# Research Papers — 2026-02 · bundle page 27 of 210

> Full-text markdown of papers #1301–1350 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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### AdaSpot: Spend Resolution Where It Matters for Precise Event Spotting

Authors: Artur Xarles, Sergio Escalera, Thomas B. Moeslund, Albert Clapés
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22073v1

Precise Event Spotting aims to localize fast-paced actions or events in videos with high temporal precision, a key task for applications in sports analytics, robotics, and autonomous systems. Existing methods typically process all frames uniformly, overlooking the inherent spatio-temporal redundancy in video data. This leads to redundant computation on non-informative regions while limiting overall efficiency. To remain tractable, they often spatially downsample inputs, losing fine-grained details crucial for precise localization. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{AdaSpot}, a simple yet effective framework that processes low-resolution videos to extract global task-relevant features while adaptively selecting the most informative region-of-interest in each frame for high-resolution processing. The selection is performed via an unsupervised, task-aware strategy that maintains spatio-temporal consistency across frames and avoids the training instability of learnable alternatives. This design preserves essential fine-grained visual cues with a marginal computational overhead compared to low-resolution-only baselines, while remaining far more efficient than uniform high-resolution processing. Experiments on standard PES benchmarks demonstrate that \textbf{AdaSpot} achieves state-of-the-art performance under strict evaluation metrics (\eg, $+3.96$ and $+2.26$ mAP$@0$ frames on Tennis and FineDiving), while also maintaining strong results under looser metrics. Code is available at: \href{https://github.com/arturxe2/AdaSpot}{https://github.com/arturxe2/AdaSpot}.

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### Understanding Artificial Theory of Mind: Perturbed Tasks and Reasoning in Large Language Models

Authors: Christian Nickel, Laura Schrewe, Florian Mai, Lucie Flek
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22072v1

Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to an agent's ability to model the internal states of others. Contributing to the debate whether large language models (LLMs) exhibit genuine ToM capabilities, our study investigates their ToM robustness using perturbations on false-belief tasks and examines the potential of Chain-of-Thought prompting (CoT) to enhance performance and explain the LLM's decision. We introduce a handcrafted, richly annotated ToM dataset, including classic and perturbed false belief tasks, the corresponding spaces of valid reasoning chains for correct task completion, subsequent reasoning faithfulness, task solutions, and propose metrics to evaluate reasoning chain correctness and to what extent final answers are faithful to reasoning traces of the generated CoT. We show a steep drop in ToM capabilities under task perturbation for all evaluated LLMs, questioning the notion of any robust form of ToM being present. While CoT prompting improves the ToM performance overall in a faithful manner, it surprisingly degrades accuracy for some perturbation classes, indicating that selective application is necessary.

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### Language Models Exhibit Inconsistent Biases Towards Algorithmic Agents and Human Experts

Authors: Jessica Y. Bo, Lillio Mok, Ashton Anderson
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22070v1

Large language models are increasingly used in decision-making tasks that require them to process information from a variety of sources, including both human experts and other algorithmic agents. How do LLMs weigh the information provided by these different sources? We consider the well-studied phenomenon of algorithm aversion, in which human decision-makers exhibit bias against predictions from algorithms. Drawing upon experimental paradigms from behavioural economics, we evaluate how eightdifferent LLMs delegate decision-making tasks when the delegatee is framed as a human expert or an algorithmic agent. To be inclusive of different evaluation formats, we conduct our study with two task presentations: stated preferences, modeled through direct queries about trust towards either agent, and revealed preferences, modeled through providing in-context examples of the performance of both agents. When prompted to rate the trustworthiness of human experts and algorithms across diverse tasks, LLMs give higher ratings to the human expert, which correlates with prior results from human respondents. However, when shown the performance of a human expert and an algorithm and asked to place an incentivized bet between the two, LLMs disproportionately choose the algorithm, even when it performs demonstrably worse. These discrepant results suggest that LLMs may encode inconsistent biases towards humans and algorithms, which need to be carefully considered when they are deployed in high-stakes scenarios. Furthermore, we discuss the sensitivity of LLMs to task presentation formats that should be broadly scrutinized in evaluation robustness for AI safety.

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### Semantic Partial Grounding via LLMs

Authors: Giuseppe Canonaco, Alberto Pozanco, Daniel Borrajo
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22067v2

Grounding is a critical step in classical planning, yet it often becomes a computational bottleneck due to the exponential growth in grounded actions and atoms as task size increases. Recent advances in partial grounding have addressed this challenge by incrementally grounding only the most promising operators, guided by predictive models. However, these approaches primarily rely on relational features or learned embeddings and do not leverage the textual and structural cues present in PDDL descriptions. We propose SPG-LLM, which uses LLMs to analyze the domain and problem files to heuristically identify potentially irrelevant objects, actions, and predicates prior to grounding, significantly reducing the size of the grounded task. Across seven hard-to-ground benchmarks, SPG-LLM achieves faster grounding-often by orders of magnitude-while delivering comparable or better plan costs in some domains.

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### DualWeaver: Synergistic Feature Weaving Surrogates for Multivariate Forecasting with Univariate Time Series Foundation Models

Authors: Jinpeng Li, Zhongyi Pei, Huaze Xue, Bojian Zheng, Chen Wang, Jianmin Wang
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22066v1

Time-series foundation models (TSFMs) have achieved strong univariate forecasting through large-scale pre-training, yet effectively extending this success to multivariate forecasting remains challenging. To address this, we propose DualWeaver, a novel framework that adapts univariate TSFMs (Uni-TSFMs) for multivariate forecasting by using a pair of learnable, structurally symmetric surrogate series. Generated by a shared auxiliary feature-fusion module that captures cross-variable dependencies, these surrogates are mapped to TSFM-compatible series via the forecasting objective. The symmetric structure enables parameter-free reconstruction of final predictions directly from the surrogates, without additional parametric decoding. A theoretically grounded regularization term is further introduced to enhance robustness against adaptation collapse. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world datasets show that DualWeaver outperforms state-of-the-art multivariate forecasters in both accuracy and stability. We release the code at https://github.com/li-jinpeng/DualWeaver.

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### Learning Quantum Data Distribution via Chaotic Quantum Diffusion Model

Authors: Quoc Hoan Tran, Koki Chinzei, Yasuhiro Endo, Hirotaka Oshima
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: quant-ph, cs.LG, nlin.CD
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22061v3

Generative models for quantum data pose significant challenges but hold immense potential in fields such as chemoinformatics and quantum physics. Quantum denoising diffusion probabilistic models (QuDDPMs) enable efficient learning of quantum data distributions by progressively scrambling and denoising quantum states. However, existing implementations typically rely on circuit-based random unitary dynamics, which can be costly to implement and sensitive to control imperfections, particularly on analog quantum hardware. We propose the chaotic quantum diffusion model, a framework that generates projected ensembles via chaotic Hamiltonian time evolution, providing a flexible and hardware-compatible diffusion mechanism. Requiring only global, time-independent control, our approach substantially reduces implementation overhead across diverse analog quantum platforms while achieving accuracy comparable to QuDDPMs. This method improves trainability and robustness, broadening the applicability of quantum generative modeling.

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### Learning Quantum Data Distribution via Chaotic Quantum Diffusion Model

Authors: Quoc Hoan Tran, Koki Chinzei, Yasuhiro Endo, Hirotaka Oshima
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: quant-ph, cs.LG, nlin.CD
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22061v2

Generative models for quantum data pose significant challenges but hold immense potential in fields such as chemoinformatics and quantum physics. Quantum denoising diffusion probabilistic models (QuDDPMs) enable efficient learning of quantum data distributions by progressively scrambling and denoising quantum states; however, existing implementations typically rely on circuit-based random unitary dynamics that can be costly to realize and sensitive to control imperfections, particularly on analog quantum hardware. We propose the chaotic quantum diffusion model, a framework that generates projected ensembles via chaotic Hamiltonian time evolution, providing a flexible and hardware-compatible diffusion mechanism. Requiring only global, time-independent control, our approach substantially reduces implementation overhead across diverse analog quantum platforms while achieving accuracy comparable to QuDDPMs. This method improves trainability and robustness, broadening the applicability of quantum generative modeling.

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### NESTOR: A Nested MOE-based Neural Operator for Large-Scale PDE Pre-Training

Authors: Dengdi Sun, Xiaoya Zhou, Xiao Wang, Hao Si, Wanli Lyu, Jin Tang, Bin Luo
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22059v1

Neural operators have emerged as an efficient paradigm for solving PDEs, overcoming the limitations of traditional numerical methods and significantly improving computational efficiency. However, due to the diversity and complexity of PDE systems, existing neural operators typically rely on a single network architecture, which limits their capacity to fully capture heterogeneous features and complex system dependencies. This constraint poses a bottleneck for large-scale PDE pre-training based on neural operators. To address these challenges, we propose a large-scale PDE pre-trained neural operator based on a nested Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework. In particular, the image-level MoE is designed to capture global dependencies, while the token-level Sub-MoE focuses on local dependencies. Our model can selectively activate the most suitable expert networks for a given input, thereby enhancing generalization and transferability. We conduct large-scale pre-training on twelve PDE datasets from diverse sources and successfully transfer the model to downstream tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

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### FlowCorrect: Efficient Interactive Correction of Generative Flow Policies for Robotic Manipulation

Authors: Edgar Welte, Yitian Shi, Rosa Wolf, Maximillian Gilles, Rania Rayyes
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22056v3

Generative manipulation policies can fail catastrophically under deployment-time distribution shift, yet many failures are near-misses: the robot reaches almost-correct poses and would succeed with a small corrective motion. We propose FlowCorrect, a modular interactive imitation learning approach that enables deployment-time adaptation of flow-matching manipulation policies from sparse, relative human corrections without retraining. During execution, a human provides brief corrective pose nudges via a lightweight VR interface. FlowCorrect uses these sparse corrections to locally adapt the policy, improving actions without retraining the backbone while preserving the model performance on previously learned scenarios. We evaluate on a real-world robot across four tabletop tasks: pick-and-place, pouring, cup uprighting, and insertion. With a low correction budget, FlowCorrect achieves an 80% success rate on previously failed cases while preserving performance on previously solved scenarios. The results clearly demonstrate that FlowCorrect learns from very few demonstrations and enables fast, sample-efficient, incremental, human-in-the-loop corrections of generative visuomotor policies at deployment time in real-world robotics.

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### FlowCorrect: Efficient Interactive Correction of Generative Flow Policies for Robotic Manipulation

Authors: Edgar Welte, Yitian Shi, Rosa Wolf, Maximillian Gilles, Rania Rayyes
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22056v2

Generative manipulation policies can fail catastrophically under deployment-time distribution shift, yet many failures are near-misses: the robot reaches almost-correct poses and would succeed with a small corrective motion. We propose FlowCorrect, a modular interactive imitation learning approach that enables deployment-time adaptation of flow-matching manipulation policies from sparse, relative human corrections without retraining. During execution, a human provides brief corrective pose nudges via a lightweight VR interface. FlowCorrect uses these sparse corrections to locally adapt the policy, improving actions without retraining the backbone while preserving the model performance on previously learned scenarios. We evaluate on a real-world robot across four tabletop tasks: pick-and-place, pouring, cup uprighting, and insertion. With a low correction budget, FlowCorrect achieves an 80% success rate on previously failed cases while preserving performance on previously solved scenarios. The results clearly demonstrate that FlowCorrect learns from very few demonstrations and enables fast, sample-efficient, incremental, human-in-the-loop corrections of generative visuomotor policies at deployment time in real-world robotics.

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### Physics-Informed Machine Learning for Vessel Shaft Power and Fuel Consumption Prediction: Interpretable KAN-based Approach

Authors: Hamza Haruna Mohammed, Dusica Marijan, Arnbjørn Maressa
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22055v1

Accurate prediction of shaft rotational speed, shaft power, and fuel consumption is crucial for enhancing operational efficiency and sustainability in maritime transportation. Conventional physics-based models provide interpretability but struggle with real-world variability, while purely data-driven approaches achieve accuracy at the expense of physical plausibility. This paper introduces a Physics-Informed Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (PI-KAN), a hybrid method that integrates interpretable univariate feature transformations with a physics-informed loss function and a leakage-free chained prediction pipeline. Using operational and environmental data from five cargo vessels, PI-KAN consistently outperforms the traditional polynomial method and neural network baselines. The model achieves the lowest mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean squared error (RMSE), and the highest coefficient of determination (R^2) for shaft power and fuel consumption across all vessels, while maintaining physically consistent behavior. Interpretability analysis reveals rediscovery of domain-consistent dependencies, such as cubic-like speed-power relationships and cosine-like wave and wind effects. These results demonstrate that PI-KAN achieves both predictive accuracy and interpretability, offering a robust tool for vessel performance monitoring and decision support in operational settings.

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### AutoSew: A Geometric Approach to Stitching Prediction with Graph Neural Networks

Authors: Pablo Ríos-Navarro, Elena Garces, Jorge Lopez-Moreno
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22052v1

Automating garment assembly from sewing patterns remains a significant challenge due to the lack of standardized annotation protocols and the frequent absence of semantic cues. Existing methods often rely on panel labels or handcrafted heuristics, which limit their applicability to real-world, non-conforming patterns. We present AutoSew, a fully automatic, geometry-based approach for predicting stitch correspondences directly from 2D pattern contours. AutoSew formulates the problem as a graph matching task, leveraging a Graph Neural Network to capture local and global geometric context, and employing a differentiable optimal transport solver to infer stitching relationships-including multi-edge connections. To support this task, we update the GarmentCodeData dataset modifying over 18k patterns with realistic multi-edge annotations, reflecting industrial assembly scenarios. AutoSew achieves 96% F1-score and successfully assembles 73.3% of test garments without error, outperforming existing methods while relying solely on geometric input. Our results demonstrate that geometry alone can robustly guide stitching prediction, enabling scalable garment assembly without manual input.

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### SPGen: Stochastic scanpath generation for paintings using unsupervised domain adaptation

Authors: Mohamed Amine Kerkouri, Marouane Tliba, Aladine Chetouani, Alessandro Bruno
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CV, cs.HC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22049v1

Understanding human visual attention is key to preserving cultural heritage We introduce SPGen a novel deep learning model to predict scanpaths the sequence of eye movementswhen viewers observe paintings. Our architecture uses a Fully Convolutional Neural Network FCNN with differentiable fixation selection and learnable Gaussian priors to simulate natural viewing biases To address the domain gap between photographs and artworks we employ unsupervised domain adaptation via a gradient reversal layer allowing the model to transfer knowledge from natural scenes to paintings Furthermore a random noise sampler models the inherent stochasticity of eyetracking data. Extensive testing shows SPGen outperforms existing methods offering a powerful tool to analyze gaze behavior and advance the preservation and appreciation of artistic treasures.

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### DLT-Corpus: A Large-Scale Text Collection for the Distributed Ledger Technology Domain

Authors: Walter Hernandez Cruz, Peter Devine, Nikhil Vadgama, Paolo Tasca, Jiahua Xu
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22045v2

We introduce DLT-Corpus, the largest domain-specific text collection for Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) research to date: 2.98 billion tokens from 22.12 million documents spanning scientific literature (37,440 publications), United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) patents (49,023 filings), and social media (22 million posts). Existing Natural Language Processing (NLP) resources for DLT focus narrowly on cryptocurrency price prediction and smart contracts, leaving domain-specific language underexplored despite the sector's ~$3 trillion market capitalization and rapid technological evolution. We demonstrate DLT-Corpus' utility by analyzing patterns of technology emergence and market-innovation correlations. Findings reveal that technologies first appear in our scientific literature subset before reaching patents and social media, following traditional technology transfer patterns. While social media sentiment remains overwhelmingly bullish even during crypto winters, scientific and patent activity grows less tied to short-term sentiment, tracking overall market expansion in a virtuous cycle in which research precedes and enables economic growth that, in turn, funds further innovation. We release the DLT-Corpus and companion artifacts: LedgerBERT (+23% over BERT-base on DLT-specific Named Entity Recognition (NER) task), a sentiment analysis dataset of 23,301 crypto news headlines and descriptions, tools, and code.

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### TG-ASR: Translation-Guided Learning with Parallel Gated Cross Attention for Low-Resource Automatic Speech Recognition

Authors: Cheng-Yeh Yang, Chien-Chun Wang, Li-Wei Chen, Hung-Shin Lee, Hsin-Min Wang, Berlin Chen
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: eess.AS, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.SD
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22039v1

Low-resource automatic speech recognition (ASR) continues to pose significant challenges, primarily due to the limited availability of transcribed data for numerous languages. While a wealth of spoken content is accessible in television dramas and online videos, Taiwanese Hokkien exemplifies this issue, with transcriptions often being scarce and the majority of available subtitles provided only in Mandarin. To address this deficiency, we introduce TG-ASR for Taiwanese Hokkien drama speech recognition, a translation-guided ASR framework that utilizes multilingual translation embeddings to enhance recognition performance in low-resource environments. The framework is centered around the parallel gated cross-attention (PGCA) mechanism, which adaptively integrates embeddings from various auxiliary languages into the ASR decoder. This mechanism facilitates robust cross-linguistic semantic guidance while ensuring stable optimization and minimizing interference between languages. To support ongoing research initiatives, we present YT-THDC, a 30-hour corpus of Taiwanese Hokkien drama speech with aligned Mandarin subtitles and manually verified Taiwanese Hokkien transcriptions. Comprehensive experiments and analyses identify the auxiliary languages that most effectively enhance ASR performance, achieving a 14.77% relative reduction in character error rate and demonstrating the efficacy of translation-guided learning for underrepresented languages in practical applications.

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### RT-RMOT: A Dataset and Framework for RGB-Thermal Referring Multi-Object Tracking

Authors: Yanqiu Yu, Zhifan Jin, Sijia Chen, Tongfei Chu, En Yu, Liman Liu, Wenbing Tao
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22033v1

Referring Multi-Object Tracking has attracted increasing attention due to its human-friendly interactive characteristics, yet it exhibits limitations in low-visibility conditions, such as nighttime, smoke, and other challenging scenarios. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new RGB-Thermal RMOT task, named RT-RMOT, which aims to fuse RGB appearance features with the illumination robustness of the thermal modality to enable all-day referring multi-object tracking. To promote research on RT-RMOT, we construct the first Referring Multi-Object Tracking dataset under RGB-Thermal modality, named RefRT. It contains 388 language descriptions, 1,250 tracked targets, and 166,147 Language-RGB-Thermal (L-RGB-T) triplets. Furthermore, we propose RTrack, a framework built upon a multimodal large language model (MLLM) that integrates RGB, thermal, and textual features. Since the initial framework still leaves room for improvement, we introduce a Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO) strategy to further exploit the model's potential. To alleviate training instability during RL fine-tuning, we introduce a Clipped Advantage Scaling (CAS) strategy to suppress gradient explosion. In addition, we design Structured Output Reward and Comprehensive Detection Reward to balance exploration and exploitation, thereby improving the completeness and accuracy of target perception. Extensive experiments on the RefRT dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed RTrack framework.

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### RGB-Event HyperGraph Prompt for Kilometer Marker Recognition based on Pre-trained Foundation Models

Authors: Xiaoyu Xian, Shiao Wang, Xiao Wang, Daxin Tian, Yan Tian
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22026v1

Metro trains often operate in highly complex environments, characterized by illumination variations, high-speed motion, and adverse weather conditions. These factors pose significant challenges for visual perception systems, especially those relying solely on conventional RGB cameras. To tackle these difficulties, we explore the integration of event cameras into the perception system, leveraging their advantages in low-light conditions, high-speed scenarios, and low power consumption. Specifically, we focus on Kilometer Marker Recognition (KMR), a critical task for autonomous metro localization under GNSS-denied conditions. In this context, we propose a robust baseline method based on a pre-trained RGB OCR foundation model, enhanced through multi-modal adaptation. Furthermore, we construct the first large-scale RGB-Event dataset, EvMetro5K, containing 5,599 pairs of synchronized RGB-Event samples, split into 4,479 training and 1,120 testing samples. Extensive experiments on EvMetro5K and other widely used benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for KMR. Both the dataset and source code will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/EvMetro5K_benchmark

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### Disease Progression and Subtype Modeling for Combined Discrete and Continuous Input Data

Authors: Sterre de Jonge, Elisabeth J. Vinke, Meike W. Vernooij, Daniel C. Alexander, Alexandra L. Young, Esther E. Bron
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22018v1

Disease progression modeling provides a robust framework to identify long-term disease trajectories from short-term biomarker data. It is a valuable tool to gain a deeper understanding of diseases with a long disease trajectory, such as Alzheimer's disease. A key limitation of most disease progression models is that they are specific to a single data type (e.g., continuous data), thereby limiting their applicability to heterogeneous, real-world datasets. To address this limitation, we propose the Mixed Events model, a novel disease progression model that handles both discrete and continuous data types. This model is implemented within the Subtype and Stage Inference (SuStaIn) framework, resulting in Mixed-SuStaIn, enabling subtype and progression modeling. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Mixed-SuStaIn through simulation experiments and real-world data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, showing that it performs well on mixed datasets. The code is available at: https://github.com/ucl-pond/pySuStaIn.

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### Function-Space Empirical Bayes Regularisation with Student's t Priors

Authors: Pengcheng Hao, Ercan Engin Kuruoglu
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22015v1

Bayesian deep learning (BDL) has emerged as a principled approach to produce reliable uncertainty estimates by integrating deep neural networks with Bayesian inference, and the selection of informative prior distributions remains a significant challenge. Various function-space variational inference (FSVI) regularisation methods have been presented, assigning meaningful priors over model predictions. However, these methods typically rely on a Gaussian prior, which fails to capture the heavy-tailed statistical characteristics inherent in neural network outputs. By contrast, this work proposes a novel function-space empirical Bayes regularisation framework -- termed ST-FS-EB -- which employs heavy-tailed Student's $t$ priors in both parameter and function spaces. Also, we approximate the posterior distribution through variational inference (VI), inducing an evidence lower bound (ELBO) objective based on Monte Carlo (MC) dropout. Furthermore, the proposed method is evaluated against various VI-based BDL baselines, and the results demonstrate its robust performance in in-distribution prediction, out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and handling distribution shifts.

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### A Diversity Diet for a Healthier Model: A Case Study of French ModernBERT

Authors: Louis Estève, Christophe Servan, Thomas Lavergne, Agata Savary
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22014v1

Diversity has been gaining interest in the NLP community in recent years. At the same time, state-of-the-art transformer models such as ModernBERT use very large pre-training datasets, which are driven by size rather than by diversity. This summons for an investigation of the impact of diversity on the ModernBERT pre-training. We do so in this study, with the express intent of reducing pre-training dataset size, while retaining at least comparable performance. We compare diversity-driven sampling algorithms, so as to pick the best one. We find that diversity-driven sampling allows in some tasks to gain 10 points relative to randomly-sampled pre-training data of commensurate size. We also see that a model pre-trained for 483h on a diversity-driven dataset of 150M tokens can yield a commensurate performance to a model pre-trained for 1,775h on a randomly-driven dataset of 2.4B tokens.

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### RobustVisRAG: Causality-Aware Vision-Based Retrieval-Augmented Generation under Visual Degradations

Authors: I-Hsiang Chen, Yu-Wei Liu, Tse-Yu Wu, Yu-Chien Chiang, Jen-Chien Yang, Wei-Ting Chen
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22013v4

Vision-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (VisRAG) leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to jointly retrieve relevant visual documents and generate grounded answers based on multimodal evidence. However, existing VisRAG models degrade in performance when visual inputs suffer from distortions such as blur, noise, low light, or shadow, where semantic and degradation factors become entangled within pretrained visual encoders, leading to errors in both retrieval and generation stages. To address this limitation, we introduce RobustVisRAG, a causality-guided dual-path framework that improves VisRAG robustness while preserving efficiency and zero-shot generalization. RobustVisRAG uses a non-causal path to capture degradation signals through unidirectional attention and a causal path to learn purified semantics guided by these signals. Together with the proposed Non-Causal Distortion Modeling and Causal Semantic Alignment objectives, the framework enforces a clear separation between semantics and degradations, enabling stable retrieval and generation under challenging visual conditions. To evaluate robustness under realistic conditions, we introduce the Distortion-VisRAG dataset, a large-scale benchmark containing both synthetic and real-world degraded documents across seven domains, with 12 synthetic and 5 real distortion types that comprehensively reflect practical visual degradations. Experimental results show that RobustVisRAG improves retrieval, generation, and end-to-end performance by 7.35%, 6.35%, and 12.40%, respectively, on real-world degradations, while maintaining comparable accuracy on clean inputs.

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### World Guidance: World Modeling in Condition Space for Action Generation

Authors: Yue Su, Sijin Chen, Haixin Shi, Mingyu Liu, Zhengshen Zhang, Ningyuan Huang, Weiheng Zhong, Zhengbang Zhu, Yuxiao Liu, Xihui Liu
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22010v1

Leveraging future observation modeling to facilitate action generation presents a promising avenue for enhancing the capabilities of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, existing approaches struggle to strike a balance between maintaining efficient, predictable future representations and preserving sufficient fine-grained information to guide precise action generation. To address this limitation, we propose WoG (World Guidance), a framework that maps future observations into compact conditions by injecting them into the action inference pipeline. The VLA is then trained to simultaneously predict these compressed conditions alongside future actions, thereby achieving effective world modeling within the condition space for action inference. We demonstrate that modeling and predicting this condition space not only facilitates fine-grained action generation but also exhibits superior generalization capabilities. Moreover, it learns effectively from substantial human manipulation videos. Extensive experiments across both simulation and real-world environments validate that our method significantly outperforms existing methods based on future prediction. Project page is available at: https://selen-suyue.github.io/WoGNet/

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### Neural solver for Wasserstein Geodesics and optimal transport dynamics

Authors: Hailiang Liu, Yan-Han Chen
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.LG, math.OC, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22003v1

In recent years, the machine learning community has increasingly embraced the optimal transport (OT) framework for modeling distributional relationships. In this work, we introduce a sample-based neural solver for computing the Wasserstein geodesic between a source and target distribution, along with the associated velocity field. Building on the dynamical formulation of the optimal transport (OT) problem, we recast the constrained optimization as a minimax problem, using deep neural networks to approximate the relevant functions. This approach not only provides the Wasserstein geodesic but also recovers the OT map, enabling direct sampling from the target distribution. By estimating the OT map, we obtain velocity estimates along particle trajectories, which in turn allow us to learn the full velocity field. The framework is flexible and readily extends to general cost functions, including the commonly used quadratic cost. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through experiments on both synthetic and real datasets.

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### Enhancing LLM-Based Test Generation by Eliminating Covered Code

Authors: WeiZhe Xu, Mengyu Liu, Fanxin Kong
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21997v1

Automated test generation is essential for software quality assurance, with coverage rate serving as a key metric to ensure thorough testing. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in improving test generation, particularly in achieving higher coverage. However, while existing LLM-based test generation solutions perform well on small, isolated code snippets, they struggle when applied to complex methods under test. To address these issues, we propose a scalable LLM-based unit test generation method. Our approach consists of two key steps. The first step is context information retrieval, which uses both LLMs and static analysis to gather relevant contextual information associated with the complex methods under test. The second step, iterative test generation with code elimination, repeatedly generates unit tests for the code slice, tracks the achieved coverage, and selectively removes code segments that have already been covered. This process simplifies the testing task and mitigates issues arising from token limits or reduced reasoning effectiveness associated with excessively long contexts. Through comprehensive evaluations on open-source projects, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art LLM-based and search-based methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in achieving high coverage on complex methods.

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### Outpatient Appointment Scheduling Optimization with a Genetic Algorithm Approach

Authors: Ana Rodrigues, Rui Rego
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.NE, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21995v1

The optimization of complex medical appointment scheduling remains a significant operational challenge in multi-center healthcare environments, where clinical safety protocols and patient logistics must be reconciled. This study proposes and evaluates a Genetic Algorithm (GA) framework designed to automate the scheduling of multiple medical acts while adhering to rigorous inter-procedural incompatibility rules. Using a synthetic dataset encompassing 50 medical acts across four healthcare facilities, we compared two GA variants, Pre-Ordered and Unordered, against deterministic First-Come, First-Served (FCFS) and Random Choice baselines. Our results demonstrate that the GA framework achieved a 100% constraint fulfillment rate, effectively resolving temporal overlaps and clinical incompatibilities that the FCFS baseline failed to address in 60% and 40% of cases, respectively. Furthermore, the GA variants demonstrated statistically significant improvements (p < 0.001) in patient-centric metrics, achieving an Idle Time Ratio (ITR) frequently below 0.4 and reducing inter-healthcenter trips. While the GA (Ordered) variant provided a superior initial search locus, both evolutionary models converged to comparable global optima by the 100th generation. These findings suggest that transitioning from manual, human-mediated scheduling to an automated metaheuristic approach enhances clinical integrity, reduces administrative overhead, and significantly improves the patient experience by minimizing wait times and logistical burdens.

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### PanoEnv: Exploring 3D Spatial Intelligence in Panoramic Environments with Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Zekai Lin, Xu Zheng
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21992v1

360 panoramic images are increasingly used in virtual reality, autonomous driving, and robotics for holistic scene understanding. However, current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggle with 3D spatial reasoning on Equirectangular Projection (ERP) images due to geometric distortion and limited 3D supervision. We introduce PanoEnv, a large-scale VQA benchmark built from synthetic 3D environments, containing 14.8K questions across five categories (e.g., relative position, volume comparison) grounded in accurate 3D annotations including depth, segmentation, and bounding boxes. Benchmarking 14 state-of-the-art VLMs reveals limited 3D understanding, achieving only 49.34% overall accuracy and 8.36% on open-ended (OE) questions. To enhance 3D reasoning, we propose a reinforcement learning post-training framework based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a ground-truth-guided reward that incorporates five geometry-aware strategies such as distance tolerance and spatial consistency. A two-stage curriculum further mitigates catastrophic forgetting: Stage 1 trains on structured tasks (true/false and multiple choice), and Stage 2 fine-tunes on mixed open-ended data to improve generalization. Our 7B model achieves new state-of-the-art performance, improving overall accuracy to 52.93% (+3.59%) and open-ended accuracy to 14.83% while maintaining structured-task performance. It also achieves top semantic evaluation scores (Q-Score 6.24, P-Score 5.95), surpassing 32B models. These results demonstrate that PanoEnv-QA and our curriculum-based RL framework effectively instill 3D spatial intelligence in VLMs for omnidirectional perception.

---

### Solving stiff dark matter equations via Jacobian Normalization with Physics-Informed Neural Networks

Authors: M. P. Bento, H. B. Câmara, J. R. Rocha, J. F. Seabra
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: hep-ph, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21988v1

Stiff differential equations pose a major challenge for Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), often causing poor convergence. We propose a simple, hyperparameter-free method to address stiffness by normalizing loss residuals with the Jacobian. We provide theoretical indications that Jacobian-based normalization can improve gradient descent and validate it on benchmark stiff ordinary differential equations. We then apply it to a realistic system: the stiff Boltzmann equations (BEs) governing weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter (DM). Our approach achieves higher accuracy than attention mechanisms previously proposed for handling stiffness, recovering the full solution where prior methods fail. This is further demonstrated in an inverse problem with a single experimental data point - the observed DM relic density - where our inverse PINNs correctly infer the cross section that solves the BEs in both Standard and alternative cosmologies.

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### PatchDenoiser: Parameter-efficient multi-scale patch learning and fusion denoiser for Low-dose CT imaging

Authors: Jitindra Fartiyal, Pedro Freire, Sergei K. Turitsyn, Sergei G. Solovski
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21987v3

Low-dose CT images are essential for reducing radiation exposure in cancer screening, pediatric imaging, and longitudinal monitoring protocols, but their quality is often degraded by noise from low-dose acquisition, patient motion, or scanner limitations, affecting both clinical interpretation and downstream analysis. Traditional filtering approaches often over-smooth and lose fine anatomical details, while deep learning methods, including CNNs, GANs, and transformers, may struggle to preserve such details or require large, computationally expensive models, limiting clinical practicality. We propose PatchDenoiser, a lightweight, energy-efficient multi-scale patch-based denoising framework. It decomposes denoising into local texture extraction and global context aggregation, fused via a spatially aware patch fusion strategy. This design enables effective noise suppression while preserving fine structural and anatomical details. PatchDenoiser is ultra-lightweight, with far fewer parameters and lower computational complexity than CNN, GAN, and transformer based denoisers. On the 2016 Mayo Low-Dose CT dataset, PatchDenoiser consistently outperforms state-of-the-art CNN- and GAN-based methods in PSNR and SSIM. It is robust to variations in slice thickness, reconstruction kernels, and HU windows, generalizes across scanners without fine-tuning, and reduces parameters by ~9x and energy consumption per inference by ~27x compared with conventional CNN denoisers. PatchDenoiser thus provides a practical, scalable, and computationally efficient solution for medical image denoising, balancing performance, robustness, and clinical deployability.

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### CxMP: A Linguistic Minimal-Pair Benchmark for Evaluating Constructional Understanding in Language Models

Authors: Miyu Oba, Saku Sugawara
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21978v1

Recent work has examined language models from a linguistic perspective to better understand how they acquire language. Most existing benchmarks focus on judging grammatical acceptability, whereas the ability to interpret meanings conveyed by grammatical forms has received much less attention. We introduce the Linguistic Minimal-Pair Benchmark for Evaluating Constructional Understanding in Language Models (CxMP), a benchmark grounded in Construction Grammar that treats form-meaning pairings, or constructions, as fundamental linguistic units. CxMP evaluates whether models can interpret the semantic relations implied by constructions, using a controlled minimal-pair design across nine construction types, including the let-alone, caused motion, and ditransitive constructions. Our results show that while syntactic competence emerges early, constructional understanding develops more gradually and remains limited even in large language models (LLMs). CxMP thus reveals persistent gaps in how language models integrate form and meaning, providing a framework for studying constructional understanding and learning trajectories in language models.

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### When LoRA Betrays: Backdooring Text-to-Image Models by Masquerading as Benign Adapters

Authors: Liangwei Lyu, Jiaqi Xu, Jianwei Ding, Qiyao Deng
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21977v4

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a leading technique for efficiently fine-tuning text-to-image diffusion models, and its widespread adoption on open-source platforms has fostered a vibrant culture of model sharing and customization. However, the same modular and plug-and-play flexibility that makes LoRA appealing also introduces a broader attack surface. To highlight this risk, we propose Masquerade-LoRA (MasqLoRA), the first systematic attack framework that leverages an independent LoRA module as the attack vehicle to stealthily inject malicious behavior into text-to-image diffusion models. MasqLoRA operates by freezing the base model parameters and updating only the low-rank adapter weights using a small number of "trigger word-target image" pairs. This enables the attacker to train a standalone backdoor LoRA module that embeds a hidden cross-modal mapping: when the module is loaded and a specific textual trigger is provided, the model produces a predefined visual output; otherwise, it behaves indistinguishably from the benign model, ensuring the stealthiness of the attack. Experimental results demonstrate that MasqLoRA can be trained with minimal resource overhead and achieves a high attack success rate of 99.8%. MasqLoRA reveals a severe and unique threat in the AI supply chain, underscoring the urgent need for dedicated defense mechanisms for the LoRA-centric sharing ecosystem.

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### Dream-SLAM: Dreaming the Unseen for Active SLAM in Dynamic Environments

Authors: Xiangqi Meng, Pengxu Hou, Zhenjun Zhao, Javier Civera, Daniel Cremers, Hesheng Wang, Haoang Li
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21967v1

In addition to the core tasks of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), active SLAM additionally in- volves generating robot actions that enable effective and efficient exploration of unknown environments. However, existing active SLAM pipelines are limited by three main factors. First, they inherit the restrictions of the underlying SLAM modules that they may be using. Second, their motion planning strategies are typically shortsighted and lack long-term vision. Third, most approaches struggle to handle dynamic scenes. To address these limitations, we propose a novel monocular active SLAM method, Dream-SLAM, which is based on dreaming cross-spatio-temporal images and semantically plausible structures of partially observed dynamic environments. The generated cross-spatio-temporal im- ages are fused with real observations to mitigate noise and data incompleteness, leading to more accurate camera pose estimation and a more coherent 3D scene representation. Furthermore, we integrate dreamed and observed scene structures to enable long- horizon planning, producing farsighted trajectories that promote efficient and thorough exploration. Extensive experiments on both public and self-collected datasets demonstrate that Dream-SLAM outperforms state-of-the-art methods in localization accuracy, mapping quality, and exploration efficiency. Source code will be publicly available upon paper acceptance.

---

### Compact Circulant Layers with Spectral Priors

Authors: Joseph Margaryan, Thomas Hamelryck
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21965v1

Critical applications in areas such as medicine, robotics and autonomous systems require compact (i.e., memory efficient), uncertainty-aware neural networks suitable for edge and other resource-constrained deployments. We study compact spectral circulant and block-circulant-with-circulant-blocks (BCCB) layers: FFT-diagonalizable circular convolutions whose weights live directly in the real FFT (RFFT) half (1D) or half-plane (2D). Parameterizing filters in the frequency domain lets us impose simple spectral structure, perform structured variational inference in a low-dimensional weight space, and calculate exact layer spectral norms, enabling inexpensive global Lipschitz bounds and margin-based robustness diagnostics. By placing independent complex Gaussians on the Hermitian support we obtain a discrete instance of the spectral representation of stationary kernels, inducing an exact stationary Gaussian-process prior over filters on the discrete circle/torus. We exploit this to define a practical spectral prior and a Hermitian-aware low-rank-plus-diagonal variational posterior in real coordinates. Empirically, spectral circulant/BCCB layers are effective compact building blocks in both (variational) Bayesian and point estimate regimes: compact Bayesian neural networks on MNIST->Fashion-MNIST, variational heads on frozen CIFAR-10 features, and deterministic ViT projections on CIFAR-10/Tiny ImageNet; spectral layers match strong baselines while using substantially fewer parameters and with tighter Lipschitz certificates.

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### Global-Aware Edge Prioritization for Pose Graph Initialization

Authors: Tong Wei, Giorgos Tolias, Jiri Matas, Daniel Barath
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21963v1

The pose graph is a core component of Structure-from-Motion (SfM), where images act as nodes and edges encode relative poses. Since geometric verification is expensive, SfM pipelines restrict the pose graph to a sparse set of candidate edges, making initialization critical. Existing methods rely on image retrieval to connect each image to its $k$ nearest neighbors, treating pairs independently and ignoring global consistency. We address this limitation through the concept of edge prioritization, ranking candidate edges by their utility for SfM. Our approach has three components: (1) a GNN trained with SfM-derived supervision to predict globally consistent edge reliability; (2) multi-minimal-spanning-tree-based pose graph construction guided by these ranks; and (3) connectivity-aware score modulation that reinforces weak regions and reduces graph diameter. This globally informed initialization yields more reliable and compact pose graphs, improving reconstruction accuracy in sparse and high-speed settings and outperforming SOTA retrieval methods on ambiguous scenes. The ode and trained models are available at https://github.com/weitong8591/global_edge_prior.

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### Robustness in sparse artificial neural networks trained with adaptive topology

Authors: Bendegúz Sulyok, Gergely Palla, Filippo Radicchi, Santo Fortunato
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.LG, physics.soc-ph
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21961v1

We investigate the robustness of sparse artificial neural networks trained with adaptive topology. We focus on a simple yet effective architecture consisting of three sparse layers with 99% sparsity followed by a dense layer, applied to image classification tasks such as MNIST and Fashion MNIST. By updating the topology of the sparse layers between each epoch, we achieve competitive accuracy despite the significantly reduced number of weights. Our primary contribution is a detailed analysis of the robustness of these networks, exploring their performance under various perturbations including random link removal, adversarial attack, and link weight shuffling. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that adaptive topology not only enhances efficiency but also maintains robustness. This work highlights the potential of adaptive sparse networks as a promising direction for developing efficient and reliable deep learning models.

---

### Estimation and Optimization of Ship Fuel Consumption in Maritime: Review, Challenges and Future Directions

Authors: Dusica Marijan, Hamza Haruna Mohammed, Bakht Zaman
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21959v1

To reduce carbon emissions and minimize shipping costs, improving the fuel efficiency of ships is crucial. Various measures are taken to reduce the total fuel consumption of ships, including optimizing vessel parameters and selecting routes with the lowest fuel consumption. Different estimation methods are proposed for predicting fuel consumption, while various optimization methods are proposed to minimize fuel oil consumption. This paper provides a comprehensive review of methods for estimating and optimizing fuel oil consumption in maritime transport. Our novel contributions include categorizing fuel oil consumption \& estimation methods into physics-based, machine-learning, and hybrid models, exploring their strengths and limitations. Furthermore, we highlight the importance of data fusion techniques, which combine AIS, onboard sensors, and meteorological data to enhance accuracy. We make the first attempt to discuss the emerging role of Explainable AI in enhancing model transparency for decision-making. Uniquely, key challenges, including data quality, availability, and the need for real-time optimization, are identified, and future research directions are proposed to address these gaps, with a focus on hybrid models, real-time optimization, and the standardization of datasets.

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### Learning to Collaborate via Structures: Cluster-Guided Item Alignment for Federated Recommendation

Authors: Yuchun Tu, Zhiwei Li, Bingli Sun, Yixuan Li, Xiao Song
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.IR, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21957v1

Federated recommendation facilitates collaborative model training across distributed clients while keeping sensitive user interaction data local. Conventional approaches typically rely on synchronizing high-dimensional item representations between the server and clients. This paradigm implicitly assumes that precise geometric alignment of embedding coordinates is necessary for collaboration across clients. We posit that establishing relative semantic relationships among items is more effective than enforcing shared representations. Specifically, global semantic relations serve as structural constraints for items. Within these constraints, the framework allows item representations to vary locally on each client, which flexibility enables the model to capture fine-grained user personalization while maintaining global consistency. To this end, we propose Cluster-Guided FedRec framework (CGFedRec), a framework that transforms uploaded embeddings into compact cluster labels. In this framework, the server functions as a global structure discoverer to learn item clusters and distributes only the resulting labels. This mechanism explicitly cuts off the downstream transmission of item embeddings, relieving clients from maintaining global shared item embeddings. Consequently, CGFedRec achieves the effective injection of global collaborative signals into local item representations without transmitting full embeddings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves communication efficiency while maintaining superior recommendation accuracy across multiple datasets.

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### Global-Local Dual Perception for MLLMs in High-Resolution Text-Rich Image Translation

Authors: Junxin Lu, Tengfei Song, Zhanglin Wu, Pengfei Li, Xiaowei Liang, Hui Yang, Kun Chen, Ning Xie, Yunfei Lu, Jing Zhao, Shiliang Sun, Daimeng Wei
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21956v2

Text Image Machine Translation (TIMT) aims to translate text embedded in images in the source-language into target-language, requiring synergistic integration of visual perception and linguistic understanding. Existing TIMT methods, whether cascaded pipelines or end-to-end multimodal large language models (MLLMs),struggle with high-resolution text-rich images due to cluttered layouts, diverse fonts, and non-textual distractions, resulting in text omission, semantic drift, and contextual inconsistency. To address these challenges, we propose GLoTran, a global-local dual visual perception framework for MLLM-based TIMT. GLoTran integrates a low-resolution global image with multi-scale region-level text image slices under an instruction-guided alignment strategy, conditioning MLLMs to maintain scene-level contextual consistency while faithfully capturing fine-grained textual details. Moreover, to realize this dual-perception paradigm, we construct GLoD, a large-scale text-rich TIMT dataset comprising 510K high-resolution global-local image-text pairs covering diverse real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GLoTran substantially improves translation completeness and accuracy over state-of-the-art MLLMs, offering a new paradigm for fine-grained TIMT under high-resolution and text-rich conditions.

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### Global-Local Dual Perception for MLLMs in High-Resolution Text-Rich Image Translation

Authors: Junxin Lu, Tengfei Song, Zhanglin Wu, Pengfei Li, Xiaowei Liang, Hui Yang, Kun Chen, Ning Xie, Yunfei Lu, Jing Zhao, Shiliang Sun, Daimeng Wei
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21956v1

Text Image Machine Translation (TIMT) aims to translate text embedded in images in the source-language into target-language, requiring synergistic integration of visual perception and linguistic understanding. Existing TIMT methods, whether cascaded pipelines or end-to-end multimodal large language models (MLLMs),struggle with high-resolution text-rich images due to cluttered layouts, diverse fonts, and non-textual distractions, resulting in text omission, semantic drift, and contextual inconsistency. To address these challenges, we propose GLoTran, a global-local dual visual perception framework for MLLM-based TIMT. GLoTran integrates a low-resolution global image with multi-scale region-level text image slices under an instruction-guided alignment strategy, conditioning MLLMs to maintain scene-level contextual consistency while faithfully capturing fine-grained textual details. Moreover, to realize this dual-perception paradigm, we construct GLoD, a large-scale text-rich TIMT dataset comprising 510K high-resolution global-local image-text pairs covering diverse real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GLoTran substantially improves translation completeness and accuracy over state-of-the-art MLLMs, offering a new paradigm for fine-grained TIMT under high-resolution and text-rich conditions.

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### MindDriver: Introducing Progressive Multimodal Reasoning for Autonomous Driving

Authors: Lingjun Zhang, Yujian Yuan, Changjie Wu, Xinyuan Chang, Xin Cai, Shuang Zeng, Linzhe Shi, Sijin Wang, Hang Zhang, Mu Xu
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21952v1

Vision-Language Models (VLM) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, showing promise for end-to-end autonomous driving systems. Chain-of-Thought (CoT), as VLM's widely used reasoning strategy, is facing critical challenges. Existing textual CoT has a large gap between text semantic space and trajectory physical space. Although the recent approach utilizes future image to replace text as CoT process, it lacks clear planning-oriented objective guidance to generate images with accurate scene evolution. To address these, we innovatively propose MindDriver, a progressive multimodal reasoning framework that enables VLM to imitate human-like progressive thinking for autonomous driving. MindDriver presents semantic understanding, semantic-to-physical space imagination, and physical-space trajectory planning. To achieve aligned reasoning processes in MindDriver, we develop a feedback-guided automatic data annotation pipeline to generate aligned multimodal reasoning training data. Furthermore, we develop a progressive reinforcement fine-tuning method to optimize the alignment through progressive high- level reward-based learning. MindDriver demonstrates superior performance in both nuScences open-loop and Bench2Drive closed-loop evaluation. Codes are available at https://github.com/hotdogcheesewhite/MindDriver.

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### RADAR: Reasoning as Discrimination with Aligned Representations for LLM-based Knowledge Graph Reasoning

Authors: Bo Xue, Yuan Jin, Luoyi Fu, Jiaxin Ding, Xinbing Wang
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21951v1

Knowledge graph reasoning (KGR) infers missing facts, with recent advances increasingly harnessing the semantic priors and reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, prevailing generative paradigms are prone to memorizing surface-level co-occurrences rather than learning genuine relational semantics, limiting out-of-distribution generalization. To address this, we propose RADAR, which reformulates KGR from generative pattern matching to discriminative relational reasoning. We recast KGR as discriminative entity selection, where reinforcement learning enforces relative entity separability beyond token-likelihood imitation. Leveraging this separability, inference operates directly in representation space, ensuring consistency with the discriminative optimization and bypassing generation-induced hallucinations. Across four benchmarks, RADAR achieves 5-6% relative gains on link prediction and triple classification over strong LLM baselines, while increasing task-relevant mutual information in intermediate representations by 62.9%, indicating more robust and transferable relational reasoning.

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### MEDSYN: Benchmarking Multi-EviDence SYNthesis in Complex Clinical Cases for Multimodal Large Language Models

Authors: Boqi Chen, Xudong Liu, Jiachuan Peng, Marianne Frey-Marti, Bang Zheng, Kyle Lam, Lin Li, Jianing Qiu
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21950v3

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown great potential in medical applications, yet existing benchmarks inadequately capture real-world clinical complexity. We introduce MEDSYN, a multilingual, multimodal benchmark of highly complex clinical cases with up to 7 distinct visual clinical evidence (CE) types per case. Mirroring clinical workflow, we evaluate 18 MLLMs on differential diagnosis (DDx) generation and final diagnosis (FDx) selection. While top models often match or even outperform human experts on DDx generation, all MLLMs exhibit a much larger DDx--FDx performance gap compared to expert clinicians, indicating a failure mode in synthesis of heterogeneous CE types. Ablations attribute this failure to (i) overreliance on less discriminative textual CE ($\it{e.g.}$, medical history) and (ii) a cross-modal CE utilization gap. We introduce Evidence Sensitivity to quantify the latter and show that a smaller gap correlates with higher diagnostic accuracy. Finally, we demonstrate how it can be used to guide interventions to improve model performance. We will open-source our benchmark and code.

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### Bayesian Generative Adversarial Networks via Gaussian Approximation for Tabular Data Synthesis

Authors: Bahrul Ilmi Nasution, Mark Elliot, Richard Allmendinger
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21948v1

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have been used in many studies to synthesise mixed tabular data. Conditional tabular GAN (CTGAN) have been the most popular variant but struggle to effectively navigate the risk-utility trade-off. Bayesian GAN have received less attention for tabular data, but have been explored with unstructured data such as images and text. The most used technique employed in Bayesian GAN is Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), but it is computationally intensive, particularly in terms of weight storage. In this paper, we introduce Gaussian Approximation of CTGAN (GACTGAN), an integration of the Bayesian posterior approximation technique using Stochastic Weight Averaging-Gaussian (SWAG) within the CTGAN generator to synthesise tabular data, reducing computational overhead after the training phase. We demonstrate that GACTGAN yields better synthetic data compared to CTGAN, achieving better preservation of tabular structure and inferential statistics with less privacy risk. These results highlight GACTGAN as a simpler, effective implementation of Bayesian tabular synthesis.

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### Algorithmic Blindness in Large Language Models: A Calibration Study of Performance Prediction

Authors: Sohan Venkatesh, Ashish Mahendran Kurapath, Tejas Melkote
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21947v5

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable breadth of knowledge, yet their ability to reason about computational processes remains poorly understood. Closing this gap matters for practitioners who rely on LLMs to guide algorithm selection and deployment. We address this limitation using causal discovery as a testbed and evaluate eight frontier LLMs against ground truth derived from algorithm executions. We find systematic, near-total failure across models. The predicted ranges are far wider than true confidence intervals yet still fail to contain the true algorithmic mean in most cases. Most models perform worse than random guessing. The best model's marginal improvement points to benchmark memorization rather than principled reasoning. We term this failure algorithmic blindness and argue it reflects a fundamental gap between declarative knowledge about algorithms and calibrated procedural prediction.

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### Learning to Fuse and Reconstruct Multi-View Graphs for Diabetic Retinopathy Grading

Authors: Haoran Li, Yuxin Lin, Huan Wang, Xiaoling Luo, Qi Zhu, Jiahua Shi, Huaming Chen, Bo Du, Johan Barthelemy, Zongyan Xue, Jun Shen, Yong Xu
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21944v1

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is one of the leading causes of vision loss worldwide, making early and accurate DR grading critical for timely intervention. Recent clinical practices leverage multi-view fundus images for DR detection with a wide coverage of the field of view (FOV), motivating deep learning methods to explore the potential of multi-view learning for DR grading. However, existing methods often overlook the inter-view correlations when fusing multi-view fundus images, failing to fully exploit the inherent consistency across views originating from the same patient. In this work, we present MVGFDR, an end-to-end Multi-View Graph Fusion framework for DR grading. Different from existing methods that directly fuse visual features from multiple views, MVGFDR is equipped with a novel Multi-View Graph Fusion (MVGF) module to explicitly disentangle the shared and view-specific visual features. Specifically, MVGF comprises three key components: (1) Multi-view Graph Initialization, which constructs visual graphs via residual-guided connections and employs Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients as frequency-domain anchors; (2) Multi-view Graph Fusion, which integrates selective nodes across multi-view graphs based on frequency-domain relevance to capture complementary view-specific information; and (3) Masked Cross-view Reconstruction, which leverages masked reconstruction of shared information across views to facilitate view-invariant representation learning. Extensive experimental results on MFIDDR, by far the largest multi-view fundus image dataset, demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach over existing state-of-the-art approaches in diabetic retinopathy grading.

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### Mobile-Ready Automated Triage of Diabetic Retinopathy Using Digital Fundus Images

Authors: Aadi Joshi, Manav S. Sharma, Vijay Uttam Rathod, Ashlesha Sawant, Prajakta Musale, Asmita B. Kalamkar
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21943v1

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a major cause of vision impairment worldwide. However, manual diagnosis is often time-consuming and prone to errors, leading to delays in screening. This paper presents a lightweight automated deep learning framework for efficient assessment of DR severity from digital fundus images. We use a MobileNetV3 architecture with a Consistent Rank Logits (CORAL) head to model the ordered progression of disease while maintaining computational efficiency for resource-constrained environments. The model is trained and validated on a combined dataset of APTOS 2019 and IDRiD images using a preprocessing pipeline including circular cropping and illumination normalization. Extensive experiments including 3-fold cross-validation and ablation studies demonstrate strong performance. The model achieves a Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) score of 0.9019 and an accuracy of 80.03 percent. Additionally, we address real-world deployment challenges through model calibration to reduce overconfidence and optimization for mobile devices. The proposed system provides a scalable and practical tool for early-stage diabetic retinopathy screening.

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### Directed Ordinal Diffusion Regularization for Progression-Aware Diabetic Retinopathy Grading

Authors: Huangwei Chen, Junhao Jia, Ruocheng Li, Cunyuan Yang, Wu Li, Xiaotao Pang, Yifei Chen, Haishuai Wang, Jiajun Bu, Lei Wu
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21942v1

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) progresses as a continuous and irreversible deterioration of the retina, following a well-defined clinical trajectory from mild to severe stages. However, most existing ordinal regression approaches model DR severity as a set of static, symmetric ranks, capturing relative order while ignoring the inherent unidirectional nature of disease progression. As a result, the learned feature representations may violate biological plausibility, allowing implausible proximity between non-consecutive stages or even reverse transitions. To bridge this gap, we propose Directed Ordinal Diffusion Regularization (D-ODR), which explicitly models the feature space as a directed flow by constructing a progression-constrained directed graph that strictly enforces forward disease evolution. By performing multi-scale diffusion on this directed structure, D-ODR imposes penalties on score inversions along valid progression paths, thereby effectively preventing the model from learning biologically inconsistent reverse transitions. This mechanism aligns the feature representation with the natural trajectory of DR worsening. Extensive experiments demonstrate that D-ODR yields superior grading performance compared to state-of-the-art ordinal regression and DR-specific grading methods, offering a more clinically reliable assessment of disease severity. Our code is available on https://github.com/HovChen/D-ODR.

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### Hidden Topics: Measuring Sensitive AI Beliefs with List Experiments

Authors: Maxim Chupilkin
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21939v1

How can researchers identify beliefs that large language models (LLMs) hide? As LLMs become more sophisticated and the prevalence of alignment faking increases, combined with their growing integration into high-stakes decision-making, responding to this challenge has become critical. This paper proposes that a list experiment, a simple method widely used in the social sciences, can be applied to study the hidden beliefs of LLMs. List experiments were originally developed to circumvent social desirability bias in human respondents, which closely parallels alignment faking in LLMs. The paper implements a list experiment on models developed by Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI and finds hidden approval of mass surveillance across all models, as well as some approval of torture, discrimination, and first nuclear strike. Importantly, a placebo treatment produces a null result, validating the method. The paper then compares list experiments with direct questioning and discusses the utility of the approach.

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### A Framework for Cross-Domain Generalization in Coronary Artery Calcium Scoring Across Gated and Non-Gated Computed Tomography

Authors: Mahmut S. Gokmen, Moneera N. Haque, Steve W. Leung, Caroline N. Leach, Seth Parker, Stephen B. Hobbs, Vincent L. Sorrell, W. Brent Seales, V. K. Cody Bumgardner
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21935v1

Coronary artery calcium (CAC) scoring is a key predictor of cardiovascular risk, but it relies on ECG-gated CT scans, restricting its use to specialized cardiac imaging settings. We introduce an automated framework for CAC detection and lesion-specific Agatston scoring that operates across both gated and non-gated CT scans. At its core is CARD-ViT, a self-supervised Vision Transformer trained exclusively on gated CT data using DINO. Without any non-gated training data, our framework achieves 0.707 accuracy and a Cohen's kappa of 0.528 on the Stanford non-gated dataset, matching models trained directly on non-gated scans. On gated test sets, the framework achieves 0.910 accuracy with Cohen's kappa scores of 0.871 and 0.874 across independent datasets, demonstrating robust risk stratification. These results demonstrate the feasibility of cross-domain CAC scoring from gated to non-gated domains, supporting scalable cardiovascular screening in routine chest imaging without additional scans or annotations.

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### Small Wins Big: Comparing Large Language Models and Domain Fine-Tuned Models for Sarcasm Detection in Code-Mixed Hinglish Text

Authors: Bitan Majumder, Anirban Sen
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21933v1

Sarcasm detection in multilingual and code-mixed environments remains a challenging task for natural language processing models due to structural variations, informal expressions, and low-resource linguistic availability. This study compares four large language models, Llama 3.1, Mistral, Gemma 3, and Phi-4, with a fine-tuned DistilBERT model for sarcasm detection in code-mixed Hinglish text. The results indicate that the smaller, sequentially fine-tuned DistilBERT model achieved the highest overall accuracy of 84%, outperforming all of the LLMs in zero and few-shot set ups, using minimal LLM generated code-mixed data used for fine-tuning. These findings indicate that domain-adaptive fine-tuning of smaller transformer based models may significantly improve sarcasm detection over general LLM inference, in low-resource and data scarce settings.

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### Geometry-as-context: Modulating Explicit 3D in Scene-consistent Video Generation to Geometry Context

Authors: JiaKui Hu, Jialun Liu, Liying Yang, Xinliang Zhang, Kaiwen Li, Shuang Zeng, Yuanwei Li, Haibin Huang, Chi Zhang, Yanye Lu
Published: 2026-02-25
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21929v1

Scene-consistent video generation aims to create videos that explore 3D scenes based on a camera trajectory. Previous methods rely on video generation models with external memory for consistency, or iterative 3D reconstruction and inpainting, which accumulate errors during inference due to incorrect intermediary outputs, non-differentiable processes, and separate models. To overcome these limitations, we introduce ``geometry-as-context". It iteratively completes the following steps using an autoregressive camera-controlled video generation model: (1) estimates the geometry of the current view necessary for 3D reconstruction, and (2) simulates and restores novel view images rendered by the 3D scene. Under this multi-task framework, we develop the camera gated attention module to enhance the model's capability to effectively leverage camera poses. During the training phase, text contexts are utilized to ascertain whether geometric or RGB images should be generated. To ensure that the model can generate RGB-only outputs during inference, the geometry context is randomly dropped from the interleaved text-image-geometry training sequence. The method has been tested on scene video generation with one-direction and forth-and-back trajectories. The results show its superiority over previous approaches in maintaining scene consistency and camera control.

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