# Research Papers — 2026-02 · bundle page 37 of 210 > Full-text markdown of papers #1801–1850 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/37 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-02/page/36.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-02/page/38.md) ### SibylSense: Adaptive Rubric Learning via Memory Tuning and Adversarial Probing Authors: Yifei Xu, Guilherme Potje, Shivam Shandilya, Tiancheng Yuan, Leonardo de Oliveira Nunes, Rakshanda Agarwal, Saeid Asgari, Adam Atkinson, Emre Kıcıman, Songwu Lu, Ranveer Chandra, Tusher Chakraborty Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20751v1 Designing aligned and robust rewards for open-ended generation remains a key barrier to RL post-training. Rubrics provide structured, interpretable supervision, but scaling rubric construction is difficult: expert rubrics are costly, prompted rubrics are often superficial or inconsistent, and fixed-pool discriminative rubrics can saturate and drift, enabling reward hacking. We present SibylSense, an inference-time learning approach that adapts a frozen rubric generator through a tunable memory bank of validated rubric items. Memory is updated via verifier-based item rewards measured by reference-candidate answer discriminative gaps from a handful of examples. SibylSense alternates memory tuning with a rubric-adversarial policy update that produces rubric-satisfying candidate answers, shrinking discriminative gaps and driving the rubric generator to capture new quality dimensions. Experiments on two open-ended tasks show that SibylSense yields more discriminative rubrics and improves downstream RL performance over static and non-adaptive baselines. --- ### Explicit Grammar Semantic Feature Fusion for Robust Text Classification Authors: Azrin Sultana, Firoz Ahmed Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20749v1 Natural Language Processing enables computers to understand human language by analysing and classifying text efficiently with deep-level grammatical and semantic features. Existing models capture features by learning from large corpora with transformer models, which are computationally intensive and unsuitable for resource-constrained environments. Therefore, our proposed study incorporates comprehensive grammatical rules alongside semantic information to build a robust, lightweight classification model without resorting to full parameterised transformer models or heavy deep learning architectures. The novelty of our approach lies in its explicit encoding of sentence-level grammatical structure, including syntactic composition, phrase patterns, and complexity indicators, into a compact grammar vector, which is then fused with frozen contextual embeddings. These heterogeneous elements unified a single representation that captures both the structural and semantic characteristics of the text. Deep learning models such as Deep Belief Networks (DBNs), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTMs), BiLSTMs, and transformer-based BERT and XLNET were used to train and evaluate the model, with the number of epochs varied. Based on experimental results, the unified feature representation model captures both the semantic and structural properties of text, outperforming baseline models by 2%-15%, enabling more effective learning across heterogeneous domains. Unlike prior syntax-aware transformer models that inject grammatical structure through additional attention layers, tree encoders, or full fine-tuning, the proposed framework treats grammar as an explicit inductive bias rather than a learnable module, resulting in a very lightweight model that delivers better performance on edge devices --- ### Voices of the Mountains: Deep Learning-Based Vocal Error Detection System for Kurdish Maqams Authors: Darvan Shvan Khairaldeen, Hossein Hassani Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20744v1 Maqam, a singing type, is a significant component of Kurdish music. A maqam singer receives training in a traditional face-to-face or through self-training. Automatic Singing Assessment (ASA) uses machine learning (ML) to provide the accuracy of singing styles and can help learners to improve their performance through error detection. Currently, the available ASA tools follow Western music rules. The musical composition requires all notes to stay within their expected pitch range from start to finish. The system fails to detect micro-intervals and pitch bends, so it identifies Kurdish maqam singing as incorrect even though the singer performs according to traditional rules. Kurdish maqam requires recognizing performance errors within microtonal spaces, which is beyond Western equal temperament. This research is the first attempt to address the mentioned gap. While many error types happen during singing, our focus is on pitch, rhythm, and modal stability errors in the context of Bayati-Kurd. We collected 50 songs from 13 vocalists ( 2-3 hours) and annotated 221 error spans (150 fine pitch, 46 rhythm, 25 modal drift). The data was segmented into 15,199 overlapping windows and converted to log-mel spectrograms. We developed a two-headed CNN-BiLSTM with attention mode to decide whether a window contains an error and to classify it based on the chosen errors. Trained for 20 epochs with early stopping at epoch 10, the model reached a validation macro-F1 of 0.468. On the full 50-song evaluation at a 0.750 threshold, recall was 39.4% and precision 25.8% . Within detected windows, type macro-F1 was 0.387, with F1 of 0.492 (fine pitch), 0.536 (rhythm), and 0.133 (modal drift); modal drift recall was 8.0%. The better performance on common error types shows that the method works, while the poor modal-drift recall shows that more data and balancing are needed. --- ### Adaptive Text Anonymization: Learning Privacy-Utility Trade-offs via Prompt Optimization Authors: Gabriel Loiseau, Damien Sileo, Damien Riquet, Maxime Meyer, Marc Tommasi Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20743v2 Anonymizing textual documents is a highly context-sensitive problem: the appropriate balance between privacy protection and utility preservation varies with the data domain, privacy objectives, and downstream application. However, existing anonymization methods rely on static, manually designed strategies that lack the flexibility to adjust to diverse requirements and often fail to generalize across domains. We introduce adaptive text anonymization, a new task formulation in which anonymization strategies are automatically adapted to specific privacy-utility requirements. We propose a framework for task-specific prompt optimization that automatically constructs anonymization instructions for language models, enabling adaptation to different privacy goals, domains, and downstream usage patterns. To evaluate our approach, we present a benchmark spanning five datasets with diverse domains, privacy constraints, and utility objectives. Across all evaluated settings, our framework consistently achieves a better privacy-utility trade-off than existing baselines, while remaining computationally efficient and effective on open-source language models, with performance comparable to larger closed-source models. Additionally, we show that our method can discover novel anonymization strategies that explore different points along the privacy-utility trade-off frontier. --- ### PyVision-RL: Forging Open Agentic Vision Models via RL Authors: Shitian Zhao, Shaoheng Lin, Ming Li, Haoquan Zhang, Wenshuo Peng, Kaipeng Zhang, Chen Wei Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20739v1 Reinforcement learning for agentic multimodal models often suffers from interaction collapse, where models learn to reduce tool usage and multi-turn reasoning, limiting the benefits of agentic behavior. We introduce PyVision-RL, a reinforcement learning framework for open-weight multimodal models that stabilizes training and sustains interaction. Our approach combines an oversampling-filtering-ranking rollout strategy with an accumulative tool reward to prevent collapse and encourage multi-turn tool use. Using a unified training pipeline, we develop PyVision-Image and PyVision-Video for image and video understanding. For video reasoning, PyVision-Video employs on-demand context construction, selectively sampling task-relevant frames during reasoning to significantly reduce visual token usage. Experiments show strong performance and improved efficiency, demonstrating that sustained interaction and on-demand visual processing are critical for scalable multimodal agents. --- ### RMIT-ADM+S at the MMU-RAG NeurIPS 2025 Competition Authors: Kun Ran, Marwah Alaofi, Danula Hettiachchi, Chenglong Ma, Khoi Nguyen Dinh Anh, Khoi Vo Nguyen, Sachin Pathiyan Cherumanal, Lida Rashidi, Falk Scholer, Damiano Spina, Shuoqi Sun, Oleg Zendel Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20735v1 This paper presents the award-winning RMIT-ADM+S system for the Text-to-Text track of the NeurIPS~2025 MMU-RAG Competition. We introduce Routing-to-RAG (R2RAG), a research-focused retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architecture composed of lightweight components that dynamically adapt the retrieval strategy based on inferred query complexity and evidence sufficiency. The system uses smaller LLMs, enabling operation on a single consumer-grade GPU while supporting complex research tasks. It builds on the G-RAG system, winner of the ACM~SIGIR~2025 LiveRAG Challenge, and extends it with modules informed by qualitative review of outputs. R2RAG won the Best Dynamic Evaluation award in the Open Source category, demonstrating high effectiveness with careful design and efficient use of resources. --- ### CHESS: Context-aware Hierarchical Efficient Semantic Selection for Long-Context LLM Inference Authors: Chao Fei, Guozhong Li, Chenxi Liu, Panos Kalnis Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20732v1 Long-context LLMs demand accurate inference at low latency, yet decoding becomes primarily constrained by KV cache as context grows. Prior pruning methods are largely context-agnostic: their token selection ignores step-wise relevance and local semantics, which undermines quality. Moreover, their irregular accesses and selection overheads yield only limited wall-clock speedups. To address this, we propose \textbf{CHESS}, an \textit{algorithm-system co-design} KV-cache management system. Algorithmically, CHESS introduces a context-aware, hierarchical selection policy that dynamically reconstructs a coherent context for the current decoding. System-wise, coarse granularity selection eliminates expensive data movement, fully realizing practical acceleration from theoretical sparsity. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that CHESS surpasses Full-KV quality using only \textbf{1\%} of the KV cache, delivers low-latency stable inference with up to \textbf{4.56$\times$} higher throughput, and consistently outperforms other strong baselines. Code is available at \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CHESS-9958/}{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CHESS/}. --- ### Communication-Inspired Tokenization for Structured Image Representations Authors: Aram Davtyan, Yusuf Sahin, Yasaman Haghighi, Sebastian Stapf, Pablo Acuaviva, Alexandre Alahi, Paolo Favaro Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20731v1 Discrete image tokenizers have emerged as a key component of modern vision and multimodal systems, providing a sequential interface for transformer-based architectures. However, most existing approaches remain primarily optimized for reconstruction and compression, often yielding tokens that capture local texture rather than object-level semantic structure. Inspired by the incremental and compositional nature of human communication, we introduce COMmunication inspired Tokenization (COMiT), a framework for learning structured discrete visual token sequences. COMiT constructs a latent message within a fixed token budget by iteratively observing localized image crops and recurrently updating its discrete representation. At each step, the model integrates new visual information while refining and reorganizing the existing token sequence. After several encoding iterations, the final message conditions a flow-matching decoder that reconstructs the full image. Both encoding and decoding are implemented within a single transformer model and trained end-to-end using a combination of flow-matching reconstruction and semantic representation alignment losses. Our experiments demonstrate that while semantic alignment provides grounding, attentive sequential tokenization is critical for inducing interpretable, object-centric token structure and substantially improving compositional generalization and relational reasoning over prior methods. --- ### Rethinking Efficiency in Neural Combinatorial Optimization: Batched Preference Optimization with Mamba Authors: Zhenxing Xu, Zeyuan Ma, Weidong Bao, Yan Zheng, Chongshuang Hu, Ji Wang, Zhiguang Cao Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20730v3 We study efficiency as a first-class objective in Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) and present ECO, an efficient learning framework that combines batched preference optimization with a Mamba backbone. Instead of tightly interleaving every policy update with on-policy rollouts, ECO decouples trajectory generation from gradient updates through two stages: supervised warm-up on pre-computed solutions and iterative Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) on batched candidate sets generated by the current policy. We pair this learning pipeline with a mixed Mamba encoder-decoder that reduces memory growth on long sequences and improves hardware utilization. A local-search-guided bootstrapping strategy is further used during training to widen preference margins and stabilize iterative improvement. Importantly, local search is only used to construct stronger preference pairs during training and is never invoked at inference time. On TSP and CVRP, ECO achieves the strongest overall performance among the compared neural baselines while also delivering clear advantages in memory usage and throughput. We provide additional analysis on memory scaling, throughput, and the contribution of each design component. --- ### Fuz-RL: A Fuzzy-Guided Robust Framework for Safe Reinforcement Learning under Uncertainty Authors: Xu Wan, Chao Yang, Cheng Yang, Jie Song, Mingyang Sun Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20729v2 Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) is crucial for achieving high performance while ensuring safety in real-world applications. However, the complex interplay of multiple uncertainty sources in real environments poses significant challenges for interpretable risk assessment and robust decision-making. To address these challenges, we propose Fuz-RL, a fuzzy measure-guided robust framework for safe RL. Specifically, our framework develops a novel fuzzy Bellman operator for estimating robust value functions using Choquet integrals. Theoretically, we prove that solving the Fuz-RL problem (in Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) form) is equivalent to solving distributionally robust safe RL problems (in robust CMDP form), effectively avoiding min-max optimization. Empirical analyses on safe-control-gym and safety-gymnasium scenarios demonstrate that Fuz-RL effectively integrates with existing safe RL baselines in a model-free manner, significantly improving both safety and control performance under various types of uncertainties in observation, action, and dynamics. --- ### Balancing Multiple Objectives in Urban Traffic Control with Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback Authors: Chenyang Zhao, Vinny Cahill, Ivana Dusparic Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20728v1 Reward design has been one of the central challenges for real world reinforcement learning (RL) deployment, especially in settings with multiple objectives. Preference-based RL offers an appealing alternative by learning from human preferences over pairs of behavioural outcomes. More recently, RL from AI feedback (RLAIF) has demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) can generate preference labels at scale, mitigating the reliance on human annotators. However, existing RLAIF work typically focuses only on single-objective tasks, leaving the open question of how RLAIF handles systems that involve multiple objectives. In such systems trade-offs among conflicting objectives are difficult to specify, and policies risk collapsing into optimizing for a dominant goal. In this paper, we explore the extension of the RLAIF paradigm to multi-objective self-adaptive systems. We show that multi-objective RLAIF can produce policies that yield balanced trade-offs reflecting different user priorities without laborious reward engineering. We argue that integrating RLAIF into multi-objective RL offers a scalable path toward user-aligned policy learning in domains with inherently conflicting objectives. --- ### ID-LoRA: Efficient Low-Rank Adaptation Inspired by Matrix Interpolative Decomposition Authors: Xindian Ma, Rundong Kong, Peng Zhang, Ruoxiang Huang, Yongyu Jiang Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20727v1 LoRA has become a universal Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) technique that equips Large Language Models (LLMs) to adapt quickly to new tasks. However, when these models are scaled up, even the latest LoRA variants still introduce considerable overhead in trainable parameters. Conversely, aggressively lowering the rank to curb this overhead markedly degrades performance in complex multi-task settings. We propose ID-LoRA, a novel PEFT framework that breaks the trade-off. Its core innovation lies in extracting and reusing clustered parameter groups from the pretrained weight matrix. These groups are then used to form multiple low-rank components, all of which share only a single initialized trainable low-rank matrix. This approach cuts the number of trainable parameters while keeping the model's capacity intact. We evaluate ID-LoRA on five diverse benchmarks: Mathematical Reasoning, Code Generation, MMLU, CommonsenseQA, and Safety Alignment. ID-LoRA outperforms both full fine-tuning and existing PEFT baselines (e.g., LoRA, DoRA, HydraLoRA) while using up to 46% fewer trainable parameters than the standard LoRA. In multi-task scenarios, it surpasses LoRA and its recent variants (e.g., DoRA and HydraLoRA) on both Code and MMLU tasks, yet requires only 54% of the trainable parameters demanded by the conventional LoRA. --- ### Bridging Rendering and Generative Modeling with Monte Carlo Transport Scheduling Authors: Junwei Shu, Wenjie Liu, Hantang Liu, Changbo Wang, Yang Li Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20725v2 Monte Carlo rendering and modern generative models both transform uncertain states into structured images, yet they are usually studied as separate processes. We introduce Monte Carlo Transport Scheduling, a framework that treats progressive path tracing as a continuous sampling-driven transport process. Our key observation is that the renderer already produces physically valid states along this process: nested Monte Carlo estimates trace a refinement trajectory whose natural time coordinate follows from sampling variance. This view leads to a continuous training framework that learns from real render endpoints rather than synthetic interpolants, preserving the statistical structure of Monte Carlo estimation while enabling arbitrary-step neural refinement. We evaluate the framework on a controlled rendering benchmark designed to separate transport difficulty from scene context, and show that it yields stable render refinement, supports continuous stopping between rendering states, and transfers as a physical prior for frozen generative samplers. These results suggest a common continuous-time substrate for rendering and generation, where Monte Carlo sampling provides both the physical states and the supervision for learning image transport. --- ### Modality-Guided Mixture of Structured Experts with Entropy-Triggered Routing for Multimodal Recommendation Authors: Ji Dai, Quan Fang, DeSheng Cai Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20723v3 Multimodal recommenders combine collaborative behavior with visual and textual item evidence, whose usefulness varies across user-item interactions. Independently trained source-specific diagnostic probes partition held-out interactions into behavior-, appearance-, semantics-, and mixed-evidence regimes across five benchmarks, within which capacity-matched fixed fusion rules exhibit systematic regime-dependent performance crossovers. This diagnostic observation motivates MAGNET, a multimodal graph recommender with two core mechanisms. First, a calibrated expert bank organizes trainable experts by anchor source (behavior, appearance, or semantics) and fusion family (dominant, balanced, or complementary), while an interaction-conditioned router selects a sparse composition using all three evidence sources. Second, an entropy-triggered, coverage-aware progressive schedule decouples population-level routing-mass coverage from per-instance decisiveness, transitioning from broad routing exploration to confident specialization once sufficient coverage is sustained, while preserving coverage thereafter. MAGNET separately encodes the observed interaction graph and a filtered content-induced structural view, applying cross-view alignment after independent propagation. We evaluate MAGNET on four Amazon domains and the non-Amazon MicroLens-100K benchmark, including tail-item and low-history warm-start user evaluation alongside matched expert-design controls. Under the shared-feature, fixed-split protocol, MAGNET-DV exceeds the strongest protocol-compatible non-MAGNET baseline in every reported main-table cell, supported by seed-wise difference tests. Both the fixed and KL-anchored structured variants achieve higher five-seed mean NDCG@20 than matched homogeneous and free-mixture alternatives across all five datasets. MAGNET supports route-level diagnostics through explicit expert semantics. --- ### Modality-Guided Mixture of Graph Experts with Entropy-Triggered Routing for Multimodal Recommendation Authors: Ji Dai, Quan Fang, Dengsheng Cai Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20723v2 Multimodal recommendation enhances ranking by integrating user-item interactions with item content, which is particularly effective under sparse feedback and long-tail distributions. However, multimodal signals are inherently heterogeneous and can conflict in specific contexts, making effective fusion both crucial and challenging. Existing approaches often rely on shared fusion pathways, leading to entangled representations and modality imbalance. To address these issues, we propose MAGNET, a Modality-Guided Mixture of Adaptive Graph Experts Network with Progressive Entropy-Triggered Routing for Multimodal Recommendation, designed to enhance controllability, stability, and interpretability in multimodal fusion. MAGNET couples interaction-conditioned expert routing with structure-aware graph augmentation, so that both what to fuse and how to fuse are explicitly controlled and interpretable. At the representation level, a dual-view graph learning module augments the interaction graph with content-induced edges, improving coverage for sparse and long-tail items while preserving collaborative structure via parallel encoding and lightweight fusion. At the fusion level, MAGNET employs structured experts with explicit modality roles-dominant, balanced, and complementary-enabling a more interpretable and adaptive combination of behavioral, visual, and textual cues. To further stabilize sparse routing and prevent expert collapse, we introduce a two-stage entropy-weighting mechanism that monitors routing entropy. This mechanism automatically transitions training from an early coverage-oriented regime to a later specialization-oriented regime, progressively balancing expert utilization and routing confidence. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines. --- ### Buffer Matters: Unleashing the Power of Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning in Large Language Model Reasoning Authors: Xu Wan, Yansheng Wang, Wenqi Huang, Mingyang Sun Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20722v2 Traditional on-policy Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) frameworks suffer from experience waste and reward homogeneity, which directly hinders learning efficiency on difficult samples during large language models post-training. In this paper, we introduce Batch Adaptation Policy Optimization (BAPO), an off-policy RLVR framework to improve the data efficiency in large language models post-training. It dynamically selects training batches by re-evaluating historically difficult samples and reusing high-quality ones, while holding a lower bound guarantee for policy improvement. Extensive experiments further demonstrate that BAPO achieves an average 12.5% improvement over GRPO across mathematics, planning, and visual reasoning tasks. Crucially, BAPO successfully resolves 40.7% of problems that base models consistently fail to solve. --- ### CleanStyle: Plug-and-Play Style Conditioning Purification for Text-to-Image Stylization Authors: Xiaoman Feng, Mingkun Lei, Yang Wang, Dingwen Fu, Chi Zhang Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20721v1 Style transfer in diffusion models enables controllable visual generation by injecting the style of a reference image. However, recent encoder-based methods, while efficient and tuning-free, often suffer from content leakage, where semantic elements from the style image undesirably appear in the output, impairing prompt fidelity and stylistic consistency. In this work, we introduce CleanStyle, a plug-and-play framework that filters out content-related noise from the style embedding without retraining. Motivated by empirical analysis, we observe that such leakage predominantly stems from the tail components of the style embedding, which are isolated via Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). To address this, we propose CleanStyleSVD (CS-SVD), which dynamically suppresses tail components using a time-aware exponential schedule, providing clean, style-preserving conditional embeddings throughout the denoising process. Furthermore, we present Style-Specific Classifier-Free Guidance (SS-CFG), which reuses the suppressed tail components to construct style-aware unconditional inputs. Unlike conventional methods that use generic negative embeddings (e.g., zero vectors), SS-CFG introduces targeted negative signals that reflect style-specific but prompt-irrelevant visual elements. This enables the model to effectively suppress these distracting patterns during generation, thereby improving prompt fidelity and enhancing the overall visual quality of stylized outputs. Our approach is lightweight, interpretable, and can be seamlessly integrated into existing encoder-based diffusion models without retraining. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CleanStyle substantially reduces content leakage, improves stylization quality and improves prompt alignment across a wide range of style references and prompts. --- ### AdapTools: Adaptive Tool-based Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks on Agentic LLMs Authors: Che Wang, Jiaming Zhang, Ziqi Zhang, Zijie Wang, Yinghui Wang, Jianbo Gao, Tao Wei, Zhong Chen, Wei Yang Bryan Lim Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20720v1 The integration of external data services (e.g., Model Context Protocol, MCP) has made large language model-based agents increasingly powerful for complex task execution. However, this advancement introduces critical security vulnerabilities, particularly indirect prompt injection (IPI) attacks. Existing attack methods are limited by their reliance on static patterns and evaluation on simple language models, failing to address the fast-evolving nature of modern AI agents. We introduce AdapTools, a novel adaptive IPI attack framework that selects stealthier attack tools and generates adaptive attack prompts to create a rigorous security evaluation environment. Our approach comprises two key components: (1) Adaptive Attack Strategy Construction, which develops transferable adversarial strategies for prompt optimization, and (2) Attack Enhancement, which identifies stealthy tools capable of circumventing task-relevance defenses. Comprehensive experimental evaluation shows that AdapTools achieves a 2.13 times improvement in attack success rate while degrading system utility by a factor of 1.78. Notably, the framework maintains its effectiveness even against state-of-the-art defense mechanisms. Our method advances the understanding of IPI attacks and provides a useful reference for future research. --- ### Monocular Endoscopic Tissue 3D Reconstruction with Multi-Level Geometry Regularization Authors: Yangsen Chen, Hao Wang Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20718v1 Reconstructing deformable endoscopic tissues is crucial for achieving robot-assisted surgery. However, 3D Gaussian Splatting-based approaches encounter challenges in achieving consistent tissue surface reconstruction, while existing NeRF-based methods lack real-time rendering capabilities. In pursuit of both smooth deformable surfaces and real-time rendering, we introduce a novel approach based on 3D Gaussian Splatting. Specifically, we introduce surface-aware reconstruction, initially employing a Sign Distance Field-based method to construct a mesh, subsequently utilizing this mesh to constrain the Gaussian Splatting reconstruction process. Furthermore, to ensure the generation of physically plausible deformations, we incorporate local rigidity and global non-rigidity restrictions to guide Gaussian deformation, tailored for the highly deformable nature of soft endoscopic tissue. Based on 3D Gaussian Splatting, our proposed method delivers a fast rendering process and smooth surface appearances. Quantitative and qualitative analysis against alternative methodologies shows that our approach achieves solid reconstruction quality in both textures and geometries. --- ### WeirNet: A Large-Scale 3D CFD Benchmark for Geometric Surrogate Modeling of Piano Key Weirs Authors: Lisa Lüddecke, Michael Hohmann, Sebastian Eilermann, Jan Tillmann-Mumm, Pezhman Pourabdollah, Mario Oertel, Oliver Niggemann Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20714v2 Reliable prediction of hydraulic performance is challenging for Piano Key Weir (PKW) design because discharge capacity depends on three-dimensional geometry and operating conditions. Surrogate models can accelerate hydraulic-structure design, but progress is limited by scarce large, well-documented datasets that jointly capture geometric variation, operating conditions, and functional performance. This study presents WeirNet, a large 3D CFD benchmark dataset for geometric surrogate modeling of PKWs. WeirNet contains 3,794 parametric, feasibility-constrained rectangular and trapezoidal PKW geometries, each scheduled at 19 discharge conditions using a consistent free-surface OpenFOAM workflow, resulting in 71,387 completed simulations that form the benchmark and with complete discharge coefficient labels. The dataset is released as multiple modalities compact parametric descriptors, watertight surface meshes and high-resolution point clouds together with standardized tasks and in-distribution and out-of-distribution splits. Representative surrogate families are benchmarked for discharge coefficient prediction. Tree-based regressors on parametric descriptors achieve the best overall accuracy, while point- and mesh-based models remain competitive and offer parameterization-agnostic inference. All surrogates evaluate in milliseconds per sample, providing orders-of-magnitude speedups over CFD runtimes. Out-of-distribution results identify geometry shift as the dominant failure mode compared to unseen discharge values, and data-efficiency experiments show diminishing returns beyond roughly 60% of the training data. By publicly releasing the dataset together with simulation setups and evaluation pipelines, WeirNet establishes a reproducible framework for data-driven hydraulic modeling and enables faster exploration of PKW designs during the early stages of hydraulic planning. --- ### F10.7 Index Prediction: A Multiscale Decomposition Strategy with Wavelet Transform for Performance Optimization Authors: Xuran Ma, Xuebao Li, Yanfang Zheng, Yongshang Lv, Xiaojia Ji, Jiancheng Xu, Hongwei Ye, Zixian Wu, Shuainan Yan, Liang Dong, Zamri Zainal Abidin, Xusheng Huang et al. Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: astro-ph.IM, astro-ph.SR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20712v1 In this study, we construct Dataset A for training, validation, and testing, and Dataset B to evaluate generalization. We propose a novel F10.7 index forecasting method using wavelet decomposition, which feeds F10.7 together with its decomposed approximate and detail signals into the iTransformer model. We also incorporate the International Sunspot Number (ISN) and its wavelet-decomposed signals to assess their influence on prediction performance. Our optimal method is then compared with the latest method from S. Yan et al. (2025) and three operational models (SWPC, BGS, CLS). Additionally, we transfer our method to the PatchTST model used in H. Ye et al. (2024) and compare our method with theirs on Dataset B. Key findings include: (1) The wavelet-based combination methods overall outperform the baseline using only F10.7 index. The prediction performance improves as higher-level approximate and detail signals are incrementally added. The Combination 6 method integrating F10.7 with its first to fifth level approximate and detail signals outperforms methods using only approximate or detail signals. (2) Incorporating ISN and its wavelet-decomposed signals does not enhance prediction performance. (3) The Combination 6 method significantly surpasses S. Yan et al. (2025) and three operational models, with RMSE, MAE, and MAPE reduced by 18.22%, 15.09%, and 8.57%, respectively, against the former method. It also excels across four different conditions of solar activity. (4) Our method demonstrates superior generalization and prediction capability over the method of H. Ye et al. (2024) across all forecast horizons. To our knowledge, this is the first application of wavelet decomposition in F10.7 prediction, substantially improving forecast performance. --- ### Counterfactual Simulation Training for Chain-of-Thought Faithfulness Authors: Peter Hase, Christopher Potts Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20710v2 Inspecting Chain-of-Thought reasoning is among the most common means of understanding why an LLM produced its output. But well-known problems with CoT faithfulness severely limit what insights can be gained from this practice. In this paper, we introduce a training method called Counterfactual Simulation Training (CST), which aims to improve CoT faithfulness by rewarding CoTs that enable a simulator to accurately predict a model's outputs over counterfactual inputs. We apply CST in two settings: (1) CoT monitoring with cue-based counterfactuals, to detect when models rely on spurious features, reward hack, or are sycophantic, and (2) counterfactual simulation over generic model-based counterfactuals, to encourage models to produce more faithful, generalizable reasoning in the CoT. Experiments with models up to 235B parameters show that CST can substantially improve monitor accuracy on cue-based counterfactuals (by 35 accuracy points) as well as simulatability over generic counterfactuals (by 2 points). We further show that: (1) CST outperforms prompting baselines, (2) rewriting unfaithful CoTs with an LLM is 5x more efficient than RL alone, (3) faithfulness improvements do not generalize to dissuading cues (as opposed to persuading cues), and (4) larger models do not show more faithful CoT out of the box, but they do benefit more from CST. These results suggest that CST can improve CoT faithfulness in general, with promising applications for CoT monitoring. Code for experiments in this paper is available at https://github.com/peterbhase/counterfactual-simulation-training --- ### Counterfactual Simulation Training for Chain-of-Thought Faithfulness Authors: Peter Hase, Christopher Potts Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20710v1 Inspecting Chain-of-Thought reasoning is among the most common means of understanding why an LLM produced its output. But well-known problems with CoT faithfulness severely limit what insights can be gained from this practice. In this paper, we introduce a training method called Counterfactual Simulation Training (CST), which aims to improve CoT faithfulness by rewarding CoTs that enable a simulator to accurately predict a model's outputs over counterfactual inputs. We apply CST in two settings: (1) CoT monitoring with cue-based counterfactuals, to detect when models rely on spurious features, reward hack, or are sycophantic, and (2) counterfactual simulation over generic model-based counterfactuals, to encourage models to produce more faithful, generalizable reasoning in the CoT. Experiments with models up to 235B parameters show that CST can substantially improve monitor accuracy on cue-based counterfactuals (by 35 accuracy points) as well as simulatability over generic counterfactuals (by 2 points). We further show that: (1) CST outperforms prompting baselines, (2) rewriting unfaithful CoTs with an LLM is 5x more efficient than RL alone, (3) faithfulness improvements do not generalize to dissuading cues (as opposed to persuading cues), and (4) larger models do not show more faithful CoT out of the box, but they do benefit more from CST. These results suggest that CST can improve CoT faithfulness in general, with promising applications for CoT monitoring. Code for experiments in this paper is available at https://github.com/peterbhase/counterfactual-simulation-training --- ### Onboard-Targeted Segmentation of Straylight in Space Camera Sensors Authors: Riccardo Gallon, Fabian Schiemenz, Alessandra Menicucci, Eberhard Gill Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20709v1 This study details an artificial intelligence (AI)-based methodology for the semantic segmentation of space camera faults. Specifically, we address the segmentation of straylight effects induced by solar presence around the camera's Field of View (FoV). Anomalous images are sourced from our published dataset. Our approach emphasizes generalization across diverse flare textures, leveraging pre-training on a public dataset (Flare7k++) including flares in various non-space contexts to mitigate the scarcity of realistic space-specific data. A DeepLabV3 model with MobileNetV3 backbone performs the segmentation task. The model design targets deployment in spacecraft resource-constrained hardware. Finally, based on a proposed interface between our model and the onboard navigation pipeline, we develop custom metrics to assess the model's performance in the system-level context. --- ### ICON: Indirect Prompt Injection Defense for Agents based on Inference-Time Correction Authors: Che Wang, Fuyao Zhang, Jiaming Zhang, Ziqi Zhang, Yinghui Wang, Longtao Huang, Jianbo Gao, Zhong Chen, Wei Yang Bryan Lim Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20708v1 Large Language Model (LLM) agents are susceptible to Indirect Prompt Injection (IPI) attacks, where malicious instructions in retrieved content hijack the agent's execution. Existing defenses typically rely on strict filtering or refusal mechanisms, which suffer from a critical limitation: over-refusal, prematurely terminating valid agentic workflows. We propose ICON, a probing-to-mitigation framework that neutralizes attacks while preserving task continuity. Our key insight is that IPI attacks leave distinct over-focusing signatures in the latent space. We introduce a Latent Space Trace Prober to detect attacks based on high intensity scores. Subsequently, a Mitigating Rectifier performs surgical attention steering that selectively manipulate adversarial query key dependencies while amplifying task relevant elements to restore the LLM's functional trajectory. Extensive evaluations on multiple backbones show that ICON achieves a competitive 0.4% ASR, matching commercial grade detectors, while yielding a over 50% task utility gain. Furthermore, ICON demonstrates robust Out of Distribution(OOD) generalization and extends effectively to multi-modal agents, establishing a superior balance between security and efficiency. --- ### Online Algorithms with Unreliable Guidance Authors: Julien Dallot, Yuval Emek, Yuval Gil, Maciej Pacut, Stefan Schmid Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.AI, cs.DS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20706v2 This paper introduces online algorithms with unreliable guidance (OAG), a model for ML-augmented online decision-making that cleanly separates the predictive and algorithmic components, thus offering a single, well-defined analysis framework that depends only on the problem at hand. Formulated through the lens of request-answer games, the OAG model brings multiple concepts (predictions from the answer space, guide, anytime competitiveness) which enable learning-augmented algorithms to be analyzed independently of predictor-specific choices - such as prediction semantics, error functions, or probing strategies - that would otherwise restrict the algorithm's generality and applicability. The clean framework of the OAG model allows to build the first generic compiler, the drop-or-trust-blindly (DTB) compiler, that turns almost any standard, prediction-free online algorithm into a learning-augmented one. Although simple, we show that the DTB compiler produces new learning-augmented algorithms with strong consistency-robustness guarantees for three classic online problems: we achieve new trade-offs for bipartite matching with adversarial arrival order, and obtain optimal solutions for caching and uniform metrical task systems. --- ### NGL: Natural Garment Language for Training-Free Sewing Pattern Estimation Authors: Anna Badalyan, Pratheba Selvaraju, Giorgio Becherini, Omid Taheri, Victoria Fernandez Abrevaya, Michael Black Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20700v2 Estimating sewing patterns from images is a practical approach for creating high-quality 3D garments, but it remains challenging due to the scarcity of paired real-world image and sewing-pattern data. Existing methods address this limitation by training vision-language models (VLMs) to learn low-level sewing-pattern representations from synthetic garments sampled from parametric garment models. However, they often struggle to generalize to in-the-wild images, fail to capture real-world correlations between garment parts, and are restricted to single-layer outfits. In contrast, we observe that VLMs are effective at describing garments in natural language, but mapping these descriptions into valid sewing patterns remains difficult. To bridge this gap, we propose NGL (Natural Garment Language), a novel domain-specific language that represents garments in terms aligned with VLMs' natural descriptive abilities. Leveraging NGL, we introduce a fully training-free pipeline that queries large VLMs to extract structured garment specifications and deterministically converts them into valid sewing patterns. We evaluate our method on the Dress4D, CloSe and a newly collected dataset of 253 in-the-wild fashion images. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard geometry metrics and is preferred in both human and GPT-based perceptual evaluations compared to existing baselines. Furthermore, NGL recovers multi-layer outfits whereas competing methods focus mostly on single-layer garments, highlighting its strong generalization to real-world images even with occluded parts. These results demonstrate that an efficient garment representation is critical for sewing pattern estimation with VLMs. Our code and data will be released for research use. --- ### High-Dimensional Robust Mean Estimation with Untrusted Batches Authors: Maryam Aliakbarpour, Vladimir Braverman, Yuhan Liu, Junze Yin Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20698v1 We study high-dimensional mean estimation in a collaborative setting where data is contributed by $N$ users in batches of size $n$. In this environment, a learner seeks to recover the mean $μ$ of a true distribution $P$ from a collection of sources that are both statistically heterogeneous and potentially malicious. We formalize this challenge through a double corruption landscape: an $\varepsilon$-fraction of users are entirely adversarial, while the remaining ``good'' users provide data from distributions that are related to $P$, but deviate by a proximity parameter $α$. Unlike existing work on the untrusted batch model, which typically measures this deviation via total variation distance in discrete settings, we address the continuous, high-dimensional regime under two natural variants for deviation: (1) good batches are drawn from distributions with a mean-shift of $\sqrtα$, or (2) an $α$-fraction of samples within each good batch are adversarially corrupted. In particular, the second model presents significant new challenges: in high dimensions, unlike discrete settings, even a small fraction of sample-level corruption can shift empirical means and covariances arbitrarily. We provide two Sum-of-Squares (SoS) based algorithms to navigate this tiered corruption. Our algorithms achieve the minimax-optimal error rate $O(\sqrt{\varepsilon/n} + \sqrt{d/nN} + \sqrtα)$, demonstrating that while heterogeneity $α$ represents an inherent statistical difficulty, the influence of adversarial users is suppressed by a factor of $1/\sqrt{n}$ due to the internal averaging afforded by the batch structure. --- ### PromptCD: Test-Time Behavior Enhancement via Polarity-Prompt Contrastive Decoding Authors: Baolong Bi, Yuyao Ge, Shenghua Liu, Yuchen He, Siqian Tong, Lizhe Chen, Lingrui Mei, Zehao Li, Yiwei Wang, Yujun Cai, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Xueqi Cheng Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20696v1 Reliable AI systems require large language models (LLMs) to exhibit behaviors aligned with human preferences and values. However, most existing alignment approaches operate at training time and rely on additional high-quality data, incurring significant computational and annotation costs. While recent work has shown that contrastive decoding can leverage a model's internal distributions to improve specific capabilities, its applicability remains limited to narrow behavioral scopes and scenarios. In this work, we introduce Polarity-Prompt Contrastive Decoding (PromptCD), a test-time behavior control method that generalizes contrastive decoding to broader enhancement settings. PromptCD constructs paired positive and negative guiding prompts for a target behavior and contrasts model responses-specifically token-level probability distributions in LLMs and visual attention patterns in VLMs-to reinforce desirable outcomes. This formulation extends contrastive decoding to a wide range of enhancement objectives and is applicable to both LLMs and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) without additional training. For LLMs, experiments on the "3H" alignment objectives (helpfulness, honesty, and harmlessness) demonstrate consistent and substantial improvements, indicating that post-trained models can achieve meaningful self-enhancement purely at test time. For VLMs, we further analyze contrastive effects on visual attention, showing that PromptCD significantly improves VQA performance by reinforcing behavior-consistent visual grounding. Collectively, these results highlight PromptCD as a simple, general, and cost-efficient strategy for reliable behavior control across modalities. --- ### MatchED: Crisp Edge Detection Using End-to-End, Matching-based Supervision Authors: Bedrettin Cetinkaya, Sinan Kalkan, Emre Akbas Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20689v1 Generating crisp, i.e., one-pixel-wide, edge maps remains one of the fundamental challenges in edge detection, affecting both traditional and learning-based methods. To obtain crisp edges, most existing approaches rely on two hand-crafted post-processing algorithms, Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) and skeleton-based thinning, which are non-differentiable and hinder end-to-end optimization. Moreover, all existing crisp edge detection methods still depend on such post-processing to achieve satisfactory results. To address this limitation, we propose \MethodLPP, a lightweight, only $\sim$21K additional parameters, and plug-and-play matching-based supervision module that can be appended to any edge detection model for joint end-to-end learning of crisp edges. At each training iteration, \MethodLPP performs one-to-one matching between predicted and ground-truth edges based on spatial distance and confidence, ensuring consistency between training and testing protocols. Extensive experiments on four popular datasets demonstrate that integrating \MethodLPP substantially improves the performance of existing edge detection models. In particular, \MethodLPP increases the Average Crispness (AC) metric by up to 2--4$\times$ compared to baseline models. Under the crispness-emphasized evaluation (CEval), \MethodLPP further boosts baseline performance by up to 20--35\% in ODS and achieves similar gains in OIS and AP, achieving SOTA performance that matches or surpasses standard post-processing for the first time. Code is available at https://cvpr26-matched.github.io. --- ### How Foundational Skills Influence VLM-based Embodied Agents:A Native Perspective Authors: Bo Peng, Pi Bu, Keyu Pan, Xinrun Xu, Yinxiu Zhao, Miao Chen, Yang Du, Lin Li, Jun Song, Tong Xu Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20687v1 Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise for human-level embodied intelligence. However, existing benchmarks for VLM-driven embodied agents often rely on high-level commands or discretized action spaces, which are non-native settings that differ markedly from real-world control. In addition, current benchmarks focus primarily on high-level tasks and lack joint evaluation and analysis at both low and high levels. To address these limitations, we present NativeEmbodied, a challenging benchmark for VLM-driven embodied agents that uses a unified, native low-level action space. Built on diverse simulated scenes, NativeEmbodied includes three representative high-level tasks in complex scenarios to evaluate overall performance. For more detailed analysis, we further decouple the skills required by complex tasks and construct four types of low-level tasks, each targeting a fundamental embodied skill. This joint evaluation across task and skill granularities enables fine-grained assessment of embodied agents. Experiments with state-of-the-art VLMs reveal clear deficiencies in several fundamental embodied skills, and further analysis shows that these bottlenecks significantly limit performance on high-level tasks. NativeEmbodied highlights key challenges for current VLM-driven embodied agents and provides insights to guide future research. --- ### RAYNOVA: Scale-Temporal Autoregressive World Modeling in Ray Space Authors: Yichen Xie, Chensheng Peng, Mazen Abdelfattah, Yihan Hu, Jiezhi Yang, Eric Higgins, Ryan Brigden, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Wei Zhan Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20685v2 World foundation models aim to simulate the evolution of the real world with physically plausible behavior. Unlike prior methods that handle spatial and temporal correlations separately, we propose RAYNOVA, a geometry-agonistic multiview world model for driving scenarios that employs a dual-causal autoregressive framework. It follows both scale-wise and temporal topological orders in the autoregressive process, and leverages global attention for unified 4D spatio-temporal reasoning. Different from existing works that impose strong 3D geometric priors, RAYNOVA constructs an isotropic spatio-temporal representation across views, frames, and scales based on relative Plücker-ray positional encoding, enabling robust generalization to diverse camera setups and ego motions. We further introduce a recurrent training paradigm to alleviate distribution drift in long-horizon video generation. RAYNOVA achieves state-of-the-art multi-view video generation results on nuScenes, while offering higher throughput and strong controllability under diverse input conditions, generalizing to novel views and camera configurations without explicit 3D scene representation. Our code will be released at https://raynova-ai.github.io/. --- ### Agile V: A Compliance-Ready Framework for AI-Augmented Engineering -- From Concept to Audit-Ready Delivery Authors: Christopher Koch, Joshua Andreas Wellbrock Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20684v1 Current AI-assisted engineering workflows lack a built-in mechanism to maintain task-level verification and regulatory traceability at machine-speed delivery. Agile V addresses this gap by embedding independent verification and audit artifact generation into each task cycle. The framework merges Agile iteration with V-Model verification into a continuous Infinity Loop, deploying specialized AI agents for requirements, design, build, test, and compliance, governed by mandatory human approval gates. We evaluate three hypotheses: (H1) audit-ready artifacts emerge as a by-product of development, (H2) 100% requirement-level verification is achievable with independent test generation, and (H3) verified increments can be delivered with single-digit human interactions per cycle. A feasibility case study on a Hardware-in-the-Loop system (about 500 LOC, 8 requirements, 54 tests) supports all three hypotheses: audit-ready documentation was generated automatically (H1), 100% requirement-level pass rate was achieved (H2), and only 6 prompts per cycle were required (H3), yielding an estimated 10-50x cost reduction versus a COCOMO II baseline (sensitivity range from pessimistic to optimistic assumptions). We invite independent replication to validate generalizability. --- ### UrbanFM: Scaling Urban Spatio-Temporal Foundation Models Authors: Wei Chen, Yuqian Wu, Junle Chen, Xiaofang Zhou, Yuxuan Liang Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20677v2 Urban systems, as dynamic complex systems, continuously generate spatio-temporal data streams that encode the fundamental laws of human mobility and city evolution. While AI for Science has witnessed the transformative power of foundation models in disciplines like genomics and meteorology, urban computing remains fragmented due to "scenario-specific" models, which are overfitted to specific regions or tasks, hindering their generalizability. To bridge this gap and advance spatio-temporal foundation models for urban systems, we adopt scaling as the central perspective and systematically investigate two key questions: what to scale and how to scale. Grounded in first-principles analysis, we identify three critical dimensions: heterogeneity, correlation, and dynamics, aligning these principles with the fundamental scientific properties of urban spatio-temporal data. Specifically, to address heterogeneity through data scaling, we construct WorldST. This billion-scale corpus standardizes diverse physical signals, such as traffic flow and speed, from over 100 global cities into a unified data format. To enable computation scaling for modeling correlations, we introduce the MiniST unit, a novel split mechanism that discretizes continuous spatio-temporal fields into learnable computational units to unify representations of grid-based and sensor-based observations. Finally, addressing dynamics via architecture scaling, we propose UrbanFM, a minimalist self-attention architecture designed with limited inductive biases to autonomously learn dynamic spatio-temporal dependencies from massive data. Furthermore, we establish EvalST, the largest-scale urban spatio-temporal benchmark to date. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UrbanFM achieves remarkable zero-shot generalization across unseen cities and tasks, marking a pivotal first step toward large-scale urban spatio-temporal foundation models. --- ### PRECTR-V2:Unified Relevance-CTR Framework with Cross-User Preference Mining, Exposure Bias Correction, and LLM-Distilled Encoder Optimization Authors: Shuzhi Cao, Rong Chen, Ailong He, Shuguang Han, Jufeng Chen Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20676v1 In search systems, effectively coordinating the two core objectives of search relevance matching and click-through rate (CTR) prediction is crucial for discovering users' interests and enhancing platform revenue. In our prior work PRECTR, we proposed a unified framework to integrate these two subtasks,thereby eliminating their inconsistency and leading to mutual benefit.However, our previous work still faces three main challenges. First, low-active users and new users have limited search behavioral data, making it difficult to achieve effective personalized relevance preference modeling. Second, training data for ranking models predominantly come from high-relevance exposures, creating a distribution mismatch with the broader candidate space in coarse-ranking, leading to generalization bias. Third, due to the latency constraint, the original model employs an Emb+MLP architecture with a frozen BERT encoder, which prevents joint optimization and creates misalignment between representation learning and CTR fine-tuning. To solve these issues, we further reinforce our method and propose PRECTR-V2. Specifically, we mitigate the low-activity users' sparse behavior problem by mining global relevance preferences under the specific query, which facilitates effective personalized relevance modeling for cold-start scenarios. Subsequently, we construct hard negative samples through embedding noise injection and relevance label reconstruction, and optimize their relative ranking against positive samples via pairwise loss, thereby correcting exposure bias. Finally, we pretrain a lightweight transformer-based encoder via knowledge distillation from LLM and SFT on the text relevance classification task. This encoder replaces the frozen BERT module, enabling better adaptation to CTR fine-tuning and advancing beyond the traditional Emb+MLP paradigm. --- ### GA-Drive: Geometry-Appearance Decoupled Modeling for Free-viewpoint Driving Scene Generation Authors: Hao Zhang, Lue Fan, Qitai Wang, Wenbo Li, Zehuan Wu, Lewei Lu, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Hongsheng Li Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20673v2 A free-viewpoint, editable, and high-fidelity driving simulator is crucial for training and evaluating end-to-end autonomous driving systems. In this paper, we present GA-Drive, a novel simulation framework capable of generating camera views along user-specified novel trajectories through Geometry-Appearance Decoupling and Diffusion-Based Generation. Given a set of images captured along a recorded trajectory and the corresponding scene geometry, GA-Drive synthesizes novel pseudo-views using geometry information. These pseudo-views are then transformed into photorealistic views using a trained video diffusion model. In this way, we decouple the geometry and appearance of scenes. An advantage of such decoupling is its support for appearance editing via state-of-the-art video-to-video editing techniques, while preserving the underlying geometry, enabling consistent edits across both original and novel trajectories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GA-Drive substantially outperforms existing methods in terms of NTA-IoU, NTL-IoU, and FID scores. --- ### BBQ-to-Image: Numeric Bounding Box and Qolor Control in Large-Scale Text-to-Image Models Authors: Eliran Kachlon, Alexander Visheratin, Nimrod Sarid, Tal Hacham, Eyal Gutflaish, Saar Huberman, Hezi Zisman, David Ruppin, Ron Mokady Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20672v1 Text-to-image models have rapidly advanced in realism and controllability, with recent approaches leveraging long, detailed captions to support fine-grained generation. However, a fundamental parametric gap remains: existing models rely on descriptive language, whereas professional workflows require precise numeric control over object location, size, and color. In this work, we introduce BBQ, a large-scale text-to-image model that directly conditions on numeric bounding boxes and RGB triplets within a unified structured-text framework. We obtain precise spatial and chromatic control by training on captions enriched with parametric annotations, without architectural modifications or inference-time optimization. This also enables intuitive user interfaces such as object dragging and color pickers, replacing ambiguous iterative prompting with precise, familiar controls. Across comprehensive evaluations, BBQ achieves strong box alignment and improves RGB color fidelity over state-of-the-art baselines. More broadly, our results support a new paradigm in which user intent is translated into an intermediate structured language, consumed by a flow-based transformer acting as a renderer and naturally accommodating numeric parameters. --- ### Bikelution: Federated Gradient-Boosting for Scalable Shared Micro-Mobility Demand Forecasting Authors: Antonios Tziorvas, Andreas Tritsarolis, Yannis Theodoridis Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20671v1 The rapid growth of dockless bike-sharing systems has generated massive spatio-temporal datasets useful for fleet allocation, congestion reduction, and sustainable mobility. Bike demand, however, depends on several external factors, making traditional time-series models insufficient. Centralized Machine Learning (CML) yields high-accuracy forecasts but raises privacy and bandwidth issues when data are distributed across edge devices. To overcome these limitations, we propose Bikelution, an efficient Federated Learning (FL) solution based on gradient-boosted trees that preserves privacy while delivering accurate mid-term demand forecasts up to six hours ahead. Experiments on three real-world BSS datasets show that Bikelution is comparable to its CML-based variant and outperforms the current state-of-the-art. The results highlight the feasibility of privacy-aware demand forecasting and outline the trade-offs between FL and CML approaches. --- ### CAMEL: Confidence-Gated Reflection for Reward Modeling Authors: Zirui Zhu, Hailun Xu, Yang Luo, Yong Liu, Kanchan Sarkar, Kun Xu, Yang You Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20670v2 Reward models play a fundamental role in aligning large language models with human preferences. Existing methods predominantly follow two paradigms: scalar discriminative preference models, which are efficient but lack interpretability, and generative judging models, which offer richer reasoning at the cost of higher computational overhead. We observe that the log-probability margin between verdict tokens strongly correlates with prediction correctness, providing a reliable proxy for instance difficulty without additional inference cost. Building on this insight, we propose CAMEL, a confidence-gated reflection framework that performs a lightweight single-token preference decision first and selectively invokes reflection only for low-confidence instances. To induce effective self-correction, we train the model via reinforcement learning with counterfactual prefix augmentation, which exposes the model to diverse initial verdicts and encourages genuine revision. Empirically, CAMEL achieves state-of-the-art performance on three widely used reward-model benchmarks with 82.9% average accuracy, surpassing the best prior model by 3.2% and outperforming 70B-parameter models using only 14B parameters, while establishing a strictly better accuracy-efficiency Pareto frontier. --- ### BoxSplitGen: A Generative Model for 3D Part Bounding Boxes in Varying Granularity Authors: Juil Koo, Wei-Tung Lin, Chanho Park, Chanhyeok Park, Minhyuk Sung Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20666v1 Human creativity follows a perceptual process, moving from abstract ideas to finer details during creation. While 3D generative models have advanced dramatically, models specifically designed to assist human imagination in 3D creation -- particularly for detailing abstractions from coarse to fine -- have not been explored. We propose a framework that enables intuitive and interactive 3D shape generation by iteratively splitting bounding boxes to refine the set of bounding boxes. The main technical components of our framework are two generative models: the box-splitting generative model and the box-to-shape generative model. The first model, named BoxSplitGen, generates a collection of 3D part bounding boxes with varying granularity by iteratively splitting coarse bounding boxes. It utilizes part bounding boxes created through agglomerative merging and learns the reverse of the merging process -- the splitting sequences. The model consists of two main components: the first learns the categorical distribution of the box to be split, and the second learns the distribution of the two new boxes, given the set of boxes and the indication of which box to split. The second model, the box-to-shape generative model, is trained by leveraging the 3D shape priors learned by an existing 3D diffusion model while adapting the model to incorporate bounding box conditioning. In our experiments, we demonstrate that the box-splitting generative model outperforms token prediction models and the inpainting approach with an unconditional diffusion model. Also, we show that our box-to-shape model, based on a state-of-the-art 3D diffusion model, provides superior results compared to a previous model. --- ### AnimeAgent: Is the Multi-Agent via Image-to-Video models a Good Disney Storytelling Artist? Authors: Hailong Yan, Shice Liu, Tao Wang, Xiangtao Zhang, Yijie Zhong, Jinwei Chen, Le Zhang, Bo Li Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20664v1 Custom Storyboard Generation (CSG) aims to produce high-quality, multi-character consistent storytelling. Current approaches based on static diffusion models, whether used in a one-shot manner or within multi-agent frameworks, face three key limitations: (1) Static models lack dynamic expressiveness and often resort to "copy-paste" pattern. (2) One-shot inference cannot iteratively correct missing attributes or poor prompt adherence. (3) Multi-agents rely on non-robust evaluators, ill-suited for assessing stylized, non-realistic animation. To address these, we propose AnimeAgent, the first Image-to-Video (I2V)-based multi-agent framework for CSG. Inspired by Disney's "Combination of Straight Ahead and Pose to Pose" workflow, AnimeAgent leverages I2V's implicit motion prior to enhance consistency and expressiveness, while a mixed subjective-objective reviewer enables reliable iterative refinement. We also collect a human-annotated CSG benchmark with ground-truth. Experiments show AnimeAgent achieves SOTA performance in consistency, prompt fidelity, and stylization. --- ### Recursive Belief Vision Language Action Models Authors: Vaidehi Bagaria, Bijo Sebastian, Nirav Kumar Patel Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20659v2 Vision-language-action models must enable agents to execute long-horizon tasks under partial observability. However, most existing approaches remain observation-driven, relying on short context windows or repeated queries to vision-language models (VLMs). This leads to loss of task progress, action repetition under perceptual aliasing, and high inference latency. While semantic grounding is important, long-horizon manipulation fundamentally requires persistent, action-conditioned state representations. Current VLAs lack such representations and exhibit limited temporal and physical reasoning, making them ill-suited for multi-stage control. This paper introduces RB-VLA, a belief-centric architecture trained with self-supervised world-model objectives that maintains a compact latent state encoding task-relevant history, dynamics, and object interactions. Queried once per task, the VLM provides high-level intent, while the belief tracks task progress and enables phase-aware, causally grounded control under partial observability without storing raw observations or scaling memory with time. The belief and intent jointly condition a diffusion policy for robust closed-loop execution. RB-VLA outperforms prior VLAs on long-horizon benchmarks, achieving 52.5 percent and 37.5 percent higher success rates on multi-stage pick-and-place and stacking tasks, respectively, compared to pi_0. It also reduces inference latency by up to five times relative to baselines and eliminates memory growth across timesteps observed in existing VLAs. Ablations show the belief module is the primary driver of performance, increasing success rates from 32.5 percent without belief to 77.5 percent with belief. --- ### Vision-Language Models for Ergonomic Assessment of Manual Lifting Tasks: Estimating Horizontal and Vertical Hand Distances from RGB Video Authors: Mohammad Sadra Rajabi, Aanuoluwapo Ojelade, Sunwook Kim, Maury A. Nussbaum Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.HC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20658v1 Manual lifting tasks are a major contributor to work-related musculoskeletal disorders, and effective ergonomic risk assessment is essential for quantifying physical exposure and informing ergonomic interventions. The Revised NIOSH Lifting Equation (RNLE) is a widely used ergonomic risk assessment tool for lifting tasks that relies on six task variables, including horizontal (H) and vertical (V) hand distances; such distances are typically obtained through manual measurement or specialized sensing systems and are difficult to use in real-world environments. We evaluated the feasibility of using innovative vision-language models (VLMs) to non-invasively estimate H and V from RGB video streams. Two multi-stage VLM-based pipelines were developed: a text-guided detection-only pipeline and a detection-plus-segmentation pipeline. Both pipelines used text-guided localization of task-relevant regions of interest, visual feature extraction from those regions, and transformer-based temporal regression to estimate H and V at the start and end of a lift. For a range of lifting tasks, estimation performance was evaluated using leave-one-subject-out validation across the two pipelines and seven camera view conditions. Results varied significantly across pipelines and camera view conditions, with the segmentation-based, multi-view pipeline consistently yielding the smallest errors, achieving mean absolute errors of approximately 6-8 cm when estimating H and 5-8 cm when estimating V. Across pipelines and camera view configurations, pixel-level segmentation reduced estimation error by approximately 20-30% for H and 35-40% for V relative to the detection-only pipeline. These findings support the feasibility of VLM-based pipelines for video-based estimation of RNLE distance parameters. --- ### SD4R: Sparse-to-Dense Learning for 3D Object Detection with 4D Radar Authors: Xiaokai Bai, Jiahao Cheng, Songkai Wang, Yixuan Luo, Lianqing Zheng, Xiaohan Zhang, Si-Yuan Cao, Hui-Liang Shen Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20653v1 4D radar measurements offer an affordable and weather-robust solution for 3D perception. However, the inherent sparsity and noise of radar point clouds present significant challenges for accurate 3D object detection, underscoring the need for effective and robust point clouds densification. Despite recent progress, existing densification methods often fail to address the extreme sparsity of 4D radar point clouds and exhibit limited robustness when processing scenes with a small number of points. In this paper, we propose SD4R, a novel framework that transforms sparse radar point clouds into dense representations. SD4R begins by utilizing a foreground point generator (FPG) to mitigate noise propagation and produce densified point clouds. Subsequently, a logit-query encoder (LQE) enhances conventional pillarization, resulting in robust feature representations. Through these innovations, our SD4R demonstrates strong capability in both noise reduction and foreground point densification. Extensive experiments conducted on the publicly available View-of-Delft dataset demonstrate that SD4R achieves state-of-the-art performance. Source code is available at https://github.com/lancelot0805/SD4R. --- ### DANCE: Doubly Adaptive Neighborhood Conformal Estimation Authors: Brandon R. Feng, Brian J. Reich, Daniel Beaglehole, Xihaier Luo, David Keetae Park, Shinjae Yoo, Zhechao Huang, Xueyu Mao, Olcay Boz, Jungeum Kim Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20652v1 The recent developments of complex deep learning models have led to unprecedented ability to accurately predict across multiple data representation types. Conformal prediction for uncertainty quantification of these models has risen in popularity, providing adaptive, statistically-valid prediction sets. For classification tasks, conformal methods have typically focused on utilizing logit scores. For pre-trained models, however, this can result in inefficient, overly conservative set sizes when not calibrated towards the target task. We propose DANCE, a doubly locally adaptive nearest-neighbor based conformal algorithm combining two novel nonconformity scores directly using the data's embedded representation. DANCE first fits a task-adaptive kernel regression model from the embedding layer before using the learned kernel space to produce the final prediction sets for uncertainty quantification. We test against state-of-the-art local, task-adapted and zero-shot conformal baselines, demonstrating DANCE's superior blend of set size efficiency and robustness across various datasets. --- ### Sparse Bayesian Deep Functional Learning with Structured Region Selection Authors: Xiaoxian Zhu, Yingmeng Li, Shuangge Ma, Mengyun Wu Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.LG, stat.AP, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20651v3 In modern applications such as ECG monitoring, neuroimaging, wearable sensing, and industrial equipment diagnostics, complex and continuously structured data are ubiquitous, presenting both challenges and opportunities for functional data analysis. However, existing methods face a critical trade-off: conventional functional models are limited by linearity, whereas deep learning approaches lack interpretable region selection for sparse effects. To bridge these gaps, we propose a sparse Bayesian functional deep neural network (sBayFDNN). It learns adaptive functional embeddings through a deep Bayesian architecture to capture complex nonlinear relationships, while a structured prior enables interpretable, region-wise selection of influential domains with quantified uncertainty. Theoretically, we establish rigorous approximation error bounds, posterior consistency, and region selection consistency. These results provide the first theoretical guarantees for a Bayesian deep functional model, ensuring its reliability and statistical rigor. Empirically, comprehensive simulations and real-world studies confirm the effectiveness and superiority of sBayFDNN. Crucially, sBayFDNN excels in recognizing intricate dependencies for accurate predictions and more precisely identifies functionally meaningful regions, capabilities fundamentally beyond existing approaches. --- ### Dataset Color Quantization: A Training-Oriented Framework for Dataset-Level Compression Authors: Chenyue Yu, Lingao Xiao, Jinhong Deng, Ivor W. Tsang, Yang He Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20650v2 Large-scale image datasets are fundamental to deep learning, but their high storage demands pose challenges for deployment in resource-constrained environments. While existing approaches reduce dataset size by discarding samples, they often ignore the significant redundancy within each image -- particularly in the color space. To address this, we propose Dataset Color Quantization (DCQ), a unified framework that compresses visual datasets by reducing color-space redundancy while preserving information crucial for model training. DCQ achieves this by enforcing consistent palette representations across similar images, selectively retaining semantically important colors guided by model perception, and maintaining structural details necessary for effective feature learning. Extensive experiments across CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet-1K show that DCQ significantly improves training performance under aggressive compression, offering a scalable and robust solution for dataset-level storage reduction. --- ### CARE: An Explainable Computational Framework for Assessing Client-Perceived Therapeutic Alliance Using Large Language Models Authors: Anqi Li, Chenxiao Wang, Yu Lu, Renjun Xu, Lizhi Ma, Zhenzhong Lan Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20648v1 Client perceptions of the therapeutic alliance are critical for counseling effectiveness. Accurately capturing these perceptions remains challenging, as traditional post-session questionnaires are burdensome and often delayed, while existing computational approaches produce coarse scores, lack interpretable rationales, and fail to model holistic session context. We present CARE, an LLM-based framework to automatically predict multi-dimensional alliance scores and generate interpretable rationales from counseling transcripts. Built on the CounselingWAI dataset and enriched with 9,516 expert-curated rationales, CARE is fine-tuned using rationale-augmented supervision with the LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct backbone. Experiments show that CARE outperforms leading LLMs and substantially reduces the gap between counselor evaluations and client-perceived alliance, achieving over 70% higher Pearson correlation with client ratings. Rationale-augmented supervision further improves predictive accuracy. CARE also produces high-quality, contextually grounded rationales, validated by both automatic and human evaluations. Applied to real-world Chinese online counseling sessions, CARE uncovers common alliance-building challenges, illustrates how interaction patterns shape alliance development, and provides actionable insights, demonstrating its potential as an AI-assisted tool for supporting mental health care. --- ### Semantic Novelty at Scale: Narrative Shape Taxonomy and Readership Prediction in 28,606 Books Authors: W. Frederick Zimmerman Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20647v1 I introduce semantic novelty--cosine distance between each paragraph's sentence embedding and the running centroid of all preceding paragraphs--as an information-theoretic measure of narrative structure at corpus scale. Applying it to 28,606 books in PG19 (pre-1920 English literature), I compute paragraph-level novelty curves using 768-dimensional SBERT embeddings, then reduce each to a 16-segment Piecewise Aggregate Approximation (PAA). Ward-linkage clustering on PAA vectors reveals eight canonical narrative shape archetypes, from Steep Descent (rapid convergence) to Steep Ascent (escalating unpredictability). Volume--variance of the novelty trajectory--is the strongest length-independent predictor of readership (partial rho = 0.32), followed by speed (rho = 0.19) and Terminal/Initial ratio (rho = 0.19). Circuitousness shows strong raw correlation (rho = 0.41) but is 93 percent correlated with length; after control, partial rho drops to 0.11--demonstrating that naive correlations in corpus studies can be dominated by length confounds. Genre strongly constrains narrative shape (chi squared = 2121.6, p < 10 to the power negative 242), with fiction maintaining plateau profiles while nonfiction front-loads information. Historical analysis shows books became progressively more predictable between 1840 and 1910 (T/I ratio trend r = negative 0.74, p = 0.037). SAX analysis reveals 85 percent signature uniqueness, suggesting each book traces a nearly unique path through semantic space. These findings demonstrate that information-density dynamics, distinct from sentiment or topic, constitute a fundamental dimension of narrative structure with measurable consequences for reader engagement. Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/wfzimmerman/pg19-semantic-novelty --- ### On the Convergence of Stochastic Gradient Descent with Perturbed Forward-Backward Passes Authors: Boao Kong, Hengrui Zhang, Kun Yuan Published: 2026-02-24 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20646v1 We study stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for composite optimization problems with $N$ sequential operators subject to perturbations in both the forward and backward passes. Unlike classical analyses that treat gradient noise as additive and localized, perturbations to intermediate outputs and gradients cascade through the computational graph, compounding geometrically with the number of operators. We present the first comprehensive theoretical analysis of this setting. Specifically, we characterize how forward and backward perturbations propagate and amplify within a single gradient step, derive convergence guarantees for both general non-convex objectives and functions satisfying the Polyak--Łojasiewicz condition, and identify conditions under which perturbations do not deteriorate the asymptotic convergence order. As a byproduct, our analysis furnishes a theoretical explanation for the gradient spiking phenomenon widely observed in deep learning, precisely characterizing the conditions under which training recovers from spikes or diverges. Experiments on logistic regression with convex and non-convex regularization validate our theories, illustrating the predicted spike behavior and the asymmetric sensitivity to forward versus backward perturbations. ---