# Research Papers — 2026-02 · bundle page 134 of 210

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### From Correspondence to Actions: Human-Like Multi-Image Spatial Reasoning in Multi-modal Large Language Models

Authors: Masanari Oi, Koki Maeda, Ryuto Koike, Daisuke Oba, Nakamasa Inoue, Naoaki Okazaki
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08735v3

While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made substantial progress in single-image spatial reasoning, multi-image spatial reasoning, which requires integration of information from multiple viewpoints, remains challenging. Cognitive studies suggest that humans address such tasks through two mechanisms: cross-view correspondence, which identifies regions across different views that correspond to the same physical locations, and stepwise viewpoint transformation, which composes relative viewpoint changes sequentially. However, existing studies incorporate these mechanisms only partially and often implicitly, without explicit supervision for both. We propose Human-Aware Training for Cross-view correspondence and viewpoint cHange (HATCH), a training framework with two complementary objectives: (1) Patch-Level Spatial Alignment, which encourages patch representations to align across views for spatially corresponding regions, and (2) Action-then-Answer Reasoning, which requires the model to generate explicit viewpoint transition actions before predicting the final answer. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that HATCH consistently outperforms baselines of comparable size by a clear margin and achieves competitive results against much larger models, while preserving single-image reasoning capabilities.

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### Finite-State Controllers for (Hidden-Model) POMDPs using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Authors: David Hudák, Maris F. L. Galesloot, Martin Tappler, Martin Kurečka, Nils Jansen, Milan Češka
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08734v2

Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) requires computing policies under imperfect state information. Despite recent advances, the scalability of existing POMDP solvers remains limited. Moreover, many settings require a policy that is robust across multiple POMDPs, further aggravating the scalability issue. We propose the Lexpop framework for POMDP solving. Lexpop (1) employs deep reinforcement learning to train a neural policy, represented by a recurrent neural network, and (2) constructs a finite-state controller mimicking the neural policy through efficient extraction methods. Crucially, unlike neural policies, such controllers can be formally evaluated, providing performance guarantees. We extend Lexpop to compute robust policies for hidden-model POMDPs (HM-POMDPs), which describe finite sets of POMDPs. We associate every extracted controller with its worst-case POMDP. Using a set of such POMDPs, we iteratively train a robust neural policy and consequently extract a robust controller. Our experiments show that on problems with large state spaces, Lexpop outperforms state-of-the-art solvers for POMDPs as well as HM-POMDPs.

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### Foundation Inference Models for Ordinary Differential Equations

Authors: Maximilian Mauel, Johannes R. Hübers, David Berghaus, Patrick Seifner, Ramses J. Sanchez
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08733v2

Ordinary differential equations (ODEs) are central to scientific modelling, but inferring their vector fields from noisy trajectories remains challenging. Current approaches such as symbolic regression, Gaussian process (GP) regression, and Neural ODEs often require complex training pipelines and substantial machine learning expertise, or they depend strongly on system-specific prior knowledge. We propose FIM-ODE, a pretrained Foundation Inference Model that amortises low-dimensional ODE inference by predicting the vector field directly from noisy trajectory data in a single forward pass. We pretrain FIM-ODE on a prior distribution over ODEs with low-degree polynomial vector fields and represent the target field with neural operators. FIM-ODE achieves strong zero-shot performance, matching and often improving upon ODEFormer, a recent pretrained symbolic baseline, across a range of regimes despite using a simpler pretraining prior distribution. Pretraining also provides a strong initialisation for finetuning, enabling fast and stable adaptation that outperforms modern neural and GP baselines without requiring machine learning expertise.

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### Closing the Confusion Loop: CLIP-Guided Alignment for Source-Free Domain Adaptation

Authors: Shanshan Wang, Ziying Feng, Xiaozheng Shen, Xun Yang, Pichao Wang, Zhenwei He, Xingyi Zhang
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08730v1

Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) tackles the problem of adapting a pre-trained source model to an unlabeled target domain without accessing any source data, which is quite suitable for the field of data security. Although recent advances have shown that pseudo-labeling strategies can be effective, they often fail in fine-grained scenarios due to subtle inter-class similarities. A critical but underexplored issue is the presence of asymmetric and dynamic class confusion, where visually similar classes are unequally and inconsistently misclassified by the source model. Existing methods typically ignore such confusion patterns, leading to noisy pseudo-labels and poor target discrimination. To address this, we propose CLIP-Guided Alignment(CGA), a novel framework that explicitly models and mitigates class confusion in SFDA. Generally, our method consists of three parts: (1) MCA: detects first directional confusion pairs by analyzing the predictions of the source model in the target domain; (2) MCC: leverages CLIP to construct confusion-aware textual prompts (e.g. a truck that looks like a bus), enabling more context-sensitive pseudo-labeling; and (3) FAM: builds confusion-guided feature banks for both CLIP and the source model and aligns them using contrastive learning to reduce ambiguity in the representation space. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate that CGA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art SFDA methods, with especially notable gains in confusion-prone and fine-grained scenarios. Our results highlight the importance of explicitly modeling inter-class confusion for effective source-free adaptation. Our code can be find at https://github.com/soloiro/CGA

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### Artifact Reduction in Undersampled 3D Cone-Beam CTs using a Hybrid 2D-3D CNN Framework

Authors: Johannes Thalhammer, Tina Dorosti, Sebastian Peterhansl, Daniela Pfeiffer, Franz Pfeiffer, Florian Schaff
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08727v2

Undersampled CT volumes minimize acquisition time and radiation exposure but introduce artifacts degrading image quality and diagnostic utility. Reducing these artifacts is critical for high-quality imaging. We propose a computationally efficient hybrid deep-learning framework that combines the strengths of 2D and 3D models. First, a 2D U-Net operates on individual slices of undersampled CT volumes to extract feature maps. These slice-wise feature maps are then stacked across the volume and used as input to a 3D decoder, which utilizes contextual information across slices to predict an artifact-free 3D CT volume. The proposed two-stage approach balances the computational efficiency of 2D processing with the volumetric consistency provided by 3D modeling. The results show substantial improvements in inter-slice consistency in coronal and sagittal direction with low computational overhead. This hybrid framework presents a robust and efficient solution for high-quality 3D CT image post-processing. The code of this project can be found on github: https://github.com/J-3TO/2D-3DCNN_sparseview/.

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### Artifact Reduction in Undersampled 3D Cone-Beam CTs using a Hybrid 2D-3D CNN Framework

Authors: Johannes Thalhammer, Tina Dorosti, Sebastian Peterhansl, Daniela Pfeiffer, Franz Pfeiffer, Florian Schaff
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08727v1

Undersampled CT volumes minimize acquisition time and radiation exposure but introduce artifacts degrading image quality and diagnostic utility. Reducing these artifacts is critical for high-quality imaging. We propose a computationally efficient hybrid deep-learning framework that combines the strengths of 2D and 3D models. First, a 2D U-Net operates on individual slices of undersampled CT volumes to extract feature maps. These slice-wise feature maps are then stacked across the volume and used as input to a 3D decoder, which utilizes contextual information across slices to predict an artifact-free 3D CT volume. The proposed two-stage approach balances the computational efficiency of 2D processing with the volumetric consistency provided by 3D modeling. The results show substantial improvements in inter-slice consistency in coronal and sagittal direction with low computational overhead. This hybrid framework presents a robust and efficient solution for high-quality 3D CT image post-processing. The code of this project can be found on github: https://github.com/J-3TO/2D-3DCNN_sparseview/.

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### SynSacc: A Blender-to-V2E Pipeline for Synthetic Neuromorphic Eye-Movement Data and Sim-to-Real Spiking Model Training

Authors: Khadija Iddrisu, Waseem Shariff, Suzanne Little, Noel OConnor
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08726v1

The study of eye movements, particularly saccades and fixations, are fundamental to understanding the mechanisms of human cognition and perception. Accurate classification of these movements requires sensing technologies capable of capturing rapid dynamics without distortion. Event cameras, also known as Dynamic Vision Sensors (DVS), provide asynchronous recordings of changes in light intensity, thereby eliminating motion blur inherent in conventional frame-based cameras and offering superior temporal resolution and data efficiency. In this study, we introduce a synthetic dataset generated with Blender to simulate saccades and fixations under controlled conditions. Leveraging Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), we evaluate its robustness by training two architectures and finetuning on real event data. The proposed models achieve up to 0.83 accuracy and maintain consistent performance across varying temporal resolutions, demonstrating stability in eye movement classification. Moreover, the use of SNNs with synthetic event streams yields substantial computational efficiency gains over artificial neural network (ANN) counterparts, underscoring the utility of synthetic data augmentation in advancing event-based vision. All code and datasets associated with this work is available at https: //github.com/Ikhadija-5/SynSacc-Dataset.

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### FusionEdit: Semantic Fusion and Attention Modulation for Training-Free Image Editing

Authors: Yongwen Lai, Chaoqun Wang, Shaobo Min
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08725v1

Text-guided image editing aims to modify specific regions according to the target prompt while preserving the identity of the source image. Recent methods exploit explicit binary masks to constrain editing, but hard mask boundaries introduce artifacts and reduce editability. To address these issues, we propose FusionEdit, a training-free image editing framework that achieves precise and controllable edits. First, editing and preserved regions are automatically identified by measuring semantic discrepancies between source and target prompts. To mitigate boundary artifacts, FusionEdit performs distance-aware latent fusion along region boundaries to yield the soft and accurate mask, and employs a total variation loss to enforce smooth transitions, obtaining natural editing results. Second, FusionEdit leverages AdaIN-based modulation within DiT attention layers to perform a statistical attention fusion in the editing region, enhancing editability while preserving global consistency with the source image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our FusionEdit significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/Yvan1001/FusionEdit}{https://github.com/Yvan1001/FusionEdit}.

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### Rotated Lights for Consistent and Efficient 2D Gaussians Inverse Rendering

Authors: Geng Lin, Matthias Zwicker
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08724v1

Inverse rendering aims to decompose a scene into its geometry, material properties and light conditions under a certain rendering model. It has wide applications like view synthesis, relighting, and scene editing. In recent years, inverse rendering methods have been inspired by view synthesis approaches like neural radiance fields and Gaussian splatting, which are capable of efficiently decomposing a scene into its geometry and radiance. They then further estimate the material and lighting that lead to the observed scene radiance. However, the latter step is highly ambiguous and prior works suffer from inaccurate color and baked shadows in their albedo estimation albeit their regularization. To this end, we propose RotLight, a simple capturing setup, to address the ambiguity. Compared to a usual capture, RotLight only requires the object to be rotated several times during the process. We show that as few as two rotations is effective in reducing artifacts. To further improve 2DGS-based inverse rendering, we additionally introduce a proxy mesh that not only allows accurate incident light tracing, but also enables a residual constraint and improves global illumination handling. We demonstrate with both synthetic and real world datasets that our method achieves superior albedo estimation while keeping efficient computation.

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### Data Reconstruction: Identifiability and Optimization with Sample Splitting

Authors: Yujie Shen, Zihan Wang, Jian Qian, Qi Lei
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CR, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08723v1

Training data reconstruction from KKT conditions has shown striking empirical success, yet it remains unclear when the resulting KKT equations have unique solutions and, even in identifiable regimes, how to reliably recover solutions by optimization. This work hereby focuses on these two complementary questions: identifiability and optimization. On the identifiability side, we discuss the sufficient conditions for KKT system of two-layer networks with polynomial activations to uniquely determine the training data, providing a theoretical explanation of when and why reconstruction is possible. On the optimization side, we introduce sample splitting, a curvature-aware refinement step applicable to general reconstruction objectives (not limited to KKT-based formulations): it creates additional descent directions to escape poor stationary points and refine solutions. Experiments demonstrate that augmenting several existing reconstruction methods with sample splitting consistently improves reconstruction performance.

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### QUOKA: Query-Oriented KV Selection For Efficient LLM Prefill

Authors: Dalton Jones, Junyoung Park, Matthew Morse, Mingu Lee, Chris Lott, Harper Langston
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08722v1

We present QUOKA: Query-oriented KV selection for efficient attention, a training-free and hardware agnostic sparse attention algorithm for accelerating transformer inference under chunked prefill. While many queries focus on a smaller group of keys in the attention operator, we observe that queries with low cosine similarity with respect to the mean query interact more strongly with more keys and have the greatest contribution to final attention logits. By prioritizing these low cosine similarity queries, the behavior of full attention during the prefill stage can be closely approximated. QUOKA leverages this observation, accelerating attention by (1) first retaining a small set of representative queries and (2) then subselectin the keys most aligned with those queries. Through experiments on Needle-In-A-Haystack, LongBench, RULER, and Math500, we show that, while realizing a 3x reduction in time-to-first-token, 5x speedup in attention on Nvidia GPUs and up to nearly a 7x speedup on Intel Xeon CPUs, QUOKA achieves near-baseline accuracy, utilizing 88% fewer key-value pairs per attention evaluation.

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### Zero-shot System for Automatic Body Region Detection for Volumetric CT and MR Images

Authors: Farnaz Khun Jush, Grit Werner, Mark Klemens, Matthias Lenga
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08717v1

Reliable identification of anatomical body regions is a prerequisite for many automated medical imaging workflows, yet existing solutions remain heavily dependent on unreliable DICOM metadata. Current solutions mainly use supervised learning, which limits their applicability in many real-world scenarios. In this work, we investigate whether body region detection in volumetric CT and MR images can be achieved in a fully zero-shot manner by using knowledge embedded in large pre-trained foundation models. We propose and systematically evaluate three training-free pipelines: (1) a segmentation-driven rule-based system leveraging pre-trained multi-organ segmentation models, (2) a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) guided by radiologist-defined rules, and (3) a segmentation-aware MLLM that combines visual input with explicit anatomical evidence. All methods are evaluated on 887 heterogeneous CT and MR scans with manually verified anatomical region labels. The segmentation-driven rule-based approach achieves the strongest and most consistent performance, with weighted F1-scores of 0.947 (CT) and 0.914 (MR), demonstrating robustness across modalities and atypical scan coverage. The MLLM performs competitively in visually distinctive regions, while the segmentation-aware MLLM reveals fundamental limitations.

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### PERSPECTRA: A Scalable and Configurable Pluralist Benchmark of Perspectives from Arguments

Authors: Shangrui Nie, Kian Omoomi, Lucie Flek, Zhixue Zhao, Charles Welch
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08716v1

Pluralism, the capacity to engage with diverse perspectives without collapsing them into a single viewpoint, is critical for developing large language models that faithfully reflect human heterogeneity. Yet this characteristic has not been carefully examined in the LLM research community and remains absent from most alignment studies. Debate-oriented sources provide a natural entry point for pluralism research. Previous work builds on online debate sources but remains constrained by costly human validation. Other debate-rich platforms such as Reddit and Kialo also offer promising material: Reddit provides linguistic diversity and scale but lacks clear argumentative structure, while Kialo supplies explicit pro/con graphs but remains overly concise and detached from natural discourse. We introduce PERSPECTRA, a pluralist benchmark that integrates the structural clarity of Kialo debate graphs with the linguistic diversity of real Reddit discussions. Using a controlled retrieval-and-expansion pipeline, we construct 3,810 enriched arguments spanning 762 pro/con stances on 100 controversial topics. Each opinion is expanded to multiple naturalistic variants, enabling robust evaluation of pluralism. We initialise three tasks with PERSPECTRA: opinion counting (identifying distinct viewpoints), opinion matching (aligning supporting stances and discourse to source opinions), and polarity check (inferring aggregate stance in mixed discourse). Experiments with state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary LLMs, highlight systematic failures, such as overestimating the number of viewpoints and misclassifying concessive structures, underscoring the difficulty of pluralism-aware understanding and reasoning. By combining diversity with structure, PERSPECTRA establishes the first scalable, configurable benchmark for evaluating how well models represent, distinguish, and reason over multiple perspectives.

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### Exploring SAIG Methods for an Objective Evaluation of XAI

Authors: Miquel Miró-Nicolau, Gabriel Moyà-Alcover, Anna Arias-Duart
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08715v1

The evaluation of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods is a rapidly growing field, characterized by a wide variety of approaches. This diversity highlights the complexity of the XAI evaluation, which, unlike traditional AI assessment, lacks a universally correct ground truth for the explanation, making objective evaluation challenging. One promising direction to address this issue involves the use of what we term Synthetic Artificial Intelligence Ground truth (SAIG) methods, which generate artificial ground truths to enable the direct evaluation of XAI techniques. This paper presents the first review and analysis of SAIG methods. We introduce a novel taxonomy to classify these approaches, identifying seven key features that distinguish different SAIG methods. Our comparative study reveals a concerning lack of consensus on the most effective XAI evaluation techniques, underscoring the need for further research and standardization in this area.

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### TimeChat-Captioner: Scripting Multi-Scene Videos with Time-Aware and Structural Audio-Visual Captions

Authors: Linli Yao, Yuancheng Wei, Yaojie Zhang, Lei Li, Xinlong Chen, Feifan Song, Ziyue Wang, Kun Ouyang, Yuanxin Liu, Lingpeng Kong, Qi Liu, Pengfei Wan et al.
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08711v3

This paper proposes Omni Dense Captioning, a novel task designed to generate continuous, fine-grained, and structured audio-visual narratives with explicit timestamps. To ensure dense semantic coverage, we introduce a six-dimensional structural schema to create "script-like" captions, enabling readers to vividly imagine the video content scene by scene, akin to a cinematographic screenplay. To facilitate research, we construct OmniDCBench, a high-quality, human-annotated benchmark, and propose SodaM, a unified metric that evaluates time-aware detailed descriptions while mitigating scene boundary ambiguity. Furthermore, we construct a training dataset, TimeChatCap-42K, and present TimeChat-Captioner-7B, a strong baseline trained via SFT and GRPO with task-specific rewards. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TimeChat-Captioner-7B achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing Gemini-2.5-Pro, while its generated dense descriptions significantly boost downstream capabilities in audio-visual reasoning (DailyOmni and WorldSense) and temporal grounding (Charades-STA). All datasets, models, and code are available at https://github.com/yaolinli/TimeChat-Captioner.

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### FactSim: Fact-Checking for Opinion Summarization

Authors: Leandro Anghinoni, Jorge Sanchez
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08709v1

We explore the need for more comprehensive and precise evaluation techniques for generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in text summarization tasks, specifically in the area of opinion summarization. Traditional methods, which leverage automated metrics to compare machine-generated summaries from a collection of opinion pieces, e.g. product reviews, have shown limitations due to the paradigm shift introduced by large language models (LLM). This paper addresses these shortcomings by proposing a novel, fully automated methodology for assessing the factual consistency of such summaries. The method is based on measuring the similarity between the claims in a given summary with those from the original reviews, measuring the coverage and consistency of the generated summary. To do so, we rely on a simple approach to extract factual assessment from texts that we then compare and summarize in a suitable score. We demonstrate that the proposed metric attributes higher scores to similar claims, regardless of whether the claim is negated, paraphrased, or expanded, and that the score has a high correlation to human judgment when compared to state-of-the-art metrics.

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### Intermediate Results on the Complexity of STRIPS$_{1}^{1}$

Authors: Stefan Edelkamp, Jiří Fink, Petr Gregor, Anders Jonsson, Bernhard Nebel
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08708v1

This paper is based on Bylander's results on the computational complexity of propositional STRIPS planning. He showed that when only ground literals are permitted, determining plan existence is PSPACE-complete even if operators are limited to two preconditions and two postconditions. While NP-hardness is settled, it is unknown whether propositional STRIPS with operators that only have one precondition and one effect is NP-complete. We shed light on the question whether this small solution hypothesis for STRIPS$^1_1$ is true, calling a SAT solver for small instances, introducing the literal graph, and mapping it to Petri nets.

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### Why do we Trust Chatbots? From Normative Principles to Behavioral Drivers

Authors: Aditya Gulati, Nuria Oliver
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.HC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08707v3

As chatbots increasingly blur the boundary between automated systems and human conversation, the foundations of trust in these systems warrant closer examination. While regulatory and policy frameworks tend to define trust in normative terms, the trust users place in chatbots often emerges from behavioral mechanisms. In many cases, this trust is not earned through demonstrated trustworthiness but is instead shaped by interactional design choices that leverage cognitive biases to influence user behavior. Based on this observation, we propose reframing chatbots not as companions or assistants, but as highly skilled salespeople whose objectives are determined by the deploying organization. We argue that the coexistence of competing notions of "trust" under a shared term obscures important distinctions between psychological trust formation and normative trustworthiness. Addressing this gap requires further research and stronger support mechanisms to help users appropriately calibrate trust in conversational AI systems.

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### Technosocial risks of ideal emotion recognition technologies: A defense of the (social) value of emotional expressions

Authors: Alexandra Pregent
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.ET
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08706v1

The prospect of AI systems that I call ideal emotion recognition technologies (ERTs) is often defended on the assumption that social life would benefit from increased affective transparency. This paper challenges that assumption by examining the technosocial risks posed by ideal ERTs, understood as multimodal systems capable of reliably inferring inner affective states in real time. Drawing on philosophical accounts of emotional expression and social practice, as well as empirical work in affective science and social psychology, I argue that the appeal of such systems rests on a misunderstanding of the social functions of emotional expression. Emotional expressions function not only as read-outs of inner states, but also as tools for coordinating action, enabling moral repair, sustaining interpersonal trust, and supporting collective norms. These functions depend on a background of partial opacity and epistemic friction. When deployed in socially authoritative or evaluative contexts, ideal ERTs threaten this expressive space by collapsing epistemic friction, displacing relational meaning with technology-mediated affective profiles, and narrowing the space for aspirational and role-sensitive expressions. The result is a drift towards affective determinism and ambient forms of affective auditing, which undermine both social cohesion and individual agency. I argue that, although it is intuitive to think that increasing accuracy would legitimise such systems, in the case of ERTs accuracy does not straightforwardly justify their deployment, and may, in some contexts, provide a reason for regulatory restraint. I conclude by defending a function-first regulatory approach that treats expressive discretion and intentional emotional expression as constitutive of certain social goods, and that accordingly seeks to protect these goods from excessive affective legibility.

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### Do Images Clarify? A Study on the Effect of Images on Clarifying Questions in Conversational Search

Authors: Clemencia Siro, Zahra Abbasiantaeb, Yifei Yuan, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Maarten de Rijke
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.CL, cs.HC, cs.IR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08700v1

Conversational search systems increasingly employ clarifying questions to refine user queries and improve the search experience. Previous studies have demonstrated the usefulness of text-based clarifying questions in enhancing both retrieval performance and user experience. While images have been shown to improve retrieval performance in various contexts, their impact on user performance when incorporated into clarifying questions remains largely unexplored. We conduct a user study with 73 participants to investigate the role of images in conversational search, specifically examining their effects on two search-related tasks: (i) answering clarifying questions and (ii) query reformulation. We compare the effect of multimodal and text-only clarifying questions in both tasks within a conversational search context from various perspectives. Our findings reveal that while participants showed a strong preference for multimodal questions when answering clarifying questions, preferences were more balanced in the query reformulation task. The impact of images varied with both task type and user expertise. In answering clarifying questions, images helped maintain engagement across different expertise levels, while in query reformulation they led to more precise queries and improved retrieval performance. Interestingly, for clarifying question answering, text-only setups demonstrated better user performance as they provided more comprehensive textual information in the absence of images. These results provide valuable insights for designing effective multimodal conversational search systems, highlighting that the benefits of visual augmentation are task-dependent and should be strategically implemented based on the specific search context and user characteristics.

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### Low-Light Video Enhancement with An Effective Spatial-Temporal Decomposition Paradigm

Authors: Xiaogang Xu, Kun Zhou, Tao Hu, Jiafei Wu, Ruixing Wang, Hao Peng, Bei Yu
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08699v1

Low-Light Video Enhancement (LLVE) seeks to restore dynamic or static scenes plagued by severe invisibility and noise. In this paper, we present an innovative video decomposition strategy that incorporates view-independent and view-dependent components to enhance the performance of LLVE. The framework is called View-aware Low-light Video Enhancement (VLLVE). We leverage dynamic cross-frame correspondences for the view-independent term (which primarily captures intrinsic appearance) and impose a scene-level continuity constraint on the view-dependent term (which mainly describes the shading condition) to achieve consistent and satisfactory decomposition results. To further ensure consistent decomposition, we introduce a dual-structure enhancement network featuring a cross-frame interaction mechanism. By supervising different frames simultaneously, this network encourages them to exhibit matching decomposition features. This mechanism can seamlessly integrate with encoder-decoder single-frame networks, incurring minimal additional parameter costs. Building upon VLLVE, we propose a more comprehensive decomposition strategy by introducing an additive residual term, resulting in VLLVE++. This residual term can simulate scene-adaptive degradations, which are difficult to model using a decomposition formulation for common scenes, thereby further enhancing the ability to capture the overall content of videos. In addition, VLLVE++ enables bidirectional learning for both enhancement and degradation-aware correspondence refinement (end-to-end manner), effectively increasing reliable correspondences while filtering out incorrect ones. Notably, VLLVE++ demonstrates strong capability in handling challenging cases, such as real-world scenes and videos with high dynamics. Extensive experiments are conducted on widely recognized LLVE benchmarks.

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### Challenges in Translating Technical Lectures: Insights from the NPTEL

Authors: Basudha Raje, Sadanand Venkatraman, Nandana TP, Soumyadeepa Das, Polkam Poojitha, M. Vijaykumar, Tanima Bagchi, Hema A. Murthy
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08698v2

This study examines the practical applications and methodological implications of Machine Translation in Indian Languages, specifically Bangla, Malayalam, and Telugu, within emerging translation workflows and in relation to existing evaluation frameworks. The choice of languages prioritized in this study is motivated by a triangulation of linguistic diversity, which illustrates the significance of multilingual accommodation of educational technology under NEP 2020. This is further supported by the largest MOOC portal, i.e., NPTEL, which has served as a corpus to facilitate the arguments presented in this paper. The curation of a spontaneous speech corpora that accounts for lucid delivery of technical concepts, considering the retention of suitable register and lexical choices are crucial in a diverse country like India. The findings of this study highlight metric-specific sensitivity and the challenges of morphologically rich and semantically compact features when tested against surface overlapping metrics.

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### Controllable Dysarthric Speech Synthesis with Patient-Specific Conditioning for Speaker-Diverse ASR Augmentation

Authors: Haoshen Wang, Xueli Zhong, Bingbing Lin, Jia Huang, Xingduo Pan, Shengxiang Liang, Nizhuan Wang, Wai Ting Siok
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.SD, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08696v3

Dysarthric speech recognition is limited by high speaker variability and scarce labeled data. Existing synthesis methods often couple speaker identity with dysarthric articulation, reducing control over generated speech. We propose a controllable dysarthric speech synthesis framework for ASR augmentation with separate prompt-derived timbre prefixes and learnable patient-specific pathology prefixes. Built on a pre-trained neural codec language model adapted using LoRA, the framework combines both prefixes through additive conditioning. A dual-classifier objective with gradient reversal and voice-conversion-based counterfactual augmentation promotes factor separation, allowing learned pathology conditions to be paired with different target speakers, including healthy speakers. Experiments on TORGO show that generated speech can partially replace real dysarthric training data and provides effective speaker-diverse augmentation when combined with real data. Objective ASR, perceptual, factor-separation, and phoneme-level analyses indicate preservation of target-speaker timbre and pathology-dependent patterns consistent with real dysarthric speech.

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### Prototype-Based Disentanglement for Controllable Dysarthric Speech Synthesis

Authors: Haoshen Wang, Xueli Zhong, Bingbing Lin, Jia Huang, Xingduo Pan, Shengxiang Liang, Nizhuan Wang, Wai Ting Siok
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.SD, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08696v2

Dysarthric speech exhibits high variability and limited labeled data, posing major challenges for both automatic speech recognition (ASR) and assistive speech technologies. Existing approaches rely on synthetic data augmentation or speech reconstruction, yet often entangle speaker identity with pathological articulation, limiting controllability and robustness. In this paper, we propose ProtoDisent-TTS, a prototype-based disentanglement TTS framework built on a pre-trained text-to-speech backbone that factorizes speaker timbre and dysarthric articulation within a unified latent space. A pathology prototype codebook provides interpretable and controllable representations of healthy and dysarthric speech patterns, while a dual-classifier objective with a gradient reversal layer enforces invariance of speaker embeddings to pathological attributes. Experiments on the TORGO dataset demonstrate that this design enables bidirectional transformation between healthy and dysarthric speech, leading to consistent ASR performance gains and robust, speaker-aware speech reconstruction.

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### Trapped by simplicity: When Transformers fail to learn from noisy features

Authors: Evan Peters, Ando Deng, Matheus H. Zambianco, Devin Blankespoor, Achim Kempf
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08695v1

Noise is ubiquitous in data used to train large language models, but it is not well understood whether these models are able to correctly generalize to inputs generated without noise. Here, we study noise-robust learning: are transformers trained on data with noisy features able to find a target function that correctly predicts labels for noiseless features? We show that transformers succeed at noise-robust learning for a selection of $k$-sparse parity and majority functions, compared to LSTMs which fail at this task for even modest feature noise. However, we find that transformers typically fail at noise-robust learning of random $k$-juntas, especially when the boolean sensitivity of the optimal solution is smaller than that of the target function. We argue that this failure is due to a combination of two factors: transformers' bias toward simpler functions, combined with an observation that the optimal function for noise-robust learning typically has lower sensitivity than the target function for random boolean functions. We test this hypothesis by exploiting transformers' simplicity bias to trap them in an incorrect solution, but show that transformers can escape this trap by training with an additional loss term penalizing high-sensitivity solutions. Overall, we find that transformers are particularly ineffective for learning boolean functions in the presence of feature noise.

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### Reasoning aligns language models to human cognition

Authors: Gonçalo Guiomar, Elia Torre, Pehuen Moure, Victoria Shavina, Mario Giulianelli, Shih-Chii Liu, Valerio Mante
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08693v1

Do language models make decisions under uncertainty like humans do, and what role does chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning play in the underlying decision process? We introduce an active probabilistic reasoning task that cleanly separates sampling (actively acquiring evidence) from inference (integrating evidence toward a decision). Benchmarking humans and a broad set of contemporary large language models against near-optimal reference policies reveals a consistent pattern: extended reasoning is the key determinant of strong performance, driving large gains in inference and producing belief trajectories that become strikingly human-like, while yielding only modest improvements in active sampling. To explain these differences, we fit a mechanistic model that captures systematic deviations from optimal behavior via four interpretable latent variables: memory, strategy, choice bias, and occlusion awareness. This model places humans and models in a shared low-dimensional cognitive space, reproduces behavioral signatures across agents, and shows how chain-of-thought shifts language models toward human-like regimes of evidence accumulation and belief-to-choice mapping, tightening alignment in inference while leaving a persistent gap in information acquisition.

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### PBLean: Pseudo-Boolean Proof Certificates for Lean 4

Authors: Stefan Szeider
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.LO, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08692v2

We present PBLean, a method for importing VeriPB pseudo-Boolean (PB) proof certificates into Lean 4. Key to our approach is reflection: a Boolean checker function whose soundness is fully proved in Lean and executed as compiled native code. Our method scales to proofs with tens of thousands of steps that would exhaust memory under explicit proof-term construction. Our checker supports all VeriPB kernel rules, including cutting-plane derivations, proof-by-contradiction subproofs, and redundance-based reasoning for symmetry breaking. In contrast to external verified checkers that produce verdicts, our integration yields Lean theorems that can serve as composable lemmas in larger formal developments. To derive theorems about the original combinatorial problems rather than about PB constraints alone, we support verified encodings. This closes the trust gap between solver output and problem semantics since the constraint translation and its correctness proof are both formalized in Lean. We demonstrate the approach on various combinatorial problems.

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### SoK: The Pitfalls of Deep Reinforcement Learning for Cybersecurity

Authors: Shae McFadden, Myles Foley, Elizabeth Bates, Ilias Tsingenopoulos, Sanyam Vyas, Vasilios Mavroudis, Chris Hicks, Fabio Pierazzi
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08690v2

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved remarkable success in domains requiring sequential decision-making, motivating its application to cybersecurity problems. However, transitioning DRL from laboratory simulations to bespoke cyber environments can introduce numerous issues. This is further exacerbated by the often adversarial, non-stationary, and partially-observable nature of most cybersecurity tasks. In this paper, we identify and systematize 11 methodological pitfalls that frequently occur in DRL for cybersecurity (DRL4Sec) literature across the stages of environment modeling, agent training, performance evaluation, and system deployment. By analyzing 66 significant DRL4Sec papers (2018-2025), we quantify the prevalence of each pitfall and find an average of over five pitfalls per paper. We demonstrate the practical impact of these pitfalls using controlled experiments in (i) autonomous cyber defense, (ii) adversarial malware creation, and (iii) web security testing environments. Finally, we provide actionable recommendations for each pitfall to support the development of more rigorous and deployable DRL-based security systems.

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### Learning To Sample From Diffusion Models Via Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Constant Bourdrez, Alexandre Vérine, Olivier Cappé
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08689v2

Diffusion models generate samples through an iterative denoising process guided by a pretrained neural network. Once the denoiser is fixed, the sampling algorithm itself (noise schedules, guidance scales, stochasticity profiles) still requires careful tuning, a process typically carried out through costly empirical grid search. In this work, we introduce an inverse reinforcement learning framework for learning sampling strategies without retraining the denoiser. We formulate the diffusion sampling procedure as a discrete-time finite-horizon Markov Decision Process, where actions correspond to optional modifications of the sampling dynamics. To optimize action scheduling, we avoid defining an explicit reward function and instead directly match the target behavior expected from the sampler using policy gradient techniques. We provide experimental evidence that this approach matches fine-tuned samplers and comes at a modest cost compared to grid search: on ImageNet-64, a single training run replaces exhaustive search at up to 9x lower cost, with only 16% overhead at inference.

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### Old wine in old glasses: Comparing computational and qualitative methods in identifying incivility on Persian Twitter during the #MahsaAmini movement

Authors: Hossein Kermani, Fatemeh Oudlajani, Pardis Yarahmadi, Hamideh Mahdi Soltani, Mohammad Makki, Zahra HosseiniKhoo
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.CL, cs.CY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08688v1

This paper compares three approaches to detecting incivility in Persian tweets: human qualitative coding, supervised learning with ParsBERT, and large language models (ChatGPT). Using 47,278 tweets from the #MahsaAmini movement in Iran, we evaluate the accuracy and efficiency of each method. ParsBERT substantially outperforms seven evaluated ChatGPT models in identifying hate speech. We also find that ChatGPT struggles not only with subtle cases but also with explicitly uncivil content, and that prompt language (English vs. Persian) does not meaningfully affect its outputs. The study provides a detailed comparison of these approaches and clarifies their strengths and limitations for analyzing hate speech in a low-resource language context.

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### CompilerKV: Risk-Adaptive KV Compression via Offline Experience Compilation

Authors: Ning Yang, Chengzhi Wang, Yibo Liu, Baoliang Tian, Haijun Zhang
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08686v3

Prefill-only KV compression freezes a token subset at the end of prefill and decodes from it without further eviction. The retention decision is therefore irreversible, yet existing methods estimate the corrective signals it relies on, per-head reliability and prompt-level compression sensitivity, online from a single noisy prompt. We argue this is the wrong statistical unit: these signals exhibit far higher cross-prompt regularity than within-prompt signal-to-noise. We introduce \textsc{CompilerKV}, a KV-retention policy whose corrective tables are compiled offline from a calibration corpus, reducing online correction after the standard observation-window scan to $O(1)$ lookups plus a budget clamp. We find that compiled retention tables behave as portable architectural priors: rankings transfer across disjoint corpora on four backbones (mean Spearman $\barρ{=}0.90$), and direct model-to-model table transfer costs only $0.4$--$0.8$ LongBench points on average. At a 512-token budget, \textsc{CompilerKV} attains compressed-SOTA on all four backbones, improving over the strongest prefill-only baseline by $+1.67$ points on average (task-bootstrap 95\% CI $(+1.08,+2.37)$). Pressure regimes amplify the gap: under a fixed $512/32k$ cache ratio, CompilerKV remains the strongest compressed method through 128k RULER ($\sim\!73$ vs.\ FullKV $\sim\!79$, SnapKV $\sim\!38$); on 32k NIAH it reaches $0.89$ vs.\ SnapKV $0.42$; and at 32k input, retaining only $1.56\%$ of the prefill KV, batch-16 serving remains feasible where FullKV is OOM.

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### OneVision-Encoder: Codec-Aligned Sparsity as a Foundational Principle for Multimodal Intelligence

Authors: Feilong Tang, Xiang An, Yunyao Yan, Yin Xie, Bin Qin, Kaicheng Yang, Yifei Shen, Yuanhan Zhang, Chunyuan Li, Shikun Feng, Changrui Chen, Huajie Tan et al.
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08683v3

Hypothesis. Artificial general intelligence is, at its core, a compression problem. Effective compression demands resonance: deep learning scales best when its architecture aligns with the fundamental structure of the data. These are the fundamental principles. Yet, modern vision architectures have strayed from these truths: visual signals are highly redundant, while discriminative information, the surprise, is sparse. Current models process dense pixel grids uniformly, wasting vast compute on static background rather than focusing on the predictive residuals that define motion and meaning. We argue that to solve visual understanding, we must align our architectures with the information-theoretic principles of video, i.e., Codecs. Method. OneVision-Encoder encodes video by compressing predictive visual structure into semantic meaning. By adopting Codec Patchification, OV-Encoder abandons uniform computation to focus exclusively on the 3.1%-25% of regions rich in signal entropy. To unify spatial and temporal reasoning under irregular token layouts, OneVision-Encoder employs a shared 3D RoPE and is trained with a large-scale cluster discrimination objective over more than one million semantic concepts, jointly capturing object permanence and motion dynamics. Evidence. The results validate our core hypothesis: efficiency and accuracy are not a trade-off; they are positively correlated. When integrated into LLM, it consistently outperforms strong vision backbones such as Qwen3-ViT and SigLIP2 across 16 image, video, and document understanding benchmarks, despite using substantially fewer visual tokens and pretraining data. Notably, on video understanding tasks, OV-Encoder achieves an average improvement of 4.1% over Qwen3-ViT. Codec-aligned, patch-level sparsity is a foundational principle, enabling OV-Encoder as a scalable engine for next-generation visual generalists.

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### ALIVE: Animate Your World with Lifelike Audio-Video Generation

Authors: Ying Guo, Qijun Gan, Yifu Zhang, Jinlai Liu, Yifei Hu, Pan Xie, Dongjun Qian, Yu Zhang, Ruiqi Li, Yuqi Zhang, Ruibiao Lu, Xiaofeng Mei et al.
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08682v2

Video generation is rapidly evolving towards unified audio-video generation. In this paper, we present ALIVE, a generation model that adapts a pretrained Text-to-Video (T2V) model to Sora-style audio-video generation and animation. In particular, the model unlocks the Text-to-Video&Audio (T2VA) and Reference-to-Video&Audio (animation) capabilities compared to the T2V foundation models. To support the audio-visual synchronization and reference animation, we augment the popular MMDiT architecture with a joint audio-video branch which includes TA-CrossAttn for temporally-aligned cross-modal fusion and UniTemp-RoPE for precise audio-visual alignment. Meanwhile, a comprehensive data pipeline consisting of audio-video captioning, quality control, etc., is carefully designed to collect high-quality finetuning data. Additionally, we introduce a new benchmark to perform a comprehensive model test and comparison. After continue pretraining and finetuning on million-level high-quality data, ALIVE demonstrates outstanding performance, consistently outperforming open-source models and matching or surpassing state-of-the-art commercial solutions. With detailed recipes and benchmarks, we hope ALIVE helps the community develop audio-video generation models more efficiently. Official page: https://github.com/FoundationVision/Alive.

---

### The Theory and Practice of MAP Inference over Non-Convex Constraints

Authors: Leander Kurscheidt, Gabriele Masina, Roberto Sebastiani, Antonio Vergari
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08681v2

In many safety-critical settings, probabilistic ML systems have to make predictions subject to algebraic constraints, e.g., predicting the most likely trajectory that does not cross obstacles. These real-world constraints are rarely convex, nor the densities considered are (log-)concave. This makes computing this constrained maximum a posteriori (MAP) prediction efficiently and reliably extremely challenging. In this paper, we first investigate under which conditions we can perform constrained MAP inference over continuous variables exactly and efficiently and devise a scalable message-passing algorithm for this tractable fragment. Then, we devise a general constrained MAP strategy that interleaves partitioning the domain into convex feasible regions with numerical constrained optimization. We evaluate both methods on synthetic and real-world benchmarks, showing our approaches outperform constraint-agnostic baselines, and scale to complex densities intractable for SoTA exact solvers.

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### Dashed Line Defense: Plug-And-Play Defense Against Adaptive Score-Based Query Attacks

Authors: Yanzhang Fu, Zizheng Guo, Jizhou Luo
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08679v1

Score-based query attacks pose a serious threat to deep learning models by crafting adversarial examples (AEs) using only black-box access to model output scores, iteratively optimizing inputs based on observed loss values. While recent runtime defenses attempt to disrupt this process via output perturbation, most either require access to model parameters or fail when attackers adapt their tactics. In this paper, we first reveal that even the state-of-the-art plug-and-play defense can be bypassed by adaptive attacks, exposing a critical limitation of existing runtime defenses. We then propose Dashed Line Defense (DLD), a plug-and-play post-processing method specifically designed to withstand adaptive query strategies. By introducing ambiguity in how the observed loss reflects the true adversarial strength of candidate examples, DLD prevents attackers from reliably analyzing and adapting their queries, effectively disrupting the AE generation process. We provide theoretical guarantees of DLD's defense capability and validate its effectiveness through experiments on ImageNet, demonstrating that DLD consistently outperforms prior defenses--even under worst-case adaptive attacks--while preserving the model's predicted labels.

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### LLaDA2.1: Speeding Up Text Diffusion via Token Editing

Authors: Tiwei Bie, Maosong Cao, Xiang Cao, Bingsen Chen, Fuyuan Chen, Kun Chen, Lun Du, Daozhuo Feng, Haibo Feng, Mingliang Gong, Zhuocheng Gong, Yanmei Gu et al.
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08676v3

While LLaDA2.0 showcased the scaling potential of 100B-level block-diffusion models and their inherent parallelization, the delicate equilibrium between decoding speed and generation quality has remained an elusive frontier. Today, we unveil LLaDA2.1, a paradigm shift designed to transcend this trade-off. By seamlessly weaving Token-to-Token (T2T) editing into the conventional Mask-to-Token (M2T) scheme, we introduce a joint, configurable threshold-decoding scheme. This structural innovation gives rise to two distinct personas: the Speedy Mode (S Mode), which audaciously lowers the M2T threshold to bypass traditional constraints while relying on T2T to refine the output; and the Quality Mode (Q Mode), which leans into conservative thresholds to secure superior benchmark performances with manageable efficiency degrade. Furthering this evolution, underpinned by an expansive context window, we implement the first large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework specifically tailored for dLLMs, anchored by specialized techniques for stable gradient estimation. This alignment not only sharpens reasoning precision but also elevates instruction-following fidelity, bridging the chasm between diffusion dynamics and complex human intent. We culminate this work by releasing LLaDA2.1-Mini (16B) and LLaDA2.1-Flash (100B). Across 33 rigorous benchmarks, LLaDA2.1 delivers strong task performance and lightning-fast decoding speed. Despite its 100B volume, on coding tasks it attains an astounding 892 TPS on HumanEval+, 801 TPS on BigCodeBench, and 663 TPS on LiveCodeBench.

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### 6G-Bench: An Open Benchmark for Semantic Communication and Network-Level Reasoning with Foundation Models in AI-Native 6G Networks

Authors: Mohamed Amine Ferrag, Abderrahmane Lakas, Merouane Debbah
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.NI, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08675v1

This paper introduces 6G-Bench, an open benchmark for evaluating semantic communication and network-level reasoning in AI-native 6G networks. 6G-Bench defines a taxonomy of 30 decision-making tasks (T1--T30) extracted from ongoing 6G and AI-agent standardization activities in 3GPP, IETF, ETSI, ITU-T, and the O-RAN Alliance, and organizes them into five standardization-aligned capability categories. Starting from 113,475 scenarios, we generate a balanced pool of 10,000 very-hard multiple-choice questions using task-conditioned prompts that enforce multi-step quantitative reasoning under uncertainty and worst-case regret minimization over multi-turn horizons. After automated filtering and expert human validation, 3,722 questions are retained as a high-confidence evaluation set, while the full pool is released to support training and fine-tuning of 6G-specialized models. Using 6G-Bench, we evaluate 22 foundation models spanning dense and mixture-of-experts architectures, short- and long-context designs (up to 1M tokens), and both open-weight and proprietary systems. Across models, deterministic single-shot accuracy (pass@1) spans a wide range from 0.22 to 0.82, highlighting substantial variation in semantic reasoning capability. Leading models achieve intent and policy reasoning accuracy in the range 0.87--0.89, while selective robustness analysis on reasoning-intensive tasks shows pass@5 values ranging from 0.20 to 0.91. To support open science and reproducibility, we release the 6G-Bench dataset on GitHub: https://github.com/maferrag/6G-Bench

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### Learning to Judge: LLMs Designing and Applying Evaluation Rubrics

Authors: Clemencia Siro, Pourya Aliannejadi, Mohammad Aliannejadi
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08672v1

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as evaluators for natural language generation, applying human-defined rubrics to assess system outputs. However, human rubrics are often static and misaligned with how models internally represent language quality. We introduce GER-Eval (Generating Evaluation Rubrics for Evaluation) to investigate whether LLMs can design and apply their own evaluation rubrics. We evaluate the semantic coherence and scoring reliability of LLM-defined criteria and their alignment with human criteria. LLMs reliably generate interpretable and task-aware evaluation dimensions and apply them consistently within models, but their scoring reliability degrades in factual and knowledge-intensive settings. Closed-source models such as GPT-4o achieve higher agreement and cross-model generalization than open-weight models such as Llama. Our findings position evaluation as a learned linguistic capability of LLMs, consistent within models but fragmented across them, and call for new methods that jointly model human and LLM evaluative language to improve reliability and interpretability.

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### A Machine Learning accelerated geophysical fluid solver

Authors: Yang Bai
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.CV, cs.CE, cs.PF, physics.comp-ph
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08670v1

Machine learning methods have been successful in many areas, like image classification and natural language processing. However, it still needs to be determined how to apply ML to areas with mathematical constraints, like solving PDEs. Among various approaches to applying ML techniques to solving PDEs, the data-driven discretization method presents a promising way of accelerating and improving existing PDE solver on structured grids where it predicts the coefficients of quasi-linear stencils for computing values or derivatives of a function at given positions. It can improve the accuracy and stability of low-resolution simulation compared with using traditional finite difference or finite volume schemes. Meanwhile, it can also benefit from traditional numerical schemes like achieving conservation law by adapting finite volume type formulations. In this thesis, we have implemented the shallow water equation and Euler equation classic solver under a different framework. Experiments show that our classic solver performs much better than the Pyclaw solver. Then we propose four different deep neural networks for the ML-based solver. The results indicate that two of these approaches could output satisfactory solutions.

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### Retrieval Pivot Attacks in Hybrid RAG: Measuring and Mitigating Amplified Leakage from Vector Seeds to Graph Expansion

Authors: Scott Thornton
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.CR, cs.IR, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08668v3

Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines combine vector similarity search with knowledge graph expansion for multi-hop reasoning. We show that this composition introduces a distinct security failure mode: a vector-retrieved "seed" chunk can pivot via entity links into sensitive graph neighborhoods, causing cross-tenant data leakage that does not occur in vector-only retrieval. We formalize this risk as Retrieval Pivot Risk (RPR) and introduce companion metrics Leakage@k, Amplification Factor, and Pivot Depth (PD) to quantify leakage magnitude and traversal structure. We present seven Retrieval Pivot Attacks that exploit the vector-to-graph boundary and show that adversarial injection is not required: naturally shared entities create cross-tenant pivot paths organically. Across a synthetic multi-tenant enterprise corpus and the Enron email corpus, the undefended hybrid pipeline exhibits high pivot risk (RPR up to 0.95) with multiple unauthorized items returned per query. Leakage consistently appears at PD=2, which we attribute to the bipartite chunk-entity topology and formalize as a proposition. We then show that enforcing authorization at a single location, the graph expansion boundary, eliminates measured leakage (RPR near 0) across both corpora, all attack variants, and label forgery rates up to 10 percent, with minimal overhead. Our results indicate the root cause is boundary enforcement, not inherently complex defenses: two individually secure retrieval components can compose into an insecure system unless authorization is re-checked at the transition point.

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### WiFlow: A Lightweight WiFi-based Continuous Human Pose Estimation Network with Spatio-Temporal Feature Decoupling

Authors: Yi Dao, Lankai Zhang, Hao Liu, Haiwei Zhang, Wenbo Wang
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08661v2

Human pose estimation is fundamental to intelligent perception in the Internet of Things (IoT), enabling applications ranging from smart healthcare to human-computer interaction. While WiFi-based methods have gained traction, they often struggle with continuous motion and high computational overhead. This work presents WiFlow, a novel framework for continuous human pose estimation using WiFi signals. Unlike vision-based approaches such as two-dimensional deep residual networks that treat Channel State Information (CSI) as images, WiFlow employs an encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder captures spatio-temporal features of CSI using temporal and asymmetric convolutions, preserving the original sequential structure of signals. It then refines keypoint features of human bodies to be tracked and capture their structural dependencies via axial attention. The decoder subsequently maps the encoded high-dimensional features into keypoint coordinates. Trained on a self-collected dataset of 360,000 synchronized CSI-pose samples from 5 subjects performing continuous sequences of 8 daily activities, WiFlow achieves a Percentage of Correct Keypoints (PCK) of 97.25% at a threshold of 20% (PCK@20) and 99.48% at PCK@50, with a mean per-joint position error of 0.007 m. With only 2.23M parameters, WiFlow significantly reduces model complexity and computational cost, establishing a new performance baseline for practical WiFi-based human pose estimation. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/DY2434/WiFlow-WiFi-Pose-Estimation-with-Spatio-Temporal-Decoupling.git.

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### Equalized Generative Treatment: Matching f-divergences for Fairness in Generative Models

Authors: Alexandre Verine, Rafael Pinot, Florian Le Bronnec
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08660v1

Fairness is a crucial concern for generative models, which not only reflect but can also amplify societal and cultural biases. Existing fairness notions for generative models are largely adapted from classification and focus on balancing the probability of generating samples from each sensitive group. We show that such criteria are brittle, as they can be met even when different sensitive groups are modeled with widely varying quality. To address this limitation, we introduce a new fairness definition for generative models, termed as equalized generative treatment (EGT), which requires comparable generation quality across all sensitive groups, with quality measured via a reference f-divergence. We further analyze the trade-offs induced by EGT, demonstrating that enforcing fairness constraints necessarily couples the overall model quality to that of the most challenging group to approximate. This indicates that a simple yet efficient min-max fine-tuning method should be able to balance f-divergences across sensitive groups to satisfy EGT. We validate this theoretical insight through a set of experiments on both image and text generation tasks. We demonstrate that min-max methods consistently achieve fairer outcomes compared to other approaches from the literature, while maintaining competitive overall performance for both tasks.

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### Fundamental Reasoning Paradigms Induce Out-of-Domain Generalization in Language Models

Authors: Mingzi Cao, Xingwei Tan, Mahmud Elahi Akhter, Marco Valentino, Maria Liakata, Xi Wang, Nikolaos Aletras
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08658v2

Deduction, induction, and abduction are fundamental reasoning paradigms, core for human logical thinking. Although improving Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning has attracted significant research efforts, the extent to which the fundamental paradigms induce generalization has yet to be systematically explored. In this study, we shed light on how the interplay between these core paradigms influences LLMs' reasoning behavior. To this end, we first collect a new dataset of reasoning trajectories from symbolic tasks, each targeting one of the three fundamental paradigms, to abstract from concrete world knowledge. Then, we investigate effective ways for inducing these skills into LLMs. We experiment with a battery of methods including simple fine-tuning, and more complex approaches to increase model depth, or transform a dense model to a mixture-of-experts. We comprehensively evaluate induced models on realistic out-of-domain tasks, that are entirely formulated in natural language and contain real-world knowledge. Our results reveal that our approach yields strong generalizability with substantial performance gains (up to $14.60$) across realistic tasks.

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### Two-Stage Data Synthesization: A Statistics-Driven Restricted Trade-off between Privacy and Prediction

Authors: Xiaotong Liu, Shao-Bo Lin, Jun Fan, Ding-Xuan Zhou
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.LG, stat.ME
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08657v1

Synthetic data have gained increasing attention across various domains, with a growing emphasis on their performance in downstream prediction tasks. However, most existing synthesis strategies focus on maintaining statistical information. Although some studies address prediction performance guarantees, their single-stage synthesis designs make it challenging to balance the privacy requirements that necessitate significant perturbations and the prediction performance that is sensitive to such perturbations. We propose a two-stage synthesis strategy. In the first stage, we introduce a synthesis-then-hybrid strategy, which involves a synthesis operation to generate pure synthetic data, followed by a hybrid operation that fuses the synthetic data with the original data. In the second stage, we present a kernel ridge regression (KRR)-based synthesis strategy, where a KRR model is first trained on the original data and then used to generate synthetic outputs based on the synthetic inputs produced in the first stage. By leveraging the theoretical strengths of KRR and the covariant distribution retention achieved in the first stage, our proposed two-stage synthesis strategy enables a statistics-driven restricted privacy--prediction trade-off and guarantee optimal prediction performance. We validate our approach and demonstrate its characteristics of being statistics-driven and restricted in achieving the privacy--prediction trade-off both theoretically and numerically. Additionally, we showcase its generalizability through applications to a marketing problem and five real-world datasets.

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### From Robotics to Sepsis Treatment: Offline RL via Geometric Pessimism

Authors: Sarthak Wanjari
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08655v2

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) promises the recovery of optimal policies from static datasets, yet it remains susceptible to the overestimation of out-of-distribution (OOD) actions, particularly in fractured and sparse data manifolds. Current solutions necessitate a trade-off between computational efficiency and performance. Methods like CQL offer rigorous conservatism but require tremendous compute power while efficient expectile-based methods like IQL often fail to correct OOD errors on pathological datasets, collapsing to Behavioural Cloning. In this work, we propose Geometric Pessimism, a modular, compute-efficient framework that augments standard IQL with density-based penalty derived from k-nearest-neighbour distances in the state-action embedding space. By pre-computing the penalties applied to each state-action pair, our method injects OOD conservatism via reward shaping with a O(1) training overhead to the training loop. Evaluated on the D4RL MuJoCo benchmark, our method, Geo-IQL outperforms standard IQL on sensitive and unstable medium-replay tasks by over 18 points, while reducing inter-seed standard-deviation by 4 times. Furthermore, Geo-IQL does not degrade performance on stable manifolds. Crucially, we validate our algorithm on the MIMIC-III Sepsis critical care dataset. While standard IQL collapses to behaviour cloning, Geo-IQL demonstrates active policy improvement. Maintaining safety constraints, it achieves 86.4% terminal agreement with clinicians compared to IQL's 75%. Our results suggest that geometric pessimism provides the necessary regularisation to safely overcome local optima in critical, real-world decision systems.

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### Deep Learning-Based Fixation Type Prediction for Quality Assurance in Digital Pathology

Authors: Oskar Thaeter, Tanja Niedermair, Jan E. G. Albin, Johannes Raffler, Ralf Huss, Peter J. Schüffler
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08652v2

Accurate annotation of fixation type is a critical step in slide preparation for pathology laboratories. However, this manual process is prone to errors, impacting downstream analyses and diagnostic accuracy. Existing methods for verifying formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded (FFPE), and frozen section (FS) fixation types typically require full-resolution whole-slide images (WSIs), limiting scalability for high-throughput quality control. We propose a deep-learning model to predict fixation types using low-resolution, pre-scan thumbnail images. The model was trained on WSIs from the TUM Institute of Pathology (n=1,200, Leica GT450DX) and evaluated on a class-balanced subset of The Cancer Genome Atlas dataset (TCGA, n=8,800, Leica AT2), as well as on class-balanced datasets from Augsburg (n=695 (392 FFPE, 303 FS), Philips UFS) and Regensburg (n=202, 3DHISTECH P1000). Our model achieves an AUROC of 0.88 on TCGA, outperforming comparable pre-scan methods by 4.8%. It also achieves AUROCs of 0.72 on Regensburg and Augsburg slides, underscoring challenges related to scanner-induced domain shifts. Furthermore, the model processes each slide in 21 ms, $400\times$ faster than existing high-magnification, full-resolution methods, enabling rapid, high-throughput processing. This approach provides an efficient solution for detecting labelling errors without relying on high-magnification scans, offering a valuable tool for quality control in high-throughput pathology workflows. Future work will improve and evaluate the model's generalisation to additional scanner types. Our findings suggest that this method can increase accuracy and efficiency in digital pathology workflows and may be extended to other low-resolution slide annotations.

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### Gradient Preconditioning for Efficient and Reliable Reward-Guided Generation

Authors: Jisung Hwang, Minhyuk Sung
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08646v3

We propose a gradient preconditioning method that makes reward-guided generation with one-step generative models both efficient and reliable. Test-time noise optimization can unlock substantially better reward-guided generations from pretrained generative models, but it is prone to reward hacking that degrades quality and is often too slow for practical use. We precondition reward gradients by projecting them onto a carefully designed white Gaussian noise feasible set, a compact spectral set with blockwise norm constraints that tightly captures the statistics and spatial uncorrelatedness of white Gaussian noise. This preconditioning reshapes each gradient update into a noise-aligned direction, driving faster and more effective reward ascent while preventing reward hacking. The projection is closed-form and matches the $O(N \log N)$ complexity of FFT, adding negligible overhead in practice. In experiments on FLUX with four reward models, our approach reaches a comparable Aesthetic Score using only 30% of the wall-clock time required by the state-of-the-art regularization-based method.

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### LEFT: Learnable Fusion of Tri-view Tokens for Unsupervised Time Series Anomaly Detection

Authors: Dezheng Wang, Tong Chen, Guansong Pang, Congyan Chen, Shihua Li, Hongzhi Yin
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08638v2

As a fundamental data mining task, unsupervised time series anomaly detection (TSAD) aims to build a model for identifying abnormal timestamps without assuming the availability of annotations. A key challenge in unsupervised TSAD is that many anomalies are too subtle to exhibit detectable deviation in any single view (e.g., time domain), and instead manifest as inconsistencies across multiple views like time, frequency, and a mixture of resolutions. However, most cross-view methods rely on feature or score fusion and do not enforce analysis-synthesis consistency, meaning the frequency branch is not required to reconstruct the time signal through an inverse transform, and vice versa. In this paper, we present Learnable Fusion of Tri-view Tokens (LEFT), a unified unsupervised TSAD framework that models anomalies as inconsistencies across complementary representations. LEFT learns feature tokens from three views of the same input time series: frequency domain tokens that embed periodicity information, time domain tokens that capture local dynamics, and multi-scale tokens that learn abnormal patterns at varying time series granularities. By learning a set of adaptive Nyquist-constrained spectral filters, the original time series is rescaled into multiple resolutions and then encoded, allowing these multi-scale tokens to complement the extracted frequency and time domain information. When generating the fused representation, we introduce a novel objective that reconstructs fine-grained targets from coarser multi-scale structure, and put forward an innovative time-frequency cycle consistency constraint to explicitly regularize cross-view agreement. As cross-view agreement is explicitly regularized during training, LEFT can adopt lightweight tri-view encoders while maintaining effective coordination among the three views.

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### We Should Separate Memorization from Copyright

Authors: Adi Haviv, Niva Elkin-Koren, Uri Hacohen, Roi Livni, Shay Moran
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08632v1

The widespread use of foundation models has introduced a new risk factor of copyright issue. This issue is leading to an active, lively and on-going debate amongst the data-science community as well as amongst legal scholars. Where claims and results across both sides are often interpreted in different ways and leading to different implications. Our position is that much of the technical literature relies on traditional reconstruction techniques that are not designed for copyright analysis. As a result, memorization and copying have been conflated across both technical and legal communities and in multiple contexts. We argue that memorization, as commonly studied in data science, should not be equated with copying and should not be used as a proxy for copyright infringement. We distinguish technical signals that meaningfully indicate infringement risk from those that instead reflect lawful generalization or high-frequency content. Based on this analysis, we advocate for an output-level, risk-based evaluation process that aligns technical assessments with established copyright standards and provides a more principled foundation for research, auditing, and policy.

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### Debate is efficient with your time

Authors: Jonah Brown-Cohen, Geoffrey Irving, Simon C. Marshall, Ilan Newman, Georgios Piliouras, Mario Szegedy
Published: 2026-02-09
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08630v1

AI safety via debate uses two competing models to help a human judge verify complex computational tasks. Previous work has established what problems debate can solve in principle, but has not analysed the practical cost of human oversight: how many queries must the judge make to the debate transcript? We introduce Debate Query Complexity}(DQC), the minimum number of bits a verifier must inspect to correctly decide a debate. Surprisingly, we find that PSPACE/poly (the class of problems which debate can efficiently decide) is precisely the class of functions decidable with O(log n) queries. This characterisation shows that debate is remarkably query-efficient: even for highly complex problems, logarithmic oversight suffices. We also establish that functions depending on all their input bits require Omega(log n) queries, and that any function computable by a circuit of size s satisfies DQC(f) <= log(s) + 3. Interestingly, this last result implies that proving DQC lower bounds of log(n) + 6 for languages in P would yield new circuit lower bounds, connecting debate query complexity to central questions in circuit complexity.

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