# Research Papers — 2026-02 · bundle page 187 of 210

> Full-text markdown of papers #9301–9350 of 10493 published in 2026-02, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 10493-paper 2026-02 archive (50 papers per file).

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### WebSplatter: Enabling Cross-Device Efficient Gaussian Splatting in Web Browsers via WebGPU

Authors: Yudong Han, Chao Xu, Xiaodan Ye, Weichen Bi, Zilong Dong, Yun Ma
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.GR, cs.CV, cs.PF
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03207v1

We present WebSplatter, an end-to-end GPU rendering pipeline for the heterogeneous web ecosystem. Unlike naive ports, WebSplatter introduces a wait-free hierarchical radix sort that circumvents the lack of global atomics in WebGPU, ensuring deterministic execution across diverse hardware. Furthermore, we propose an opacity-aware geometry culling stage that dynamically prunes splats before rasterization, significantly reducing overdraw and peak memory footprint. Evaluation demonstrates that WebSplatter consistently achieves 1.2$\times$ to 4.5$\times$ speedups over state-of-the-art web viewers.

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### Sparsity is Combinatorial Depth: Quantifying MoE Expressivity via Tropical Geometry

Authors: Ye Su, Huayi Tang, Zixuan Gong, Yong Liu
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03204v2

While Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures define the state-of-the-art, their theoretical success is often attributed to heuristic efficiency rather than geometric expressivity. In this work, we present the first analysis of MoE through the lens of tropical geometry, establishing that the Top-$k$ routing mechanism is algebraically isomorphic to the $k$-th elementary symmetric tropical polynomial. This isomorphism partitions the input space into the Normal Fan of a Hypersimplex, revealing that \textbf{sparsity is combinatorial depth} which scales geometric capacity by the binomial coefficient $\binom{N}{k}$. Moving beyond ambient bounds, we introduce the concept of \textit{Effective Capacity} under the Manifold Hypothesis. We prove that while dense networks suffer from capacity collapse on low-dimensional data, MoE architectures exhibit \textit{Combinatorial Resilience}, maintaining high expressivity via the transversality of routing cones. Translating these theoretical bounds into architectural principles, we derive asymptotic capacity limits for optimal expert granularity and prove that shared experts are geometrically necessary to prevent routing collapse.

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### ForesightKV: Optimizing KV Cache Eviction for Reasoning Models by Learning Long-Term Contribution

Authors: Zican Dong, Peiyu Liu, Junyi Li, Zhipeng Chen, Han Peng, Shuo Wang, Wayne Xin Zhao
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03203v2

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning abilities by producing long reasoning traces. However, as the sequence length grows, the key-value (KV) cache expands linearly, incurring significant memory and computation costs. Existing KV cache eviction methods mitigate this issue by discarding less important KV pairs, but often fail to capture complex KV dependencies, resulting in performance degradation. To better balance efficiency and performance, we introduce ForesightKV, a training-based KV cache eviction framework that learns to predict which KV pairs to evict during long-text generations. We first design the Golden Eviction algorithm, which identifies the optimal eviction KV pairs at each step using future attention scores. These traces and the scores at each step are then distilled via supervised training with a Pairwise Ranking Loss. Furthermore, we formulate cache eviction as a Markov Decision Process and apply the GRPO algorithm to mitigate the significant language modeling loss increase on low-entropy tokens. Experiments on AIME2024 and AIME2025 benchmarks of three reasoning models demonstrate that ForesightKV consistently outperforms prior methods under only half the cache budget, while benefiting synergistically from both supervised and reinforcement learning approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/ForesightKV.

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### Sharp Inequalities between Total Variation and Hellinger Distances for Gaussian Mixtures

Authors: Joonhyuk Jung, Chao Gao
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: math.ST, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03202v3

We study the relation between the total variation (TV) and Hellinger distances between two Gaussian location mixtures. Our first result establishes a general upper bound: for any two mixing distributions supported on a compact set, the Hellinger distance between the two mixtures is controlled by the TV distance raised to a power $1-o(1)$, where the $o(1)$ term is of order $1/\log\log(1/\mathrm{TV})$. We also construct two sequences of mixing distributions that demonstrate the sharpness of this bound. Taken together, our results resolve an open problem raised in Jia et al. (2023) and thus lead to an entropic characterization of learning Gaussian mixtures in total variation. Our inequality also yields optimal robust estimation of Gaussian mixtures in Hellinger distance, which has a direct implication for bounding the minimax regret of empirical Bayes under Huber contamination.

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### SLOPE: Optimistic Potential Landscape Shaping for Model-based Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Yao-Hui Li, Zeyu Wang, Xin Li, Wei Pang, Yingfang Yuan, Zhengkun Chen, Boya Zhang, Riashat Islam, Alex Lamb, Yonggang Zhang
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03201v3

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is sample-efficient but struggles in sparse reward settings. A critical bottleneck arises from the lack of informative gradients in sparse settings, where standard reward models often yield flat landscapes that struggle to guide planning. To address this challenge, we propose Shaping Landscapes with Optimistic Potential Estimates (SLOPE), a novel framework that shifts reward modeling from predicting sparse scalars to constructing informative potential landscapes. SLOPE employs optimistic distributional regression to estimate high-confidence upper bounds, which amplifies rare success signals and ensures sufficient exploration gradients. Evaluations on 30+ tasks across 5 benchmarks and real-world robotic deployments, demonstrate that SLOPE consistently outperforms leading baselines in fully sparse, semi-sparse, and dense rewards.

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### Hand3R: Online 4D Hand-Scene Reconstruction in the Wild

Authors: Wendi Hu, Haonan Zhou, Wenhao Hu, Gaoang Wang
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03200v1

For Embodied AI, jointly reconstructing dynamic hands and the dense scene context is crucial for understanding physical interaction. However, most existing methods recover isolated hands in local coordinates, overlooking the surrounding 3D environment. To address this, we present Hand3R, the first online framework for joint 4D hand-scene reconstruction from monocular video. Hand3R synergizes a pre-trained hand expert with a 4D scene foundation model via a scene-aware visual prompting mechanism. By injecting high-fidelity hand priors into a persistent scene memory, our approach enables simultaneous reconstruction of accurate hand meshes and dense metric-scale scene geometry in a single forward pass. Experiments demonstrate that Hand3R bypasses the reliance on offline optimization and delivers competitive performance in both local hand reconstruction and global positioning.

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### From Single Scan to Sequential Consistency: A New Paradigm for LIDAR Relocalization

Authors: Minghang Zhu, Zhijing Wang, Yuxin Guo, Wen Li, Sheng Ao, Cheng Wang
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03198v1

LiDAR relocalization aims to estimate the global 6-DoF pose of a sensor in the environment. However, existing regression-based approaches are prone to dynamic or ambiguous scenarios, as they either solely rely on single-frame inference or neglect the spatio-temporal consistency across scans. In this paper, we propose TempLoc, a new LiDAR relocalization framework that enhances the robustness of localization by effectively modeling sequential consistency. Specifically, a Global Coordinate Estimation module is first introduced to predict point-wise global coordinates and associated uncertainties for each LiDAR scan. A Prior Coordinate Generation module is then presented to estimate inter-frame point correspondences by the attention mechanism. Lastly, an Uncertainty-Guided Coordinate Fusion module is deployed to integrate both predictions of point correspondence in an end-to-end fashion, yielding a more temporally consistent and accurate global 6-DoF pose. Experimental results on the NCLT and Oxford Robot-Car benchmarks show that our TempLoc outperforms stateof-the-art methods by a large margin, demonstrating the effectiveness of temporal-aware correspondence modeling in LiDAR relocalization. Our code will be released soon.

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### Reinforcement Learning with Promising Tokens for Large Language Models

Authors: Jing-Cheng Pang, Liang Lu, Xian Tang, Kun Jiang, Sijie Wu, Kai Zhang, Xubin Li
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03195v2

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a key paradigm for aligning and optimizing large language models (LLMs). Standard approaches treat the LLM as the policy and apply RL directly over the full vocabulary space. However, this formulation includes the massive tail of contextually irrelevant tokens in the action space, which could distract the policy from focusing on decision-making among the truly reasonable tokens. In this work, we verify that valid reasoning paths could inherently concentrate within a low-rank subspace. Based on this insight, we introduce Reinforcement Learning with Promising Tokens (RLPT), a framework that mitigates the action space issue by decoupling strategic decision-making from token generation. Specifically, RLPT leverages the semantic priors of the base model to identify a dynamic set of promising tokens and constrains policy optimization exclusively to this refined subset via masking. Theoretical analysis and empirical results demonstrate that RLPT effectively reduces gradient variance, stabilizes the training process, and improves sample efficiency. Experiment results on math, coding, and telecom reasoning show that RLPT outperforms standard RL baselines and integrates effectively across various model sizes (4B and 8B) and RL algorithms (GRPO and DAPO).

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### PrAg-PO: Prompt Augmented Policy Optimization for Robust and Diverse Mathematical Reasoning

Authors: Wenquan Lu, Hai Huang, Enqi Liu, Randall Balestriero
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03190v3

Reinforcement learning algorithms such as group-relative policy optimization (GRPO) have shown strong potential for improving the mathematical reasoning capabilities of large language models. While a growing body of work seeks to improve training entropy, rollout diversity, and exploration, most existing methods still train models with a single fixed reasoning prompt or template, which can encourage prompt-specific overfitting and unstable training dynamics. In this work, we introduce Prompt Augmented Policy Optimization (PrAg-PO), a simple policy optimization method that mixes prompt templates with template-specific format rewards during training. By encouraging models to generate reasoning traces under diverse instructions and output formats, PrAg-PO increases rollout diversity and improves robustness. Compared with GRPO and DAPO, PrAg-PO achieves significantly higher reasoning accuracy while mitigating premature training collapse. Empirically, experiments on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B, and Qwen3-1.7B show that PrAg-PO consistently outperforms strong baselines and achieves competitive performance against recent methods on mathematics benchmarks, using only a fixed MATH Level 3-5 training set of 8.5K problems. The code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/wenquanlu/PrAg-PO.

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### DynSplit-KV: Dynamic Semantic Splitting for KVCache Compression in Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference

Authors: Jiancai Ye, Jun Liu, Qingchen Li, Tianlang Zhao, Hanbin Zhang, Jiayi Pan, Ningyi Xu, Guohao Dai
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03184v1

Although Key-Value (KV) Cache is essential for efficient large language models (LLMs) inference, its growing memory footprint in long-context scenarios poses a significant bottleneck, making KVCache compression crucial. Current compression methods rely on rigid splitting strategies, such as fixed intervals or pre-defined delimiters. We observe that rigid splitting suffers from significant accuracy degradation (ranging from 5.5% to 55.1%) across different scenarios, owing to the scenario-dependent nature of the semantic boundaries. This highlights the necessity of dynamic semantic splitting to match semantics. To achieve this, we face two challenges. (1) Improper delimiter selection misaligns semantics with the KVCache, resulting in 28.6% accuracy loss. (2) Variable-length blocks after splitting introduce over 73.1% additional inference overhead. To address the above challenges, we propose DynSplit-KV, a KVCache compression method that dynamically identifies delimiters for splitting. We propose: (1) a dynamic importance-aware delimiter selection strategy, improving accuracy by 49.9%. (2) A uniform mapping strategy that transforms variable-length semantic blocks into a fixed-length format, reducing inference overhead by 4.9x. Experiments show that DynSplit-KV achieves the highest accuracy, 2.2x speedup compared with FlashAttention and 2.6x peak memory reduction in long-context scenarios.

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### Privasis: Synthesizing the Largest "Public" Private Dataset from Scratch

Authors: Hyunwoo Kim, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Michael Duan, Rui Xin, Shuyue Stella Li, Jaehun Jung, David Acuna, Qi Pang, Hanshen Xiao, G. Edward Suh, Sewoong Oh, Yulia Tsvetkov et al.
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03183v1

Research involving privacy-sensitive data has always been constrained by data scarcity, standing in sharp contrast to other areas that have benefited from data scaling. This challenge is becoming increasingly urgent as modern AI agents--such as OpenClaw and Gemini Agent--are granted persistent access to highly sensitive personal information. To tackle this longstanding bottleneck and the rising risks, we present Privasis (i.e., privacy oasis), the first million-scale fully synthetic dataset entirely built from scratch--an expansive reservoir of texts with rich and diverse private information--designed to broaden and accelerate research in areas where processing sensitive social data is inevitable. Compared to existing datasets, Privasis, comprising 1.4 million records, offers orders-of-magnitude larger scale with quality, and far greater diversity across various document types, including medical history, legal documents, financial records, calendars, and text messages with a total of 55.1 million annotated attributes such as ethnicity, date of birth, workplace, etc. We leverage Privasis to construct a parallel corpus for text sanitization with our pipeline that decomposes texts and applies targeted sanitization. Our compact sanitization models (<=4B) trained on this dataset outperform state-of-the-art large language models, such as GPT-5 and Qwen-3 235B. We plan to release data, models, and code to accelerate future research on privacy-sensitive domains and agents.

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### LSGQuant: Layer-Sensitivity Guided Quantization for One-Step Diffusion Real-World Video Super-Resolution

Authors: Tianxing Wu, Zheng Chen, Cirou Xu, Bowen Chai, Yong Guo, Yutong Liu, Linghe Kong, Yulun Zhang
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03182v1

One-Step Diffusion Models have demonstrated promising capability and fast inference in video super-resolution (VSR) for real-world. Nevertheless, the substantial model size and high computational cost of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) limit downstream applications. While low-bit quantization is a common approach for model compression, the effectiveness of quantized models is challenged by the high dynamic range of input latent and diverse layer behaviors. To deal with these challenges, we introduce LSGQuant, a layer-sensitivity guided quantizing approach for one-step diffusion-based real-world VSR. Our method incorporates a Dynamic Range Adaptive Quantizer (DRAQ) to fit video token activations. Furthermore, we estimate layer sensitivity and implement a Variance-Oriented Layer Training Strategy (VOLTS) by analyzing layer-wise statistics in calibration. We also introduce Quantization-Aware Optimization (QAO) to jointly refine the quantized branch and a retained high-precision branch. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method has nearly performance to origin model with full-precision and significantly exceeds existing quantization techniques. Code is available at: https://github.com/zhengchen1999/LSGQuant.

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### BinaryDemoire: Moiré-Aware Binarization for Image Demoiréing

Authors: Zheng Chen, Zhi Yang, Xiaoyang Liu, Weihang Zhang, Mengfan Wang, Yifan Fu, Linghe Kong, Yulun Zhang
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03176v1

Image demoiréing aims to remove structured moiré artifacts in recaptured imagery, where degradations are highly frequency-dependent and vary across scales and directions. While recent deep networks achieve high-quality restoration, their full-precision designs remain costly for deployment. Binarization offers an extreme compression regime by quantizing both activations and weights to 1-bit. Yet, it has been rarely studied for demoiréing and performs poorly when naively applied. In this work, we propose BinaryDemoire, a binarized demoiréing framework that explicitly accommodates the frequency structure of moiré degradations. First, we introduce a moiré-aware binary gate (MABG) that extracts lightweight frequency descriptors together with activation statistics. It predicts channel-wise gating coefficients to condition the aggregation of binary convolution responses. Second, we design a shuffle-grouped residual adapter (SGRA) that performs structured sparse shortcut alignment. It further integrates interleaved mixing to promote information exchange across different channel partitions. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed BinaryDemoire surpasses current binarization methods. Code: https://github.com/zhengchen1999/BinaryDemoire.

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### Probe-then-Commit Multi-Objective Bandits: Theoretical Benefits of Limited Multi-Arm Feedback

Authors: Ming Shi
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03175v2

We study an online resource-selection problem motivated by multi-radio access selection and mobile edge computing offloading. In each round, an agent chooses among $K$ candidate links/servers (arms) whose performance is a stochastic $d$-dimensional vector (e.g., throughput, latency, energy, reliability). The key interaction is \emph{probe-then-commit (PtC)}: the agent may probe up to $q>1$ candidates via control-plane measurements to observe their vector outcomes, but must execute exactly one candidate in the data plane. This limited multi-arm feedback regime strictly interpolates between classical bandits ($q=1$) and full-information experts ($q=K$), yet existing multi-objective learning theory largely focuses on these extremes. We develop \textsc{PtC-P-UCB}, an optimistic probe-then-commit algorithm whose technical core is frontier-aware probing under uncertainty in a Pareto mode, e.g., it selects the $q$ probes by approximately maximizing a hypervolume-inspired frontier-coverage potential and commits by marginal hypervolume gain to directly expand the attained Pareto region. We prove a dominated-hypervolume frontier error of $\tilde{O} (K_P d/\sqrt{qT})$, where $K_P$ is the Pareto-frontier size and $T$ is the horizon, and scalarized regret $\tilde{O} (L_φd\sqrt{(K/q)T})$, where $φ$ is the scalarizer. These quantify a transparent $1/\sqrt{q}$ acceleration from limited probing. We further extend to \emph{multi-modal probing}: each probe returns $M$ modalities (e.g., CSI, queue, compute telemetry), and uncertainty fusion yields variance-adaptive versions of the above bounds via an effective noise scale.

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### Adversarial construction as a potential solution to the experiment design problem in large task spaces

Authors: Prakhar Godara, Frederick Callaway, Marcelo G. Mattar
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.LG, q-bio.NC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03172v1

Despite decades of work, we still lack a robust, task-general theory of human behavior even in the simplest domains. In this paper we tackle the generality problem head-on, by aiming to develop a unified model for all tasks embedded in a task-space. In particular we consider the space of binary sequence prediction tasks where the observations are generated by the space parameterized by hidden Markov models (HMM). As the space of tasks is large, experimental exploration of the entire space is infeasible. To solve this problem we propose the adversarial construction approach, which helps identify tasks that are most likely to elicit a qualitatively novel behavior. Our results suggest that adversarial construction significantly outperforms random sampling of environments and therefore could be used as a proxy for optimal experimental design in high-dimensional task spaces.

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### StepScorer: Accelerating Reinforcement Learning with Step-wise Scoring and Psychological Regret Modeling

Authors: Zhe Xu
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03171v1

Reinforcement learning algorithms often suffer from slow convergence due to sparse reward signals, particularly in complex environments where feedback is delayed or infrequent. This paper introduces the Psychological Regret Model (PRM), a novel approach that accelerates learning by incorporating regret-based feedback signals after each decision step. Rather than waiting for terminal rewards, PRM computes a regret signal based on the difference between the expected value of the optimal action and the value of the action taken in each state. This transforms sparse rewards into dense feedback signals through a step-wise scoring framework, enabling faster convergence. We demonstrate that PRM achieves stable performance approximately 36\% faster than traditional Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) in benchmark environments such as Lunar Lander. Our results indicate that PRM is particularly effective in continuous control tasks and environments with delayed feedback, making it suitable for real-world applications such as robotics, finance, and adaptive education where rapid policy adaptation is critical. The approach formalizes human-inspired counterfactual thinking as a computable regret signal, bridging behavioral economics and reinforcement learning.

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### NeuralFLoC: Neural Flow-Based Joint Registration and Clustering of Functional Data

Authors: Xinyang Xiong, Siyuan jiang, Pengcheng Zeng
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03169v2

Clustering functional data in the presence of phase variation is challenging, as temporal misalignment can obscure intrinsic shape differences and degrade clustering performance. Most existing approaches treat registration and clustering as separate tasks or rely on restrictive parametric assumptions. We present \textbf{NeuralFLoC}, a fully unsupervised, end-to-end deep learning framework for joint functional registration and clustering based on Neural ODE-driven diffeomorphic flows and spectral clustering. The proposed model learns smooth, invertible warping functions and cluster-specific templates simultaneously, effectively disentangling phase and amplitude variation. We establish universal approximation guarantees and asymptotic consistency for the proposed framework. Experiments on functional benchmarks show state-of-the-art performance in both registration and clustering, with robustness to missing data, irregular sampling, and noise, while maintaining scalability. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/NeuralFLoC-FEC8.

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### Online Conformal Prediction via Universal Portfolio Algorithms

Authors: Tuo Liu, Edgar Dobriban, Francesco Orabona
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03168v1

Online conformal prediction (OCP) seeks prediction intervals that achieve long-run $1-α$ coverage for arbitrary (possibly adversarial) data streams, while remaining as informative as possible. Existing OCP methods often require manual learning-rate tuning to work well, and may also require algorithm-specific analyses. Here, we develop a general regret-to-coverage theory for interval-valued OCP based on the $(1-α)$-pinball loss. Our first contribution is to identify \emph{linearized regret} as a key notion, showing that controlling it implies coverage bounds for any online algorithm. This relies on a black-box reduction that depends only on the Fenchel conjugate of an upper bound on the linearized regret. Building on this theory, we propose UP-OCP, a parameter-free method for OCP, via a reduction to a two-asset portfolio selection problem, leveraging universal portfolio algorithms. We show strong finite-time bounds on the miscoverage of UP-OCP, even for polynomially growing predictions. Extensive experiments support that UP-OCP delivers consistently better size/coverage trade-offs than prior online conformal baselines.

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### Entropic Mirror Monte Carlo

Authors: Anas Cherradi, Yazid Janati, Alain Durmus, Sylvain Le Corff, Yohan Petetin, Julien Stoehr
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: stat.ME, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03165v2

Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo method which designs estimators of expectations under a target distribution using weighted samples from a proposal distribution. When the target distribution is complex, such as multimodal distributions in highdimensional spaces, the efficiency of importance sampling critically depends on the choice of the proposal distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive scheme for the construction of efficient proposal distributions. Our algorithm promotes efficient exploration of the target distribution by combining global sampling mechanisms with a delayed weighting procedure. The proposed weighting mechanism plays a key role by enabling rapid resampling in regions where the proposal distribution is poorly adapted to the target. Our sampling algorithm is shown to be geometrically convergent under mild assumptions and is illustrated through various numerical experiments.

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### MemCast: Memory-Driven Time Series Forecasting with Experience-Conditioned Reasoning

Authors: Xiaoyu Tao, Mingyue Cheng, Ze Guo, Shuo Yu, Yaguo Liu, Qi Liu, Shijin Wang
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03164v2

Time series forecasting (TSF) plays a critical role in decision-making for many real-world applications. Recently, large language model (LLM)- based forecasters have made promising advancements. Despite their effectiveness, existing methods often lack explicit experience accumulation and continual evolution. In this work, we propose MemCast, a learning-to-memory framework that reformulates TSF as an experience-conditioned reasoning task. Specifically, we learn experience from the training set and organize it into a hierarchical memory. This is achieved by summarizing prediction results into historical patterns, distilling inference trajectories into reasoning wisdom, and inducing extracted temporal features into general laws. Furthermore, during inference, we leverage historical patterns to guide the reasoning process and utilize reasoning wisdom to select better trajectories, while general laws serve as criteria for reflective iteration. Additionally, to enable continual evolution, we design a dynamic confidence adaptation strategy that updates the confidence of individual entries without leaking the test set distribution. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that MemCast consistently outperforms previous methods, validating the effectiveness of our approach. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/MemCast-TS.

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### VALUEFLOW: Toward Pluralistic and Steerable Value-based Alignment in Large Language Models

Authors: Woojin Kim, Sieun Hyeon, Jusang Oh, Jaeyoung Do
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03160v2

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with the diverse spectrum of human values remains a central challenge: preference-based methods often fail to capture deeper motivational principles. Value-based approaches offer a more principled path, yet three gaps persist: extraction often ignores hierarchical structure, evaluation detects presence but not calibrated intensity, and the steerability of LLMs at controlled intensities remains insufficiently understood. To address these limitations, we introduce VALUEFLOW, the first unified framework that spans extraction, evaluation, and steering with calibrated intensity control. The framework integrates three components: (i) HIVES, a hierarchical value embedding space that captures intra- and cross-theory value structure; (ii) the Value Intensity DataBase (VIDB), a large-scale resource of value-labeled texts with intensity estimates derived from ranking-based aggregation; and (iii) an anchor-based evaluator that produces consistent intensity scores for model outputs by ranking them against VIDB panels. Using VALUEFLOW, we conduct a comprehensive large-scale study across ten models and four value theories, identifying asymmetries in steerability and composition laws for multi-value control. This paper establishes a scalable infrastructure for evaluating and controlling value intensity, advancing pluralistic alignment of LLMs.

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### Human-in-the-loop Adaptation in Group Activity Feature Learning for Team Sports Video Retrieval

Authors: Chihiro Nakatani, Hiroaki Kawashima, Norimichi Ukita
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03157v1

This paper proposes human-in-the-loop adaptation for Group Activity Feature Learning (GAFL) without group activity annotations. This human-in-the-loop adaptation is employed in a group-activity video retrieval framework to improve its retrieval performance. Our method initially pre-trains the GAF space based on the similarity of group activities in a self-supervised manner, unlike prior work that classifies videos into pre-defined group activity classes in a supervised learning manner. Our interactive fine-tuning process updates the GAF space to allow a user to better retrieve videos similar to query videos given by the user. In this fine-tuning, our proposed data-efficient video selection process provides several videos, which are selected from a video database, to the user in order to manually label these videos as positive or negative. These labeled videos are used to update (i.e., fine-tune) the GAF space, so that the positive and negative videos move closer to and farther away from the query videos through contrastive learning. Our comprehensive experimental results on two team sports datasets validate that our method significantly improves the retrieval performance. Ablation studies also demonstrate that several components in our human-in-the-loop adaptation contribute to the improvement of the retrieval performance. Code: https://github.com/chihina/GAFL-FINE-CVIU.

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### Fully Kolmogorov-Arnold Deep Model in Medical Image Segmentation

Authors: Xingyu Qiu, Xinghua Ma, Dong Liang, Gongning Luo, Wei Wang, Kuanquan Wang, Shuo Li
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03156v1

Deeply stacked KANs are practically impossible due to high training difficulties and substantial memory requirements. Consequently, existing studies can only incorporate few KAN layers, hindering the comprehensive exploration of KANs. This study overcomes these limitations and introduces the first fully KA-based deep model, demonstrating that KA-based layers can entirely replace traditional architectures in deep learning and achieve superior learning capacity. Specifically, (1) the proposed Share-activation KAN (SaKAN) reformulates Sprecher's variant of Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem, which achieves better optimization due to its simplified parameterization and denser training samples, to ease training difficulty, (2) this paper indicates that spline gradients contribute negligibly to training while consuming huge GPU memory, thus proposes the Grad-Free Spline to significantly reduce memory usage and computational overhead. (3) Building on these two innovations, our ALL U-KAN is the first representative implementation of fully KA-based deep model, where the proposed KA and KAonv layers completely replace FC and Conv layers. Extensive evaluations on three medical image segmentation tasks confirm the superiority of the full KA-based architecture compared to partial KA-based and traditional architectures, achieving all higher segmentation accuracy. Compared to directly deeply stacked KAN, ALL U-KAN achieves 10 times reduction in parameter count and reduces memory consumption by more than 20 times, unlocking the new explorations into deep KAN architectures.

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### Intelligent Front-End Personalization: AI-Driven UI Adaptation

Authors: Mona Rajhans
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.SE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03154v1

Front-end personalization has traditionally relied on static designs or rule-based adaptations, which fail to fully capture user behavior patterns. This paper presents an AI driven approach for dynamic front-end personalization, where UI layouts, content, and features adapt in real-time based on predicted user behavior. We propose three strategies: dynamic layout adaptation using user path prediction, content prioritization through reinforcement learning, and a comparative analysis of AI-driven vs. rule-based personalization. Technical implementation details, algorithms, system architecture, and evaluation methods are provided to illustrate feasibility and performance gains.

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### FASA: Frequency-aware Sparse Attention

Authors: Yifei Wang, Yueqi Wang, Zhenrui Yue, Huimin Zeng, Yong Wang, Ismini Lourentzou, Zhengzhong Tu, Xiangxiang Chu, Julian McAuley
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03152v3

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) faces a critical bottleneck when handling lengthy inputs: the prohibitive memory footprint of the Key Value (KV) cache. To address this bottleneck, the token pruning paradigm leverages attention sparsity to selectively retain a small, critical subset of tokens. However, existing approaches fall short, with static methods risking irreversible information loss and dynamic strategies employing heuristics that insufficiently capture the query-dependent nature of token importance. We propose FASA, a novel framework that achieves query-aware token eviction by dynamically predicting token importance. FASA stems from a novel insight into RoPE: the discovery of functional sparsity at the frequency-chunk (FC) level. Our key finding is that a small, identifiable subset of "dominant" FCs consistently exhibits high contextual agreement with the full attention head. This provides a robust and computationally free proxy for identifying salient tokens. Building on this insight, FASA first identifies a critical set of tokens using dominant FCs, and then performs focused attention computation solely on this pruned subset. Across a spectrum of long-context tasks, from sequence modeling to complex CoT reasoning, FASA consistently outperforms all token-eviction baselines and achieves near-oracle accuracy, demonstrating remarkable robustness even under constraint budgets. Notably, on LongBench-V1, FASA reaches nearly 100\% of full-KV performance when only keeping 256 tokens, and achieves 2.56$\times$ speedup using just 18.9\% of the cache on AIME24.

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### Enhancing Foundation VLM Robustness to Missing Modality: Scalable Diffusion for Bi-directional Feature Restoration

Authors: Wei Dai, Haoyu Wang, Honghao Chang, Lijun He, Fan Li, Jian Sun, Haixia Bi
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03151v2

Vision Language Model (VLM) typically assume complete modality input during inference. However, their effectiveness drops sharply when certain modalities are unavailable or incomplete. Current research on missing modality primarily faces two dilemmas: Prompt-based methods struggle to restore missing yet indispensable features and degrade the generalizability of VLM. Imputation-based approaches, lacking effective guidance, are prone to generating semantically irrelevant noise. Restoring precise semantics while sustaining VLM's generalization remains challenging. Therefore, we propose a general missing modality restoration strategy in this paper. We introduce an enhanced diffusion model as a pluggable mid-stage training module to effectively restore missing features. Our strategy introduces two key innovations: (I) Dynamic Modality Gating, which adaptively leverages conditional features to guide the generation of semantically consistent features; (II) Cross-Modal Mutual Learning mechanism, which bridges the semantic spaces of the dual models to achieve bi-directional alignment. Notably, our strategy maintains the original integrity of the pre-trained VLM, requiring no fine-tuning of the backbone models while significantly boosting resilience to information loss. Zero-shot evaluations across benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing baselines, establishing it as a robust and scalable extension that ensures VLM reliability across diverse missing rates and conditions. Our code and models will be publicly available.

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### General Agents Contain World Models, even under Partial Observability and Stochasticity

Authors: Santiago Cifuentes
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03146v1

Deciding whether an agent possesses a model of its surrounding world is a fundamental step toward understanding its capabilities and limitations. In (10), it was shown that, within a particular framework, every almost optimal and general agent necessarily contains sufficient knowledge of its environment to allow an approximate reconstruction of it by querying the agent as a black box. This result relied on the assumptions that the agent is deterministic and that the environment is fully observable. In this work, we remove both assumptions by extending the theorem to stochastic agents operating in partially observable environments. Fundamentally, this shows that stochastic agents cannot avoid learning their environment through the usage of randomization. We also strengthen the result by weakening the notion of generality, proving that less powerful agents already contain a model of the world in which they operate.

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### Internet of Agentic AI: Incentive-Compatible Distributed Teaming and Workflow

Authors: Ya-Ting Yang, Quanyan Zhu
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.GT, cs.AI, cs.MA
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03145v1

Large language models (LLMs) have enabled a new class of agentic AI systems that reason, plan, and act by invoking external tools. However, most existing agentic architectures remain centralized and monolithic, limiting scalability, specialization, and interoperability. This paper proposes a framework for scalable agentic intelligence, termed the Internet of Agentic AI, in which autonomous, heterogeneous agents distributed across cloud and edge infrastructure dynamically form coalitions to execute task-driven workflows. We formalize a network-native model of agentic collaboration and introduce an incentive-compatible workflow-coalition feasibility framework that integrates capability coverage, network locality, and economic implementability. To enable scalable coordination, we formulate a minimum-effort coalition selection problem and propose a decentralized coalition formation algorithm. The proposed framework can operate as a coordination layer above the Model Context Protocol (MCP). A healthcare case study demonstrates how domain specialization, cloud-edge heterogeneity, and dynamic coalition formation enable scalable, resilient, and economically viable agentic workflows. This work lays the foundation for principled coordination and scalability in the emerging era of Internet of Agentic AI.

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### What Makes a Good Example? Modeling Exemplar Selection with Neural Network Representations

Authors: Fanxiao Wani Qiu, Oscar Leong, Alexander LaTourrette
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03144v1

Teaching requires distilling a rich category distribution into a small set of informative exemplars. Although prior work shows that humans consider both representativeness and diversity when teaching, the computational principles underlying these tradeoffs remain unclear. We address this gap by modeling human exemplar selection using neural network feature representations and principled subset selection criteria. Novel visual categories were embedded along a one-dimensional morph continuum using pretrained vision models, and selection strategies varied in their emphasis on prototypicality, joint representativeness, and diversity. Adult participants selected one to three exemplars to teach a learner. Model-human comparisons revealed that strategies based on joint representativeness, or its combination with diversity, best captured human judgments, whereas purely prototypical or diversity-based strategies performed worse. Moreover, transformer-based representations consistently aligned more closely with human behavior than convolutional networks. These results highlight the potential utility of dataset distillation methods in machine learning as computational models for teaching.

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### Self-Hinting Language Models Enhance Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Baohao Liao, Hanze Dong, Xinxing Xu, Christof Monz, Jiang Bian
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03143v1

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has recently emerged as a practical recipe for aligning large language models with verifiable objectives. However, under sparse terminal rewards, GRPO often stalls because rollouts within a group frequently receive identical rewards, causing relative advantages to collapse and updates to vanish. We propose self-hint aligned GRPO with privileged supervision (SAGE), an on-policy reinforcement learning framework that injects privileged hints during training to reshape the rollout distribution under the same terminal verifier reward. For each prompt $x$, the model samples a compact hint $h$ (e.g., a plan or decomposition) and then generates a solution $τ$ conditioned on $(x,h)$. Crucially, the task reward $R(x,τ)$ is unchanged; hints only increase within-group outcome diversity under finite sampling, preventing GRPO advantages from collapsing under sparse rewards. At test time, we set $h=\varnothing$ and deploy the no-hint policy without any privileged information. Moreover, sampling diverse self-hints serves as an adaptive curriculum that tracks the learner's bottlenecks more effectively than fixed hints from an initial policy or a stronger external model. Experiments over 6 benchmarks with 3 LLMs show that SAGE consistently outperforms GRPO, on average +2.0 on Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct, +1.2 on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct and +1.3 on Qwen3-4B-Instruct. The code is available at https://github.com/BaohaoLiao/SAGE.

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### Short Chains, Deep Thoughts: Balancing Reasoning Efficiency and Intra-Segment Capability via Split-Merge Optimization

Authors: Runquan Gui, Jie Wang, Zhihai Wang, Chi Ma, Jianye Hao, Feng Wu
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03141v4

While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in solving complex tasks through the generation of long reasoning chains, this reliance on verbose generation results in significant latency and computational overhead. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{CoSMo} (\textbf{Co}nsistency-Guided \textbf{S}plit-\textbf{M}erge \textbf{O}ptimization), a framework designed to eliminate structural redundancy rather than indiscriminately restricting token volume. Specifically, CoSMo utilizes a split-merge algorithm that dynamically refines reasoning chains by merging redundant segments and splitting logical gaps to ensure coherence. We then employ structure-aligned reinforcement learning with a novel segment-level budget to supervise the model in maintaining efficient reasoning structures throughout training. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks and backbones demonstrate that CoSMo achieves superior performance, improving accuracy by \textbf{3.3} points while reducing segment usage by \textbf{28.7\%} on average compared to reasoning efficiency baselines.

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### Diversity-Preserved Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Visual Synthesis

Authors: Tianhe Wu, Ruibin Li, Lei Zhang, Kede Ma
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03139v2

Distribution matching distillation (DMD) facilitates few-step image generation by aligning a distilled student with a reference multi-step teacher. In practice, however, optimizing DMD can reduce sample diversity in few-step synthesis, and existing remedies typically rely on perceptual or adversarial regularization, leading to stability and scalability challenges during training. Here, we describe diversity-preserved DMD (DP-DMD), a role-separated distillation method inspired by the complementary roles of early and late denoising steps. Specifically, the first distillation step is trained with a teacher-derived target-prediction objective (e.g., v-prediction) to preserve sample diversity, while the remaining steps are optimized with the standard DMD loss to refine perceptual quality. DP-DMD, with no perceptual or adversarial regularization, no additional modules, and no teacher-generated reference samples, preserves sample diversity while maintaining competitive visual quality under few-step sampling, providing a simple and stable alternative to other DMD variants.

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### SATORIS-N: Spectral Analysis based Traffic Observation Recovery via Informed Subspaces and Nuclear-norm minimization

Authors: Sampad Mohanty, Bhaskar Krishnamachari
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03138v1

Traffic-density matrices from different days exhibit both low rank and stable correlations in their singular-vector subspaces. Leveraging this, we introduce SATORIS-N, a framework for imputing partially observed traffic-density by informed subspace priors from neighboring days. Our contribution is a subspace-aware semidefinite programming (SDP)} formulation of nuclear norm that explicitly informs the reconstruction with prior singular-subspace information. This convex formulation jointly enforces low rank and subspace alignment, providing a single global optimum and substantially improving accuracy under medium and high occlusion. We also study a lightweight implicit subspace-alignment} strategy in which matrices from consecutive days are concatenated to encourage alignment of spatial or temporal singular directions. Although this heuristic offers modest gains when missing rates are low, the explicit SDP approach is markedly more robust when large fractions of entries are missing. Across two real-world datasets (Beijing and Shanghai), SATORIS-N consistently outperforms standard matrix-completion methods such as SoftImpute, IterativeSVD, statistical, and even deep learning baselines at high occlusion levels. The framework generalizes to other spatiotemporal settings in which singular subspaces evolve slowly over time. In the context of intelligent vehicles and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) systems, accurate traffic-density reconstruction enables critical applications including cooperative perception, predictive routing, and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication optimization. When infrastructure sensors or vehicle-reported observations are incomplete - due to communication dropouts, sensor occlusions, or sparse connected vehicle penetration-reliable imputation becomes essential for safe and efficient autonomous navigation.

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### FSOD-VFM: Few-Shot Object Detection with Vision Foundation Models and Graph Diffusion

Authors: Chen-Bin Feng, Youyang Sha, Longfei Liu, Yongjun Yu, Chi Man Vong, Xuanlong Yu, Xi Shen
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03137v1

In this paper, we present FSOD-VFM: Few-Shot Object Detectors with Vision Foundation Models, a framework that leverages vision foundation models to tackle the challenge of few-shot object detection. FSOD-VFM integrates three key components: a universal proposal network (UPN) for category-agnostic bounding box generation, SAM2 for accurate mask extraction, and DINOv2 features for efficient adaptation to new object categories. Despite the strong generalization capabilities of foundation models, the bounding boxes generated by UPN often suffer from overfragmentation, covering only partial object regions and leading to numerous small, false-positive proposals rather than accurate, complete object detections. To address this issue, we introduce a novel graph-based confidence reweighting method. In our approach, predicted bounding boxes are modeled as nodes in a directed graph, with graph diffusion operations applied to propagate confidence scores across the network. This reweighting process refines the scores of proposals, assigning higher confidence to whole objects and lower confidence to local, fragmented parts. This strategy improves detection granularity and effectively reduces the occurrence of false-positive bounding box proposals. Through extensive experiments on Pascal-5$^i$, COCO-20$^i$, and CD-FSOD datasets, we demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms existing approaches, achieving superior performance without requiring additional training. Notably, on the challenging CD-FSOD dataset, which spans multiple datasets and domains, our FSOD-VFM achieves 31.6 AP in the 10-shot setting, substantially outperforming previous training-free methods that reach only 21.4 AP. Code is available at: https://intellindust-ai-lab.github.io/projects/FSOD-VFM.

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### Enhanced Parcel Arrival Forecasting for Logistic Hubs: An Ensemble Deep Learning Approach

Authors: Xinyue Pan, Yujia Xu, Benoit Montreuil
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03135v1

The rapid expansion of online shopping has increased the demand for timely parcel delivery, compelling logistics service providers to enhance the efficiency, agility, and predictability of their hub networks. In order to solve the problem, we propose a novel deep learning-based ensemble framework that leverages historical arrival patterns and real-time parcel status updates to forecast upcoming workloads at logistic hubs. This approach not only facilitates the generation of short-term forecasts, but also improves the accuracy of future hub workload predictions for more strategic planning and resource management. Empirical tests of the algorithm, conducted through a case study of a major city's parcel logistics, demonstrate the ensemble method's superiority over both traditional forecasting techniques and standalone deep learning models. Our findings highlight the significant potential of this method to improve operational efficiency in logistics hubs and advocate for its broader adoption.

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### SwiftVLM: Efficient Vision-Language Model Inference via Cross-Layer Token Bypass

Authors: Chen Qian, Xinran Yu, Danyang Li, Guoxuan Chi, Zheng Yang, Qiang Ma, Xin Miao
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03134v1

Visual token pruning is a promising approach for reducing the computational cost of vision-language models (VLMs), and existing methods often rely on early pruning decisions to improve efficiency. While effective on coarse-grained reasoning tasks, they suffer from significant performance degradation on tasks requiring fine-grained visual details. Through layer-wise analysis, we reveal substantial discrepancies in visual token importance across layers, showing that tokens deemed unimportant at shallow layers can later become highly relevant for text-conditioned reasoning. To avoid irreversible critical information loss caused by premature pruning, we introduce a new pruning paradigm, termed bypass, which preserves unselected visual tokens and forwards them to subsequent pruning stages for re-evaluation. Building on this paradigm, we propose SwiftVLM, a simple and training-free method that performs pruning at model-specific layers with strong visual token selection capability, while enabling independent pruning decisions across layers. Experiments across multiple VLMs and benchmarks demonstrate that SwiftVLM consistently outperforms existing pruning strategies, achieving superior accuracy-efficiency trade-offs and more faithful visual token selection behavior.

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### Contrastive Concept-Tree Search for LLM-Assisted Algorithm Discovery

Authors: Timothee Leleu, Sudeera Gunathilaka, Federico Ghimenti, Surya Ganguli
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.NE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03132v1

Large language Model (LLM)-assisted algorithm discovery is an iterative, black-box optimization process over programs to approximatively solve a target task, where an LLM proposes candidate programs and an external evaluator provides task feedback. Despite intense recent research on the topic and promising results, how can the LLM internal representation of the space of possible programs be maximally exploited to improve performance is an open question. Here, we introduce Contrastive Concept-Tree Search (CCTS), which extracts a hierarchical concept representation from the generated programs and learns a contrastive concept model that guides parent selection. By reweighting parents using a likelihood-ratio score between high- and low-performing solutions, CCTS biases search toward useful concept combinations and away from misleading ones, providing guidance through an explicit concept hierarchy rather than the algorithm lineage constructed by the LLM. We show that CCTS improves search efficiency over fitness-based baselines and produces interpretable, task-specific concept trees across a benchmark of open Erdős-type combinatorics problems. Our analysis indicates that the gains are driven largely by learning which concepts to avoid. We further validate these findings in a controlled synthetic algorithm-discovery environment, which reproduces qualitatively the search dynamics observed with the LLMs.

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### FinMTM: A Multi-Turn Multimodal Benchmark for Financial Reasoning and Agent Evaluation

Authors: Chenxi Zhang, Ziliang Gan, Liyun Zhu, Youwei Pang, Qing Zhang, Rongjunchen Zhang
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.CV, cs.CE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03130v1

The financial domain poses substantial challenges for vision-language models (VLMs) due to specialized chart formats and knowledge-intensive reasoning requirements. However, existing financial benchmarks are largely single-turn and rely on a narrow set of question formats, limiting comprehensive evaluation in realistic application scenarios. To address this gap, we propose FinMTM, a multi-turn multimodal benchmark that expands diversity along both data and task dimensions. On the data side, we curate and annotate 11{,}133 bilingual (Chinese and English) financial QA pairs grounded in financial visuals, including candlestick charts, statistical plots, and report figures. On the task side, FinMTM covers single- and multiple-choice questions, multi-turn open-ended dialogues, and agent-based tasks. We further design task-specific evaluation protocols, including a set-overlap scoring rule for multiple-choice questions, a weighted combination of turn-level and session-level scores for multi-turn dialogues, and a composite metric that integrates planning quality with final outcomes for agent tasks. Extensive experimental evaluation of 22 VLMs reveal their limitations in fine-grained visual perception, long-context reasoning, and complex agent workflows.

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### Architectural Design, Not Only Model Intelligence, Governs Multi-Agent LLM Performance

Authors: Abdelghny Orogat, Ana Rostam, Essam Mansour
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03128v2

Multi-agent LLM frameworks are data-intensive systems that govern how agents orchestrate tasks, manage state, and coordinate decisions. These architectural choices control execution overhead, memory behavior, planning effectiveness, and coordination scalability. Their impact on system performance remains poorly understood. Existing benchmarks evaluate individual agent capabilities in isolation and lack standardized framework-level comparison. We make four contributions. We introduce an architectural taxonomy that decomposes multi-agent LLM frameworks along five dimensions: orchestration, memory, planning interfaces, specialization, and communication topology. We develop MAFBench, a unified evaluation suite that integrates existing benchmarks within a standardized execution pipeline. We conduct a controlled empirical study across nine frameworks, fixing the underlying LLM and varying only architectural design choices. We distill the results into six evidence-based design principles. Architectural design, not only model intelligence, governs performance. Orchestration alone increases latency by over 60x, and a minimal implementation of the same paradigm isolates that cost as implementation rather than paradigm. Schema-constrained planning interfaces reduce accuracy by up to 32 points through formatting failures, not reasoning errors. Communication topology drops coordination success from above 90% to below 30% under mismatched structure. Memory architecture controls recall and scalability independent of context window size, and no evaluated framework natively supports controlled knowledge revision.

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### Understanding Multi-Agent LLM Frameworks: A Unified Benchmark and Experimental Analysis

Authors: Abdelghny Orogat, Ana Rostam, Essam Mansour
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03128v1

Multi-agent LLM frameworks are widely used to accelerate the development of agent systems powered by large language models (LLMs). These frameworks impose distinct architectural structures that govern how agents interact, store information, and coordinate tasks. However, their impact on system performance remains poorly understood. This gap is critical, as architectural choices alone can induce order-of-magnitude differences in latency and throughput, as well as substantial variation in accuracy and scalability. Addressing this challenge requires (i) jointly evaluating multiple capabilities, such as orchestration overhead, memory behavior, planning, specialization, and coordination, and (ii) conducting these evaluations under controlled, framework-level conditions to isolate architectural effects. Existing benchmarks focus on individual capabilities and lack standardized framework-level evaluation. We address these limitations by (i) introducing an architectural taxonomy for systematically comparing multi-agent LLM frameworks along fundamental dimensions, and (ii) developing MAFBench, a unified evaluation suite that integrates existing benchmarks under a standardized execution pipeline. Using MAFBench, we conduct a controlled empirical study across several widely used frameworks. Our results show that framework-level design choices alone can increase latency by over 100x, reduce planning accuracy by up to 30%, and lower coordination success from above 90% to below 30%. Finally, we translate our findings into concrete architectural design principles and framework selection guidance, and outline promising future research directions.

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### Flexible Geometric Guidance for Probabilistic Human Pose Estimation with Diffusion Models

Authors: Francis Snelgar, Ming Xu, Stephen Gould, Liang Zheng, Akshay Asthana
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03126v1

3D human pose estimation from 2D images is a challenging problem due to depth ambiguity and occlusion. Because of these challenges the task is underdetermined, where there exists multiple -- possibly infinite -- poses that are plausible given the image. Despite this, many prior works assume the existence of a deterministic mapping and estimate a single pose given an image. Furthermore, methods based on machine learning require a large amount of paired 2D-3D data to train and suffer from generalization issues to unseen scenarios. To address both of these issues, we propose a framework for pose estimation using diffusion models, which enables sampling from a probability distribution over plausible poses which are consistent with a 2D image. Our approach falls under the guidance framework for conditional generation, and guides samples from an unconditional diffusion model, trained only on 3D data, using the gradients of the heatmaps from a 2D keypoint detector. We evaluate our method on the Human 3.6M dataset under best-of-$m$ multiple hypothesis evaluation, showing state-of-the-art performance among methods which do not require paired 2D-3D data for training. We additionally evaluate the generalization ability using the MPI-INF-3DHP and 3DPW datasets and demonstrate competitive performance. Finally, we demonstrate the flexibility of our framework by using it for novel tasks including pose generation and pose completion, without the need to train bespoke conditional models. We make code available at https://github.com/fsnelgar/diffusion_pose .

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### Feature, Alignment, and Supervision in Category Learning: A Comparative Approach with Children and Neural Networks

Authors: Fanxiao Wani Qiu, Oscar Leong
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03124v1

Understanding how humans and machines learn from sparse data is central to cognitive science and machine learning. Using a species-fair design, we compare children and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in a few-shot semi-supervised category learning task. Both learners are exposed to novel object categories under identical conditions. Learners receive mixtures of labeled and unlabeled exemplars while we vary supervision (1/3/6 labels), target feature (size, shape, pattern), and perceptual alignment (high/low). We find that children generalize rapidly from minimal labels but show strong feature-specific biases and sensitivity to alignment. CNNs show a different interaction profile: added supervision improves performance, but both alignment and feature structure moderate the impact additional supervision has on learning. These results show that human-model comparisons must be drawn under the right conditions, emphasizing interactions among supervision, feature structure, and alignment rather than overall accuracy.

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### Beyond Cropping and Rotation: Automated Evolution of Powerful Task-Specific Augmentations with Generative Models

Authors: Judah Goldfeder, Shreyes Kaliyur, Vaibhav Sourirajan, Patrick Minwan Puma, Philippe Martin Wyder, Yuhang Hu, Jiong Lin, Hod Lipson
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03123v1

Data augmentation has long been a cornerstone for reducing overfitting in vision models, with methods like AutoAugment automating the design of task-specific augmentations. Recent advances in generative models, such as conditional diffusion and few-shot NeRFs, offer a new paradigm for data augmentation by synthesizing data with significantly greater diversity and realism. However, unlike traditional augmentations like cropping or rotation, these methods introduce substantial changes that enhance robustness but also risk degrading performance if the augmentations are poorly matched to the task. In this work, we present EvoAug, an automated augmentation learning pipeline, which leverages these generative models alongside an efficient evolutionary algorithm to learn optimal task-specific augmentations. Our pipeline introduces a novel approach to image augmentation that learns stochastic augmentation trees that hierarchically compose augmentations, enabling more structured and adaptive transformations. We demonstrate strong performance across fine-grained classification and few-shot learning tasks. Notably, our pipeline discovers augmentations that align with domain knowledge, even in low-data settings. These results highlight the potential of learned generative augmentations, unlocking new possibilities for robust model training.

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### Quantized Evolution Strategies: High-precision Fine-tuning of Quantized LLMs at Low-precision Cost

Authors: Yinggan Xu, Kajetan Schweighofer, Risto Miikkulainen, Xin Qiu
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03120v2

Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is essential for deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on memory-constrained devices, yet it renders models static and difficult to fine-tune. Standard fine-tuning paradigms, including Reinforcement Learning (RL), fundamentally rely on backpropagation and continuous weights to compute gradients. Thus they cannot be used on quantized models, where the parameter space is discrete and non-differentiable. While Evolution Strategies (ES) offer a backpropagation-free alternative, optimization of the quantized parameters can still fail due to vanishing or inaccurate gradient estimation. This paper introduces Quantized Evolution Strategies (QES), an optimization paradigm that performs full-parameter fine-tuning directly in the quantized space. QES is based on two innovations: (1) it integrates accumulated error feedback to preserve high-precision weight updating signals, and (2) it utilizes a stateless seed replay to reduce memory usage to low-precision inference levels. QES significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art zeroth-order fine-tuning methods on a variety of tasks, making direct fine-tuning for quantized models possible. It therefore opens up the possibility for scaling up LLMs entirely in the quantized space. The source code is available at https://github.com/dibbla/Quantized-Evolution-Strategies .

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### Function-Space Empirical Bayes Regularisation with Large Vision-Language Model Priors

Authors: Pengcheng Hao, Huaze Tang, Ercan Engin Kuruoglu, Wenbo Ding
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.LG, eess.SP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03119v1

Bayesian deep learning (BDL) provides a principled framework for reliable uncertainty quantification by combining deep neural networks with Bayesian inference. A central challenge in BDL lies in the design of informative prior distributions that scale effectively to high-dimensional data. Recent functional variational inference (VI) approaches address this issue by imposing priors directly in function space; however, most existing methods rely on Gaussian process (GP) priors, whose expressiveness and generalisation capabilities become limited in high-dimensional regimes. In this work, we propose VLM-FS-EB, a novel function-space empirical Bayes regularisation framework, leveraging large vision-language models (VLMs) to generates semantically meaningful context points. These synthetic samples are then used VLMs for embeddings to construct expressive functional priors. Furthermore, the proposed method is evaluated against various baselines, and experimental results demonstrate that our method consistently improves predictive performance and yields more reliable uncertainty estimates, particularly in out-of-distribution (OOD) detection tasks and data-scarce regimes.

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### Digital Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI: Trends and Insights

Authors: Geeta Puri, Nachamma Socklingam, Dorien Herremans
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03114v1

Rapid innovations in AI and large language models (LLMs) have accelerated the adoption of digital learning, particularly beyond formal education. What began as an emergency response during COVID-19 has shifted from a supplementary resource to an essential pillar of education. Understanding how digital learning continues to evolve for adult and lifelong learners is therefore increasingly important. This study examines how various demographics interact with digital learning platforms, focusing on the learner motivations, the effectiveness of gamification in digital learning, and the integration of AI. Using multi survey data from 200 respondents and advanced analytics, our findings reveal a notable increase in the perceived relevance of digital learning after the pandemic, especially among young adults and women, coinciding with the rise of LLM-powered AI tools that support personalized learning. We aim to provide actionable insights for businesses, government policymakers, and educators seeking to optimize their digital learning offerings to meet evolving workforce needs.

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### One Model, All Roles: Multi-Turn, Multi-Agent Self-Play Reinforcement Learning for Conversational Social Intelligence

Authors: Bowen Jiang, Taiwei Shi, Ryo Kamoi, Yuan Yuan, Camillo J. Taylor, Longqi Yang, Pei Zhou, Sihao Chen
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03109v1

This paper introduces OMAR: One Model, All Roles, a reinforcement learning framework that enables AI to develop social intelligence through multi-turn, multi-agent conversational self-play. Unlike traditional paradigms that rely on static, single-turn optimizations, OMAR allows a single model to role-play all participants in a conversation simultaneously, learning to achieve long-term goals and complex social norms directly from dynamic social interaction. To ensure training stability across long dialogues, we implement a hierarchical advantage estimation that calculates turn-level and token-level advantages. Evaluations in the SOTOPIA social environment and Werewolf strategy games show that our trained models develop fine-grained, emergent social intelligence, such as empathy, persuasion, and compromise seeking, demonstrating the effectiveness of learning collaboration even under competitive scenarios. While we identify practical challenges like reward hacking, our results show that rich social intelligence can emerge without human supervision. We hope this work incentivizes further research on AI social intelligence in group conversations.

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### ChemPro: A Progressive Chemistry Benchmark for Large Language Models

Authors: Aaditya Baranwal, Shruti Vyas
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03108v4

We introduce ChemPro, a progressive benchmark with 4100 natural language question-answer pairs in Chemistry, across 4 coherent sections of difficulty designed to assess the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) in a broad spectrum of general chemistry topics. We include Multiple Choice Questions and Numerical Questions spread across fine-grained information recall, long-horizon reasoning, multi-concept questions, problem-solving with nuanced articulation, and straightforward questions in a balanced ratio, effectively covering Bio-Chemistry, Inorganic-Chemistry, Organic-Chemistry and Physical-Chemistry. ChemPro is carefully designed analogous to a student's academic evaluation for basic to high-school chemistry. A gradual increase in the question difficulty rigorously tests the ability of LLMs to progress from solving basic problems to solving more sophisticated challenges. We evaluate 45+7 state-of-the-art LLMs, spanning both open-source and proprietary variants, and our analysis reveals that while LLMs perform well on basic chemistry questions, their accuracy declines with different types and levels of complexity. These findings highlight the critical limitations of LLMs in general scientific reasoning and understanding and point towards understudied dimensions of difficulty, emphasizing the need for more robust methodologies to improve LLMs.

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### The Mask of Civility: Benchmarking Chinese Mock Politeness Comprehension in Large Language Models

Authors: Yitong Zhang, Yuhan Xiang, Mingxuan Liu
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03107v1

From a pragmatic perspective, this study systematically evaluates the differences in performance among representative large language models (LLMs) in recognizing politeness, impoliteness, and mock politeness phenomena in Chinese. Addressing the existing gaps in pragmatic comprehension, the research adopts the frameworks of Rapport Management Theory and the Model of Mock Politeness to construct a three-category dataset combining authentic and simulated Chinese discourse. Six representative models, including GPT-5.1 and DeepSeek, were selected as test subjects and evaluated under four prompting conditions: zero-shot, few-shot, knowledge-enhanced, and hybrid strategies. This study serves as a meaningful attempt within the paradigm of ``Great Linguistics,'' offering a novel approach to applying pragmatic theory in the age of technological transformation. It also responds to the contemporary question of how technology and the humanities may coexist, representing an interdisciplinary endeavor that bridges linguistic technology and humanistic reflection.

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### Gromov Wasserstein Optimal Transport for Semantic Correspondences

Authors: Francis Snelgar, Stephen Gould, Ming Xu, Liang Zheng, Akshay Asthana
Published: 2026-02-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03105v1

Establishing correspondences between image pairs is a long studied problem in computer vision. With recent large-scale foundation models showing strong zero-shot performance on downstream tasks including classification and segmentation, there has been interest in using the internal feature maps of these models for the semantic correspondence task. Recent works observe that features from DINOv2 and Stable Diffusion (SD) are complementary, the former producing accurate but sparse correspondences, while the latter produces spatially consistent correspondences. As a result, current state-of-the-art methods for semantic correspondence involve combining features from both models in an ensemble. While the performance of these methods is impressive, they are computationally expensive, requiring evaluating feature maps from large-scale foundation models. In this work we take a different approach, instead replacing SD features with a superior matching algorithm which is imbued with the desirable spatial consistency property. Specifically, we replace the standard nearest neighbours matching with an optimal transport algorithm that includes a Gromov Wasserstein spatial smoothness prior. We show that we can significantly boost the performance of the DINOv2 baseline, and be competitive and sometimes surpassing state-of-the-art methods using Stable Diffusion features, while being 5--10x more efficient. We make code available at https://github.com/fsnelgar/semantic_matching_gwot .

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