# Research Papers — 2026-02 · bundle page 139 of 210 > Full-text markdown of papers #6901–6950 of 10493 published in 2026-02, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 10493-paper 2026-02 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-02/page/139 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-02/page/138.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-02/page/140.md) ### Interpretable Dynamic Network Modeling of Tensor Time Series via Kronecker Time-Varying Graphical Lasso Authors: Shingo Higashiguchi, Koki Kawabata, Yasuko Matsubara, Yasushi Sakurai Published: 2026-02-09 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08197v1 With the rapid development of web services, large amounts of time series data are generated and accumulated across various domains such as finance, healthcare, and online platforms. As such data often co-evolves with multiple variables interacting with each other, estimating the time-varying dependencies between variables (i.e., the dynamic network structure) has become crucial for accurate modeling. However, real-world data is often represented as tensor time series with multiple modes, resulting in large, entangled networks that are hard to interpret and computationally intensive to estimate. In this paper, we propose Kronecker Time-Varying Graphical Lasso (KTVGL), a method designed for modeling tensor time series. Our approach estimates mode-specific dynamic networks in a Kronecker product form, thereby avoiding overly complex entangled structures and producing interpretable modeling results. Moreover, the partitioned network structure prevents the exponential growth of computational time with data dimension. In addition, our method can be extended to stream algorithms, making the computational time independent of the sequence length. Experiments on synthetic data show that the proposed method achieves higher edge estimation accuracy than existing methods while requiring less computation time. To further demonstrate its practical value, we also present a case study using real-world data. Our source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Higashiguchi-Shingo/KTVGL. --- ### Dreaming in Code for Curriculum Learning in Open-Ended Worlds Authors: Konstantinos Mitsides, Maxence Faldor, Antoine Cully Published: 2026-02-09 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08194v2 Open-ended learning frames intelligence as emerging from continual interaction with an ever-expanding space of environments. While recent advances have utilized foundation models to programmatically generate diverse environments, these approaches often focus on discovering isolated behaviors rather than orchestrating sustained progression. In complex open-ended worlds, the large combinatorial space of possible challenges makes it difficult for agents to discover sequences of experiences that remain consistently learnable. To address this, we propose Dreaming in Code (DiCode), an unsupervised environment design (UED) framework in which foundation models (large language models) synthesize executable environment code to scaffold learning toward increasing competence. In DiCode, "dreaming" takes the form of materializing code-level variations of the world. We instantiate DiCode in Craftax, a challenging open-ended reinforcement learning benchmark characterized by rich mechanics and long-horizon progression. Empirically, DiCode enables agents to acquire long-horizon skills, achieving a 17% improvement in mean return over the strongest baseline and non-zero success on late-game combat tasks where prior methods fail. Our results suggest that code-level environment design provides a practical mechanism for curriculum control, enabling the construction of intermediate environments that bridge competence gaps in open-ended worlds. --- ### Dreaming in Code for Curriculum Learning in Open-Ended Worlds Authors: Konstantinos Mitsides, Maxence Faldor, Antoine Cully Published: 2026-02-09 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08194v1 Open-ended learning frames intelligence as emerging from continual interaction with an ever-expanding space of environments. While recent advances have utilized foundation models to programmatically generate diverse environments, these approaches often focus on discovering isolated behaviors rather than orchestrating sustained progression. In complex open-ended worlds, the large combinatorial space of possible challenges makes it difficult for agents to discover sequences of experiences that remain consistently learnable. To address this, we propose Dreaming in Code (DiCode), a framework in which foundation models synthesize executable environment code to scaffold learning toward increasing competence. In DiCode, "dreaming" takes the form of materializing code-level variations of the world. We instantiate DiCode in Craftax, a challenging open-ended benchmark characterized by rich mechanics and long-horizon progression. Empirically, DiCode enables agents to acquire long-horizon skills, achieving a $16\%$ improvement in mean return over the strongest baseline and non-zero success on late-game combat tasks where prior methods fail. Our results suggest that code-level environment design provides a practical mechanism for curriculum control, enabling the construction of intermediate environments that bridge competence gaps in open-ended worlds. Project page and source code are available at https://konstantinosmitsides.github.io/dreaming-in-code and https://github.com/konstantinosmitsides/dreaming-in-code. --- ### Chamelion: Reliable Change Detection for Long-Term LiDAR Mapping in Transient Environments Authors: Seoyeon Jang, Alex Junho Lee, I Made Aswin Nahrendra, Hyun Myung Published: 2026-02-09 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08189v1 Online change detection is crucial for mobile robots to efficiently navigate through dynamic environments. Detecting changes in transient settings, such as active construction sites or frequently reconfigured indoor spaces, is particularly challenging due to frequent occlusions and spatiotemporal variations. Existing approaches often struggle to detect changes and fail to update the map across different observations. To address these limitations, we propose a dual-head network designed for online change detection and long-term map maintenance. A key difficulty in this task is the collection and alignment of real-world data, as manually registering structural differences over time is both labor-intensive and often impractical. To overcome this, we develop a data augmentation strategy that synthesizes structural changes by importing elements from different scenes, enabling effective model training without the need for extensive ground-truth annotations. Experiments conducted at real-world construction sites and in indoor office environments demonstrate that our approach generalizes well across diverse scenarios, achieving efficient and accurate map updates.\resubmit{Our source code and additional material are available at: https://chamelion-pages.github.io/. --- ### Large Language Models in Peer-Run Community Behavioral Health Services: Understanding Peer Specialists and Service Users' Perspectives on Opportunities, Risks, and Mitigation Strategies Authors: Cindy Peng, Megan Chai, Gao Mo, Naveen Raman, Ningjing Tang, Shannon Pagdon, Margaret Swarbrick, Nev Jones, Fei Fang, Hong Shen Published: 2026-02-09 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08187v1 Peer-run organizations (PROs) provide critical, recovery-based behavioral health support rooted in lived experience. As large language models (LLMs) enter this domain, their scale, conversationality, and opacity introduce new challenges for situatedness, trust, and autonomy. Partnering with Collaborative Support Programs of New Jersey (CSPNJ), a statewide PRO in the Northeastern United States, we used comicboarding, a co-design method, to conduct workshops with 16 peer specialists and 10 service users exploring perceptions of integrating an LLM-based recommendation system into peer support. Findings show that depending on how LLMs are introduced, constrained, and co-used, they can reconfigure in-room dynamics by sustaining, undermining, or amplifying the relational authority that grounds peer support. We identify opportunities, risks, and mitigation strategies across three tensions: bridging scale and locality, protecting trust and relational dynamics, and preserving peer autonomy amid efficiency gains. We contribute design implications that center lived-experience-in-the-loop, reframe trust as co-constructed, and position LLMs not as clinical tools but as relational collaborators in high-stakes, community-led care. --- ### Nexus: Inferring Join Graphs from Metadata Alone via Iterative Low-Rank Matrix Completion Authors: Tianji Cong, Yuanyuan Tian, Andreas Mueller, Rathijit Sen, Yeye He, Fotis Psallidas, Shaleen Deep, H. V. Jagadish Published: 2026-02-09 Categories: cs.DB, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08186v1 Automatically inferring join relationships is a critical task for effective data discovery, integration, querying and reuse. However, accurately and efficiently identifying these relationships in large and complex schemas can be challenging, especially in enterprise settings where access to data values is constrained. In this paper, we introduce the problem of join graph inference when only metadata is available. We conduct an empirical study on a large number of real-world schemas and observe that join graphs when represented as adjacency matrices exhibit two key properties: high sparsity and low-rank structure. Based on these novel observations, we formulate join graph inference as a low-rank matrix completion problem and propose Nexus, an end-to-end solution using only metadata. To further enhance accuracy, we propose a novel Expectation-Maximization algorithm that alternates between low-rank matrix completion and refining join candidate probabilities by leveraging Large Language Models. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that Nexus outperforms existing methods by a significant margin on four datasets including a real-world production dataset. Additionally, Nexus can operate in a fast mode, providing comparable results with up to 6x speedup, offering a practical and efficient solution for real-world deployments. --- ### Information Geometry of Absorbing Markov-Chain and Discriminative Random Walks Authors: Masanari Kimura Published: 2026-02-09 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08185v1 Discriminative Random Walks (DRWs) are a simple yet powerful tool for semi-supervised node classification, but their theoretical foundations remain fragmentary. We revisit DRWs through the lens of information geometry, treating the family of class-specific hitting-time laws on an absorbing Markov chain as a statistical manifold. Starting from a log-linear edge-weight model, we derive closed-form expressions for the hitting-time probability mass function, its full moment hierarchy, and the observed Fisher information. The Fisher matrix of each seed node turns out to be rank-one, taking the quotient by its null space yields a low-dimensional, globally flat manifold that captures all identifiable directions of the model. Leveraging the geometry, we introduce a sensitivity score for unlabeled nodes that bounds, and in one-dimensional cases attains, the maximal first-order change in DRW betweenness under unit Fisher perturbations. The score can lead to principled strategies for active label acquisition, edge re-weighting, and explanation. --- ### Nansde-net: A neural sde framework for generating time series with memory Authors: Hiromu Ozai, Kei Nakagawa Published: 2026-02-09 Categories: cs.LG, q-fin.CP, q-fin.ST arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08182v1 Modeling time series with long- or short-memory characteristics is a fundamental challenge in many scientific and engineering domains. While fractional Brownian motion has been widely used as a noise source to capture such memory effects, its incompatibility with Itô calculus limits its applicability in neural stochastic differential equation~(SDE) frameworks. In this paper, we propose a novel class of noise, termed Neural Network-kernel ARMA-type noise~(NA-noise), which is an Itô-process-based alternative capable of capturing both long- and short-memory behaviors. The kernel function defining the noise structure is parameterized via neural networks and decomposed into a product form to preserve the Markov property. Based on this noise process, we develop NANSDE-Net, a generative model that extends Neural SDEs by incorporating NA-noise. We prove the theoretical existence and uniqueness of the solution under mild conditions and derive an efficient backpropagation scheme for training. Empirical results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that NANSDE-Net matches or outperforms existing models, including fractional SDE-Net, in reproducing long- and short-memory features of the data, while maintaining computational tractability within the Itô calculus framework. --- ### Fundamental Limits of Community Detection in Contextual Multi-Layer Stochastic Block Models Authors: Shuyang Gong, Dong Huang, Zhangsong Li Published: 2026-02-09 Categories: math.ST, cs.IT, cs.LG, math.PR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08173v1 We consider the problem of community detection from the joint observation of a high-dimensional covariate matrix and $L$ sparse networks, all encoding noisy, partial information about the latent community labels of $n$ subjects. In the asymptotic regime where the networks have constant average degree and the number of features $p$ grows proportionally with $n$, we derive a sharp threshold under which detecting and estimating the subject labels is possible. Our results extend the work of \cite{MN23} to the constant-degree regime with noisy measurements, and also resolve a conjecture in \cite{YLS24+} when the number of networks is a constant. Our information-theoretic lower bound is obtained via a novel comparison inequality between Bernoulli and Gaussian moments, as well as a statistical variant of the ``recovery to chi-square divergence reduction'' argument inspired by \cite{DHSS25}. On the algorithmic side, we design efficient algorithms based on counting decorated cycles and decorated paths and prove that they achieve the sharp threshold for both detection and weak recovery. In particular, our results show that there is no statistical-computational gap in this setting. --- ### A Causal Machine Learning Framework for Treatment Personalization in Clinical Trials: Application to Ulcerative Colitis Authors: Cristian Minoccheri, Sophia Tesic, Kayvan Najarian, Ryan Stidham Published: 2026-02-09 Categories: cs.LG, stat.AP, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08171v1 Randomized controlled trials estimate average treatment effects, but treatment response heterogeneity motivates personalized approaches. A critical question is whether statistically detectable heterogeneity translates into improved treatment decisions -- these are distinct questions that can yield contradictory answers. We present a modular causal machine learning framework that evaluates each question separately: permutation importance identifies which features predict heterogeneity, best linear predictor (BLP) testing assesses statistical significance, and doubly robust policy evaluation measures whether acting on the heterogeneity improves patient outcomes. We apply this framework to patient-level data from the UNIFI maintenance trial of ustekinumab in ulcerative colitis, comparing placebo, standard-dose ustekinumab every 12 weeks, and dose-intensified ustekinumab every 8 weeks, using cross-fitted X-learner models with baseline demographics, medication history, week-8 clinical scores, laboratory biomarkers, and video-derived endoscopic features. BLP testing identified strong associations between endoscopic features and treatment effect heterogeneity for ustekinumab versus placebo, yet doubly robust policy evaluation showed no improvement in expected remission from incorporating endoscopic features, and out-of-fold multi-arm evaluation showed worse performance. Diagnostic comparison of prognostic contribution against policy value revealed that endoscopic scores behaved as disease severity markers -- improving outcome prediction in untreated patients but adding noise to treatment selection -- while clinical variables (fecal calprotectin, age, CRP) captured the decision-relevant variation. These results demonstrate that causal machine learning applications to clinical trials should include policy-level evaluation alongside heterogeneity testing. --- ### Evasion of IoT Malware Detection via Dummy Code Injection Authors: Sahar Zargarzadeh, Mohammad Islam Published: 2026-02-09 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08170v1 The Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized connectivity by linking billions of devices worldwide. However, this rapid expansion has also introduced severe security vulnerabilities, making IoT devices attractive targets for malware such as the Mirai botnet. Power side-channel analysis has recently emerged as a promising technique for detecting malware activity based on device power consumption patterns. However, the resilience of such detection systems under adversarial manipulation remains underexplored. This work presents a novel adversarial strategy against power side-channel-based malware detection. By injecting structured dummy code into the scanning phase of the Mirai botnet, we dynamically perturb power signatures to evade AI/ML-based anomaly detection without disrupting core functionality. Our approach systematically analyzes the trade-offs between stealthiness, execution overhead, and evasion effectiveness across multiple state-of-the-art models for side-channel analysis, using a custom dataset collected from smartphones of diverse manufacturers. Experimental results show that our adversarial modifications achieve an average attack success rate of 75.2\%, revealing practical vulnerabilities in power-based intrusion detection frameworks. --- ### Spherical Steering: Geometry-Aware Activation Rotation for Language Models Authors: Zejia You, Chunyuan Deng, Hanjie Chen Published: 2026-02-09 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08169v2 Inference-time steering offers a promising way to control language models (LMs) without retraining. However, standard approaches typically rely on activation addition, which inevitably alters the hidden-state magnitudes raising concerns about representation collapse and degraded open-ended generation. In this work, we explore Spherical Steering, a training-free primitive that resolves this trade-off through activation rotation. Rather than shifting activations with a fixed vector, our method rotates them along a geodesic toward a target direction, preserving signal integrity while steering toward the target concept. To further enhance adaptivity, we incorporate a confidence gate that dynamically modulates steering strength based on input uncertainty. Extensive experiments across multiple-choice benchmarks demonstrate that Spherical Steering significantly outperforms addition-based baselines (notably by +10% on TruthfulQA, COPA, and Storycloze), while simultaneously maintaining the model's general open-ended generation quality. This work highlights the value of geometric consistency, suggesting that norm-preserving rotation is a robust and effective primitive for precise inference-time control. The code is available at: https://github.com/chili-lab/Spherical-Steering. --- ### DAS-SK: An Adaptive Model Integrating Dual Atrous Separable and Selective Kernel CNN for Agriculture Semantic Segmentation Authors: Mei Ling Chee, Thangarajah Akilan, Aparna Ravindra Phalke, Kanchan Keisham Published: 2026-02-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08168v1 Semantic segmentation in high-resolution agricultural imagery demands models that strike a careful balance between accuracy and computational efficiency to enable deployment in practical systems. In this work, we propose DAS-SK, a novel lightweight architecture that retrofits selective kernel convolution (SK-Conv) into the dual atrous separable convolution (DAS-Conv) module to strengthen multi-scale feature learning. The model further enhances the atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) module, enabling the capture of fine-grained local structures alongside global contextual information. Built upon a modified DeepLabV3 framework with two complementary backbones - MobileNetV3-Large and EfficientNet-B3, the DAS-SK model mitigates limitations associated with large dataset requirements, limited spectral generalization, and the high computational cost that typically restricts deployment on UAVs and other edge devices. Comprehensive experiments across three benchmarks: LandCover.ai, VDD, and PhenoBench, demonstrate that DAS-SK consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, while being more efficient than CNN-, transformer-, and hybrid-based competitors. Notably, DAS-SK requires up to 21x fewer parameters and 19x fewer GFLOPs than top-performing transformer models. These findings establish DAS-SK as a robust, efficient, and scalable solution for real-time agricultural robotics and high-resolution remote sensing, with strong potential for broader deployment in other vision domains. --- ### Self-Supervised Bootstrapping of Action-Predictive Embodied Reasoning Authors: Milan Ganai, Katie Luo, Jonas Frey, Clark Barrett, Marco Pavone Published: 2026-02-09 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08167v2 Embodied Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has significantly enhanced Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, yet current methods rely on rigid templates to specify reasoning primitives (e.g., objects in the scene, high-level plans, structural affordances). These templates can force policies to process irrelevant information that distracts from critical action-prediction signals. This creates a bottleneck: without successful policies, we cannot verify reasoning quality; without quality reasoning, we cannot build robust policies. We introduce R&B-EnCoRe, which enables models to bootstrap embodied reasoning from internet-scale knowledge through self-supervised refinement. By treating reasoning as a latent variable within importance-weighted variational inference, models can generate and distill a refined reasoning training dataset of embodiment-specific strategies without external rewards, verifiers, or human annotation. We validate R&B-EnCoRe across manipulation (Franka Panda in simulation, WidowX in hardware), legged navigation (bipedal, wheeled, bicycle, quadruped), and autonomous driving embodiments using various VLA architectures with 1B, 4B, 7B, and 30B parameters. Our approach achieves 28% gains in manipulation success, 101% improvement in navigation scores, and 21% reduction in collision-rate metric over models that indiscriminately reason about all available primitives. R&B-EnCoRe enables models to distill reasoning that is predictive of successful control, bypassing manual annotation engineering while grounding internet-scale knowledge in physical execution. --- ### Homophily-aware Supervised Contrastive Counterfactual Augmented Fair Graph Neural Network Authors: Mahdi Tavassoli Kejani, Fadi Dornaika, Charlotte Laclau, Jean-Michel Loubes Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.02342v1 In recent years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success in tasks such as node classification, link prediction, and graph representation learning. However, they remain susceptible to biases that can arise not only from node attributes but also from the graph structure itself. Addressing fairness in GNNs has therefore emerged as a critical research challenge. In this work, we propose a novel model for training fairness-aware GNNs by improving the counterfactual augmented fair graph neural network framework (CAF). Specifically, our approach introduces a two-phase training strategy: in the first phase, we edit the graph to increase homophily ratio with respect to class labels while reducing homophily ratio with respect to sensitive attribute labels; in the second phase, we integrate a modified supervised contrastive loss and environmental loss into the optimization process, enabling the model to jointly improve predictive performance and fairness. Experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms CAF and several state-of-the-art graph-based learning methods in both classification accuracy and fairness metrics. --- ### LLM Reasoning with Process Rewards for Outcome-Guided Steps Authors: Mohammad Rezaei, Jens Lehmann, Sahar Vahdati Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.02341v1 Mathematical reasoning in large language models has improved substantially with reinforcement learning using verifiable rewards, where final answers can be checked automatically and converted into reliable training signals. Most such pipelines optimize outcome correctness only, which yields sparse feedback for long, multi-step solutions and offers limited guidance on intermediate reasoning errors. Recent work therefore introduces process reward models (PRMs) to score intermediate steps and provide denser supervision. In practice, PRM scores are often imperfectly aligned with final correctness and can reward locally fluent reasoning that still ends in an incorrect answer. When optimized as absolute rewards, such signals can amplify fluent failure modes and induce reward hacking. We propose PROGRS, a framework that leverages PRMs while keeping outcome correctness dominant. PROGRS treats process rewards as relative preferences within outcome groups rather than absolute targets. We introduce outcome-conditioned centering, which shifts PRM scores of incorrect trajectories to have zero mean within each prompt group. It removes systematic bias while preserving informative rankings. PROGRS combines a frozen quantile-regression PRM with a multi-scale coherence evaluator. We integrate the resulting centered process bonus into Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) without auxiliary objectives or additional trainable components. Across MATH-500, AMC, AIME, MinervaMath, and OlympiadBench, PROGRS consistently improves Pass@1 over outcome-only baselines and achieves stronger performance with fewer rollouts. These results show that outcome-conditioned centering enables safe and effective use of process rewards for mathematical reasoning. --- ### UniRank: End-to-End Domain-Specific Reranking of Hybrid Text-Image Candidates Authors: Yupei Yang, Lin Yang, Wanxi Deng, Lin Qu, Shikui Tu, Lei Xu Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29897v2 Reranking is a critical component in many information retrieval pipelines. Despite remarkable progress in text-only settings, multimodal reranking remains challenging, particularly when the candidate set contains hybrid text and image items. A key difficulty is the modality gap: a text reranker is intrinsically closer to text candidates than to image candidates, leading to biased and suboptimal cross-modal ranking. Vision-language models (VLMs) mitigate this gap through strong cross-modal alignment and have recently been adopted to build multimodal rerankers. However, most VLM-based rerankers encode all candidates as images, and treating text as images introduces substantial computational overhead. Meanwhile, existing open-source multimodal rerankers are typically trained on general-domain data and often underperform in domain-specific scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose UniRank, a VLM-based reranking framework that natively scores and orders hybrid text-image candidates without any modality conversion. Building on this hybrid scoring interface, UniRank provides an end-to-end domain adaptation pipeline that includes: (1) an instruction-tuning stage that learns calibrated cross-modal relevance scoring by mapping label-token likelihoods to a unified scalar score; and (2) a hard-negative-driven preference alignment stage that constructs in-domain pairwise preferences and performs query-level policy optimization through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Extensive experiments on scientific literature retrieval and design patent search demonstrate that UniRank consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, improving Recall@1 by 8.9% and 7.3%, respectively. --- ### Generative AI in Action: Field Experimental Evidence from Alibaba's Customer Service Operations Authors: Xiao Ni, Yiwei Wang, Tianjun Feng, Lauren Xiaoyan Lu, Yitong Wang, Congyi Zhou Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29888v2 In collaboration with Alibaba, we study how a generative AI assistant affects service performance in e-commerce after-sales operations. In a large-scale field experiment, human agents providing digital chat support were randomly assigned access to a gen AI assistant. The assistant drafts issue diagnoses and solution proposals in the opening stage only; agents can adopt, modify, or disregard them. Because of this discretion, we estimate the effects of both gen AI access and usage. On average, gen AI improves service speed and subjective service quality, measured by customer ratings, but has no significant effect on objective service quality, measured by customer retrials. These gains come from more than automation. Gen AI reshapes agent-customer interactions: treated agents respond faster and take a more proactive role, while customers provide less input; both patterns persist into later chat stages. These average effects, however, mask heterogeneity across agents. Lower-performing agents benefit the most, indicating that gen AI can narrow performance gaps. Top-performing agents experience declines in both subjective and objective service quality. This decline is consistent with workflow disruption: among top performers, gen AI use increases shift-away time, response delays, and immediate customer retrials, suggesting weakened service continuity in the focal chat. Successful gen AI deployment therefore requires careful performance evaluation and rollout tailored to agent skill. --- ### Mitigating Forgetting in Continual Learning with Selective Gradient Projection Authors: Anika Singh, Aayush Dhaulakhandi, Varun Chopade, Likhith Malipati, David Martinez, Kevin Zhu Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.LG, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26671v1 As neural networks are increasingly deployed in dynamic environments, they face the challenge of catastrophic forgetting, the tendency to overwrite previously learned knowledge when adapting to new tasks, resulting in severe performance degradation on earlier tasks. We propose Selective Forgetting-Aware Optimization (SFAO), a dynamic method that regulates gradient directions via cosine similarity and per-layer gating, enabling controlled forgetting while balancing plasticity and stability. SFAO selectively projects, accepts, or discards updates using a tunable mechanism with efficient Monte Carlo approximation. Experiments on standard continual learning benchmarks show that SFAO achieves competitive accuracy with markedly lower memory cost, a 90$\%$ reduction, and improved forgetting on MNIST datasets, making it suitable for resource-constrained scenarios. --- ### Explainable LLM Unlearning Through Reasoning Authors: Junfeng Liao, Qizhou Wang, Shanshan Ye, Xin Yu, Ling Chen, Zhen Fang Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09980v1 LLM unlearning is essential for mitigating safety, copyright, and privacy concerns in pre-trained large language models (LLMs). Compared to preference alignment, it offers a more explicit way by removing undesirable knowledge characterized by specific unlearning datasets. In previous works, gradient ascent (GA) and its variants have shown promise for implementing unlearning, yet their untargeted nature results in unintended degradation of general capabilities, incomplete removal of knowledge, and the generation of incoherent responses, among many others. We argue that these issues stem from the absence of explicit guidance on what and how models should unlearn. To fill this gap, we introduce a novel unlearning target, reasoning-based unlearning target, which satisfies both the specified unlearning scope and the specified post-unlearning response. Building on this, we propose targeted reasoning unlearning (TRU), which leverages reasoning-based unlearning target as guidance. We employ the target using a cross-entropy supervised loss combined with a GA-based loss, enabling the model to learn reasoning ability for precise knowledge removal while preserving unrelated abilities. We evaluate TRU against strong baselines across multiple benchmarks and LLM backbones, and find that it achieves more reliable unlearning while preserving general capabilities. Moreover, TRU exhibits superior robustness under diverse attack scenarios, stemming from the reasoning ability learned through reasoning-based targets. Overall, our study establishes reasoning-augmented unlearning as a practical paradigm for reliable and explainable LLM unlearning. --- ### The Logovista English-Japanese Machine Translation System Authors: Barton D. Wright Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03311v1 This paper documents the architecture, development practices, and preserved artifacts of the Logovista English--Japanese machine translation system, a large, explicitly rule-based MT system that was developed and sold commercially from the early 1990s through at least 2012. The system combined hand-authored grammatical rules, a large central dictionary encoding syntactic and semantic constraints, and chart-based parsing with weighted interpretation scoring to manage extensive structural ambiguity. The account emphasizes how the system was extended and maintained under real-world usage pressures, including regression control, ambiguity management, and the limits encountered as coverage expanded. Unlike many rule-based MT systems described primarily in research settings, Logovista was deployed for decades and evolved continuously in response to practical requirements. The paper is intended as a technical and historical record rather than an argument for reviving rule-based MT, and describes the software and linguistic resources that have been preserved for potential future study. --- ### Entropic-Time Inference: Self-Organizing Large Language Model Decoding Beyond Attention Authors: Andrew Kiruluta Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03310v1 Modern large language model (LLM) inference engines optimize throughput and latency under fixed decoding rules, treating generation as a linear progression in token time. We propose a fundamentally different paradigm: entropic\-time inference, where decoding is governed by the flow of uncertainty rather than token index. We introduce a self\-organizing inference architecture that jointly couples scheduling, attention sparsification, and sampling temperature under a unified entropy control objective. Our method extends vLLM with entropy-aware scheduling, entropic pruning of paged attention blocks, and adaptive temperature control that stabilizes generation near a target entropy regime. This transforms inference into a resource\-intelligent thermodynamic process that allocates computation where uncertainty reduction is maximized. We present a concrete systems design, pseudocode, and integration plan, demonstrating how entropy can serve as a first\-class control signal for scalable LLM inference. --- ### Combating data scarcity in recommendation services: Integrating cognitive types of VARK and neural network technologies (LLM) Authors: Nikita Zmanovskii Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03309v1 Cold start scenarios present fundamental obstacles to effective recommendation generation, particularly when dealing with users lacking interaction history or items with sparse metadata. This research proposes an innovative hybrid framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) for content semantic analysis and knowledge graph development, integrated with cognitive profiling based on VARK (Visual, Auditory, Reading/Writing, Kinesthetic) learning preferences. The proposed system tackles multiple cold start dimensions: enriching inadequate item descriptions through LLM processing, generating user profiles from minimal data, and dynamically adjusting presentation formats based on cognitive assessment. The framework comprises six integrated components: semantic metadata enhancement, dynamic graph construction, VARK-based profiling, mental state estimation, graph-enhanced retrieval with LLM-powered ranking, and adaptive interface design with iterative learning. Experimental validation on MovieLens-1M dataset demonstrates the system's capacity for personalized recommendation generation despite limited initial information. This work establishes groundwork for cognitively-aware recommendation systems capable of overcoming cold start limitations through semantic comprehension and psychological modeling, offering personalized, explainable recommendations from initial user contact. --- ### Old Habits Die Hard: How Conversational History Geometrically Traps LLMs Authors: Adi Simhi, Fazl Barez, Martin Tutek, Yonatan Belinkov, Shay B. Cohen Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03308v2 How does the conversational past of large language models (LLMs) influence their future performance? Recent work suggests that LLMs are affected by their conversational history in unexpected ways. For instance, hallucinations in prior interactions may influence subsequent model responses. In this work, we introduce History-Echoes, a framework that investigates how conversational history biases subsequent generations. The framework explores this bias from two perspectives: probabilistically, we model conversations as Markov chains to quantify state consistency; geometrically, we measure the consistency of consecutive hidden representations. Across three model families and six datasets spanning diverse phenomena, our analysis reveals a strong correlation between the two perspectives. By bridging these perspectives, we demonstrate that behavioral persistence manifests as a geometric trap, where gaps in the latent space confine the model's trajectory. Code available at https://github.com/technion-cs-nlp/OldHabitsDieHard. --- ### TopicENA: Enabling Epistemic Network Analysis at Scale through Automated Topic-Based Coding Authors: Owen H. T. Lu, Tiffany T. Y. Hsu Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03307v1 Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) is a method for investigating the relational structure of concepts in text by representing co-occurring concepts as networks. Traditional ENA, however, relies heavily on manual expert coding, which limits its scalability and real-world applicability to large text corpora. Topic modeling provides an automated approach to extracting concept-level representations from text and can serve as an alternative to manual coding. To tackle this limitation, the present study merges BERTopic with ENA and introduces TopicENA, a topic-based epistemic network analysis framework. TopicENA substitutes manual concept coding with automatically generated topics while maintaining ENA's capacity for modeling structural associations among concepts. To explain the impact of modeling choices on TopicENA outcomes, three analysis cases are presented. The first case assesses the effect of topic granularity, indicating that coarse-grained topics are preferable for large datasets, whereas fine-grained topics are more effective for smaller datasets. The second case examines topic inclusion thresholds and finds that threshold values should be adjusted according to topic quality indicators to balance network consistency and interpretability. The third case tests TopicENA's scalability by applying it to a substantially larger dataset than those used in previous ENA studies. Collectively, these cases illustrate that TopicENA facilitates practical and interpretable ENA analysis at scale and offers concrete guidance for configuring topic-based ENA pipelines in large-scale text analysis. --- ### Token-Oriented Object Notation vs JSON: A Benchmark of Plain and Constrained Decoding Generation Authors: Ivan Matveev Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03306v1 Recently presented Token-Oriented Object Notation (TOON) aims to replace JSON as a serialization format for passing structured data to LLMs with significantly reduced token usage. While showing solid accuracy in LLM comprehension, there is a lack of tests against JSON generation. Though never present in training data, TOON syntax is simple enough to suggest one-shot in-context learning could support accurate generation. The inevitable prompt overhead can be an acceptable trade-off for shorter completions. To test this, we conducted a benchmark creating several test cases with regard to structural complexity, a validation pipeline, and comparing plain JSON generation vs structured output (via constrained decoding) JSON generation vs TOON one-shot in-context learning generation. JSON structured output was included to establish a minimum token budget baseline and to set a starting point for future experiments testing TOON constrained decoding inference enforcement. Key findings: TOON shows promising accuracy/token consumption ratio for in-domain generation tasks, though this advantage is often reduced by the "prompt tax" of instructional overhead in shorter contexts. Plain JSON generation shows the best one-shot and final accuracy, even compared with constrained decoding structured output, where the only significant advantage is the lowest token usage as a trade-off for slightly decreased accuracy overall and significant degradation for some models. Notably, for simple structures, this "lowest token usage" of constrained decoding outperformed even TOON, hinting that TOON enforcing via frameworks such as xgrammar may not yield the desired results. Furthermore, the results suggest a scaling hypothesis: TOON's true efficiency potential likely follows a non-linear curve, shining only beyond a specific point where cumulative syntax savings amortize the initial prompt overhead. --- ### The Hidden Cost of Structured Generation in LLMs: Draft-Conditioned Constrained Decoding Authors: Avinash Reddy, Thayne T. Walker, James S. Ide, Amrit Singh Bedi Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03305v2 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate executable outputs, JSON objects, and API calls, where a single syntax error can make the output unusable. Constrained decoding enforces validity token-by-token via masking and renormalization, but it can distort generation when the model assigns low probability mass to valid continuations, pushing decoding toward locally valid yet semantically incorrect trajectories. We propose \emph{Draft-Conditioned Constrained Decoding (DCCD)}, a simple two-step, training-free inference procedure that decouples semantic planning from structural enforcement: an unconstrained draft is generated first, and constrained decoding is then applied, conditioned on this draft, to guarantee validity. We analyze DCCD through a KL-projection view, showing that draft conditioning increases feasible mass and reduces the cumulative "projection tax" induced by hard constraints, with an optional best-of-$K$ draft selection. Across structured reasoning benchmarks, DCCD improves strict structured accuracy by up to +24 percentage points over standard constrained decoding (e.g., 15.2\% to 39.0\% on GSM8K with a 1B model), and enables smaller model pairs to match or exceed much larger constrained baselines, yielding substantial gains in parameter efficiency. --- ### StaTS: Spectral Trajectory Schedule Learning for Adaptive Time Series Forecasting with Frequency Guided Denoiser Authors: Jintao Zhang, Zirui Liu, Mingyue Cheng, Xianquan Wang, Zhiding Liu, Qi Liu Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00037v1 Diffusion models have been used for probabilistic time series forecasting and show strong potential. However, fixed noise schedules often produce intermediate states that are hard to invert and a terminal state that deviates from the near noise assumption. Meanwhile, prior methods rely on time domain conditioning and seldom model schedule induced spectral degradation, which limits structure recovery across noise levels. We propose StaTS, a diffusion model for probabilistic time series forecasting that learns the noise schedule and the denoiser through alternating updates. StaTS includes Spectral Trajectory Scheduler (STS) that learns a data adaptive noise schedule with spectral regularization to improve structural preservation and stepwise invertibility, and Frequency Guided Denoiser (FGD) that estimates schedule induced spectral distortion and uses it to modulate denoising strength for heterogeneous restoration across diffusion steps and variables. A two stage training procedure stabilizes the coupling between schedule learning and denoiser optimization. Experiments on multiple real world benchmarks show consistent gains, while maintaining strong performance with fewer sampling steps. Our code is available at https://github.com/zjt-gpu/StaTS/. --- ### Transforming Science Learning Materials in the Era of Artificial Intelligence Authors: Xiaoming Zhai, Kent Crippen Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18470v2 The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into science education is transforming the design and function of learning materials, offering new affordances for personalization, authenticity, and accessibility. This chapter examines how AI technologies are transforming science learning materials across six interrelated domains: 1) integrating AI into scientific practice, 2) enabling adaptive and personalized instruction, 3) facilitating interactive simulations, 4) generating multimodal content, 5) enhancing accessibility for diverse learners, and 6) promoting co-creation through AI-supported content development. These advancements enable learning materials to more accurately reflect contemporary scientific practice, catering to the diverse needs of students. For instance, AI support can enable students to engage in dynamic simulations, interact with real-time data, and explore science concepts through multimodal representations. Educators are increasingly collaborating with generative AI tools to develop timely and culturally responsive instructional resources. However, these innovations also raise critical ethical and pedagogical concerns, including issues of algorithmic bias, data privacy, transparency, and the need for human oversight. To ensure equitable and meaningful science learning, we emphasize the importance of designing AI-supported materials with careful attention to scientific integrity, inclusivity, and student agency. This chapter advocates for a responsible, ethical, and reflective approach to leveraging AI in science education, framing it as a catalyst for innovation while upholding core educational values. --- ### The Landscape of AI in Science Education: What is Changing and How to Respond Authors: Xiaoming Zhai, Kent Crippen Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18469v2 This introductory chapter explores the transformative role of artificial intelligence (AI) in reshaping the landscape of science education. Positioned at the intersection of tradition and innovation, AI is altering educational goals, procedures, learning materials, assessment practices, and desired outcomes. We highlight how AI-supported tools, such as intelligent tutoring systems, adaptive learning platforms, automated feedback, and generative content creation--enhance personalization, efficiency, and equity while fostering competencies essential for an AI-driven society, including critical thinking, creativity, and interdisciplinary collaboration. At the same time, this chapter examines the ethical, social, and pedagogical challenges that arise, particularly issues of fairness, transparency, accountability, privacy, and human oversight. To address these tensions, we argue that a Responsible and Ethical Principles (REP) framework is needed to offer guidance for aligning AI integration with values of fairness, scientific integrity, and democratic participation. Through this lens, we synthesize the changes brought to each of the five transformative aspects and the approaches introduced to meet the changes according to the REP framework. We argue that AI should be viewed not as a replacement for human teachers and learners but as a partner that supports inquiry, enriches assessment, and expands access to authentic scientific practices. Aside from what is changing, we conclude by exploring the roles that remain uniquely human, engaging as moral and relational anchors in classrooms, bringing interpretive and ethical judgement, fostering creativity, imagination, and curiosity, and co-constructing meaning through dialogue and community, and assert that these qualities must remain central if AI is to advance equity, integrity, and human flourishing in science education. --- ### The Algorithmic Unconscious: Structural Mechanisms and Implicit Biases in Large Language Models Authors: Philippe Boisnard Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.CY, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18468v1 This article introduces the concept of the algorithmic unconscious to designate the set of structural determinations that operate within large language models (LLMs) without being accessible either to the model's own reflexivity or to that of its users. In contrast to approaches that reduce AI bias solely to dataset composition or to the projection of human intentionality, we argue that a significant class of biases emerges directly from the technical mechanisms of the models themselves: tokenization, attention, statistical optimization, and alignment procedures. By framing bias as an infrastructural phenomenon, this approach resolves a central theoretical ambiguity surrounding responsibility, neutrality, and correction in contemporary LLMs. Based on a comparative analysis of tokenization across a corpus of parallel sentences, we show that Arabic languages (Modern Standard Arabic and Maghrebi dialects) undergo a systematic inflation in token count relative to English, with ratios ranging from 1.6x to nearly 4x depending on the infrastructure (OpenAI, Anthropic, SentencePiece/Mistral). This over-segmentation constitutes a measurable infrastructural bias that mechanically increases inference costs, constrains access to contextual space, and alters attentional weighting within model representations. We relate these empirical findings to three additional structural mechanisms: causal bias (correlation vs causation), the erasure of minoritized features through dimensional collapse, and normative biases induced by safety alignment. Finally, we propose a framework for a technical clinic of models, grounded in the audit of tokenization regimes, latent space topology, and alignment systems, as a necessary condition for the critical appropriation of AI infrastructures. --- ### Can Multimodal LLMs See Science Instruction? Benchmarking Pedagogical Reasoning in K-12 Classroom Videos Authors: Yixuan Shen, Peng He, Honglu Liu, Jinxuan Fan, Yuyang Ji, Tingting Li, Tianlong Chen, Kaidi Xu, Feng Liu Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18466v2 K-12 science classrooms are rich sites of inquiry where students coordinate phenomena, evidence, and explanatory models through discourse; yet, the multimodal complexity of these interactions has made automated analysis elusive. Existing benchmarks for classroom discourse focus primarily on mathematics and rely solely on transcripts, overlooking the visual artifacts and model-based reasoning emphasized by the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). We address this gap with SciIBI, the first video benchmark for analyzing science classroom discourse, featuring 113 NGSS-aligned clips annotated with Core Instructional Practices (CIP) and sophistication levels. By evaluating eight state-of-the-art LLMs and Multimodal LLMs, we reveal fundamental limitations: current models struggle to distinguish pedagogically similar practices, suggesting that CIP coding requires instructional reasoning beyond surface pattern matching. Furthermore, adding video input yields inconsistent gains across architectures. Crucially, our evidence-based evaluation reveals that models often succeed through surface shortcuts rather than genuine pedagogical understanding. These findings establish science classroom discourse as a challenging frontier for multimodal AI and point toward human-AI collaboration, where models retrieve evidence to accelerate expert review rather than replace it. --- ### AGORA: Agentic Green Orchestration Architecture for Beyond 5G Networks Authors: Rodrigo Moreira, Larissa Ferreira Rodrigues Moreira, Maycon Peixoto, Flavio De Oliveira Silva Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.NI, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13290v1 Effective management and operational decision-making for complex mobile network systems present significant challenges, particularly when addressing conflicting requirements such as efficiency, user satisfaction, and energy-efficient traffic steering. The literature presents various approaches aimed at enhancing network management, including the Zero-Touch Network (ZTN) and Self-Organizing Network (SON); however, these approaches often lack a practical and scalable mechanism to consider human sustainability goals as input, translate them into energy-aware operational policies, and enforce them at runtime. In this study, we address this gap by proposing the AGORA: Agentic Green Orchestration Architecture for Beyond 5G Networks. AGORA embeds a local tool-augmented Large Language Model (LLM) agent in the mobile network control loop to translate natural-language sustainability goals into telemetry-grounded actions, actuating the User Plane Function (UPF) to perform energy-aware traffic steering. The findings indicate a strong latency-energy coupling in tool-driven control loops and demonstrate that compact models can achieve a low energy footprint while still facilitating correct policy execution, including non-zero migration behavior under stressed Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) conditions. Our approach paves the way for sustainability-first, intent-driven network operations that align human objectives with executable orchestration in Beyond-5G infrastructures. --- ### Evaluating the Impact of Post-Training Quantization on Reliable VQA with Multimodal LLMs Authors: Paul Jonas Kurz, Tobias Jan Wieczorek, Mohamed A. Abdelsalam, Rahaf Aljundi, Marcus Rohrbach Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13289v1 Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) are increasingly deployed in domains where both reliability and efficiency are critical. However, current models remain overconfident, producing highly certain but incorrect answers. At the same time, their large size limits deployment on edge devices, necessitating compression. We study the intersection of these two challenges by analyzing how Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) compression affects both accuracy and reliability in Visual Question Answering (VQA). We evaluate two MLLMs, Qwen2-VL-7B and Idefics3-8B, quantized with data-free (HQQ) and data-aware (MBQ) methods across multiple bit widths. To counteract the reduction in reliability caused by quantization, we adapt the Selector confidence estimator for quantized multimodal settings and test its robustness across various quantization levels and out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. We find that PTQ degrades both accuracy and reliability. Data-aware methods soften the effect thereof. The Selector substantially mitigates the reliability impact. The combination of int4 MBQ and the Selector achieves the best efficiency-reliability trade-off, closing in on uncompressed performance at approx. 75% less memory demand. Overall, we present the first systematic study linking quantization and reliability in multimodal settings. --- ### Can Large Language Models Implement Agent-Based Models? An ODD-based Replication Study Authors: Nuno Fachada, Daniel Fernandes, Carlos M. Fernandes, João P. Matos-Carvalho Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10140v2 Large language models (LLMs) can now synthesize non-trivial executable code from textual descriptions, raising an important question: can LLMs reliably implement agent-based models from standardized specifications in a way that supports replication, verification, and validation? We address this question by evaluating 17 contemporary LLMs on a controlled ODD-to-code translation task, using the PPHPC predator-prey model as a fully specified reference. Generated Python implementations are assessed through staged executability checks, model-independent statistical comparison against a validated NetLogo baseline, and quantitative measures of runtime efficiency and maintainability. Results show that behaviorally faithful implementations are achievable but not guaranteed, and that executability alone is insufficient for scientific use. GPT-4.1 consistently produces statistically valid and efficient implementations, with Claude 3.7 Sonnet performing well but less reliably. Overall, the findings clarify both the promise and current limitations of LLMs as model engineering tools, with implications for reproducible agent-based and ecological modeling. --- ### Anonymization-Enhanced Privacy Protection for Mobile GUI Agents: Available but Invisible Authors: Lepeng Zhao, Zhenhua Zou, Shuo Li, Zhuotao Liu Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10139v3 Mobile Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in automating complex smartphone tasks by leveraging multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and system-level control interfaces. However, this paradigm introduces significant privacy risks, as agents typically capture and process entire screen contents, thereby exposing sensitive personal data such as phone numbers, addresses, messages, and financial information. Existing defenses either reduce UI exposure, obfuscate only task-irrelevant content, or rely on user authorization, but none can protect task-critical sensitive information while preserving seamless agent usability. We propose an anonymization-based privacy protection framework that enforces the principle of available-but-invisible access to sensitive data: sensitive information remains usable for task execution but is never directly visible to the cloud-based agent. Our system detects sensitive UI content using a PII-aware recognition model and replaces it with deterministic, type-preserving placeholders (e.g., PHONE_NUMBER#a1b2c) that retain semantic categories while removing identifying details. A layered architecture comprising a PII Detector, UI Transformer, Secure Interaction Proxy, and Privacy Gatekeeper ensures consistent anonymization across user instructions, XML hierarchies, and screenshots, mediates all agent actions over anonymized interfaces, and supports narrowly scoped local computations when reasoning over raw values is necessary. Extensive experiments on the AndroidLab and PrivScreen benchmarks show that our framework substantially reduces privacy leakage across multiple models while incurring only modest utility degradation, achieving the best observed privacy-utility trade-off among existing methods. Code available at: https://github.com/one-step-beh1nd/gui_privacy_protection --- ### Multimodal Information Fusion for Chart Understanding: A Survey of MLLMs -- Evolution, Limitations, and Cognitive Enhancement Authors: Zhihang Yi, Jian Zhao, Jiancheng Lv, Tao Wang Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10138v1 Chart understanding is a quintessential information fusion task, requiring the seamless integration of graphical and textual data to extract meaning. The advent of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has revolutionized this domain, yet the landscape of MLLM-based chart analysis remains fragmented and lacks systematic organization. This survey provides a comprehensive roadmap of this nascent frontier by structuring the domain's core components. We begin by analyzing the fundamental challenges of fusing visual and linguistic information in charts. We then categorize downstream tasks and datasets, introducing a novel taxonomy of canonical and non-canonical benchmarks to highlight the field's expanding scope. Subsequently, we present a comprehensive evolution of methodologies, tracing the progression from classic deep learning techniques to state-of-the-art MLLM paradigms that leverage sophisticated fusion strategies. By critically examining the limitations of current models, particularly their perceptual and reasoning deficits, we identify promising future directions, including advanced alignment techniques and reinforcement learning for cognitive enhancement. This survey aims to equip researchers and practitioners with a structured understanding of how MLLMs are transforming chart information fusion and to catalyze progress toward more robust and reliable systems. --- ### Multi-encoder ConvNeXt Network with Smooth Attentional Feature Fusion for Multispectral Semantic Segmentation Authors: Leo Thomas Ramos, Angel D. Sappa Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10137v1 This work proposes MeCSAFNet, a multi-branch encoder-decoder architecture for land cover segmentation in multispectral imagery. The model separately processes visible and non-visible channels through dual ConvNeXt encoders, followed by individual decoders that reconstruct spatial information. A dedicated fusion decoder integrates intermediate features at multiple scales, combining fine spatial cues with high-level spectral representations. The feature fusion is further enhanced with CBAM attention, and the ASAU activation function contributes to stable and efficient optimization. The model is designed to process different spectral configurations, including a 4-channel (4c) input combining RGB and NIR bands, as well as a 6-channel (6c) input incorporating NDVI and NDWI indices. Experiments on the Five-Billion-Pixels (FBP) and Potsdam datasets demonstrate significant performance gains. On FBP, MeCSAFNet-base (6c) surpasses U-Net (4c) by +19.21%, U-Net (6c) by +14.72%, SegFormer (4c) by +19.62%, and SegFormer (6c) by +14.74% in mIoU. On Potsdam, MeCSAFNet-large (4c) improves over DeepLabV3+ (4c) by +6.48%, DeepLabV3+ (6c) by +5.85%, SegFormer (4c) by +9.11%, and SegFormer (6c) by +4.80% in mIoU. The model also achieves consistent gains over several recent state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, compact variants of MeCSAFNet deliver notable performance with lower training time and reduced inference cost, supporting their deployment in resource-constrained environments. --- ### Persistent Entropy as a Detector of Phase Transitions Authors: Marcos Gutierrez-del-Pozo, Eduardo Paluzo-Hidalgo, Matteo Rucco Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: stat.ML, cs.AI, cs.IT, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09058v2 Persistent entropy is a scalar summary of persistence barcodes widely used to detect regime changes, yet there is no account of when a structural change in a barcode must produce a detectable change in entropy. We establish a model-agnostic theorem supplying such conditions. Treating persistence diagrams as random objects indexed by a control parameter, we identify a dispersion-condensation mechanism in the normalized persistence weights and derive an explicit lower bound on the entropy difference between the two regimes, valid with high probability at finite sample size and insensitive to the absolute scale of bar lifetimes. We also give a procedure for verifying the hypotheses on empirical barcodes. Applied to convolutional networks, the criterion shows that the circular organization of learned filters reported by Gabrielsson and Carlsson emerges through a sharp topological phase transition, and locates its onset: within a few hundred iterations on MNIST, but an order of magnitude later on CIFAR-10. The same criterion detects the Kuramoto synchronization and Vicsek order-disorder transitions. --- ### Persistent Entropy as a Detector of Phase Transitions Authors: Matteo Rucco Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: stat.ML, cs.AI, cs.IT, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09058v1 Persistent entropy (PE) is an information-theoretic summary statistic of persistence barcodes that has been widely used to detect regime changes in complex systems. Despite its empirical success, a general theoretical understanding of when and why persistent entropy reliably detects phase transitions has remained limited, particularly in stochastic and data-driven settings. In this work, we establish a general, model-independent theorem providing sufficient conditions under which persistent entropy provably separates two phases. We show that persistent entropy exhibits an asymptotically non-vanishing gap across phases. The result relies only on continuity of persistent entropy along the convergent diagram sequence, or under mild regularization, and is therefore broadly applicable across data modalities, filtrations, and homological degrees. To connect asymptotic theory with finite-time computations, we introduce an operational framework based on topological stabilization, defining a topological transition time by stabilizing a chosen topological statistic over sliding windows, and a probability-based estimator of critical parameters within a finite observation horizon. We validate the framework on the Kuramoto synchronization transition, the Vicsek order-to-disorder transition in collective motion, and neural network training dynamics across multiple datasets and architectures. Across all experiments, stabilization of persistent entropy and collapse of variability across realizations provide robust numerical signatures consistent with the theoretical mechanism. --- ### NLP for Local Governance Meeting Records: A Focus Article on Tasks, Datasets, Metrics and Benchmark Authors: Ricardo Campos, José Pedro Evans, José Miguel Isidro, Miguel Marques, Luís Filipe Cunha, Alípio Jorge, Sérgio Nunes, Nuno Guimarães Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08162v1 Local governance meeting records are official documents, in the form of minutes or transcripts, documenting how proposals, discussions, and procedural actions unfold during institutional meetings. While generally structured, these documents are often dense, bureaucratic, and highly heterogeneous across municipalities, exhibiting significant variation in language, terminology, structure, and overall organization. This heterogeneity makes them difficult for non-experts to interpret and challenging for intelligent automated systems to process, limiting public transparency and civic engagement. To address these challenges, computational methods can be employed to structure and interpret such complex documents. In particular, Natural Language Processing (NLP) offers well-established methods that can enhance the accessibility and interpretability of governmental records. In this focus article, we review foundational NLP tasks that support the structuring of local governance meeting documents. Specifically, we review three core tasks: document segmentation, domain-specific entity extraction and automatic text summarization, which are essential for navigating lengthy deliberations, identifying political actors and personal information, and generating concise representations of complex decision-making processes. In reviewing these tasks, we discuss methodological approaches, evaluation metrics, and publicly available resources, while highlighting domain-specific challenges such as data scarcity, privacy constraints, and source variability. By synthesizing existing work across these foundational tasks, this article provides a structured overview of how NLP can enhance the structuring and accessibility of local governance meeting records. --- ### The Confidence Manifold: Geometric Structure of Correctness Representations in Language Models Authors: Seonglae Cho, Zekun Wu, Kleyton Da Costa, Adriano Koshiyama Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08159v2 When a language model asserts that "the capital of Australia is Sydney," does it know this is wrong? Models assert misconceptions with the same fluency as facts, so the question cannot be answered from output uncertainty. Truth-related signals are known to exist in the residual stream, but not their geometry: how many dimensions carry the signal, how simple a detector can be, and whether it transfers. We characterize this geometry across 11 models (124M-14B) and test it causally with activation steering, concept erasure, and distributed alignment search. The structure is simple: two class centroids in a 2-8 dimensional subspace match a trained linear probe, and 25 labeled examples recover 90% of full-data AUC on GPT-2. Steering shifts hallucination rates by 9.1 points on six models, erasure drops detection to chance, and distributed alignment search, the only method that bounds rank, localizes at most five causal dimensions. The internal advantage is regime-specific: probes far outperform P(True) and semantic entropy on adversarial misconceptions but tie on standard QA. Single-dataset probes transfer near-randomly until joint multi-dataset training restores 0.73-0.91 AUC. That centroid distance matches probe performance indicates class separation is a mean shift, making detection geometric rather than learned. --- ### A second order regret bound for NormalHedge Authors: Yoav Freund, Nicholas J. A. Harvey, Victor S. Portella, Yabing Qi, Yu-Xiang Wang Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08151v1 We consider the problem of prediction with expert advice for ``easy'' sequences. We show that a variant of NormalHedge enjoys a second-order $ε$-quantile regret bound of $O\big(\sqrt{V_T \log(V_T/ε)}\big) $ when $V_T > \log N$, where $V_T$ is the cumulative second moment of instantaneous per-expert regret averaged with respect to a natural distribution determined by the algorithm. The algorithm is motivated by a continuous time limit using Stochastic Differential Equations. The discrete time analysis uses self-concordance techniques. --- ### DIAL-SUMMER: A Structured Evaluation Framework of Hierarchical Errors in Dialogue Summaries Authors: Sahana Ramnath, Nima Chitsazan, Mingyang Zhou, Chia-Hsuan Lee, Shi-Xiong Zhang, Stephen Rawls, Sambit Sahu, Sangwoo Cho, Xiang Ren, Genta Indra Winata, Akshaj Kumar Veldanda Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08149v1 Dialogues are a predominant mode of communication for humans, and it is immensely helpful to have automatically generated summaries of them (e.g., to revise key points discussed in a meeting, to review conversations between customer agents and product users). Prior works on dialogue summary evaluation largely ignore the complexities specific to this task: (i) shift in structure, from multiple speakers discussing information in a scattered fashion across several turns, to a summary's sentences, and (ii) shift in narration viewpoint, from speakers' first/second-person narration, standardized third-person narration in the summary. In this work, we introduce our framework DIALSUMMER to address the above. We propose DIAL-SUMMER's taxonomy of errors to comprehensively evaluate dialogue summaries at two hierarchical levels: DIALOGUE-LEVEL that focuses on the broader speakers/turns, and WITHIN-TURN-LEVEL that focuses on the information talked about inside a turn. We then present DIAL-SUMMER's dataset composed of dialogue summaries manually annotated with our taxonomy's fine-grained errors. We conduct empirical analyses of these annotated errors, and observe interesting trends (e.g., turns occurring in middle of the dialogue are the most frequently missed in the summary, extrinsic hallucinations largely occur at the end of the summary). We also conduct experiments on LLM-Judges' capability at detecting these errors, through which we demonstrate the challenging nature of our dataset, the robustness of our taxonomy, and the need for future work in this field to enhance LLMs' performance in the same. Code and inference dataset coming soon. --- ### Variance-Gated Ensembles: An Epistemic-Aware Framework for Uncertainty Estimation Authors: H. Martin Gillis, Isaac Xu, Thomas Trappenberg Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08142v2 Machine learning applications require fast and reliable per-sample uncertainty estimation. A common approach is to use predictive distributions from Bayesian or approximation methods and additively decompose uncertainty into aleatoric (i.e., data-related) and epistemic (i.e., model-related) components. However, additive decomposition has recently been questioned, with evidence that it breaks down when using finite-ensemble sampling and/or mismatched predictive distributions. This paper introduces Variance-Gated Ensembles (VGE), an intuitive, differentiable framework that injects epistemic sensitivity via a signal-to-noise gate computed from ensemble statistics. VGE provides: (i) a Variance-Gated Margin Uncertainty (VGMU) score that couples decision margins with ensemble predictive variance; and (ii) a Variance-Gated Normalization (VGN) layer that generalizes the variance-gated uncertainty mechanism to training via per-class, learnable normalization of ensemble member probabilities. We derive closed-form vector-Jacobian products enabling end-to-end training through ensemble sample mean and variance. VGE matches or exceeds state-of-the-art information-theoretic baselines while remaining computationally efficient. As a result, VGE provides a practical and scalable approach to epistemic-aware uncertainty estimation in ensemble models. --- ### Robustness of Vision Language Models Against Split-Image Harmful Input Attacks Authors: Md Rafi Ur Rashid, MD Sadik Hossain Shanto, Vishnu Asutosh Dasu, Shagufta Mehnaz Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08136v2 Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are now a core part of modern AI. Recent work proposed several visual jailbreak attacks using single/ holistic images. However, contemporary VLMs demonstrate strong robustness against such attacks due to extensive safety alignment through preference optimization, e.g., reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). In this work, we identify a new vulnerability: while VLM pretraining and instruction tuning generalize well to split-image inputs, safety alignment is typically performed only on holistic images and does not account for harmful semantics distributed across multiple image fragments. Consequently, VLMs often fail to detect and reject harmful split-image inputs, in which unsafe cues emerge only upon combining images. We introduce novel split-image visual jailbreak attacks (\textbf{SIVA}) that exploit this misalignment. Unlike prior optimization-based attacks, which exhibit poor black-box transferability due to architectural and prior mismatches across models, our attacks evolve in progressive phases from naive splitting to an adaptive white-box attack, culminating in a black-box transfer attack. Our strongest strategy leverages a novel adversarial knowledge distillation \textbf{(Adv-KD)} algorithm to substantially improve cross-model transferability. Evaluations on four state-of-the-art modern VLMs and three jailbreak datasets demonstrate that our strongest attack achieves up to 44% higher transfer success than existing baselines. Lastly, we propose efficient ways to address this critical vulnerability in the current VLM safety alignment. --- ### Robustness of Vision Language Models Against Split-Image Harmful Input Attacks Authors: Md Rafi Ur Rashid, MD Sadik Hossain Shanto, Vishnu Asutosh Dasu, Shagufta Mehnaz Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08136v1 Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are now a core part of modern AI. Recent work proposed several visual jailbreak attacks using single/ holistic images. However, contemporary VLMs demonstrate strong robustness against such attacks due to extensive safety alignment through preference optimization (e.g., RLHF). In this work, we identify a new vulnerability: while VLM pretraining and instruction tuning generalize well to split-image inputs, safety alignment is typically performed only on holistic images and does not account for harmful semantics distributed across multiple image fragments. Consequently, VLMs often fail to detect and refuse harmful split-image inputs, where unsafe cues emerge only after combining images. We introduce novel split-image visual jailbreak attacks (SIVA) that exploit this misalignment. Unlike prior optimization-based attacks, which exhibit poor black-box transferability due to architectural and prior mismatches across models, our attacks evolve in progressive phases from naive splitting to an adaptive white-box attack, culminating in a black-box transfer attack. Our strongest strategy leverages a novel adversarial knowledge distillation (Adv-KD) algorithm to substantially improve cross-model transferability. Evaluations on three state-of-the-art modern VLMs and three jailbreak datasets demonstrate that our strongest attack achieves up to 60% higher transfer success than existing baselines. Lastly, we propose efficient ways to address this critical vulnerability in the current VLM safety alignment. --- ### Fields of The World: A Field Guide for Extracting Agricultural Field Boundaries Authors: Isaac Corley, Hannah Kerner, Caleb Robinson, Jennifer Marcus Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08131v1 Field boundary maps are a building block for agricultural data products and support crop monitoring, yield estimation, and disease estimation. This tutorial presents the Fields of The World (FTW) ecosystem: a benchmark of 1.6M field polygons across 24 countries, pre-trained segmentation models, and command-line inference tools. We provide two notebooks that cover (1) local-scale field boundary extraction with crop classification and forest loss attribution, and (2) country-scale inference using cloud-optimized data. We use MOSAIKS random convolutional features and FTW derived field boundaries to map crop type at the field level and report macro F1 scores of 0.65--0.75 for crop type classification with limited labels. Finally, we show how to explore pre-computed predictions over five countries (4.76M km\textsuperscript{2}), with median predicted field areas from 0.06 ha (Rwanda) to 0.28 ha (Switzerland). --- ### Adjustment of Cluster-Then-Predict Framework for Multiport Scatterer Load Prediction Authors: Hanjun Park, Aleksandr D. Kuznetsov, Ville Viikari Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: eess.SP, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08129v2 Predicting interdependent load values in multiport scatterers is challenging due to high dimensionality and complex dependence between impedance and scattering ability, yet this prediction remains crucial for the design of communication and measurement systems. In this paper, we propose a two-stage cluster-then-predict framework for multiple load values prediction task in multiport scatterers. The proposed cluster-then-predict approach effectively captures the underlying functional relation between S-parameters and corresponding load impedances, achieving up to a 46% reduction in Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) compared to the baseline when applied to gradient boosting (GB). This improvement is consistent across various clustering and regression methods. Furthermore, we introduce the Real-world Unified Index (RUI), a metric for quantitative analysis of trade-offs among multiple metrics with conflicting objectives and different scales, suitable for performance assessment in realistic scenarios. Based on RUI, the combination of K-means clustering and k-nearest neighbors (KNN) is identified as the optimal setup for the analyzed multiport scatterer. --- ### Online Bayesian Imbalanced Learning with Bregman-Calibrated Deep Networks Authors: Zahir Alsulaimawi Published: 2026-02-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08128v1 Class imbalance remains a fundamental challenge in machine learning, where standard classifiers exhibit severe performance degradation in minority classes. Although existing approaches address imbalance through resampling or cost-sensitive learning during training, they require retraining or access to labeled target data when class distributions shift at deployment time, a common occurrence in real-world applications such as fraud detection, medical diagnosis, and anomaly detection. We present \textit{Online Bayesian Imbalanced Learning} (OBIL), a principled framework that decouples likelihood-ratio estimation from class-prior assumptions, enabling real-time adaptation to distribution shifts without model retraining. Our approach builds on the established connection between Bregman divergences and proper scoring rules to show that deep networks trained with such losses produce posterior probability estimates from which prior-invariant likelihood ratios can be extracted. We prove that these likelihood-ratio estimates remain valid under arbitrary changes in class priors and cost structures, requiring only a threshold adjustment for optimal Bayes decisions. We derive finite-sample regret bounds demonstrating that OBIL achieves $O(\sqrt{T \log T})$ regret against an oracle with perfect prior knowledge. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets and medical diagnosis benchmarks under simulated deployment shifts demonstrate that OBIL maintains robust performance under severe distribution shifts, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in F1 Score when test distributions deviate significantly from the training conditions. ---