework of flow matching, providing a unified formulation for the noise-to-data generative process. Various training-free flow matching approaches have been developed to improve image generation through flow velocity field adjustment, eliminating the need for costly retraining. However, Modifying the velocity field $v$ introduces errors that propagate through the full generation path, whereas adjustments to the latent trajectory $z$ are naturally corrected by the pretrained velocity network, reducing error accumulation. In this paper, we propose two complementary training-free latent-trajectory adjustment approaches based on future and past velocity $v$ and latent trajectory $z$ information that refine the generative path directly in latent space. We propose two training-free trajectory smoothing schemes: \emph{Look-Ahead}, which averages the current and next-step latents using a curvature-gated weight, and \emph{Look-Back}, which smoothes latents using an exponential moving average with decay. We demonstrate through extensive experiments and comprehensive evaluation metrics that the proposed training-free trajectory smoothing models substantially outperform various state-of-the-art models across multiple datasets including COCO17, CUB-200, and Flickr30K.

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### The Wisdom of Many Queries: Complexity-Diversity Principle for Dense Retriever Training

Authors: Xincan Feng, Noriki Nishida, Yusuke Sakai, Yuji Matsumoto
Published: 2026-02-10
Categories: cs.IR, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09448v4

Synthetic query generation has become essential for training dense retrievers, yet prior methods generate one query per document, focusing solely on query quality. We are the first to systematically study multi-query synthesis and discover a quality-diversity trade-off: high-quality queries benefit in-domain tasks, while diverse queries benefit out-of-domain (OOD) generalization. Through controlled experiments on 4 benchmark types across Contriever, RetroMAE, and Qwen3-Embedding, we find that diversity benefit strongly correlates with query complexity (r$\geq$0.95, p<0.05), approximated by content words (CW). We formalize this as the Complexity-Diversity Principle (CDP): query complexity determines optimal diversity. Based on CDP, we propose complexity-aware training: multi-query synthesis for high-complexity tasks and CW-weighted training for existing data. Both strategies improve OOD performance on reasoning-intensive benchmarks, with compounded gains when combined.

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