# Research Papers — 2026-02 · bundle page 208 of 210 > Full-text markdown of papers #10351–10400 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/208 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-02/page/207.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-02/page/209.md) ### Multi-Fidelity Physics-Informed Neural Networks with Bayesian Uncertainty Quantification and Adaptive Residual Learning for Efficient Solution of Parametric Partial Differential Equations Authors: Olaf Yunus Laitinen Imanov Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.LG, math.NA, physics.comp-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01176v2 Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) by embedding physical laws directly into neural network training. However, solving high-fidelity PDEs remains computationally prohibitive, particularly for parametric systems requiring multiple evaluations across varying parameter configurations. This paper presents MF-BPINN, a novel multi-fidelity framework that synergistically combines physics-informed neural networks with Bayesian uncertainty quantification and adaptive residual learning. Our approach leverages abundant low-fidelity simulations alongside sparse high-fidelity data through a hierarchical neural architecture that learns nonlinear correlations across fidelity levels. We introduce an adaptive residual network with learnable gating mechanisms that dynamically balances linear and nonlinear fidelity discrepancies. Furthermore, we develop a rigorous Bayesian framework employing Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. --- ### Multi-Fidelity Physics-Informed Neural Networks with Bayesian Uncertainty Quantification and Adaptive Residual Learning for Efficient Solution of Parametric Partial Differential Equations Authors: Olaf Yunus Laitinen Imanov Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.LG, math.NA, physics.comp-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01176v1 Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) by embedding physical laws directly into neural network training. However, solving high-fidelity PDEs remains computationally prohibitive, particularly for parametric systems requiring multiple evaluations across varying parameter configurations. This paper presents MF-BPINN, a novel multi-fidelity framework that synergistically combines physics-informed neural networks with Bayesian uncertainty quantification and adaptive residual learning. Our approach leverages abundant low-fidelity simulations alongside sparse high-fidelity data through a hierarchical neural architecture that learns nonlinear correlations across fidelity levels. We introduce an adaptive residual network with learnable gating mechanisms that dynamically balances linear and nonlinear fidelity discrepancies. Furthermore, we develop a rigorous Bayesian framework employing Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. --- ### EEmo-Logic: A Unified Dataset and Multi-Stage Framework for Comprehensive Image-Evoked Emotion Assessment Authors: Lancheng Gao, Ziheng Jia, Zixuan Xing, Wei Sun, Huiyu Duan, Guangtao Zhai, Xiongkuo Min Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01173v4 Understanding the multi-dimensional attributes and intensity nuances of image-evoked emotions is pivotal for advancing machine empathy and empowering diverse human-computer interaction applications. However, existing models are still limited to coarse-grained emotion perception or deficient reasoning capabilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce EEmoDB, the largest image-evoked emotion understanding dataset to date. It features $5$ analysis dimensions spanning $5$ distinct task categories, facilitating comprehensive interpretation. Specifically, we compile $1.2M$ question-answering (QA) pairs (EEmoDB-QA) from $125K$ images via automated generation, alongside a $36K$ dataset (EEmoDB-Assess) curated from $25K$ images for fine-grained assessment. Furthermore, we propose EEmo-Logic, an all-in-one multimodal large language model (MLLM) developed via instruction fine-tuning and task-customized group relative preference optimization (GRPO) with novel reward design. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EEmo-Logic achieves robust performance in in-domain and cross-domain datasets, excelling in emotion QA and fine-grained assessment. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/workerred/EEmo-Logic. --- ### ASP-Bench: From Natural Language to Logic Programs Authors: Stefan Szeider Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01171v1 Automating the translation of natural-language specifications into logic programs is a challenging task that affects neurosymbolic engineering. We present ASP-Bench, a benchmark comprising 128 natural language problem instances, 64 base problems with easy and hard variants. It evaluates systems that translate natural-language problems into Answer Set Programs (ASPs), a prominent form of logic programming. It provides systematic coverage of ASP features, including choice rules, aggregates, and optimization. Each problem includes reference validators that check whether solutions satisfy the problem specification. We characterize problems along seven largely independent reasoning aspects (optimization, temporal reasoning, default logic, resource allocation, recursion, spatial reasoning, and quantitative complexity), providing a multidimensional view of modeling difficulty. We test the benchmark using an agentic approach based on the ReAct (Reason and Act) framework, which achieves full saturation, demonstrating that feedback-driven iterative refinement with solver feedback provides a reliable and robust approach for modeling natural language in ASP. Our analysis across multiple agent runs enables us to gain insights into what determines a problem's modeling hardness. --- ### EmoAra: Emotion-Preserving English Speech Transcription and Cross-Lingual Translation with Arabic Text-to-Speech Authors: Besher Hassan, Ibrahim Alsarraj, Musaab Hasan, Yousef Melhim, Shahem Fadi, Shahem Sultan Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01170v1 This work presents EmoAra, an end-to-end emotion-preserving pipeline for cross-lingual spoken communication, motivated by banking customer service where emotional context affects service quality. EmoAra integrates Speech Emotion Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition, Machine Translation, and Text-to-Speech to process English speech and deliver an Arabic spoken output while retaining emotional nuance. The system uses a CNN-based emotion classifier, Whisper for English transcription, a fine-tuned MarianMT model for English-to-Arabic translation, and MMS-TTS-Ara for Arabic speech synthesis. Experiments report an F1-score of 94% for emotion classification, translation performance of BLEU 56 and BERTScore F1 88.7%, and an average human evaluation score of 81% on banking-domain translations. The implementation and resources are available at the accompanying GitHub repository. --- ### PedagoSense: A Pedology Grounded LLM System for Pedagogical Strategy Detection and Contextual Response Generation in Learning Dialogues Authors: Shahem Sultan, Shahem Fadi, Yousef Melhim, Ibrahim Alsarraj, Besher Hassan Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01169v1 This paper addresses the challenge of improving interaction quality in dialogue based learning by detecting and recommending effective pedagogical strategies in tutor student conversations. We introduce PedagoSense, a pedology grounded system that combines a two stage strategy classifier with large language model generation. The system first detects whether a pedagogical strategy is present using a binary classifier, then performs fine grained classification to identify the specific strategy. In parallel, it recommends an appropriate strategy from the dialogue context and uses an LLM to generate a response aligned with that strategy. We evaluate on human annotated tutor student dialogues, augmented with additional non pedagogical conversations for the binary task. Results show high performance for pedagogical strategy detection and consistent gains when using data augmentation, while analysis highlights where fine grained classes remain challenging. Overall, PedagoSense bridges pedagogical theory and practical LLM based response generation for more adaptive educational technologies. --- ### Do All Individual Layers Help? An Empirical Study of Task-Interfering Layers in Vision-Language Models Authors: Zhiming Liu, Yujie Wei, Lei Feng, Xiu Su, Xiaobo Xia, Weili Guan, Zeke Xie, Shuo Yang Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01167v1 Current VLMs have demonstrated capabilities across a wide range of multimodal tasks. Typically, in a pretrained VLM, all layers are engaged by default to make predictions on downstream tasks. We find that intervening on a single layer, such as by zeroing its parameters, can improve the performance on certain tasks, indicating that some layers hinder rather than help downstream tasks. We systematically investigate how individual layers influence different tasks via layer intervention. Specifically, we measure the change in performance relative to the base model after intervening on each layer and observe improvements when bypassing specific layers. This improvement can be generalizable across models and datasets, indicating the presence of Task-Interfering Layers that harm downstream tasks' performance. We introduce Task-Layer Interaction Vector, which quantifies the effect of intervening on each layer of a VLM given a task. These task-interfering layers exhibit task-specific sensitivity patterns: tasks requiring similar capabilities show consistent response trends under layer interventions, as evidenced by the high similarity in their task-layer interaction vectors. Inspired by these findings, we propose TaLo (Task-Adaptive Layer Knockout), a training-free, test-time adaptation method that dynamically identifies and bypasses the most interfering layer for a given task. Without parameter updates, TaLo improves performance across various models and datasets, including boosting Qwen-VL's accuracy on the Maps task in ScienceQA by up to 16.6%. Our work reveals an unexpected form of modularity in pretrained VLMs and provides a plug-and-play, training-free mechanism to unlock hidden capabilities at inference time. The source code will be publicly available. --- ### A Multimodal Large Language Model-Driven Framework for Context-Aware UAV Emergency Landing Site Selection Authors: Chunliang Hua, Lei Zhang, Jiayang Sun, Chunlan Zeng, Xiao Hu Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01163v2 Safe UAV emergency landing requires more than just identifying flat terrain; it demands understanding complex semantic risks (e.g., crowds, temporary structures) invisible to traditional geometric sensors. In this paper, we propose a novel framework leveraging Remote Sensing (RS) imagery and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for global context-aware landing site assessment. Unlike local geometric methods, our approach employs a coarse-to-fine pipeline: first, a lightweight semantic segmentation module efficiently pre-screens candidate areas; second, a vision-language reasoning agent fuses visual features with Point-of-Interest (POI) data to detect subtle hazards. To validate this approach, we construct and release the Emergency Landing Site Selection (ELSS) benchmark at https://github.com/chunlianghua/ELSS-dataset. ELSS includes a remote-sensing subset for simulation validation and a UAV aerial-video subset for real-world testing. Experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms geometric baselines in risk identification accuracy. Furthermore, qualitative results confirm its ability to generate human-like, interpretable justifications, enhancing trust in automated decision-making. --- ### Semantically Aware UAV Landing Site Assessment from Remote Sensing Imagery via Multimodal Large Language Models Authors: Chunliang Hua, Zeyuan Yang, Lei Zhang, Jiayang Sun, Fengwen Chen, Chunlan Zeng, Xiao Hu Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01163v1 Safe UAV emergency landing requires more than just identifying flat terrain; it demands understanding complex semantic risks (e.g., crowds, temporary structures) invisible to traditional geometric sensors. In this paper, we propose a novel framework leveraging Remote Sensing (RS) imagery and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for global context-aware landing site assessment. Unlike local geometric methods, our approach employs a coarse-to-fine pipeline: first, a lightweight semantic segmentation module efficiently pre-screens candidate areas; second, a vision-language reasoning agent fuses visual features with Point-of-Interest (POI) data to detect subtle hazards. To validate this approach, we construct and release the Emergency Landing Site Selection (ELSS) benchmark. Experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms geometric baselines in risk identification accuracy. Furthermore, qualitative results confirm its ability to generate human-like, interpretable justifications, enhancing trust in automated decision-making. The benchmark dataset is publicly accessible at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ELSS-dataset-43D7. --- ### Typologically-Informed Candidate Reranking for LLM-based Translation into Low-Resource Languages Authors: Nipuna Abeykoon, Ashen Weerathunga, Pubudu Wijesinghe, Parameswari Krishnamurthy Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01162v1 Large language models trained predominantly on high-resource languages exhibit systematic biases toward dominant typological patterns, leading to structural non-conformance when translating into typologically divergent low-resource languages. We present a framework that leverages linguistic typology to improve translation quality without parallel training data or model retraining. The framework consists of two components: the Universal Metalinguistic Framework (UMF), which represents languages as structured profiles across 16 typological dimensions with divergence-weighted scoring, and the Computational Engine, which operates through linguistic disambiguation during generation and typological compliance scoring during selection. Evaluation across nine language pairs demonstrates intervention rates strongly correlating with typological distance from English. In experiments on 341 English sentences each having different morphological and syntactic phenomena, the framework shows an intervention precision of 48.16% for conservatively treated languages, 28.15% for morphologically dense languages, and 86.26% for structurally profiled languages. The framework requires no parallel training data and operates with any LLM capable of producing multiple candidate outputs, enabling practical deployment for under-resourced languages. --- ### The Role of Dataset Linguistic Structure in the Cultural Awareness of Large Language Models Authors: Reem I. Masoud, Chen Feng, Shunta Asano, Saied Alshahrani, Philip Colin Treleaven, Miguel R. D. Rodrigues Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01161v2 The global deployment of large language models (LLMs) has raised concerns about cultural misalignment, yet the linguistic properties of fine-tuning datasets used for cultural adaptation remain poorly understood. We adopt a dataset-centric view of cultural alignment and investigate which properties of post-training data are associated with cultural performance, whether they can guide data selection before fine-tuning, and how their effects vary across languages and model families. We compute lightweight linguistic, semantic, and structural metrics for Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese datasets and apply principal component analysis (PCA) separately within each language. The resulting components form broadly interpretable axes: PC1 is generally dominated by semantic structure, PC2 captures diversity and lexical variation, and PC3 reflects more language-specific organization. We fine-tune LLaMA, Mistral, and DeepSeek models and evaluate them on benchmarks of cultural knowledge, values, and norms. Although the PCA-derived dataset descriptors are associated with downstream performance, the strongest relationships vary across models, benchmarks, and languages, indicating that no single component serves as a universal predictor. Controlled, size-matched subset interventions further show that PCA-guided selection can improve cultural performance when the relevant component and direction are validated against random sampling. PC3 provides the strongest signal for Arabic, while High-PC1 is most effective for Japanese, particularly for LLaMA. Chinese results are weaker and more model-specific and remain exploratory because of smaller subset sizes. Overall, our findings show that lightweight dataset descriptors can support pre-training data diagnostics, but effective cultural adaptation requires language- and architecture-aware selection rather than a universal linguistic criterion. --- ### Beyond Training for Cultural Awareness: The Role of Dataset Linguistic Structure in Large Language Models Authors: Reem I. Masoud, Chen Feng, Shunta Asano, Saied Alshahrani, Philip Colin Treleaven, Miguel R. D. Rodrigues Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01161v1 The global deployment of large language models (LLMs) has raised concerns about cultural misalignment, yet the linguistic properties of fine-tuning datasets used for cultural adaptation remain poorly understood. We adopt a dataset-centric view of cultural alignment and ask which linguistic properties of fine-tuning data are associated with cultural performance, whether these properties are predictive prior to training, and how these effects vary across models. We compute lightweight linguistic, semantic, and structural metrics for Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese datasets and apply principal component analysis separately within each language. This design ensures that the resulting components capture variation among datasets written in the same language rather than differences between languages. The resulting components correspond to broadly interpretable axes related to semantic coherence, surface-level lexical and syntactic diversity, and lexical or structural richness, though their composition varies across languages. We fine-tune three major LLM families (LLaMA, Mistral, DeepSeek) and evaluate them on benchmarks of cultural knowledge, values, and norms. While PCA components correlate with downstream performance, these associations are strongly model-dependent. Through controlled subset interventions, we show that lexical-oriented components (PC3) are the most robust, yielding more consistent performance across models and benchmarks, whereas emphasizing semantic or diversity extremes (PC1-PC2) is often neutral or harmful. --- ### Improving Robustness of Vision-Language-Action Models by Restoring Corrupted Visual Inputs Authors: Daniel Yezid Guarnizo Orjuela, Leonardo Scappatura, Veronica Di Gennaro, Riccardo Andrea Izzo, Gianluca Bardaro, Matteo Matteucci Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01158v1 Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a dominant paradigm for generalist robotic manipulation, unifying perception and control within a single end-to-end architecture. However, despite their success in controlled environments, reliable real-world deployment is severely hindered by their fragility to visual disturbances. While existing literature extensively addresses physical occlusions caused by scene geometry, a critical mode remains largely unexplored: image corruptions. These sensor-level artifacts, ranging from electronic noise and dead pixels to lens contaminants, directly compromise the integrity of the visual signal prior to interpretation. In this work, we quantify this vulnerability, demonstrating that state-of-the-art VLAs such as $π_{0.5}$ and SmolVLA, suffer catastrophic performance degradation, dropping from 90\% success rates to as low as 2\%, under common signal artifacts. To mitigate this, we introduce the Corruption Restoration Transformer (CRT), a plug-and-play and model-agnostic vision transformer designed to immunize VLA models against sensor disturbances. Leveraging an adversarial training objective, CRT restores clean observations from corrupted inputs without requiring computationally expensive fine-tuning of the underlying model. Extensive experiments across the LIBERO and Meta-World benchmarks demonstrate that CRT effectively recovers lost performance, enabling VLAs to maintain near-baseline success rates, even under severe visual corruption. --- ### Deep Time-Series Models Meet Volatility: Multi-Horizon Electricity Price Forecasting in the Australian National Electricity Market Authors: Mohammed Osman Gani, Zhipeng He, Chun Ouyang, Sara Khalifa Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01157v2 Accurate electricity price forecasting (EPF) is increasingly difficult in markets characterised by extreme volatility, frequent price spikes, and rapid structural shifts. Deep learning (DL) has been increasingly adopted in EPF due to its ability to achieve high forecasting accuracy. Recently, state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep time-series models have demonstrated promising performance across general forecasting tasks. Yet, their effectiveness in highly volatile electricity markets remains underexplored. Moreover, existing EPF studies rarely assess how model accuracy varies across intraday periods, leaving model sensitivity to market conditions unexplored. To address these gaps, this paper proposes an EPF framework that systematically evaluates SOTA deep time-series models using a direct multi-horizon forecasting approach across day-ahead and two-day-ahead settings. We conduct a comprehensive empirical study across all five regions of the Australian National Electricity Market using contemporary, high-volatility data. The results reveal a clear gap between time-series benchmark expectations and observed performance under real-world price volatility: recent deep time-series models often fail to surpass standard DL baselines. All models experience substantial degradation under extreme and negative prices, yet DL baselines often remain competitive. Intraday performance analysis further reveals that all evaluated models are consistently vulnerable to prevailing market conditions, where absolute errors peak during evening ramps, relative errors escalate during midday negative-price periods, and directional accuracy deteriorates sharply during abrupt shifts in price direction. These findings emphasise the need for volatility-aware modelling strategies and richer feature representations to advance EPF. --- ### PolicyFlow: Policy Optimization with Continuous Normalizing Flow in Reinforcement Learning Authors: Shunpeng Yang, Ben Liu, Hua Chen Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.LG, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01156v1 Among on-policy reinforcement learning algorithms, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) demonstrates is widely favored for its simplicity, numerical stability, and strong empirical performance. Standard PPO relies on surrogate objectives defined via importance ratios, which require evaluating policy likelihood that is typically straightforward when the policy is modeled as a Gaussian distribution. However, extending PPO to more expressive, high-capacity policy models such as continuous normalizing flows (CNFs), also known as flow-matching models, is challenging because likelihood evaluation along the full flow trajectory is computationally expensive and often numerically unstable. To resolve this issue, we propose PolicyFlow, a novel on-policy CNF-based reinforcement learning algorithm that integrates expressive CNF policies with PPO-style objectives without requiring likelihood evaluation along the full flow path. PolicyFlow approximates importance ratios using velocity field variations along a simple interpolation path, reducing computational overhead without compromising training stability. To further prevent mode collapse and further encourage diverse behaviors, we propose the Brownian Regularizer, an implicit policy entropy regularizer inspired by Brownian motion, which is conceptually elegant and computationally lightweight. Experiments on diverse tasks across various environments including MultiGoal, PointMaze, IsaacLab and MuJoCo Playground show that PolicyFlow achieves competitive or superior performance compared to PPO using Gaussian policies and flow-based baselines including FPO and DPPO. Notably, results on MultiGoal highlight PolicyFlow's ability to capture richer multimodal action distributions. --- ### Multi-Agent Causal Reasoning System for Error Pattern Rule Automation in Vehicles Authors: Hugo Math, Julian Lorenz, Stefan Oelsner, Rainer Lienhart Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01155v2 Modern vehicles generate thousands of different discrete events known as Diagnostic Trouble Codes (DTCs). Automotive manufacturers use Boolean combinations of these codes, called error patterns (EPs), to characterize system faults and ensure vehicle safety. Yet, EP rules are still manually handcrafted by domain experts, a process that is expensive and prone to errors as vehicle complexity grows. This paper introduces CAREP (Causal Automated Reasoning for Error Patterns), a multi-agent system that automatizes the generation of EP rules from high-dimensional event sequences of DTCs. CAREP combines a causal discovery agent that identifies potential DTC-EP relations, a contextual information agent that integrates metadata and descriptions, and an orchestrator agent that synthesizes candidate boolean rules together with interpretable reasoning traces. Evaluation on a large-scale automotive dataset with over 29,100 unique DTCs and 474 error patterns demonstrates that CAREP can automatically and accurately discover the unknown EP rules, outperforming LLM-only baselines while providing transparent causal explanations. By uniting practical causal discovery and agent-based reasoning, CAREP represents a step toward fully automated fault diagnostics, enabling scalable, interpretable, and cost-efficient vehicle maintenance. --- ### SMI: Statistical Membership Inference for Reliable Unlearned Model Auditing Authors: Jialong Sun, Zeming Wei, Jiaxuan Zou, Jiacheng Gong, Jie Fu, Chengyang Dong, Heng Xu, Jialong Li, Bo Liu Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CR, cs.CV, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01150v2 Machine unlearning (MU) is essential for enforcing the right to be forgotten in machine learning systems. A key challenge of MU is how to reliably audit whether a model has truly forgotten specified training data. Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) are widely used for unlearned model auditing, where samples that evade membership detection are regarded as successfully forgotten. We show this assumption is fundamentally flawed: failed membership inference does not imply true forgetting. We prove that unlearned samples occupy fundamentally different positions in the feature space than non-member samples, making this alignment bias unavoidable and unobservable, which leads to systematically optimistic evaluations of unlearning performance. Meanwhile, training shadow models for MIA incurs substantial computational overhead. To address both limitations, we propose Statistical Membership Inference (SMI), a training-free auditing framework that reformulates auditing as estimating the non-member mixture proportion in the unlearned feature distribution. Beyond estimating the forgetting rate, SMI also provides bootstrap reference ranges for quantified auditing reliability. Extensive experiments show that SMI consistently outperforms all MIA-based baselines, with no shadow model training required. Overall, SMI establishes a principled and efficient alternative to MIA-based auditing methods, with both theoretical guarantees and strong empirical performance. --- ### Robust Machine Learning Framework for Reliable Discovery of High-Performance Half-Heusler Thermoelectrics Authors: Shoeb Athar, Adrien Mecibah, Philippe Jund Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cond-mat.mtrl-sci, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01149v1 Machine learning (ML) can facilitate efficient thermoelectric (TE) material discovery essential to address the environmental crisis. However, ML models often suffer from poor experimental generalizability despite high metrics. This study presents a robust workflow, applied to the half-Heusler (hH) structural prototype, for figure of merit (zT) prediction, to improve the generalizability of ML models. To resolve challenges in dataset handling and feature filtering, we first introduce a rigorous PCA-based splitting method that ensures training and test sets are unbiased and representative of the full chemical space. We then integrate Bayesian hyperparameter optimization with k-best feature filtering across three architectures-Random Forest, XGBoost, and Neural Networks - while employing SISSO symbolic regression for physical insight and comparison. Using SHAP and SISSO analysis, we identify A-site dopant concentration (xA'), and A-site Heat of Vaporization (HVA) as the primary drivers of zT besides Temperature (T). Finally, a high-throughput screening of approximately 6.6x10^8 potential compositions, filtered by stability constraints, yielded several novel high-zT candidates. Breaking from the traditional focus of improving test RMSE/R^2 values of the models, this work shifts the attention on establishing the test set a true proxy for model generalizability and strengthening the often neglected modules of the existing ML workflows for the data-driven design of next-generation thermoelectric materials. --- ### Capabilities and Fundamental Limits of Latent Chain-of-Thought Authors: Jiaxuan Zou, Yaozhong Xiong, Yong Liu Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.AI, cs.IT, cs.LG, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01148v1 Latent Chain-of-Thought (Latent CoT) models promise efficient reasoning via continuous representations, yet exhibit puzzling performance inconsistencies: excelling at exploration (ProsQA: 97.0%) but failing at computation (GSM8K: 34.1%). We reveal that this trade-off is governed by decisional certainty. Our contributions are threefold: (1) We theoretically characterize the fundamental Exploration-Execution Trade-off, proving that high certainty enables precise execution but inhibits exploration, while low certainty facilitates search but causes error accumulation. (2) We introduce the Symbolic Index--quantifying decisional commitment--as the core mechanism governing this trade-off and establish its causal relationship with both execution stability and exploration capability. (3) We prove that curriculum learning is theoretically necessary, as direct training provably fails due to distributional mismatch. Our framework shifts the design paradigm from binary architectural choices toward adaptive systems that dynamically regulate decisional certainty based on task demands. --- ### Unleashing the Potential of Differential Evolution through Individual-Level Strategy Diversity Authors: Chenchen Feng, Minyang Chen, Zhuozhao Li, Ran Cheng Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01147v1 Since Differential Evolution (DE) is sensitive to strategy choice, most existing variants pursue performance through adaptive mechanisms or intricate designs. While these approaches focus on adjusting strategies over time, the structural benefits that static strategy diversity may bring remain largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we study the impact of individual-level strategy diversity on DE's search dynamics and performance, and introduce iStratDE (DE with individual-level strategies), a minimalist variant that assigns mutation and crossover strategies independently to each individual at initialization and keeps them fixed throughout the evolutionary process. By injecting diversity at the individual level without adaptation or feedback, iStratDE cultivates persistent behavioral heterogeneity that is especially effective with large populations. Moreover, its communication-free construction possesses intrinsic concurrency, thereby enabling efficient parallel execution and straightforward scaling for GPU computing. We further provide a convergence analysis of iStratDE under standard reachability assumptions, which establishes the almost-sure convergence of the best-so-far fitness. Extensive experiments on the CEC2022 benchmark suite and robotic control tasks demonstrate that iStratDE matches or surpasses established adaptive DE variants. These results highlight individual-level strategy assignment as a straightforward yet effective mechanism for enhancing DE's performance. The source code of iStratDE is publicly accessible at: https://github.com/EMI-Group/istratde. --- ### PersistBench: When Should Long-Term Memories Be Forgotten by LLMs? Authors: Sidharth Pulipaka, Oliver Chen, Manas Sharma, Taaha S Bajwa, Vyas Raina, Ivaxi Sheth Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01146v2 Conversational assistants are increasingly integrating long-term memory with large language models (LLMs). This persistence of memories, e.g., the user is vegetarian, can enhance personalization in future conversations. However, the same persistence can also introduce safety risks that have been largely overlooked. Hence, we introduce PersistBench to measure the extent of these safety risks. We identify two long-term memory-specific risks: cross-domain leakage, where LLMs inappropriately inject context from the long-term memories; and memory-induced sycophancy, where stored long-term memories insidiously reinforce user biases. We evaluate 18 frontier and open-source LLMs on our benchmark. Our results reveal a surprisingly high failure rate across these LLMs - a median failure rate of 53% on cross-domain samples and 97% on sycophancy samples. To address this, our benchmark encourages the development of more robust and safer long-term memory usage in frontier conversational systems. --- ### Generalized Radius and Integrated Codebook Transforms for Differentiable Vector Quantization Authors: Haochen You, Heng Zhang, Hongyang He, Yuqi Li, Baojing Liu Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01140v1 Vector quantization (VQ) underpins modern generative and representation models by turning continuous latents into discrete tokens. Yet hard nearest-neighbor assignments are non-differentiable and are typically optimized with heuristic straight-through estimators, which couple the update step size to the quantization gap and train each code in isolation, leading to unstable gradients and severe codebook under-utilization at scale. In this paper, we introduce GRIT-VQ (Generalized Radius and Integrated Transform-Vector Quantization), a unified surrogate framework that keeps hard assignments in the forward pass while making VQ fully differentiable. GRIT-VQ replaces the straight-through estimator with a radius-based update that moves latents along the quantization direction with a controllable, geometry-aware step, and applies a data-agnostic integrated transform to the codebook so that all codes are updated through shared parameters instead of independently. Our theoretical analysis clarifies the fundamental optimization dynamics introduced by GRIT-VQ, establishing conditions for stable gradient flow, coordinated codebook evolution, and reliable avoidance of collapse across a broad family of quantizers. Across image reconstruction, image generation, and recommendation tokenization benchmarks, GRIT-VQ consistently improves reconstruction error, generative quality, and recommendation accuracy while substantially increasing codebook utilization compared to existing VQ variants. --- ### Key Principles of Graph Machine Learning: Representation, Robustness, and Generalization Authors: Yassine Abbahaddou Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01139v1 Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful tools for learning representations from structured data. Despite their growing popularity and success across various applications, GNNs encounter several challenges that limit their performance. in their generalization, robustness to adversarial perturbations, and the effectiveness of their representation learning capabilities. In this dissertation, I investigate these core aspects through three main contributions: (1) developing new representation learning techniques based on Graph Shift Operators (GSOs, aiming for enhanced performance across various contexts and applications, (2) introducing generalization-enhancing methods through graph data augmentation, and (3) developing more robust GNNs by leveraging orthonormalization techniques and noise-based defenses against adversarial attacks. By addressing these challenges, my work provides a more principled understanding of the limitations and potential of GNNs. --- ### Self-Generative Adversarial Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models Authors: Shiguang Wu, Yaqing Wang, Quanming Yao Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01137v1 Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for alignment typically relies on supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning from human feedback, both limited by the cost and scarcity of high-quality annotations. Recent self-play and synthetic data approaches reduce this dependence but often rely on heuristic assumptions or ungrounded self-evaluation, which can cause bias accumulation and performance drift. In this paper, we propose Self-Generative Adversarial LLM (SGALM), a unified fine-tuning framework that formulates alignment as a generative adversarial game within a single LLM. SGALM jointly evolves generation and discrimination capabilities without external reward models. Theoretical and empirical results demonstrate that SGALM achieves state-of-the-art performance, serves as an effective alignment algorithm and a robust synthetic data engine. --- ### A Unified Matrix-Spectral Framework for Stability and Interpretability in Deep Learning Authors: Ronald Katende Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.LG, math.DS, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01136v1 We develop a unified matrix-spectral framework for analyzing stability and interpretability in deep neural networks. Representing networks as data-dependent products of linear operators reveals spectral quantities governing sensitivity to input perturbations, label noise, and training dynamics. We introduce a Global Matrix Stability Index that aggregates spectral information from Jacobians, parameter gradients, Neural Tangent Kernel operators, and loss Hessians into a single stability scale controlling forward sensitivity, attribution robustness, and optimization conditioning. We further show that spectral entropy refines classical operator-norm bounds by capturing typical, rather than purely worst-case, sensitivity. These quantities yield computable diagnostics and stability-oriented regularization principles. Synthetic experiments and controlled studies on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100 confirm that modest spectral regularization substantially improves attribution stability even when global spectral summaries change little. The results establish a precise connection between spectral concentration and analytic stability, providing practical guidance for robustness-aware model design and training. --- ### Your Autoregressive Model Already Reveals the Causal Graph Authors: Hugo Math, Rainer Lienhart Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01135v4 Autoregressive models trained via next-token prediction implicitly learn the conditional independence structure of their data-generating process. We exploit this observation to perform scalable causal discovery from a single observed sequence of discrete events -- without any task-specific retraining. Such single-stream settings arise naturally in vehicle diagnostics, manufacturing systems, and patient trajectories, yet they remain largely unsolved: the absence of repeated samples, massive event vocabularies, and long-range temporal dependencies render existing methods either inaccurate or computationally intractable. We introduce TRACE, a framework that repurposes any pretrained autoregressive model as a density estimator for conditional mutual information, the fundamental primitive for conditional independence testing. By constructing parallelized CI tests on GPUs, TRACE recovers both the sample-level time causal graph and its summary projection, scaling linearly with the vocabulary size while naturally handling delayed causal effects. Crucially, we prove that minimizing the standard cross-entropy pretraining loss directly minimizes an upper bound on the causal identification error, establishing a duality between sequence prediction and causal discovery. On nonlinear SCMs (|X| = 8000) and real-world vehicle diagnostic logs (|X| = 29100), TRACE is the first applicable method at this scale, outperforming the strongest baseline by over 20 F1 points. --- ### Parallel Training in Spiking Neural Networks Authors: Yanbin Huang, Man Yao, Yuqi Pan, Changze Lv, Siyuan Xu, Xiaoqing Zheng, Bo Xu, Guoqi Li Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01133v1 The bio-inspired integrate-fire-reset mechanism of spiking neurons constitutes the foundation for efficient processing in Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs). Recent progress in large models demands that spiking neurons support highly parallel computation to scale efficiently on modern GPUs. This work proposes a novel functional perspective that provides general guidance for designing parallel spiking neurons. We argue that the reset mechanism, which induces complex temporal dependencies and hinders parallel training, should be removed. However, any such modification should satisfy two principles: 1) preserving the functions of reset as a core biological mechanism; and 2) enabling parallel training without sacrificing the serial inference ability of spiking neurons, which underpins their efficiency at test time. To this end, we identify the functions of the reset and analyze how to reconcile parallel training with serial inference, upon which we propose a dynamic decay spiking neuron. We conduct comprehensive testing of our method in terms of: 1) Training efficiency and extrapolation capability. On 16k-length sequences, we achieve a 25.6x training speedup over the pioneering parallel spiking neuron, and our models trained on 2k-length can stably perform inference on sequences as long as 30k. 2) Generality. We demonstrate the consistent effectiveness of the proposed method across five task categories (image classification, neuromorphic event processing, time-series forecasting, language modeling, and reinforcement learning), three network architectures (spiking CNN/Transformer/SSMs), and two spike activation modes (spike/integer activation). 3) Energy consumption. The spiking firing of our neuron is lower than that of vanilla and existing parallel spiking neurons. --- ### Don't Judge a Book by its Cover: Testing LLMs' Robustness Under Logical Obfuscation Authors: Abhilekh Borah, Shubhra Ghosh, Kedar Joshi, Aditya Kumar Guru, Kripabandhu Ghosh Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01132v2 Tasks such as solving arithmetic equations, evaluating truth tables, and completing syllogisms are handled well by large language models (LLMs) in their standard form, but they often fail when the same problems are posed in logically equivalent yet obfuscated formats. To study this vulnerability, we introduce Logifus, a structure-preserving logical obfuscation framework, and, utilizing this, we present LogiQAte, a first-of-its-kind diagnostic benchmark with 1,108 questions across four reasoning tasks: (i) Obfus FOL (first-order logic entailment under equivalence-preserving rewrites), (ii) Obfus Blood Relation (family-graph entailment under indirect relational chains), (iii) Obfus Number Series (pattern induction under symbolic substitutions), and (iv) Obfus Direction Sense (navigation reasoning under altered directions and reference frames). Across all the tasks, evaluating six state-of-the-art models, we find that obfuscation severely degrades zero-shot performance, with performance dropping on average by 47% for GPT-4o, 27% for GPT-5, and 22% for reasoning model, o4-mini. Our findings reveal that current LLMs parse questions without deep understanding, highlighting the urgency of building models that genuinely comprehend and preserve meaning beyond surface form. --- ### Lyapunov Stability-Aware Stackelberg Game for Low-Altitude Economy: A Control-Oriented Pruning-Based DRL Approach Authors: Yue Zhong, Jiawen Kang, Yongju Tong, Hong-Ning Dai, Dong In Kim, Abbas Jamalipour, Shengli Xie Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01131v2 With the rapid expansion of the low-altitude economy, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) serve as pivotal aerial base stations supporting diverse services from users, ranging from latency-sensitive critical missions to bandwidth-intensive data streaming. However, the efficacy of such heterogeneous networks is often compromised by the conflict between limited onboard resources and stringent stability requirements. Moving beyond traditional throughput-centric designs, we propose a Sensing-Communication-Computing-Control closed-loop framework that explicitly models the impact of communication latency on physical control stability. To guarantee mission reliability, we leverage the Lyapunov stability theory to derive an intrinsic mapping between the state evolution of the control system and communication constraints, transforming abstract stability requirements into quantifiable resource boundaries. Then, we formulate the resource allocation problem as a Stackelberg game, where UAVs (as leaders) dynamically price resources to balance load and ensure stability, while users (as followers) optimize requests based on service urgency. Furthermore, addressing the prohibitive computational overhead of standard Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) on energy-constrained edge platforms, we propose a novel and lightweight pruning-based Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. By integrating a dynamic structured pruning mechanism, the proposed algorithm significantly compresses the neural network scale during training, enabling the UAV to rapidly approximate the game equilibrium with minimal inference latency. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme effectively secures control loop stability while maximizing system utility in dynamic low-altitude environments. --- ### Tangent Space Fine-Tuning for Directional Preference Alignment in Large Language Models Authors: Mete Erdogan Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01128v1 Our goal is to enable large language models (LLMs) to balance multiple human preference dimensions; such as helpfulness, safety, and verbosity, through principled and controllable alignment. Existing preference optimization methods, including Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), collapse feedback into a single scalar reward, fixing one balance among objectives and preventing traversal of the Pareto front. Recent work by Ortiz-Jimenez et al. (2023) showed that fine-tuning can be viewed in a model's tangent space, where linearized updates act as additive vectors that can be composed to jointly perform well on multiple tasks. Building on this formulation, we extend this idea to preference alignment and propose Tangent-Space Direct Preference Optimization (TS-DPO), which performs DPO within this locally linear regime to learn per-objective update directions. These directions can be linearly combined at inference to generate user-specified behaviors without additional optimization. Evaluated on the helpfulness-verbosity trade-off using the HelpSteer and UltraFeedback datasets, TS-DPO achieves broader Pareto-optimal coverage and smoother preference control than scalarized DPO. Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) further shows that tangent-space training amplifies canonical directions aligned with distinct preferences, improving disentanglement. --- ### Koo-Fu CLIP: Closed-Form Adaptation of Vision-Language Models via Fukunaga-Koontz Linear Discriminant Analysis Authors: Matej Suchanek, Klara Janouskova, Ondrej Vasatko, Jiri Matas Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01127v1 Visual-language models such as CLIP provide powerful general-purpose representations, but their raw embeddings are not optimized for supervised classification, often exhibiting limited class separation and excessive dimensionality. We propose Koo-Fu CLIP, a supervised CLIP adaptation method based on Fukunaga-Koontz Linear Discriminant Analysis, which operates in a whitened embedding space to suppress within-class variation and enhance between-class discrimination. The resulting closed-form linear projection reshapes the geometry of CLIP embeddings, improving class separability while performing effective dimensionality reduction, and provides a lightweight and efficient adaptation of CLIP representations. Across large-scale ImageNet benchmarks, nearest visual prototype classification in the Koo-Fu CLIP space improves top-1 accuracy from 75.1% to 79.1% on ImageNet-1K, with consistent gains persisting as the label space expands to 14K and 21K classes. The method supports substantial compression by up to 10-12x with little or no loss in accuracy, enabling efficient large-scale classification and retrieval. --- ### WinFLoRA: Incentivizing Client-Adaptive Aggregation in Federated LoRA under Privacy Heterogeneity Authors: Mengsha Kou, Xiaoyu Xia, Ziqi Wang, Ibrahim Khalil, Runkun Luo, Jingwen Zhou, Minhui Xue Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01126v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly underpin intelligent web applications, from chatbots to search and recommendation, where efficient specialization is essential. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enables such adaptation with minimal overhead, while federated LoRA allows web service providers to fine-tune shared models without data sharing. However, in privacy-sensitive deployments, clients inject varying levels of differential privacy (DP) noise, creating privacy heterogeneity that misaligns individual incentives and global performance. In this paper, we propose WinFLoRA, a privacy-heterogeneous federated LoRA that utilizes aggregation weights as incentives with noise awareness. Specifically, the noises from clients are estimated based on the uploaded LoRA adapters. A larger weight indicates greater influence on the global model and better downstream task performance, rewarding lower-noise contributions. By up-weighting low-noise updates, WinFLoRA improves global accuracy while accommodating clients' heterogeneous privacy requirements. Consequently, WinFLoRA aligns heterogeneous client utility in terms of privacy and downstream performance with global model objectives without third-party involvement. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that across multiple LLMs and datasets, WinFLoRA achieves up to 52.58% higher global accuracy and up to 2.56x client utility than state-of-the-art benchmarks. Source code is publicly available at https://github.com/koums24/WinFLoRA.git. --- ### Long-range Modeling and Processing of Multimodal Event Sequences Authors: Jichu Li, Yilun Zhong, Zhiting Li, Feng Zhou, Quyu Kong Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01125v1 Temporal point processes (TPPs) have emerged as powerful tools for modeling asynchronous event sequences. While recent advances have extended TPPs to handle textual information, existing approaches are limited in their ability to generate rich, multimodal content and reason about event dynamics. A key challenge is that incorporating multimodal data dramatically increases sequence length, hindering the ability of attention-based models to generate coherent, long-form textual descriptions that require long-range understanding. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that extends LLM-based TPPs to the visual modality, positioning text generation as a core capability alongside time and type prediction. Our approach addresses the long-context problem through an adaptive sequence compression mechanism based on temporal similarity, which reduces sequence length while preserving essential patterns. We employ a two-stage paradigm of pre-training on compressed sequences followed by supervised fine-tuning for downstream tasks. Extensive experiments, including on the challenging DanmakuTPP-QA benchmark, demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both predictive accuracy and the quality of its generated textual analyses. --- ### ChronoSpike: An Adaptive Spiking Graph Neural Network for Dynamic Graphs Authors: Md Abrar Jahin, Taufikur Rahman Fuad, Jay Pujara, Craig Knoblock Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01124v3 Dynamic graph representation learning requires capturing both structural relations and temporal evolution, yet existing approaches face a core trade-off: attention-based methods offer expressiveness at $O(T^2)$ complexity, while recurrent architectures suffer from gradient pathologies and dense state storage. Spiking neural networks provide event-driven efficiency but are constrained by sequential propagation, binary information loss, and local aggregation that lacks global context. We propose ChronoSpike, an adaptive spiking graph neural network that integrates learnable LIF neurons with per-channel membrane dynamics, multi-head spatially-attentive aggregation over continuous features, and a lightweight Transformer temporal encoder. This design enables fine-grained local modeling and long-range dependency capture with $O(T \cdot d)$ activation/state memory and an additional $O(T^2)$ per-node attention term that remains small for the horizons evaluated here. ChronoSpike outperforms twelve state-of-the-art baselines on three large benchmarks by $2.0$% Macro-F1 and $2.4$% Micro-F1 on average while achieving $3-10\times$ faster training than recurrent methods with a constant 105K-parameter budget independent of graph size. We provide theoretical guarantees for membrane potential boundedness, gradient flow stability under contraction factor $ρ<1$, and BIBO stability; interpretability analyses reveal heterogeneous temporal receptive fields and a learned primacy effect with $83-88$% sparsity. --- ### MarkovScale: Towards Optimal Sequential Scaling at Inference Time Authors: Youkang Wang, Jian Wang, Rubing Chen, Tianyi Zeng, Xiao-Yong Wei, Qing Li Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01120v1 Sequential scaling is a prominent inference-time scaling paradigm, yet its performance improvements are typically modest and not well understood, largely due to the prevalence of heuristic, non-principled approaches that obscure clear optimality bounds. To address this, we propose a principled framework that models sequential scaling as a two-state Markov process. This approach reveals the underlying properties of sequential scaling and yields closed-form solutions for essential aspects, such as the specific conditions under which accuracy is improved and the theoretical upper, neutral, and lower performance bounds. Leveraging this formulation, we develop MarkovScale, a practical system that applies these optimality criteria to achieve a theoretically grounded balance between accuracy and efficiency. Comprehensive experiments across 3 backbone LLMs, 5 benchmarks, and over 20 configurations show that MarkovScale consistently outperforms state-of-the-art parallel and sequential scaling methods, representing a significant step toward optimal and resource-efficient inference in LLMs. The source code will be open upon acceptance at https://open-upon-acceptance. --- ### Tendem: A Hybrid AI+Human Platform Authors: Konstantin Chernyshev, Ekaterina Artemova, Viacheslav Zhukov, Maksim Nerush, Mariia Fedorova, Iryna Repik, Olga Shapovalova, Aleksey Sukhorosov, Vladimir Dobrovolskii, Natalia Mikhailova, Sergei Tilga Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01119v1 Tendem is a hybrid system where AI handles structured, repeatable work and Human Experts step in when the models fail or to verify results. Each result undergoes a comprehensive quality review before delivery to the Client. To assess Tendem's performance, we conducted a series of in-house evaluations on 94 real-world tasks, comparing it with AI-only agents and human-only workflows carried out by Upwork freelancers. The results show that Tendem consistently delivers higher-quality outputs with faster turnaround times. At the same time, its operational costs remain comparable to human-only execution. On third-party agentic benchmarks, Tendem's AI Agent (operating autonomously, without human involvement) performs near state-of-the-art on web browsing and tool-use tasks while demonstrating strong results in frontier domain knowledge and reasoning. --- ### LightCity: An Urban Dataset for Outdoor Inverse Rendering and Reconstruction under Multi-illumination Conditions Authors: Jingjing Wang, Qirui Hu, Chong Bao, Yuke Zhu, Hujun Bao, Zhaopeng Cui, Guofeng Zhang Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01118v1 Inverse rendering in urban scenes is pivotal for applications like autonomous driving and digital twins. Yet, it faces significant challenges due to complex illumination conditions, including multi-illumination and indirect light and shadow effects. However, the effects of these challenges on intrinsic decomposition and 3D reconstruction have not been explored due to the lack of appropriate datasets. In this paper, we present LightCity, a novel high-quality synthetic urban dataset featuring diverse illumination conditions with realistic indirect light and shadow effects. LightCity encompasses over 300 sky maps with highly controllable illumination, varying scales with street-level and aerial perspectives over 50K images, and rich properties such as depth, normal, material components, light and indirect light, etc. Besides, we leverage LightCity to benchmark three fundamental tasks in the urban environments and conduct a comprehensive analysis of these benchmarks, laying a robust foundation for advancing related research. --- ### Logic-Oriented Retriever Enhancement via Contrastive Learning Authors: Wenxuan Zhang, Yuan-Hao Jiang, Changyong Qi, Rui Jia, Yonghe Wu Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01116v1 Large language models (LLMs) struggle in knowledge-intensive tasks, as retrievers often overfit to surface similarity and fail on queries involving complex logical relations. The capacity for logical analysis is inherent in model representations but remains underutilized in standard training. LORE (Logic ORiented Retriever Enhancement) introduces fine-grained contrastive learning to activate this latent capacity, guiding embeddings toward evidence aligned with logical structure rather than shallow similarity. LORE requires no external upervision, resources, or pre-retrieval analysis, remains index-compatible, and consistently improves retrieval utility and downstream generation while maintaining efficiency. The datasets and code are publicly available at https://github.com/mazehart/Lore-RAG. --- ### KAN We Flow? Advancing Robotic Manipulation with 3D Flow Matching via KAN & RWKV Authors: Zhihao Chen, Yiyuan Ge, Ziyang Wang, Youwei Zhang Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01115v3 Diffusion-based visuomotor policies excel at modeling action distributions but are inference-inefficient, since recursively denoising from noise to policy requires many steps and heavy UNet backbones, which hinders deployment on resource-constrained robots. Flow matching alleviates the sampling burden by learning a one-step vector field, yet prior implementations still inherit large UNet-style architectures. In this work, we present KAN-We-Flow, a flow-matching policy that draws on recent advances in Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV) and Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN) from vision to build a lightweight and highly expressive backbone for 3D manipulation. Concretely, we introduce an RWKV-KAN block: an RWKV first performs efficient time/channel mixing to propagate task context, and a subsequent GroupKAN layer applies learnable spline-based, groupwise functional mappings to perform feature-wise nonlinear calibration of the action mapping on RWKV outputs. Moreover, we introduce an Action Consistency Regularization (ACR), a lightweight auxiliary loss that enforces alignment between predicted action trajectories and expert demonstrations via Euler extrapolation, providing additional supervision to stabilize training and improve policy precision. Without resorting to large UNets, our design reduces parameters by 86.8\%, maintains fast runtime, and achieves state-of-the-art success rates on Adroit, Meta-World, and DexArt benchmarks. Our project page can be viewed in \href{https://zhihaochen-2003.github.io/KAN-We-Flow.github.io/}{\textcolor{red}{link}} --- ### KAN We Flow? Advancing Robotic Manipulation with 3D Flow Matching via KAN & RWKV Authors: Zhihao Chen, Yiyuan Ge, Ziyang Wang Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01115v2 Diffusion-based visuomotor policies excel at modeling action distributions but are inference-inefficient, since recursively denoising from noise to policy requires many steps and heavy UNet backbones, which hinders deployment on resource-constrained robots. Flow matching alleviates the sampling burden by learning a one-step vector field, yet prior implementations still inherit large UNet-style architectures. In this work, we present KAN-We-Flow, a flow-matching policy that draws on recent advances in Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV) and Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN) from vision to build a lightweight and highly expressive backbone for 3D manipulation. Concretely, we introduce an RWKV-KAN block: an RWKV first performs efficient time/channel mixing to propagate task context, and a subsequent GroupKAN layer applies learnable spline-based, groupwise functional mappings to perform feature-wise nonlinear calibration of the action mapping on RWKV outputs. Moreover, we introduce an Action Consistency Regularization (ACR), a lightweight auxiliary loss that enforces alignment between predicted action trajectories and expert demonstrations via Euler extrapolation, providing additional supervision to stabilize training and improve policy precision. Without resorting to large UNets, our design reduces parameters by 86.8\%, maintains fast runtime, and achieves state-of-the-art success rates on Adroit, Meta-World, and DexArt benchmarks. Our project page can be viewed in \href{https://zhihaochen-2003.github.io/KAN-We-Flow.github.io/}{\textcolor{red}{link}} --- ### Single-Edge Node Injection Threats to GNN-Based Security Monitoring in Industrial Graph Systems Authors: Wenjie Liang, Ranhui Yan, Jia Cai, You-Gan Wang Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01113v1 Graph neural networks (GNNs) are increasingly adopted in industrial graph-based monitoring systems (e.g., Industrial internet of things (IIoT) device graphs, power-grid topology models, and manufacturing communication networks) to support anomaly detection, state estimation, and asset classification. In such settings, an adversary that compromises a small number of edge devices may inject counterfeit nodes (e.g., rogue sensors, virtualized endpoints, or spoofed substations) to bias downstream decisions while evading topology- and homophily-based sanitization. This paper formulates deployment-oriented node-injection attacks under constrained resources and proposes the \emph{Single-Edge Graph Injection Attack} (SEGIA), in which each injected node attaches to the operational graph through a single edge. SEGIA integrates a pruned SGC surrogate, multi-hop neighborhood sampling, and reverse graph convolution-based feature synthesis with a similarity-regularized objective to preserve local homophily and survive edge pruning. Theoretical analysis and extensive evaluations across datasets and defenses show at least $25\%$ higher attack success than representative baselines under substantially smaller edge budgets. These results indicate a system-level risk in industrial GNN deployments and motivate lightweight admission validation and neighborhood-consistency monitoring. --- ### Transforming Vehicle Diagnostics: A Multimodal Approach to Error Patterns Prediction Authors: Hugo Math, Rainer Lienhart Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01109v1 Accurately diagnosing and predicting vehicle malfunctions is crucial for maintenance and safety in the automotive industry. While modern diagnostic systems primarily rely on sequences of vehicular Diagnostic Trouble Codes (DTCs) registered in On-Board Diagnostic (OBD) systems, they often overlook valuable contextual information such as raw sensory data (e.g., temperature, humidity, and pressure). This contextual data, crucial for domain experts to classify vehicle failures, introduces unique challenges due to its complexity and the noisy nature of real-world data. This paper presents BiCarFormer: the first multimodal approach to multi-label sequence classification of error codes into error patterns that integrates DTC sequences and environmental conditions. BiCarFormer is a bidirectional Transformer model tailored for vehicle event sequences, employing embedding fusions and a co-attention mechanism to capture the relationships between diagnostic codes and environmental data. Experimental results on a challenging real-world automotive dataset with 22,137 error codes and 360 error patterns demonstrate that our approach significantly improves classification performance compared to models that rely solely on DTC sequences and traditional sequence models. This work highlights the importance of incorporating contextual environmental information for more accurate and robust vehicle diagnostics, hence reducing maintenance costs and enhancing automation processes in the automotive industry. --- ### SPELL: Synthesis of Programmatic Edits using LLMs Authors: Daniel Ramos, Catarina Gamboa, Inês Lynce, Vasco Manquinho, Ruben Martins, Claire Le Goues Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01107v1 Library migration is a common but error-prone task in software development. Developers may need to replace one library with another due to reasons like changing requirements or licensing changes. Migration typically entails updating and rewriting source code manually. While automated migration tools exist, most rely on mining examples from real-world projects that have already undergone similar migrations. However, these data are scarce, and collecting them for arbitrary pairs of libraries is difficult. Moreover, these migration tools often miss out on leveraging modern code transformation infrastructure. In this paper, we present a new approach to automated API migration that sidesteps the limitations described above. Instead of relying on existing migration data or using LLMs directly for transformation, we use LLMs to extract migration examples. Next, we use an Agent to generalize those examples to reusable transformation scripts in PolyglotPiranha, a modern code transformation tool. Our method distills latent migration knowledge from LLMs into structured, testable, and repeatable migration logic, without requiring preexisting corpora or manual engineering effort. Experimental results across Python libraries show that our system can generate diverse migration examples and synthesize transformation scripts that generalize to real-world codebases. --- ### OLion: Approaching the Hadamard Ideal by Intersecting Spectral and $\ell_{\infty}$ Implicit Biases Authors: Zixiao Wang, Yifei Shen, Huishuai Zhang Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01105v2 Many optimizers can be interpreted as steepest-descent methods under norm-induced geometries, and thus inherit corresponding implicit biases. We introduce \nameA{} (\fullname{}), which combines spectral control from orthogonalized update directions with $\ell_\infty$-style coordinate control from sign updates. \nameA{} forms a Lion-style momentum direction, approximately orthogonalizes it via a few Newton--Schulz iterations, and then applies an entrywise sign, providing an efficient approximation to taking a maximal step over the intersection of the spectral and $\ell_\infty$ constraint sets (a scaled Hadamard-like set for matrix parameters). Despite the strong nonlinearity of orthogonalization and sign, we prove convergence under a mild, empirically verified diagonal-isotropy assumption. Across large-scale language and vision training, including GPT-2 and Llama pretraining, SiT image pretraining, and supervised fine-tuning, \nameA{} matches or outperforms AdamW and Muon under comparable tuning while using only momentum-level optimizer state, and it mitigates optimizer mismatch when fine-tuning AdamW-pretrained checkpoints. --- ### Probing RLVR training instability through the lens of objective-level hacking Authors: Yiming Dong, Kun Fu, Haoyu Li, Xinyuan Zhu, Yurou Liu, Lijing Shao, Jieping Ye, Zheng Wang Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01103v2 Prolonged reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been shown to drive continuous improvements in the reasoning capabilities of large language models, but the training is often prone to instabilities, especially in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures. Training instability severely undermines model capability improvement, yet its underlying causes and mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this work, we introduce a principled framework for understanding RLVR instability through the lens of objective-level hacking. Unlike reward hacking, which arises from exploitable verifiers, objective-level hacking emerges from token-level credit misalignment and is manifested as system-level spurious signals in the optimization objective. Grounded in our framework, together with extensive experiments on a 30B MoE model, we trace the origin and formalize the mechanism behind a key pathological training dynamic in MoE models: the abnormal growth of the training-inference discrepancy, a phenomenon widely associated with instability but previously lacking a mechanistic explanation. These findings provide a concrete and causal account of the training dynamics underlying instabilities in MoE models, offering guidance for the design of stable RLVR algorithms. --- ### Robust Harmful Meme Detection under Missing Modalities via Shared Representation Learning Authors: Felix Breiteneder, Mohammad Belal, Muhammad Saad Saeed, Shahed Masoudian, Usman Naseem, Kulshrestha Juhi, Markus Schedl, Shah Nawaz Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01101v1 Internet memes are powerful tools for communication, capable of spreading political, psychological, and sociocultural ideas. However, they can be harmful and can be used to disseminate hate toward targeted individuals or groups. Although previous studies have focused on designing new detection methods, these often rely on modal-complete data, such as text and images. In real-world settings, however, modalities like text may be missing due to issues like poor OCR quality, making existing methods sensitive to missing information and leading to performance deterioration. To address this gap, in this paper, we present the first-of-its-kind work to comprehensively investigate the behavior of harmful meme detection methods in the presence of modal-incomplete data. Specifically, we propose a new baseline method that learns a shared representation for multiple modalities by projecting them independently. These shared representations can then be leveraged when data is modal-incomplete. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches when text is missing. Moreover, these results suggest that our method allows for better integration of visual features, reducing dependence on text and improving robustness in scenarios where textual information is missing. Our work represents a significant step forward in enabling the real-world application of harmful meme detection, particularly in situations where a modality is absent. --- ### PandaPose: 3D Human Pose Lifting from a Single Image via Propagating 2D Pose Prior to 3D Anchor Space Authors: Jinghong Zheng, Changlong Jiang, Yang Xiao, Jiaqi Li, Haohong Kuang, Hang Xu, Ran Wang, Zhiguo Cao, Min Du, Joey Tianyi Zhou Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01095v1 3D human pose lifting from a single RGB image is a challenging task in 3D vision. Existing methods typically establish a direct joint-to-joint mapping from 2D to 3D poses based on 2D features. This formulation suffers from two fundamental limitations: inevitable error propagation from input predicted 2D pose to 3D predictions and inherent difficulties in handling self-occlusion cases. In this paper, we propose PandaPose, a 3D human pose lifting approach via propagating 2D pose prior to 3D anchor space as the unified intermediate representation. Specifically, our 3D anchor space comprises: (1) Joint-wise 3D anchors in the canonical coordinate system, providing accurate and robust priors to mitigate 2D pose estimation inaccuracies. (2) Depth-aware joint-wise feature lifting that hierarchically integrates depth information to resolve self-occlusion ambiguities. (3) The anchor-feature interaction decoder that incorporates 3D anchors with lifted features to generate unified anchor queries encapsulating joint-wise 3D anchor set, visual cues and geometric depth information. The anchor queries are further employed to facilitate anchor-to-joint ensemble prediction. Experiments on three well-established benchmarks (i.e., Human3.6M, MPI-INF-3DHP and 3DPW) demonstrate the superiority of our proposition. The substantial reduction in error by $14.7\%$ compared to SOTA methods on the challenging conditions of Human3.6M and qualitative comparisons further showcase the effectiveness and robustness of our approach. --- ### Hard Constraints Meet Soft Generation: Guaranteed Feasibility for LLM-based Combinatorial Optimization Authors: Yang Liu, Chuan Zhou, Yancheng Chen, Shuai Zhang, Xixun Lin, Xiaoqing Wang Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01090v1 Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as promising general-purpose solvers for combinatorial optimization (CO), yet they fundamentally lack mechanisms to guarantee solution feasibility which is critical for real-world deployment. In this work, we introduce FALCON, a framework that ensures 100\% feasibility through three key innovations: (i) \emph{grammar-constrained decoding} enforces syntactic validity, (ii) a \emph{feasibility repair layer} corrects semantic constraint violations, and (iii) \emph{adaptive Best-of-$N$ sampling} allocates inference compute efficiently. To train the underlying LLM, we introduce the Best-anchored Objective-guided Preference Optimization (BOPO) in LLM training, which weights preference pairs by their objective gap, providing dense supervision without human labels. Theoretically, we prove convergence for BOPO and provide bounds on repair-induced quality loss. Empirically, across seven NP-hard CO problems, FALCON achieves perfect feasibility while matching or exceeding the solution quality of state-of-the-art neural and LLM-based solvers. --- ### Differential Vector Erasure: Unified Training-Free Concept Erasure for Flow Matching Models Authors: Zhiqi Zhang, Xinhao Zhong, Yi Sun, Shuoyang Sun, Bin Chen, Shu-Tao Xia, Xuan Wang Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01089v1 Text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating high-quality images, yet their tendency to reproduce undesirable concepts, such as NSFW content, copyrighted styles, or specific objects, poses growing concerns for safe and controllable deployment. While existing concept erasure approaches primarily focus on DDPM-based diffusion models and rely on costly fine-tuning, the recent emergence of flow matching models introduces a fundamentally different generative paradigm for which prior methods are not directly applicable. In this paper, we propose Differential Vector Erasure (DVE), a training-free concept erasure method specifically designed for flow matching models. Our key insight is that semantic concepts are implicitly encoded in the directional structure of the velocity field governing the generative flow. Leveraging this observation, we construct a differential vector field that characterizes the directional discrepancy between a target concept and a carefully chosen anchor concept. During inference, DVE selectively removes concept-specific components by projecting the velocity field onto the differential direction, enabling precise concept suppression without affecting irrelevant semantics. Extensive experiments on FLUX demonstrate that DVE consistently outperforms existing baselines on a wide range of concept erasure tasks, including NSFW suppression, artistic style removal, and object erasure, while preserving image quality and diversity. --- ### MedBeads: An AI-Native Clinical Context Graph Built from Immutable Beads and Reconstructable Clinical Links Authors: Takahito Nakajima Published: 2026-02-01 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CR, cs.DB, cs.DC, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01086v3 Generative AI can encode substantial medical knowledge, but patient-specific answers remain constrained by the context supplied at inference time. Electronic health records and FHIR support documentation and interoperability, but they do not by themselves define the complete, current, and auditable context a model should receive. Similarity-based retrieval can find related text, but it neither guarantees collection of clinically connected records nor makes omissions explicit. We introduce MedBeads, an AI-facing clinical record substrate that assembles a declared closure of longitudinal patient information before generation. A Bead is an immutable clinical or knowledge object identified by SHA-256 over canonical content and stored as an append-only frame in a patient-scoped Pod. Structural parent edges form a patient-rooted Merkle DAG. Typed clinical links occupy a separate, reconstructable interpretation layer derived from signed, versioned knowledge rules; they can be recomputed when knowledge changes without rewriting clinical facts. Retrieval follows authorized structural and clinical edges, resolves amendments and retractions, and reports policy or token truncation. An open-source Go implementation uses append-only Pods and reconstructable SQLite projections. File-based conversion of 1,135 synthetic Synthea FHIR bundles produced approximately one million Beads and demonstrated deterministic clinical-link derivation and interpretation-layer reconstruction. These engineering results establish feasibility and reproducibility, not reduced hallucination or improved clinical outcomes. MedBeads reframes grounding as a data-structure problem by delivering a policy-bounded, provenance-bearing clinical subgraph rather than an opaque list of similar fragments. ---