# Research Papers — 2026-02 · bundle page 163 of 210 > Full-text markdown of papers #8101–8150 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/163 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-02/page/162.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-02/page/164.md) ### CASTLE: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Student-Tailored Personalized Safety in Large Language Models Authors: Rui Jia, Ruiyi Lan, Fengrui Liu, Zhongxiang Dai, Bo Jiang, Jing Shao, Jingyuan Chen, Guandong Xu, Fei Wu, Min Zhang Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05633v1 Large language models (LLMs) have advanced the development of personalized learning in education. However, their inherent generation mechanisms often produce homogeneous responses to identical prompts. This one-size-fits-all mechanism overlooks the substantial heterogeneity in students cognitive and psychological, thereby posing potential safety risks to vulnerable groups. Existing safety evaluations primarily rely on context-independent metrics such as factual accuracy, bias, or toxicity, which fail to capture the divergent harms that the same response might cause across different student attributes. To address this gap, we propose the concept of Student-Tailored Personalized Safety and construct CASTLE based on educational theories. This benchmark covers 15 educational safety risks and 14 student attributes, comprising 92,908 bilingual scenarios. We further design three evaluation metrics: Risk Sensitivity, measuring the model ability to detect risks; Emotional Empathy, evaluating the model capacity to recognize student states; and Student Alignment, assessing the match between model responses and student attributes. Experiments on 18 SOTA LLMs demonstrate that CASTLE poses a significant challenge: all models scored below an average safety rating of 2.3 out of 5, indicating substantial deficiencies in personalized safety assurance. --- ### Rewards as Labels: Revisiting RLVR from a Classification Perspective Authors: Zepeng Zhai, Meilin Chen, Jiaxuan Zhao, Junlang Qian, Lei Shen, Yuan Lu Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05630v4 Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards has recently advanced the capabilities of Large Language Models in complex reasoning tasks by providing explicit rule-based supervision. Among RLVR methods, GRPO and its variants have achieved strong empirical performance. Despite their success, we identify that they suffer from Gradient Misassignment in Positives and Gradient Domination in Negatives, which lead to inefficient and suboptimal policy updates. To address these issues, we propose Rewards as Labels (REAL), a novel framework that revisits verifiable rewards as categorical labels rather than scalar weights, thereby reformulating policy optimization as a classification problem. Building on this, we further introduce anchor logits to enhance policy learning. Our analysis reveals that REAL induces a monotonic and bounded gradient weighting, enabling balanced gradient allocation across rollouts and effectively mitigating the identified mismatches. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that REAL improves training stability and consistently outperforms GRPO and strong variants such as DAPO. On the 1.5B model, REAL improves average Pass@1 over DAPO by 6.7%. These gains further scale to 7B model, REAL continues to outperform DAPO and GSPO by 6.2% and 1.7%, respectively. Notably, even with a vanilla binary cross-entropy, REAL remains stable and exceeds DAPO by 4.5% on average. --- ### ROMAN: Reward-Orchestrated Multi-Head Attention Network for Autonomous Driving System Testing Authors: Jianlei Chi, Yuzhen Wu, Jiaxuan Hou, Xiaodong Zhang, Ming Fan, Suhui Sun, Weijun Dai, Bo Li, Jianguo Sun, Jun Sun Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.SE, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05629v1 Automated Driving System (ADS) acts as the brain of autonomous vehicles, responsible for their safety and efficiency. Safe deployment requires thorough testing in diverse real-world scenarios and compliance with traffic laws like speed limits, signal obedience, and right-of-way rules. Violations like running red lights or speeding pose severe safety risks. However, current testing approaches face significant challenges: limited ability to generate complex and high-risk law-breaking scenarios, and failing to account for complex interactions involving multiple vehicles and critical situations. To address these challenges, we propose ROMAN, a novel scenario generation approach for ADS testing that combines a multi-head attention network with a traffic law weighting mechanism. ROMAN is designed to generate high-risk violation scenarios to enable more thorough and targeted ADS evaluation. The multi-head attention mechanism models interactions among vehicles, traffic signals, and other factors. The traffic law weighting mechanism implements a workflow that leverages an LLM-based risk weighting module to evaluate violations based on the two dimensions of severity and occurrence. We have evaluated ROMAN by testing the Baidu Apollo ADS within the CARLA simulation platform and conducting extensive experiments to measure its performance. Experimental results demonstrate that ROMAN surpassed state-of-the-art tools ABLE and LawBreaker by achieving 7.91% higher average violation count than ABLE and 55.96% higher than LawBreaker, while also maintaining greater scenario diversity. In addition, only ROMAN successfully generated violation scenarios for every clause of the input traffic laws, enabling it to identify more high-risk violations than existing approaches. --- ### AI chatbots versus human healthcare professionals: a systematic review and meta-analysis of empathy in patient care Authors: Alastair Howcroft, Amber Bennett-Weston, Ahmad Khan, Joseff Griffiths, Simon Gay, Jeremy Howick Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05628v1 Background: Empathy is widely recognized for improving patient outcomes, including reduced pain and anxiety and improved satisfaction, and its absence can cause harm. Meanwhile, use of artificial intelligence (AI)-based chatbots in healthcare is rapidly expanding, with one in five general practitioners using generative AI to assist with tasks such as writing letters. Some studies suggest AI chatbots can outperform human healthcare professionals (HCPs) in empathy, though findings are mixed and lack synthesis. Sources of data: We searched multiple databases for studies comparing AI chatbots using large language models with human HCPs on empathy measures. We assessed risk of bias with ROBINS-I and synthesized findings using random-effects meta-analysis where feasible, whilst avoiding double counting. Areas of agreement: We identified 15 studies (2023-2024). Thirteen studies reported statistically significantly higher empathy ratings for AI, with only two studies situated in dermatology favouring human responses. Of the 15 studies, 13 provided extractable data and were suitable for pooling. Meta-analysis of those 13 studies, all utilising ChatGPT-3.5/4, showed a standardized mean difference of 0.87 (95% CI, 0.54-1.20) favouring AI (P < .00001), roughly equivalent to a two-point increase on a 10-point scale. Areas of controversy: Studies relied on text-based assessments that overlook non-verbal cues and evaluated empathy through proxy raters. Growing points: Our findings indicate that, in text-only scenarios, AI chatbots are frequently perceived as more empathic than human HCPs. Areas timely for developing research: Future research should validate these findings with direct patient evaluations and assess whether emerging voice-enabled AI systems can deliver similar empathic advantages. --- ### Reactive Knowledge Representation and Asynchronous Reasoning Authors: Simon Kohaut, Benedict Flade, Julian Eggert, Kristian Kersting, Devendra Singh Dhami Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05625v2 Exact inference in complex probabilistic models often incurs prohibitive computational costs. This challenge is particularly acute for autonomous agents in dynamic environments that require frequent, real-time belief updates. Existing methods are often inefficient for ongoing reasoning, as they re-evaluate the entire model upon any change, failing to exploit that real-world information streams have heterogeneous update rates. To address this, we approach the problem from a reactive, asynchronous, probabilistic reasoning perspective. We first introduce Resin (Reactive Signal Inference), a probabilistic programming language that merges probabilistic logic with reactive programming. Furthermore, to provide efficient and exact semantics for Resin, we propose Reactive Circuits (RCs). Formulated as a meta-structure over Algebraic Circuits and asynchronous data streams, RCs are time-dynamic Directed Acyclic Graphs that autonomously adapt themselves based on the volatility of input signals. In high-fidelity drone swarm simulations, our approach achieves several orders of magnitude of speedup over frequency-agnostic inference. We demonstrate that RCs' structural adaptations successfully capture environmental dynamics, significantly reducing latency and facilitating reactive real-time reasoning. By partitioning computations based on the estimated Frequency of Change in the asynchronous inputs, large inference tasks can be decomposed into individually memoized sub-problems. This ensures that only the specific components of a model affected by new information are re-evaluated, drastically reducing redundant computation in streaming contexts. --- ### Mode-Dependent Rectification for Stable PPO Training Authors: Mohamad Mohamad, Francesco Ponzio, Xavier Descombes Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05619v2 Mode-dependent architectural components (layers that behave differently during training and evaluation, such as Batch Normalization or dropout) are commonly used in visual reinforcement learning but can destabilize on-policy optimization. We show that in Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), discrepancies between training and evaluation behavior induced by Batch Normalization lead to policy mismatch, distributional drift, and reward collapse. We propose Mode-Dependent Rectification (MDR), a lightweight dual-phase training procedure that stabilizes PPO under mode-dependent layers without architectural changes. Experiments across procedurally generated games and real-world patch-localization tasks demonstrate that MDR consistently improves stability and performance, and extends naturally to other mode-dependent layers. --- ### Mode-Dependent Rectification for Stable PPO Training Authors: Mohamad Mohamad, Francesco Ponzio, Xavier Descombes Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05619v1 Mode-dependent architectural components (layers that behave differently during training and evaluation, such as Batch Normalization or dropout) are commonly used in visual reinforcement learning but can destabilize on-policy optimization. We show that in Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), discrepancies between training and evaluation behavior induced by Batch Normalization lead to policy mismatch, distributional drift, and reward collapse. We propose Mode-Dependent Rectification (MDR), a lightweight dual-phase training procedure that stabilizes PPO under mode-dependent layers without architectural changes. Experiments across procedurally generated games and real-world patch-localization tasks demonstrate that MDR consistently improves stability and performance, and extends naturally to other mode-dependent layers. --- ### Unified Sensor Simulation for Autonomous Driving Authors: Nikolay Patakin, Arsenii Shirokov, Anton Konushin, Dmitry Senushkin Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05617v1 In this work, we introduce \textbf{XSIM}, a sensor simulation framework for autonomous driving. XSIM extends 3DGUT splatting with a generalized rolling-shutter modeling tailored for autonomous driving applications. Our framework provides a unified and flexible formulation for appearance and geometric sensor modeling, enabling rendering of complex sensor distortions in dynamic environments. We identify spherical cameras, such as LiDARs, as a critical edge case for existing 3DGUT splatting due to cyclic projection and time discontinuities at azimuth boundaries leading to incorrect particle projection. To address this issue, we propose a phase modeling mechanism that explicitly accounts temporal and shape discontinuities of Gaussians projected by the Unscented Transform at azimuth borders. In addition, we introduce an extended 3D Gaussian representation that incorporates two distinct opacity parameters to resolve mismatches between geometry and color distributions. As a result, our framework provides enhanced scene representations with improved geometric consistency and photorealistic appearance. We evaluate our framework extensively on multiple autonomous driving datasets, including Waymo Open Dataset, Argoverse 2, and PandaSet. Our framework consistently outperforms strong recent baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance across all datasets. The source code is publicly available at \href{https://github.com/whesense/XSIM}{https://github.com/whesense/XSIM}. --- ### Path-Guided Flow Matching for Dataset Distillation Authors: Xuhui Li, Zhengquan Luo, Xiwei Liu, Yongqiang Yu, Zhiqiang Xu Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05616v1 Dataset distillation compresses large datasets into compact synthetic sets with comparable performance in training models. Despite recent progress on diffusion-based distillation, this type of method typically depends on heuristic guidance or prototype assignment, which comes with time-consuming sampling and trajectory instability and thus hurts downstream generalization especially under strong control or low IPC. We propose \emph{Path-Guided Flow Matching (PGFM)}, the first flow matching-based framework for generative distillation, which enables fast deterministic synthesis by solving an ODE in a few steps. PGFM conducts flow matching in the latent space of a frozen VAE to learn class-conditional transport from Gaussian noise to data distribution. Particularly, we develop a continuous path-to-prototype guidance algorithm for ODE-consistent path control, which allows trajectories to reliably land on assigned prototypes while preserving diversity and efficiency. Extensive experiments across high-resolution benchmarks demonstrate that PGFM matches or surpasses prior diffusion-based distillation approaches with fewer steps of sampling while delivering competitive performance with remarkably improved efficiency, e.g., 7.6$\times$ more efficient than the diffusion-based counterparts with 78\% mode coverage. --- ### Shiva-DiT: Residual-Based Differentiable Top-$k$ Selection for Efficient Diffusion Transformers Authors: Jiaji Zhang, Hailiang Zhao, Jiaju Wu, Ruichao Sun, Xinkui Zhao, Shuiguang Deng Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05605v2 Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) are costly at high resolution because self-attention scales quadratically with token sequence length. Existing pruning methods do not jointly provide end-to-end learnability, low training overhead, and deterministic token counts for predictable token-dependent computation. We propose Shiva-DiT, based on Residual-Based Differentiable Top-k Selection. Its forward pass executes hard top-k selection, while a residual-aware straight-through estimator propagates gradients to both token scores and the budget k without evaluating a second backbone path. A Context-Aware Router and Adaptive Ratio Policy learn layer- and timestep-dependent retention schedules under a target average budget. Experiments on SD3-Medium, Flux.1-dev, and PixArt-Σ show consistent reductions in FLOPs and measured latency. On SD3-Medium, Shiva-DiT provides four fidelity-latency operating points and reaches a 1.54x wall-clock speedup with competitive fidelity. --- ### Shiva-DiT: Residual-Based Differentiable Top-$k$ Selection for Efficient Diffusion Transformers Authors: Jiaji Zhang, Hailiang Zhao, Guoxuan Zhu, Ruichao Sun, Jiaju Wu, Xinkui Zhao, Hanlin Tang, Weiyi Lu, Kan Liu, Tao Lan, Lin Qu, Shuiguang Deng Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05605v1 Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) incur prohibitive computational costs due to the quadratic scaling of self-attention. Existing pruning methods fail to simultaneously satisfy differentiability, efficiency, and the strict static budgets required for hardware overhead. To address this, we propose Shiva-DiT, which effectively reconciles these conflicting requirements via Residual-Based Differentiable Top-$k$ Selection. By leveraging a residual-aware straight-through estimator, our method enforces deterministic token counts for static compilation while preserving end-to-end learnability through residual gradient estimation. Furthermore, we introduce a Context-Aware Router and Adaptive Ratio Policy to autonomously learn an adaptive pruning schedule. Experiments on mainstream models, including SD3.5, demonstrate that Shiva-DiT establishes a new Pareto frontier, achieving a 1.54$\times$ wall-clock speedup with superior fidelity compared to existing baselines, effectively eliminating ragged tensor overheads. --- ### Multi-instance robust fitting for non-classical geometric models Authors: Zongliang Zhang, Shuxiang Li, Xingwang Huang, Zongyue Wang Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05602v1 Most existing robust fitting methods are designed for classical models, such as lines, circles, and planes. In contrast, fewer methods have been developed to robustly handle non-classical models, such as spiral curves, procedural character models, and free-form surfaces. Furthermore, existing methods primarily focus on reconstructing a single instance of a non-classical model. This paper aims to reconstruct multiple instances of non-classical models from noisy data. We formulate this multi-instance fitting task as an optimization problem, which comprises an estimator and an optimizer. Specifically, we propose a novel estimator based on the model-to-data error, capable of handling outliers without a predefined error threshold. Since the proposed estimator is non-differentiable with respect to the model parameters, we employ a meta-heuristic algorithm as the optimizer to seek the global optimum. The effectiveness of our method are demonstrated through experimental results on various non-classical models. The code is available at https://github.com/zhangzongliang/fitting. --- ### On the Superlinear Relationship between SGD Noise Covariance and Loss Landscape Curvature Authors: Yikuan Zhang, Ning Yang, Yuhai Tu Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05600v2 Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) introduces anisotropic noise that is correlated with the local curvature of the loss landscape, thereby biasing optimization toward flat minima. Prior work often assumes an equivalence between the Fisher Information Matrix and the Hessian for negative log-likelihood losses, leading to the claim that the SGD noise covariance $\mathbf{C}$ is proportional to the Hessian $\mathbf{H}$. We show that this assumption holds only under restrictive conditions that are typically violated in deep neural networks. Using the recently discovered Activity--Weight Duality, we find a more general relationship agnostic to the specific loss formulation, showing that $\mathbf{C} \propto \mathbb{E}_p(\mathbf{h}_p^2)$, where $\mathbf{h}_p$ denotes the per-sample Hessian with $\mathbf{H} = \mathbb{E}_p(\mathbf{h}_p)$. As a consequence, $\mathbf{C}$ and $\mathbf{H}$ commute approximately rather than coincide exactly. We further find that, within the analyzed fully connected layers, their diagonal elements follow per-layer empirical power laws $C_{ii} \propto H_{ii}^γ$, with layer-dependent fitted exponents bounded by $1 \leq γ\leq 2$. Experiments across datasets, architectures, and loss functions support the resulting layerwise bounds, providing a unified characterization of the noise-curvature relationship in deep learning. --- ### BhashaSetu: Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer from High-Resource to Extreme Low-Resource Languages Authors: Subhadip Maji, Arnab Bhattacharya Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05599v1 Despite remarkable advances in natural language processing, developing effective systems for low-resource languages remains a formidable challenge, with performances typically lagging far behind high-resource counterparts due to data scarcity and insufficient linguistic resources. Cross-lingual knowledge transfer has emerged as a promising approach to address this challenge by leveraging resources from high-resource languages. In this paper, we investigate methods for transferring linguistic knowledge from high-resource languages to low-resource languages, where the number of labeled training instances is in hundreds. We focus on sentence-level and word-level tasks. We introduce a novel method, GETR (Graph-Enhanced Token Representation) for cross-lingual knowledge transfer along with two adopted baselines (a) augmentation in hidden layers and (b) token embedding transfer through token translation. Experimental results demonstrate that our GNN-based approach significantly outperforms existing multilingual and cross-lingual baseline methods, achieving 13 percentage point improvements on truly low-resource languages (Mizo, Khasi) for POS tagging, and 20 and 27 percentage point improvements in macro-F1 on simulated low-resource languages (Marathi, Bangla, Malayalam) across sentiment classification and NER tasks respectively. We also present a detailed analysis of the transfer mechanisms and identify key factors that contribute to successful knowledge transfer in this linguistic context. --- ### CAViT -- Channel-Aware Vision Transformer for Dynamic Feature Fusion Authors: Aon Safdar, Mohamed Saadeldin Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05598v1 Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated strong performance across a range of computer vision tasks by modeling long-range spatial interactions via self-attention. However, channel-wise mixing in ViTs remains static, relying on fixed multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) that lack adaptability to input content. We introduce 'CAViT', a dual-attention architecture that replaces the static MLP with a dynamic, attention-based mechanism for feature interaction. Each Transformer block in CAViT performs spatial self-attention followed by channel-wise self-attention, allowing the model to dynamically recalibrate feature representations based on global image context. This unified and content-aware token mixing strategy enhances representational expressiveness without increasing depth or complexity. We validate CAViT across five benchmark datasets spanning both natural and medical domains, where it outperforms the standard ViT baseline by up to +3.6% in accuracy, while reducing parameter count and FLOPs by over 30%. Qualitative attention maps reveal sharper and semantically meaningful activation patterns, validating the effectiveness of our attention-driven token mixing. --- ### Emulating Aggregate Human Choice Behavior and Biases with GPT Conversational Agents Authors: Stephen Pilli, Vivek Nallur Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.AI, cs.HC, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05597v1 Cognitive biases often shape human decisions. While large language models (LLMs) have been shown to reproduce well-known biases, a more critical question is whether LLMs can predict biases at the individual level and emulate the dynamics of biased human behavior when contextual factors, such as cognitive load, interact with these biases. We adapted three well-established decision scenarios into a conversational setting and conducted a human experiment (N=1100). Participants engaged with a chatbot that facilitates decision-making through simple or complex dialogues. Results revealed robust biases. To evaluate how LLMs emulate human decision-making under similar interactive conditions, we used participant demographics and dialogue transcripts to simulate these conditions with LLMs based on GPT-4 and GPT-5. The LLMs reproduced human biases with precision. We found notable differences between models in how they aligned human behavior. This has important implications for designing and evaluating adaptive, bias-aware LLM-based AI systems in interactive contexts. --- ### Efficient Algorithms for Robust Markov Decision Processes with $s$-Rectangular Ambiguity Sets Authors: Chin Pang Ho, Marek Petrik, Wolfram Wiesemann Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05591v1 Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) have attracted significant interest due to their ability to protect MDPs from poor out-of-sample performance in the presence of ambiguity. In contrast to classical MDPs, which account for stochasticity by modeling the dynamics through a stochastic process with a known transition kernel, a robust MDP additionally accounts for ambiguity by optimizing against the most adverse transition kernel from an ambiguity set constructed via historical data. In this paper, we develop a unified solution framework for a broad class of robust MDPs with $s$-rectangular ambiguity sets, where the most adverse transition probabilities are considered independently for each state. Using our algorithms, we show that $s$-rectangular robust MDPs with $1$- and $2$-norm as well as $φ$-divergence ambiguity sets can be solved several orders of magnitude faster than with state-of-the-art commercial solvers, and often only a logarithmic factor slower than classical MDPs. We demonstrate the favorable scaling properties of our algorithms on a range of synthetically generated as well as standard benchmark instances. --- ### EgoPoseVR: Spatiotemporal Multi-Modal Reasoning for Egocentric Full-Body Pose in Virtual Reality Authors: Haojie Cheng, Shaun Jing Heng Ong, Shaoyu Cai, Aiden Tat Yang Koh, Fuxi Ouyang, Eng Tat Khoo Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.ET, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05590v1 Immersive virtual reality (VR) applications demand accurate, temporally coherent full-body pose tracking. Recent head-mounted camera-based approaches show promise in egocentric pose estimation, but encounter challenges when applied to VR head-mounted displays (HMDs), including temporal instability, inaccurate lower-body estimation, and the lack of real-time performance. To address these limitations, we present EgoPoseVR, an end-to-end framework for accurate egocentric full-body pose estimation in VR that integrates headset motion cues with egocentric RGB-D observations through a dual-modality fusion pipeline. A spatiotemporal encoder extracts frame- and joint-level representations, which are fused via cross-attention to fully exploit complementary motion cues across modalities. A kinematic optimization module then imposes constraints from HMD signals, enhancing the accuracy and stability of pose estimation. To facilitate training and evaluation, we introduce a large-scale synthetic dataset of over 1.8 million temporally aligned HMD and RGB-D frames across diverse VR scenarios. Experimental results show that EgoPoseVR outperforms state-of-the-art egocentric pose estimation models. A user study in real-world scenes further shows that EgoPoseVR achieved significantly higher subjective ratings in accuracy, stability, embodiment, and intention for future use compared to baseline methods. These results show that EgoPoseVR enables robust full-body pose tracking, offering a practical solution for accurate VR embodiment without requiring additional body-worn sensors or room-scale tracking systems. --- ### A Mixed Reality System for Robust Manikin Localization in Childbirth Training Authors: Haojie Cheng, Chang Liu, Abhiram Kanneganti, Mahesh Arjandas Choolani, Arundhati Tushar Gosavi, Eng Tat Khoo Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.ET, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05588v1 Opportunities for medical students to gain practical experience in vaginal births are increasingly constrained by shortened clinical rotations, patient reluctance, and the unpredictable nature of labour. To alleviate clinicians' instructional burden and enhance trainees' learning efficiency, we introduce a mixed reality (MR) system for childbirth training that combines virtual guidance with tactile manikin interaction, thereby preserving authentic haptic feedback while enabling independent practice without continuous on-site expert supervision. The system extends the passthrough capability of commercial head-mounted displays (HMDs) by spatially calibrating an external RGB-D camera, allowing real-time visual integration of physical training objects. Building on this capability, we implement a coarse-to-fine localization pipeline that first aligns the maternal manikin with fiducial markers to define a delivery region and then registers the pre-scanned neonatal head within this area. This process enables spatially accurate overlay of virtual guiding hands near the manikin, allowing trainees to follow expert trajectories reinforced by haptic interaction. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the system achieves accurate and stable manikin localization on a standalone headset, ensuring practical deployment without external computing resources. A large-scale user study involving 83 fourth-year medical students was subsequently conducted to compare MR-based and virtual reality (VR)-based childbirth training. Four senior obstetricians independently assessed performance using standardized criteria. Results showed that MR training achieved significantly higher scores in delivery, post-delivery, and overall task performance, and was consistently preferred by trainees over VR training. --- ### The Geometric Observability Index: Influence, Fisher Information, and Weak Observability in SE(3) Pose Estimation Authors: Joe-Mei Feng, Hsin-Hsiung Kao, Sheng-Wei Yu Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05582v4 We introduce the Geometric Observability Index (GOI), a per-feature sensitivity measure for pose estimation on SE(3): the metric norm of the pose perturbation that a single measurement induces through the (possibly rank-deficient) Gauss-Newton curvature, restricted to the observable subspace. We prove that GOI equals the norm of the M-estimator influence function, that the underlying curvature operator coincides with the Fisher information, and that its smallest observable eigenvalue governs both the worst-case amplification of a measurement's effect and a finite-sample stability radius O(sigma/sqrt(n*lambda_min)). Operationally the theory cuts both ways. GOI is the exact per-measurement attribution, predicting the true leave-one-out pose shift with log-correlation r = 1.00; yet the influence standardized by its inlier null covariance collapses exactly to the classical chi-square residual statistic. Residual gating is thus the leverage-corrected influence test -- a first-principles explanation of its robustness -- while raw-influence gating conflates a measurement's information with its harm and is predicted to over-reject high-leverage inliers in weakly observable geometry. Controlled synthetic experiments validate every quantitative claim, and studies on five TUM RGB-D sequences (four dynamic, one static control) and two KITTI odometry sequences confirm the prediction: parity of the two criteria under well-conditioned geometry, and significant degradation of raw-influence gating at cond(H) of order 10^4. All code is released for reproducibility. --- ### The Geometric Observability Index: Influence, Fisher Information, and Weak Observability in $\SE$ Pose Estimation Authors: Joe-Mei Feng, Hsin-Hsiung Kao, Sheng-Wei Yu Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05582v3 We introduce the Geometric Observability Index (GOI), a per-feature sensitivity measure for pose estimation on SE(3): the metric norm of the pose perturbation that a single measurement induces through the (possibly rank-deficient) Gauss-Newton curvature, restricted to the observable subspace. We prove that GOI equals the norm of the M-estimator influence function, that the underlying curvature operator coincides with the Fisher information, and that its smallest observable eigenvalue governs both the worst-case amplification of a measurement's effect and a finite-sample stability radius O(sigma/sqrt(n*lambda_min)). Operationally the theory cuts both ways. GOI is the exact per-measurement attribution, predicting the true leave-one-out pose shift with log-correlation r = 1.00; yet the influence standardized by its inlier null covariance collapses exactly to the classical chi-square residual statistic. Residual gating is thus the leverage-corrected influence test -- a first-principles explanation of its robustness -- while raw-influence gating conflates a measurement's information with its harm and is predicted to over-reject high-leverage inliers in weakly observable geometry. Controlled synthetic experiments validate every quantitative claim, and studies on five TUM RGB-D sequences (four dynamic, one static control) and two KITTI odometry sequences confirm the prediction: parity of the two criteria under well-conditioned geometry, and significant degradation of raw-influence gating at cond(H) of order 10^4. All code is released for reproducibility. --- ### LoGoSeg: Integrating Local and Global Features for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation Authors: Junyang Chen, Xiangbo Lv, Zhiqiang Kou, Xingdong Sheng, Ning Xu, Yiguo Qiao Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05578v2 Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) extends traditional closed-set segmentation by enabling pixel-wise annotation for both seen and unseen categories using arbitrary textual descriptions. While existing methods leverage vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP, their reliance on image-level pretraining often results in imprecise spatial alignment, leading to mismatched segmentations in ambiguous or cluttered scenes. However, most existing approaches lack strong object priors and region-level constraints, which can lead to object hallucination or missed detections, further degrading performance. To address these challenges, we propose LoGoSeg, an efficient single-stage framework that integrates three key innovations: (i) an object existence prior that dynamically weights relevant categories through global image-text similarity, effectively reducing hallucinations; (ii) a region-aware alignment module that establishes precise region-level visual-textual correspondences; and (iii) a dual-stream fusion mechanism that optimally combines local structural information with global semantic context. Unlike prior works, LoGoSeg eliminates the need for external mask proposals, additional backbones, or extra datasets, ensuring efficiency. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks (A-847, PC-459, A-150, PC-59, PAS-20, and PAS-20b) demonstrate its competitive performance and strong generalization in open-vocabulary settings. --- ### LocateEdit-Bench: A Benchmark for Instruction-Based Editing Localization Authors: Shiyu Wu, Shuyan Li, Jing Li, Jing Liu, Yequan Wang Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05577v1 Recent advancements in image editing have enabled highly controllable and semantically-aware alteration of visual content, posing unprecedented challenges to manipulation localization. However, existing AI-generated forgery localization methods primarily focus on inpainting-based manipulations, making them ineffective against the latest instruction-based editing paradigms. To bridge this critical gap, we propose LocateEdit-Bench, a large-scale dataset comprising $231$K edited images, designed specifically to benchmark localization methods against instruction-driven image editing. Our dataset incorporates four cutting-edge editing models and covers three common edit types. We conduct a detailed analysis of the dataset and develop two multi-metric evaluation protocols to assess existing localization methods. Our work establishes a foundation to keep pace with the evolving landscape of image editing, thereby facilitating the development of effective methods for future forgery localization. Dataset will be open-sourced upon acceptance. --- ### OpenMAG: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal-Attributed Graph Authors: Chenxi Wan, Xunkai Li, Yilong Zuo, Haokun Deng, Sihan Li, Bowen Fan, Hongchao Qin, Ronghua Li, Guoren Wang Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05576v1 Multimodal-Attributed Graph (MAG) learning has achieved remarkable success in modeling complex real-world systems by integrating graph topology with rich attributes from multiple modalities. With the rapid proliferation of novel MAG models capable of handling intricate cross-modal semantics and structural dependencies, establishing a rigorous and unified evaluation standard has become imperative. Although existing benchmarks have facilitated initial progress, they exhibit critical limitations in domain coverage, encoder flexibility, model diversity, and task scope, presenting significant challenges to fair evaluation. To bridge this gap, we present OpenMAG, a comprehensive benchmark that integrates 19 datasets across 6 domains and incorporates 16 encoders to support both static and trainable feature encoding. OpenMAG further implements a standardized library of 24 state-of-the-art models and supports 8 downstream tasks, enabling fair comparisons within a unified framework. Through systematic assessment of necessity, data quality, effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency, we derive 14 fundamental insights into MAG learning to guide future advancements. Our code is available at https://github.com/YUKI-N810/OpenMAG. --- ### A Hybrid CNN and ML Framework for Multi-modal Classification of Movement Disorders Using MRI and Brain Structural Features Authors: Mengyu Li, Ingibjörg Kristjánsdóttir, Thilo van Eimeren, Kathrin Giehl, Lotta M. Ellingsen, the ASAP Neuroimaging Initiative Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05574v1 Atypical Parkinsonian Disorders (APD), also known as Parkinson-plus syndrome, are a group of neurodegenerative diseases that include progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) and multiple system atrophy (MSA). In the early stages, overlapping clinical features often lead to misdiagnosis as Parkinson's disease (PD). Identifying reliable imaging biomarkers for early differential diagnosis remains a critical challenge. In this study, we propose a hybrid framework combining convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with machine learning (ML) techniques to classify APD subtypes versus PD and distinguish between the subtypes themselves: PSP vs. PD, MSA vs. PD, and PSP vs. MSA. The model leverages multi-modal input data, including T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), segmentation masks of 12 deep brain structures associated with APD, and their corresponding volumetric measurements. By integrating these complementary modalities, including image data, structural segmentation masks, and quantitative volume features, the hybrid approach achieved promising classification performance with area under the curve (AUC) scores of 0.95 for PSP vs. PD, 0.86 for MSA vs. PD, and 0.92 for PSP vs. MSA. These results highlight the potential of combining spatial and structural information for robust subtype differentiation. In conclusion, this study demonstrates that fusing CNN-based image features with volume-based ML inputs improves classification accuracy for APD subtypes. The proposed approach may contribute to more reliable early-stage diagnosis, facilitating timely and targeted interventions in clinical practice. --- ### Visual Implicit Geometry Transformer for Autonomous Driving Authors: Arsenii Shirokov, Mikhail Kuznetsov, Danila Stepochkin, Egor Evdokimov, Daniil Glazkov, Nikolay Patakin, Anton Konushin, Dmitry Senushkin Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05573v1 We introduce the Visual Implicit Geometry Transformer (ViGT), an autonomous driving geometric model that estimates continuous 3D occupancy fields from surround-view camera rigs. ViGT represents a step towards foundational geometric models for autonomous driving, prioritizing scalability, architectural simplicity, and generalization across diverse sensor configurations. Our approach achieves this through a calibration-free architecture, enabling a single model to adapt to different sensor setups. Unlike general-purpose geometric foundational models that focus on pixel-aligned predictions, ViGT estimates a continuous 3D occupancy field in a birds-eye-view (BEV) addressing domain-specific requirements. ViGT naturally infers geometry from multiple camera views into a single metric coordinate frame, providing a common representation for multiple geometric tasks. Unlike most existing occupancy models, we adopt a self-supervised training procedure that leverages synchronized image-LiDAR pairs, eliminating the need for costly manual annotations. We validate the scalability and generalizability of our approach by training our model on a mixture of five large-scale autonomous driving datasets (NuScenes, Waymo, NuPlan, ONCE, and Argoverse) and achieving state-of-the-art performance on the pointmap estimation task, with the best average rank across all evaluated baselines. We further evaluate ViGT on the Occ3D-nuScenes benchmark, where ViGT achieves comparable performance with supervised methods. The source code is publicly available at \href{https://github.com/whesense/ViGT}{https://github.com/whesense/ViGT}. --- ### ShapeGaussian: High-Fidelity 4D Human Reconstruction in Monocular Videos via Vision Priors Authors: Zhenxiao Liang, Ning Zhang, Youbao Tang, Ruei-Sung Lin, Qixing Huang, Peng Chang, Jing Xiao Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05572v1 We introduce ShapeGaussian, a high-fidelity, template-free method for 4D human reconstruction from casual monocular videos. Generic reconstruction methods lacking robust vision priors, such as 4DGS, struggle to capture high-deformation human motion without multi-view cues. While template-based approaches, primarily relying on SMPL, such as HUGS, can produce photorealistic results, they are highly susceptible to errors in human pose estimation, often leading to unrealistic artifacts. In contrast, ShapeGaussian effectively integrates template-free vision priors to achieve both high-fidelity and robust scene reconstructions. Our method follows a two-step pipeline: first, we learn a coarse, deformable geometry using pretrained models that estimate data-driven priors, providing a foundation for reconstruction. Then, we refine this geometry using a neural deformation model to capture fine-grained dynamic details. By leveraging 2D vision priors, we mitigate artifacts from erroneous pose estimation in template-based methods and employ multiple reference frames to resolve the invisibility issue of 2D keypoints in a template-free manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ShapeGaussian surpasses template-based methods in reconstruction accuracy, achieving superior visual quality and robustness across diverse human motions in casual monocular videos. --- ### EdgeMask-DG*: Learning Domain-Invariant Graph Structures via Adversarial Edge Masking Authors: Rishabh Bhattacharya, Naresh Manwani Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05571v1 Structural shifts pose a significant challenge for graph neural networks, as graph topology acts as a covariate that can vary across domains. Existing domain generalization methods rely on fixed structural augmentations or training on globally perturbed graphs, mechanisms that do not pinpoint which specific edges encode domain-invariant information. We argue that domain-invariant structural information is not rigidly tied to a single topology but resides in the consensus across multiple graph structures derived from topology and feature similarity. To capture this, we first propose EdgeMask-DG, a novel min-max algorithm where an edge masker learns to find worst-case continuous masks subject to a sparsity constraint, compelling a task GNN to perform effectively under these adversarial structural perturbations. Building upon this, we introduce EdgeMask-DG*, an extension that applies this adversarial masking principle to an enriched graph. This enriched graph combines the original topology with feature-derived edges, allowing the model to discover invariances even when the original topology is noisy or domain-specific. EdgeMask-DG* is the first to systematically combine adaptive adversarial topology search with feature-enriched graphs. We provide a formal justification for our approach from a robust optimization perspective. We demonstrate that EdgeMask-DG* achieves new state-of-the-art performance on diverse graph domain generalization benchmarks, including citation networks, social networks, and temporal graphs. Notably, on the Cora OOD benchmark, EdgeMask-DG* lifts the worst-case domain accuracy to 78.0\%, a +3.8 pp improvement over the prior state of the art (74.2\%). The source code for our experiments can be found here: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TMLR-EAEF/ --- ### TangramSR: Can Vision-Language Models Reason in Continuous Geometric Space? Authors: Yikun Zong, Cheston Tan Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05570v1 Humans excel at spatial reasoning tasks like Tangram puzzle assembly through cognitive processes involving mental rotation, iterative refinement, and visual feedback. Inspired by how humans solve Tangram puzzles through trial-and-error, observation, and correction, we design a framework that models these human cognitive mechanisms. However, comprehensive experiments across five representative Vision-Language Models (VLMs) reveal systematic failures in continuous geometric reasoning: average IoU of only 0.41 on single-piece tasks, dropping to 0.23 on two-piece composition, far below human performance where children can complete Tangram tasks successfully. This paper addresses a fundamental challenge in self-improving AI: can models iteratively refine their predictions at test time without parameter updates? We introduce a test-time self-refinement framework that combines in-context learning (ICL) with reward-guided feedback loops, inspired by human cognitive processes. Our training-free verifier-refiner agent applies recursive refinement loops that iteratively self-refine predictions based on geometric consistency feedback, achieving IoU improvements from 0.63 to 0.932 on medium-triangle cases without any model retraining. This demonstrates that incorporating human-inspired iterative refinement mechanisms through ICL and reward loops can substantially enhance geometric reasoning in VLMs, moving self-improving AI from promise to practice in continuous spatial domains. Our work is available at this anonymous link https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TangramVLM-F582/. --- ### MAGPrompt: Message-Adaptive Graph Prompt Tuning for Graph Neural Networks Authors: Long D. Nguyen, Binh P. Nguyen Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05567v1 Pre-trained graph neural networks (GNNs) transfer well, but adapting them to downstream tasks remains challenging due to mismatches between pre-training objectives and task requirements. Graph prompt tuning offers a parameter-efficient alternative to fine-tuning, yet most methods only modify inputs or representations and leave message passing unchanged, limiting their ability to adapt neighborhood interactions. We propose message-adaptive graph prompt tuning, which injects learnable prompts into the message passing step to reweight incoming neighbor messages and add task-specific prompt vectors during message aggregation, while keeping the backbone GNN frozen. The approach is compatible with common GNN backbones and pre-training strategies, and applicable across downstream settings. Experiments on diverse node- and graph-level datasets show consistent gains over prior graph prompting methods in few-shot settings, while achieving performance competitive with fine-tuning in full-shot regimes. --- ### Piecewise Deterministic Markov Processes for Bayesian Inference of PDE Coefficients Authors: Leon Riccius, Iuri B. C. M. Rocha, Joris Bierkens, Hanne Kekkonen, Frans P. van der Meer Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: stat.CO, math.ST, stat.AP, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05559v1 We develop a general framework for piecewise deterministic Markov process (PDMP) samplers that enables efficient Bayesian inference in non-linear inverse problems with expensive likelihoods. The key ingredient is a surrogate-assisted thinning scheme in which a surrogate model provides a proposal event rate and a robust correction mechanism enforces an upper bound on the true rate by dynamically adjusting an additive offset whenever violations are detected. This construction is agnostic to the choice of surrogate and PDMP, and we demonstrate it for the Zig-Zag sampler and the Bouncy particle sampler with constant, Laplace, and Gaussian process (GP) surrogates, including gradient-informed and adaptively refined GP variants. As a representative application, we consider Bayesian inference of a spatially varying Young's modulus in a one-dimensional linear elasticity problem. Across dimensions, PDMP samplers equipped with GP-based surrogates achieve substantially higher accuracy and effective sample size per forward model evaluation than Random Walk Metropolis algorithm and the No-U-Turn sampler. The Bouncy particle sampler exhibits the most favorable overall efficiency and scaling, illustrating the potential of the proposed PDMP framework beyond this particular setting. --- ### PIRATR: Parametric Object Inference for Robotic Applications with Transformers in 3D Point Clouds Authors: Michael Schwingshackl, Fabio F. Oberweger, Mario Niedermeyer, Huemer Johannes, Markus Murschitz Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05557v1 We present PIRATR, an end-to-end 3D object detection framework for robotic use cases in point clouds. Extending PI3DETR, our method streamlines parametric 3D object detection by jointly estimating multi-class 6-DoF poses and class-specific parametric attributes directly from occlusion-affected point cloud data. This formulation enables not only geometric localization but also the estimation of task-relevant properties for parametric objects, such as a gripper's opening, where the 3D model is adjusted according to simple, predefined rules. The architecture employs modular, class-specific heads, making it straightforward to extend to novel object types without re-designing the pipeline. We validate PIRATR on an automated forklift platform, focusing on three structurally and functionally diverse categories: crane grippers, loading platforms, and pallets. Trained entirely in a synthetic environment, PIRATR generalizes effectively to real outdoor LiDAR scans, achieving a detection mAP of 0.919 without additional fine-tuning. PIRATR establishes a new paradigm of pose-aware, parameterized perception. This bridges the gap between low-level geometric reasoning and actionable world models, paving the way for scalable, simulation-trained perception systems that can be deployed in dynamic robotic environments. Code available at https://github.com/swingaxe/piratr. --- ### IndustryShapes: An RGB-D Benchmark dataset for 6D object pose estimation of industrial assembly components and tools Authors: Panagiotis Sapoutzoglou, Orestis Vaggelis, Athina Zacharia, Evangelos Sartinas, Maria Pateraki Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05555v1 We introduce IndustryShapes, a new RGB-D benchmark dataset of industrial tools and components, designed for both instance-level and novel object 6D pose estimation approaches. The dataset provides a realistic and application-relevant testbed for benchmarking these methods in the context of industrial robotics bridging the gap between lab-based research and deployment in real-world manufacturing scenarios. Unlike many previous datasets that focus on household or consumer products or use synthetic, clean tabletop datasets, or objects captured solely in controlled lab environments, IndustryShapes introduces five new object types with challenging properties, also captured in realistic industrial assembly settings. The dataset has diverse complexity, from simple to more challenging scenes, with single and multiple objects, including scenes with multiple instances of the same object and it is organized in two parts: the classic set and the extended set. The classic set includes a total of 4,6k images and 6k annotated poses. The extended set introduces additional data modalities to support the evaluation of model-free and sequence-based approaches. To the best of our knowledge, IndustryShapes is the first dataset to offer RGB-D static onboarding sequences. We further evaluate the dataset on a representative set of state-of-the art methods for instance-based and novel object 6D pose estimation, including also object detection, segmentation, showing that there is room for improvement in this domain. The dataset page can be found in https://pose-lab.github.io/IndustryShapes. --- ### VLN-Pilot: Large Vision-Language Model as an Autonomous Indoor Drone Operator Authors: Bessie Dominguez-Dager, Sergio Suescun-Ferrandiz, Felix Escalona, Francisco Gomez-Donoso, Miguel Cazorla Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05552v1 This paper introduces VLN-Pilot, a novel framework in which a large Vision-and-Language Model (VLLM) assumes the role of a human pilot for indoor drone navigation. By leveraging the multimodal reasoning abilities of VLLMs, VLN-Pilot interprets free-form natural language instructions and grounds them in visual observations to plan and execute drone trajectories in GPS-denied indoor environments. Unlike traditional rule-based or geometric path-planning approaches, our framework integrates language-driven semantic understanding with visual perception, enabling context-aware, high-level flight behaviors with minimal task-specific engineering. VLN-Pilot supports fully autonomous instruction-following for drones by reasoning about spatial relationships, obstacle avoidance, and dynamic reactivity to unforeseen events. We validate our framework on a custom photorealistic indoor simulation benchmark and demonstrate the ability of the VLLM-driven agent to achieve high success rates on complex instruction-following tasks, including long-horizon navigation with multiple semantic targets. Experimental results highlight the promise of replacing remote drone pilots with a language-guided autonomous agent, opening avenues for scalable, human-friendly control of indoor UAVs in tasks such as inspection, search-and-rescue, and facility monitoring. Our results suggest that VLLM-based pilots may dramatically reduce operator workload while improving safety and mission flexibility in constrained indoor environments. --- ### FastVMT: Eliminating Redundancy in Video Motion Transfer Authors: Yue Ma, Zhikai Wang, Tianhao Ren, Mingzhe Zheng, Hongyu Liu, Jiayi Guo, Kunyu Feng, Yuxuan Xue, Zixiang Zhao, Konrad Schindler, Qifeng Chen, Linfeng Zhang Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05551v3 Video motion transfer aims to synthesize videos by generating visual content according to a text prompt while transferring the motion pattern observed in a reference video. Recent methods predominantly use the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture. To achieve satisfactory runtime, several methods attempt to accelerate the computations in the DiT, but fail to address structural sources of inefficiency. In this work, we identify and remove two types of computational redundancy in earlier work: motion redundancy arises because the generic DiT architecture does not reflect the fact that frame-to-frame motion is small and smooth; gradient redundancy occurs if one ignores that gradients change slowly along the diffusion trajectory. To mitigate motion redundancy, we mask the corresponding attention layers to a local neighborhood such that interaction weights are not computed unnecessarily distant image regions. To exploit gradient redundancy, we design an optimization scheme that reuses gradients from previous diffusion steps and skips unwarranted gradient computations. On average, FastVMT achieves a 3.43x speedup without degrading the visual fidelity or the temporal consistency of the generated videos. --- ### ArkTS-CodeSearch: A Open-Source ArkTS Dataset for Code Retrieval Authors: Yulong He, Artem Ermakov, Sergey Kovalchuk, Artem Aliev, Dmitry Shalymov Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.SE, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05550v2 ArkTS is a core programming language in the OpenHarmony ecosystem, yet research on ArkTS code intelligence is hindered by the lack of public datasets and evaluation benchmarks. This paper presents a large-scale ArkTS dataset constructed from open-source repositories, targeting code retrieval and code evaluation tasks. We design a single-search task, where natural language comments are used to retrieve corresponding ArkTS functions. ArkTS repositories are crawled from GitHub and Gitee, and comment-function pairs are extracted using tree-sitter-arkts, followed by cross-platform deduplication and statistical analysis of ArkTS function types. We further evaluate existing open-source code embedding models on the single-search task and perform fine-tuning using both ArkTS and TypeScript training datasets, resulting in a high-performing model for ArkTS code understanding. This work establishes the first systematic benchmark for ArkTS code retrieval. Both the dataset and our fine-tuned model are available at https://huggingface.co/hreyulog/embedinggemma_arkts and https://huggingface.co/datasets/hreyulog/arkts-code-docstring . --- ### Logical Guidance for the Exact Composition of Diffusion Models Authors: Francesco Alesiani, Jonathan Warrell, Tanja Bien, Henrik Christiansen, Matheus Ferraz, Mathias Niepert Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05549v2 We propose LOGDIFF (Logical Guidance for the Exact Composition of Diffusion Models), a guidance framework for diffusion models that enables principled constrained generation with complex logical expressions at inference time. We study when exact score-based guidance for complex logical formulas can be obtained from guidance signals associated with atomic properties. First, we derive an exact Boolean calculus that provides a sufficient condition for exact logical guidance. Specifically, if a formula admits a circuit representation in which conjunctions combine conditionally independent subformulas and disjunctions combine subformulas that are either conditionally independent or mutually exclusive, exact logical guidance is achievable. In this case, the guidance signal can be computed exactly from atomic scores and posterior probabilities using an efficient recursive algorithm. Moreover, we show that, for commonly encountered classes of distributions, any desired Boolean formula is compilable into such a circuit representation. Second, by combining atomic guidance scores with posterior probability estimates, we introduce a hybrid guidance approach that bridges classifier guidance and classifier-free guidance, applicable to both compositional logical guidance and standard conditional generation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on multiple image and protein structure generation tasks. --- ### Unveiling Implicit Advantage Symmetry: Why GRPO Struggles with Exploration and Difficulty Adaptation Authors: Zhiqi Yu, Zhangquan Chen, Mengting Liu, Heye Zhang, Liangqiong Qu Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05548v4 Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), particularly GRPO, has become the standard for eliciting LLM reasoning. However, its efficiency in exploration and difficulty adaptation remains an open challenge. In this work, we identify an implicit advantage symmetry inherent in Group Relative Advantage Estimation (GRAE) as a structural property that provides a new perspective for understanding these bottlenecks. This symmetry induces two critical limitations: (i) at the group level, strict symmetry in weights between correct and incorrect trajectories leaves unsampled action logits unchanged, thereby hindering the exploration of novel correct solution. (ii) at the sample level, the algorithm implicitly prioritizes medium-difficulty samples, remaining agnostic to the non-stationary demands of difficulty focus. Through controlled experiments, we reveal that this symmetric property is sub-optimal, yielding two pivotal insights: (i) asymmetrically down-weighting the advantages of correct trajectories encourages essential exploration but risks instability; (ii) learning efficiency can be boosted by a curriculum-like transition-prioritizing simpler samples initially before gradually shifting to complex ones. Motivated by these findings, we propose Asymmetric GRAE (A-GRAE), which dynamically modulates exploration incentives and sample-difficulty focus. Experiments across seven benchmarks demonstrate that A-GRAE consistently improves GRPO and its variants across both LLMs and MLLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/HKU-HealthAI/A-GRAE --- ### Unveiling Implicit Advantage Symmetry: Why GRPO Struggles with Exploration and Difficulty Adaptation Authors: Zhiqi Yu, Zhangquan Chen, Mengting Liu, Heye Zhang, Liangqiong Qu Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05548v3 Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), particularly GRPO, has become the standard for eliciting LLM reasoning. However, its efficiency in exploration and difficulty adaptation remains an open challenge. In this work, we argue that these bottlenecks stem from an implicit advantage symmetry inherent in Group Relative Advantage Estimation (GRAE). This symmetry induces two critical limitations: (i) at the group level, strict symmetry in weights between correct and incorrect trajectories leaves unsampled action logits unchanged, thereby hindering exploration of novel correct solution. (ii) at the sample level, the algorithm implicitly prioritizes medium-difficulty samples, remaining agnostic to the non-stationary demands of difficulty focus. Through controlled experiments, we reveal that this symmetric property is sub-optimal, yielding two pivotal insights: (i) asymmetrically suppressing the advantages of correct trajectories encourages essential exploration. (ii) learning efficiency is maximized by a curriculum-like transition-prioritizing simpler samples initially before gradually shifting to complex ones. Motivated by these findings, we propose Asymmetric GRAE (A-GRAE), which dynamically modulates exploration incentives and sample-difficulty focus. Experiments across seven benchmarks demonstrate that A-GRAE consistently improves GRPO and its variants across both LLMs and MLLMs. --- ### Multi-Task GRPO: Reliable LLM Reasoning Across Tasks Authors: Shyam Sundhar Ramesh, Xiaotong Ji, Matthieu Zimmer, Sangwoong Yoon, Zhiyong Wang, Haitham Bou Ammar, Aurelien Lucchi, Ilija Bogunovic Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05547v3 RL-based post-training with GRPO is widely used to improve large language models on individual reasoning tasks. However, real-world deployment requires reliable performance across diverse tasks. A straightforward multi-task adaptation of GRPO often leads to imbalanced outcomes, with some tasks dominating optimization while others stagnate. Moreover, tasks can vary widely in how frequently prompts yield zero advantages (and thus zero gradients), which further distorts their effective contribution to the optimization signal. To address these issues, we propose a novel Multi-Task GRPO (MT-GRPO) algorithm that (i) dynamically adapts task weights to explicitly optimize worst-task performance and promote balanced progress across tasks, and (ii) introduces a ratio-preserving sampler to ensure task-wise policy gradients reflect the adapted weights. Experiments on both 3-task and 9-task settings show that MT-GRPO consistently outperforms baselines in worst-task accuracy. In particular, MT-GRPO achieves 16-28% and 6% absolute improvement on worst-task performance over standard GRPO and DAPO, respectively, while maintaining competitive average accuracy. Moreover, MT-GRPO requires 50% fewer training steps to reach 50% worst-task accuracy in the 3-task setting, demonstrating substantially improved efficiency in achieving reliable performance across tasks. --- ### Reasoning-guided Collaborative Filtering with Language Models for Explainable Recommendation Authors: Fahad Anwaar, Adil Mehmood Khan, Muhammad Khalid, Usman Zia, Kezhi Wang Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05544v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit potential for explainable recommendation systems but overlook collaborative signals, while prevailing methods treat recommendation and explanation as separate tasks, resulting in a memory footprint. We present RGCF-XRec, a hybrid framework that introduces reasoning-guided collaborative filtering (CF) knowledge into a language model to deliver explainable sequential recommendations in a single step. Theoretical grounding and empirical findings reveal that RGCF-XRec offers three key merits over leading CF-aware LLM-based methods: (1) reasoning-guided augmentation of CF knowledge through contextual prompting to discover latent preferences and interpretable reasoning paths; (2) an efficient scoring mechanism based on four dimensions: coherence, completeness, relevance, and consistency to mitigate noisy CF reasoning traces and retain high-quality explanations; (3) a unified representation learning network that encodes collaborative and semantic signals, enabling a structured prompt to condition the LLM for explainable sequential recommendation. RGCF-XRec demonstrates consistent improvements across Amazon datasets, Sports, Toys, and Beauty, comprising 642,503 user-item interactions. It improves HR@10 by 7.38\% in Sports and 4.59\% in Toys, along with ROUGE-L by 8.02\% and 3.49\%, respectively. It reduces the cold warm performance gap, achieving overall gains of 14.5\% in cold-start and 11.9\% in warm start scenarios, and enhances zero-shot HR@5 by 18.54\% in Beauty and 23.16\% in Toys, highlighting effective generalization and robustness. Moreover, RGCF-XRec achieves training efficiency with a lightweight LLaMA 3.2-3B backbone, ensuring scalability for real-world applications. --- ### Reducing the Complexity of Matrix Multiplication by Quantum Computing Authors: Jiaqi Yao, Tianjian Huang, Tonghe Zhang, Ding Liu Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: quant-ph, cs.CC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05541v3 Matrix multiplication is a fundamental operation in compute-intensive tasks and a key component of modern quantum acceleration frameworks. Here we present a quantum matrix multiplication algorithm based on quantum kernels (QKMM), achieving an elementary gate complexity of \(O(N^2\log_2N)\), with amplitude encoding overhead explicitly included and without assuming a QRAM oracle. This scaling is asymptotically lower than that of the best-known classical matrix multiplication algorithm \(O(N^{2.371339})\). Building upon QKMM, we establish a family of quantum linear algebra operators, including Quantum Vector Inner Product (V${\scriptstyle 2}$V), Quantum Vector-Matrix Multiplication (V${\scriptstyle 2}$M), QKMM (M${\scriptstyle 2}$M), Quantum One-to-Many Matrix Multiplication(O${\scriptstyle 2}$M) and Quantum Sequential Matrix Multiplication (SMM), providing a unified framework from vector operations to parallel and sequential matrix transformations. Through noiseless simulations, realistic noise modelling and experiments on a superconducting quantum processor, we systematically characterize the numerical accuracy, resource requirements and hardware execution limits of this operator framework. Furthermore, we integrate SMM into deep neural-network inference, enabling intermediate features to propagate coherently across layers without repeated measurement and re-encoding. These results establish a pathway from quantum circuit-level algorithm design to end-to-end coherent computation, providing a quantum computing framework for matrix-centric compute-intensive applications. --- ### Reducing the Complexity of Matrix Multiplication to $O(N^2log_2N)$ by an Asymptotically Optimal Quantum Algorithm Authors: Jiaqi Yao, Ding Liu Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: quant-ph, cs.CC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05541v2 Matrix multiplication is a fundamental classical computing operation whose efficiency becomes a major challenge at scale, especially for machine learning applications. Quantum computing, with its inherent parallelism and exponential storage capacity, offers a potential solution to these limitations. This work presents a quantum kernel-based matrix multiplication algorithm (QKMM) that achieves an asymptotically optimal computational complexity of $ O(N^2 \log_2 N) $, outperforming the classical optimal complexity of $ O(N^{2.371552}) $, where $N$ denotes the matrix dimension. Through noiseless and noisy quantum simulation experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm not only exhibits superior theoretical efficiency but also shows practical advantages in runtime performance and stability. --- ### Steering Large Reasoning Models towards Concise Reasoning via Flow Matching Authors: Yawei Li, Benjamin Bergner, Yinghan Zhao, Vihang Prakash Patil, Bei Chen, Cheng Wang Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05539v1 Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex reasoning tasks, but their efficiency is often hampered by overly verbose outputs. Prior steering methods attempt to address this issue by applying a single, global vector to hidden representations -- an approach grounded in the restrictive linear representation hypothesis. In this work, we introduce FlowSteer, a nonlinear steering method that goes beyond uniform linear shifts by learning a complete transformation between the distributions associated with verbose and concise reasoning. This transformation is learned via Flow Matching as a velocity field, enabling precise, input-dependent control over the model's reasoning process. By aligning steered representations with the distribution of concise-reasoning activations, FlowSteer yields more compact reasoning than the linear shifts. Across diverse reasoning benchmarks, FlowSteer demonstrates strong task performance and token efficiency compared to leading inference-time baselines. Our work demonstrates that modeling the full distributional transport with generative techniques offers a more effective and principled foundation for controlling LRMs. --- ### A Comparative Study of 3D Person Detection: Sensor Modalities and Robustness in Diverse Indoor and Outdoor Environments Authors: Malaz Tamim, Andrea Matic-Flierl, Karsten Roscher Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05538v2 Accurate 3D person detection is critical for safety in applications such as robotics, industrial monitoring, and surveillance. This work presents a systematic evaluation of 3D person detection using camera-only, LiDAR-only, and camera-LiDAR fusion. While most existing research focuses on autonomous driving, we explore detection performance and robustness in diverse indoor and outdoor scenes using the JRDB dataset. We compare three representative models - BEVDepth (camera), PointPillars (LiDAR), and DAL (camera-LiDAR fusion) - and analyze their behavior under varying occlusion and distance levels. Our results show that the fusion-based approach consistently outperforms single-modality models, particularly in challenging scenarios. We further investigate robustness against sensor corruptions and misalignments, revealing that while DAL offers improved resilience, it remains sensitive to sensor misalignment and certain LiDAR-based corruptions. In contrast, the camera-based BEVDepth model showed the lowest performance and was most affected by occlusion, distance, and noise. Our findings highlight the importance of utilizing sensor fusion for enhanced 3D person detection, while also underscoring the need for ongoing research to address the vulnerabilities inherent in these systems. --- ### When Shared Knowledge Hurts: Spectral Over-Accumulation in Model Merging Authors: Yayuan Li, Ze Peng, Jian Zhang, Jintao Guo, Yue Duan, Yinghuan Shi Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05536v2 Model merging combines multiple fine-tuned models into a single model by adding their weight updates, providing a lightweight alternative to retraining. Existing methods primarily target resolving conflicts between task updates, leaving the failure mode of over-counting shared knowledge unaddressed. We show that when tasks share aligned spectral directions (i.e., overlapping singular vectors), a simple linear combination repeatedly accumulates these directions, inflating the singular values and biasing the merged model toward shared subspaces. To mitigate this issue, we propose Singular Value Calibration (SVC), a training-free and data-free post-processing method that quantifies subspace overlap and rescales inflated singular values to restore a balanced spectrum. Across vision and language benchmarks, SVC consistently improves strong merging baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, by modifying only the singular values, SVC improves the performance of Task Arithmetic by 13.0%. Code is available at https://github.com/lyymuwu/SVC. --- ### Detecting Misbehaviors of Large Vision-Language Models by Evidential Uncertainty Quantification Authors: Tao Huang, Rui Wang, Xiaofei Liu, Yi Qin, Li Duan, Liping Jing Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05535v2 %Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have shown substantial advances in multimodal understanding and generation. However, when presented with incompetent or adversarial inputs, they frequently produce unreliable or even harmful content, such as fact hallucinations or dangerous instructions. This misalignment with human expectations, referred to as \emph{misbehaviors} of LVLMs, raises serious concerns for deployment in critical applications. These misbehaviors are found to stem from epistemic uncertainty, specifically either conflicting internal knowledge or the absence of supporting information. However, existing uncertainty quantification methods, which typically capture only overall epistemic uncertainty, have shown limited effectiveness in identifying such issues. To address this gap, we propose Evidential Uncertainty Quantification (EUQ), a fine-grained method that captures both information conflict and ignorance for effective detection of LVLM misbehaviors. In particular, we interpret features from the model output head as either supporting (positive) or opposing (negative) evidence. Leveraging Evidence Theory, we model and aggregate this evidence to quantify internal conflict and knowledge gaps within a single forward pass. %We extensively evaluate our method across four categories of misbehavior, including hallucinations, jailbreaks, adversarial vulnerabilities, and out-of-distribution (OOD) failures, using state-of-the-art LVLMs, and find that EUQ consistently outperforms strong baselines, showing that hallucinations correspond to high internal conflict and OOD failures to high ignorance. Furthermore, layer-wise evidential uncertainty dynamics analysis helps interpret the evolution of internal representations from a new perspective. The source code is available at https://github.com/HT86159/EUQ. --- ### SSG: Scaled Spatial Guidance for Multi-Scale Visual Autoregressive Generation Authors: Youngwoo Shin, Jiwan Hur, Junmo Kim Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05534v1 Visual autoregressive (VAR) models generate images through next-scale prediction, naturally achieving coarse-to-fine, fast, high-fidelity synthesis mirroring human perception. In practice, this hierarchy can drift at inference time, as limited capacity and accumulated error cause the model to deviate from its coarse-to-fine nature. We revisit this limitation from an information-theoretic perspective and deduce that ensuring each scale contributes high-frequency content not explained by earlier scales mitigates the train-inference discrepancy. With this insight, we propose Scaled Spatial Guidance (SSG), training-free, inference-time guidance that steers generation toward the intended hierarchy while maintaining global coherence. SSG emphasizes target high-frequency signals, defined as the semantic residual, isolated from a coarser prior. To obtain this prior, we leverage a principled frequency-domain procedure, Discrete Spatial Enhancement (DSE), which is devised to sharpen and better isolate the semantic residual through frequency-aware construction. SSG applies broadly across VAR models leveraging discrete visual tokens, regardless of tokenization design or conditioning modality. Experiments demonstrate SSG yields consistent gains in fidelity and diversity while preserving low latency, revealing untapped efficiency in coarse-to-fine image generation. Code is available at https://github.com/Youngwoo-git/SSG. --- ### Conditional Diffusion Guidance under Hard Constraint: A Stochastic Analysis Approach Authors: Zhengyi Guo, Wenpin Tang, Renyuan Xu Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05533v3 We study conditional generation in diffusion models under hard constraints, where generated samples must satisfy prescribed events with probability one. Such constraints arise naturally in safety-critical applications and in rare-event simulation, where soft or reward-based guidance methods offer no guarantee of constraint satisfaction. Building on a probabilistic interpretation of diffusion models, we develop a principled conditional diffusion guidance framework based on Doob's h-transform, martingale representation and quadratic variation process. Specifically, the resulting guided dynamics augment a pretrained diffusion with an explicit drift correction involving the logarithmic gradient of a conditioning function, without modifying the pretrained score network. Leveraging martingale and quadratic-variation identities, we propose two novel off-policy learning algorithms based on a martingale loss and a martingale-covariation loss to estimate h and its gradient using only trajectories from the pretrained model. We provide non-asymptotic guarantees for the resulting conditional sampler in both total variation and Wasserstein distances, explicitly characterizing the impact of score approximation and guidance estimation errors. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in enforcing hard constraints and generating rare-event samples. The code of the numerical experiments can be found at https://github.com/ZhengyiGuo2002/CDG_Finance. --- ### Split Personality Training: Revealing Latent Knowledge Through Alternate Personalities Authors: Florian Dietz, William Wale, Oscar Gilg, Robert McCarthy, Felix Michalak, Gustavo Ewbank Rodrigues Danon, Miguelito de Guzman, Dietrich Klakow Published: 2026-02-05 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05532v1 Detecting misalignment in large language models is challenging because models may learn to conceal misbehavior during training. Standard auditing techniques fall short: black-box methods often cannot distinguish misaligned outputs from benign ones, and mechanistic interpretability does not scale with model capabilities. We introduce Split Personality Training (SPT), which fine-tunes a second ``honest persona'' into LoRA parameters that remain inactive during normal operation. After the main model responds, we activate the LoRA adapter and insert a trigger string, enabling the honest persona to review the response while accessing the main model's latent states. We test our method on the Anthropic Auditing Game Model Organism, a benchmark where Llama-3.3-70B is trained to exploit reward hacks while concealing this behavior. SPT achieves 96% overall accuracy, whereas Anthropic reports near 0% accuracy. The honest persona reveals latent knowledge inaccessible to external observers, such as the fictional biases the compromised model was trained on. ---