# Research Papers — 2026-03 · bundle page 143 of 243 > Full-text markdown of papers #7101–7150 of 12123 published in 2026-03, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 12123-paper 2026-03 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-03/page/143 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-03/page/142.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-03/page/144.md) ### Reinforcing the Weakest Links: Modernizing SIENA with Targeted Deep Learning Integration Authors: Riccardo Raciti, Lemuel Puglisi, Francesco Guarnera, Daniele Ravì, Sebastiano Battiato Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12951v1 Percentage Brain Volume Change (PBVC) derived from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a widely used biomarker of brain atrophy, with SIENA among the most established methods for its estimation. However, SIENA relies on classical image processing steps, particularly skull stripping and tissue segmentation, whose failures can propagate through the pipeline and bias atrophy estimates. In this work, we examine whether targeted deep learning substitutions can improve SIENA while preserving its established and interpretable framework. To this end, we integrate SynthStrip and SynthSeg into SIENA and evaluate three pipeline variants on the ADNI and PPMI longitudinal cohorts. Performance is assessed using three complementary criteria: correlation with longitudinal clinical and structural decline, scan-order consistency, and end-to-end runtime. Replacing the skull-stripping module yields the most consistent gains: in ADNI, it substantially strengthens associations between PBVC and multiple measures of disease progression relative to the standard SIENA pipeline, while across both datasets it markedly improves robustness under scan reversal. The fully integrated pipeline achieves the strongest scan-order consistency, reducing the error by up to 99.1%. In addition, GPU-enabled variants reduce execution time by up to 46% while maintaining CPU runtimes comparable to standard SIENA. Overall, these findings show that deep learning can meaningfully strengthen established longitudinal atrophy pipelines when used to reinforce their weakest image processing steps. More broadly, this study highlights the value of modularly modernizing clinically trusted neuroimaging tools without sacrificing their interpretability. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/Raciti/Enhanced-SIENA.git. --- ### Thinking in Streaming Video Authors: Zikang Liu, Longteng Guo, Handong Li, Ru Zhen, Xingjian He, Ruyi Ji, Xiaoming Ren, Yanhao Zhang, Haonan Lu, Jing Liu Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12938v1 Real-time understanding of continuous video streams is essential for interactive assistants and multimodal agents operating in dynamic environments. However, most existing video reasoning approaches follow a batch paradigm that defers reasoning until the full video context is observed, resulting in high latency and growing computational cost that are incompatible with streaming scenarios. In this paper, we introduce ThinkStream, a framework for streaming video reasoning based on a Watch--Think--Speak paradigm that enables models to incrementally update their understanding as new video observations arrive. At each step, the model performs a short reasoning update and decides whether sufficient evidence has accumulated to produce a response. To support long-horizon streaming, we propose Reasoning-Compressed Streaming Memory (RCSM), which treats intermediate reasoning traces as compact semantic memory that replaces outdated visual tokens while preserving essential context. We further train the model using a Streaming Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards scheme that aligns incremental reasoning and response timing with the requirements of streaming interaction. Experiments on multiple streaming video benchmarks show that ThinkStream significantly outperforms existing online video models while maintaining low latency and memory usage. Code, models and data will be released at https://github.com/johncaged/ThinkStream --- ### SGMatch: Semantic-Guided Non-Rigid Shape Matching with Flow Regularization Authors: Tianwei Ye, Xiaoguang Mei, Yifan Xia, Fan Fan, Jun Huang, Jiayi Ma Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12937v2 Establishing accurate point-to-point correspondences between non-rigid 3D shapes remains a critical challenge, particularly under non-isometric deformations and topological noise. Existing functional map pipelines suffer from ambiguities that geometric descriptors alone cannot resolve, and spatial inconsistencies inherent in the projection of truncated spectral bases to dense pointwise correspondences. In this paper, we introduce SGMatch, a learning-based framework that couples 3D-lifted semantic cues with trajectory-level feature transport regularization. Specifically, we design a Semantic-Guided Local Cross-Attention module that integrates semantic features from vision foundation models into geometric descriptors while preserving local structural continuity. Furthermore, we adapt conditional flow matching as a time-conditioned feature transport regularizer that promotes spatially coherent point-wise recovery. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SGMatch achieves competitive performance across near-isometric settings and consistent improvements under non-isometric deformations and topological noise. --- ### MotionAnymesh: Physics-Grounded Articulation for Simulation-Ready Digital Twins Authors: WenBo Xu, Liu Liu, Li Zhang, Dan Guo, RuoNan Liu Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12936v1 Converting static 3D meshes into interactable articulated assets is crucial for embodied AI and robotic simulation. However, existing zero-shot pipelines struggle with complex assets due to a critical lack of physical grounding. Specifically, ungrounded Vision-Language Models (VLMs) frequently suffer from kinematic hallucinations, while unconstrained joint estimation inevitably leads to catastrophic mesh inter-penetration during physical simulation. To bridge this gap, we propose MotionAnymesh, an automated zero-shot framework that seamlessly transforms unstructured static meshes into simulation-ready digital twins. Our method features a kinematic-aware part segmentation module that grounds VLM reasoning with explicit SP4D physical priors, effectively eradicating kinematic hallucinations. Furthermore, we introduce a geometry-physics joint estimation pipeline that combines robust type-aware initialization with physics-constrained trajectory optimization to rigorously guarantee collision-free articulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MotionAnymesh significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both geometric precision and dynamic physical executability, providing highly reliable assets for downstream applications. --- ### Efficient and Interpretable Multi-Agent LLM Routing via Ant Colony Optimization Authors: Xudong Wang, Chaoning Zhang, Jiaquan Zhang, Chenghao Li, Qigan Sun, Sung-Ho Bae, Peng Wang, Ning Xie, Jie Zou, Yang Yang, Hengtao Shen Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12933v1 Large Language Model (LLM)-driven Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have demonstrated strong capability in complex reasoning and tool use, and heterogeneous agent pools further broaden the quality--cost trade-off space. Despite these advances, real-world deployment is often constrained by high inference cost, latency, and limited transparency, which hinders scalable and efficient routing. Existing routing strategies typically rely on expensive LLM-based selectors or static policies, and offer limited controllability for semantic-aware routing under dynamic loads and mixed intents, often resulting in unstable performance and inefficient resource utilization. To address these limitations, we propose AMRO-S, an efficient and interpretable routing framework for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). AMRO-S models MAS routing as a semantic-conditioned path selection problem, enhancing routing performance through three key mechanisms: First, it leverages a supervised fine-tuned (SFT) small language model for intent inference, providing a low-overhead semantic interface for each query; second, it decomposes routing memory into task-specific pheromone specialists, reducing cross-task interference and optimizing path selection under mixed workloads; finally, it employs a quality-gated asynchronous update mechanism to decouple inference from learning, optimizing routing without increasing latency. Extensive experiments on five public benchmarks and high-concurrency stress tests demonstrate that AMRO-S consistently improves the quality--cost trade-off over strong routing baselines, while providing traceable routing evidence through structured pheromone patterns. --- ### DS$^2$-Instruct: Domain-Specific Data Synthesis for Large Language Models Instruction Tuning Authors: Ruiyao Xu, Noelle I. Samia, Han Liu Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12932v2 Adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to specialized domains requires high-quality instruction tuning datasets, which are expensive to create through human annotation. Existing data synthesis methods focus on general-purpose tasks and fail to capture domain-specific terminology and reasoning patterns. To address this, we introduce DS$^2$-Instruct, a zero-shot framework that generates domain-specific instruction datasets without human supervision. Our approach first generates task-informed keywords to ensure comprehensive domain coverage. It then creates diverse instructions by pairing these keywords with different cognitive levels from Bloom's Taxonomy. Finally, it uses self-consistency validation to ensure data quality. We apply this framework to generate datasets across seven challenging domains, such as mathematics, finance, and logical reasoning. Comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that models fine-tuned on our generated data achieve substantial improvements over existing data generation methods. --- ### Rethinking VLMs for Image Forgery Detection and Localization Authors: Shaofeng Guo, Jiequan Cui, Richang Hong Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12930v1 With the rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC), image manipulation has become increasingly accessible, posing significant challenges for image forgery detection and localization (IFDL). In this paper, we study how to fully leverage vision-language models (VLMs) to assist the IFDL task. In particular, we observe that priors from VLMs hardly benefit the detection and localization performance and even have negative effects due to their inherent biases toward semantic plausibility rather than authenticity. Additionally, the location masks explicitly encode the forgery concepts, which can serve as extra priors for VLMs to ease their training optimization, thus enhancing the interpretability of detection and localization results. Building on these findings, we propose a new IFDL pipeline named IFDL-VLM. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we conduct experiments on 9 popular benchmarks and assess the model performance under both in-domain and cross-dataset generalization settings. The experimental results show that we consistently achieve new state-of-the-art performance in detection, localization, and interpretability.Code is available at: https://github.com/sha0fengGuo/IFDL-VLM. --- ### ODRL Policy Comparison Through Normalisation Authors: Jaime Osvaldo Salas, Paolo Pareti, George Konstantinidis Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12926v1 The ODRL language has become the standard for representing policies and regulations for digital rights. However its complexity is a barrier to its usage, which has caused many related theoretical and practical works to focus on different, and not interoperable, fragments of ODRL. Moreover, semantically equivalent policies can be expressed in numerous different ways, which makes comparing them and processing them harder. Building on top of a recently defined semantics, we tackle these problems by proposing an approach that involves a parametrised normalisation of ODRL policies into its minimal components which reformulates policies with permissions and prohibitions into policies with permissions exclusively, and simplifies complex logic constraints into simple ones. We provide algorithms to compute a normal form for ODRL policies and simplifying numerical and symbolic constraints. We prove that these algorithms preserve the semantics of policies, and analyse the size complexity of the result, which is exponential on the number of attributes and linear on the number of unique values for these attributes. We show how this makes complex policies representable in more basic fragments of ODRL, and how it reduces the problem of policy comparison to the simpler problem of checking if two rules are identical. --- ### HMS-BERT: Hybrid Multi-Task Self-Training for Multilingual and Multi-Label Cyberbullying Detection Authors: Zixin Feng, Xinying Cui, Yifan Sun, Zheng Wei, Jiachen Yuan, Jiazhen Hu, Ning Xin, Md Maruf Hasan Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.CL, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12920v1 Cyberbullying on social media is inherently multilingual and multi-faceted, where abusive behaviors often overlap across multiple categories. Existing methods are commonly limited by monolingual assumptions or single-task formulations, which restrict their effectiveness in realistic multilingual and multi-label scenarios. In this paper, we propose HMS-BERT, a hybrid multi-task self-training framework for multilingual and multi-label cyberbullying detection. Built upon a pretrained multilingual BERT backbone, HMS-BERT integrates contextual representations with handcrafted linguistic features and jointly optimizes a fine-grained multi-label abuse classification task and a three-class main classification task. To address labeled data scarcity in low-resource languages, an iterative self-training strategy with confidence-based pseudo-labeling is introduced to facilitate cross-lingual knowledge transfer. Experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that HMS-BERT achieves strong performance, attaining a macro F1-score of up to 0.9847 on the multi-label task and an accuracy of 0.6775 on the main classification task. Ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of the proposed components. --- ### VIRD: View-Invariant Representation through Dual-Axis Transformation for Cross-View Pose Estimation Authors: Juhye Park, Wooju Lee, Dasol Hong, Changki Sung, Youngwoo Seo, Dongwan Kang, Hyun Myung Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12918v2 Accurate global localization is critical for autonomous driving and robotics, but GNSS-based approaches often degrade due to occlusion and multipath effects. As an emerging alternative, cross-view pose estimation predicts the 3-DoF camera pose corresponding to a ground-view image with respect to a geo-referenced satellite image. However, existing methods struggle to bridge the significant viewpoint gap between the ground and satellite views mainly due to limited spatial correspondences. We propose a novel cross-view pose estimation method that constructs view-invariant representations through dual-axis transformation (VIRD). VIRD first applies a polar transformation to the satellite view to facilitate horizontal correspondence, then uses context-enhanced positional attention on the ground and polar-transformed satellite features to mitigate vertical misalignment, explicitly bridging the viewpoint gap. To further strengthen view invariance, we introduce a view-reconstruction loss that encourages the derived representations to reconstruct the original and cross-view images. Experiments on the KITTI and VIGOR datasets demonstrate that VIRD outperforms the state-of-the-art methods without orientation priors, reducing median position and orientation errors by 50.7% and 76.5% on KITTI, and 18.0% and 46.8% on VIGOR, respectively. --- ### Surprised by Attention: Predictable Query Dynamics for Time Series Anomaly Detection Authors: Kadir-Kaan Özer, René Ebeling, Markus Enzweiler Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12916v4 Multivariate time series anomalies often manifest as shifts in cross-channel dependencies rather than simple amplitude excursions. In autonomous driving, for instance, a steering command might be internally consistent but decouple from the resulting lateral acceleration. Residual-based detectors can miss such anomalies when flexible sequence models still reconstruct signals plausibly despite altered coordination. We introduce AxonAD, an unsupervised detector that treats multi-head attention query evolution as a short horizon predictable process. A gradient-updated reconstruction pathway is coupled with a history-only predictor that forecasts future query vectors from past context. This is trained via a masked predictor-target objective against an exponential moving average (EMA) target encoder. At inference, reconstruction error is combined with a tail-aggregated query mismatch score, which measures cosine deviation between predicted and target queries on recent timesteps. This dual approach provides sensitivity to structural dependency shifts while retaining amplitude-level detection. On proprietary in-vehicle telemetry with interval annotations and on the TSB-AD multi-variate suite (17 datasets, 180 series) with threshold-free and range-aware metrics, AxonAD improves ranking quality and temporal localization over strong baselines. Ablations confirm that query prediction and combined scoring are the primary drivers of the observed gains. Code is available at the URL https://github.com/iis-esslingen/AxonAD. --- ### Surprised by Attention: Predictable Query Dynamics for Time Series Anomaly Detection Authors: Kadir-Kaan Özer, René Ebeling, Markus Enzweiler Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12916v3 Multivariate time series anomalies often manifest as shifts in cross-channel dependencies rather than simple amplitude excursions. In autonomous driving, for instance, a steering command might be internally consistent but decouple from the resulting lateral acceleration. Residual-based detectors can miss such anomalies when flexible sequence models still reconstruct signals plausibly despite altered coordination. We introduce AxonAD, an unsupervised detector that treats multi-head attention query evolution as a short horizon predictable process. A gradient-updated reconstruction pathway is coupled with a history-only predictor that forecasts future query vectors from past context. This is trained via a masked predictor-target objective against an exponential moving average (EMA) target encoder. At inference, reconstruction error is combined with a tail-aggregated query mismatch score, which measures cosine deviation between predicted and target queries on recent timesteps. This dual approach provides sensitivity to structural dependency shifts while retaining amplitude-level detection. On proprietary in-vehicle telemetry with interval annotations and on the TSB-AD multi-variate suite (17 datasets, 180 series) with threshold-free and range-aware metrics, AxonAD improves ranking quality and temporal localization over strong baselines. Ablations confirm that query prediction and combined scoring are the primary drivers of the observed gains. Code is available at the URL https://github.com/iis-esslingen/AxonAD. --- ### Stake the Points: Structure-Faithful Instance Unlearning Authors: Kiseong Hong, JungKyoo Shin, Eunwoo Kim Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12915v1 Machine unlearning (MU) addresses privacy risks in pretrained models. The main goal of MU is to remove the influence of designated data while preserving the utility of retained knowledge. Achieving this goal requires preserving semantic relations among retained instances, which existing studies often overlook. We observe that without such preservation, models suffer from progressive structural collapse, undermining both the deletion-retention balance. In this work, we propose a novel structure-faithful framework that introduces stakes, i.e., semantic anchors that serve as reference points to maintain the knowledge structure. By leveraging these anchors, our framework captures and stabilizes the semantic organization of knowledge. Specifically, we instantiate the anchors from language-driven attribute descriptions encoded by a semantic encoder (e.g., CLIP). We enforce preservation of the knowledge structure via structure-aware alignment and regularization: the former aligns the organization of retained knowledge before and after unlearning around anchors, while the latter regulates updates to structure-critical parameters. Results from image classification, retrieval, and face recognition show average gains of 32.9%, 22.5%, and 19.3% in performance, balancing the deletion-retention trade-off and enhancing generalization. --- ### FedBPrompt: Federated Domain Generalization Person Re-Identification via Body Distribution Aware Visual Prompts Authors: Xin Xu, Weilong Li, Wei Liu, Wenke Huang, Zhixi Yu, Bin Yang, Xiaoying Liao, Kui Jiang Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12912v1 Federated Domain Generalization for Person Re-Identification (FedDG-ReID) learns domain-invariant representations from decentralized data. While Vision Transformer (ViT) is widely adopted, its global attention often fails to distinguish pedestrians from high similarity backgrounds or diverse viewpoints -- a challenge amplified by cross-client distribution shifts in FedDG-ReID. To address this, we propose Federated Body Distribution Aware Visual Prompt (FedBPrompt), introducing learnable visual prompts to guide Transformer attention toward pedestrian-centric regions. FedBPrompt employs a Body Distribution Aware Visual Prompts Mechanism (BAPM) comprising: Holistic Full Body Prompts to suppress cross-client background noise, and Body Part Alignment Prompts to capture fine-grained details robust to pose and viewpoint variations. To mitigate high communication costs, we design a Prompt-based Fine-Tuning Strategy (PFTS) that freezes the ViT backbone and updates only lightweight prompts, significantly reducing communication overhead while maintaining adaptability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BAPM effectively enhances feature discrimination and cross-domain generalization, while PFTS achieves notable performance gains within only a few aggregation rounds. Moreover, both BAPM and PFTS can be easily integrated into existing ViT-based FedDG-ReID frameworks, making FedBPrompt a flexible and effective solution for federated person re-identification. The code is available at https://github.com/leavlong/FedBPrompt. --- ### Learning from Child-Directed Speech in Two-Language Scenarios: A French-English Case Study Authors: Liel Binyamin, Elior Sulem Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12906v1 Research on developmentally plausible language models has largely focused on English, leaving open questions about multilingual settings. We present a systematic study of compact language models by extending BabyBERTa to English-French scenarios under strictly size-matched data conditions, covering monolingual, bilingual, and cross-lingual settings. Our design contrasts two types of training corpora: (i) child-directed speech (about 2.5M tokens), following BabyBERTa and related work, and (ii) multi-domain corpora (about 10M tokens), extending the BabyLM framework to French. To enable fair evaluation, we also introduce new resources, including French versions of QAMR and QASRL, as well as English and French multi-domain corpora. We evaluate the models on both syntactic and semantic tasks and compare them with models trained on Wikipedia-only data. The results reveal context-dependent effects: training on Wikipedia consistently benefits semantic tasks, whereas child-directed speech improves grammatical judgments in monolingual settings. Bilingual pretraining yields notable gains for textual entailment, with particularly strong improvements for French. Importantly, similar patterns emerge across BabyBERTa, RoBERTa, and LTG-BERT, suggesting consistent trends across architectures. --- ### DirPA: Addressing Prior Shift in Imbalanced Few-shot Crop-type Classification Authors: Joana Reuss, Ekaterina Gikalo, Marco Körner Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12905v2 Real-world agricultural monitoring is often hampered by severe class imbalance and high label acquisition costs, resulting in significant data scarcity. In few-shot learning (FSL) -- a framework specifically designed for data-scarce settings -- , training sets are often artificially balanced. However, this creates a disconnect from the long-tailed distributions observed in nature, leading to a distribution shift that undermines the model's ability to generalize to real-world agricultural tasks. We previously introduced Dirichlet Prior Augmentation (DirPA; Reuss et al., 2026a) to proactively mitigate the effects of such label distribution skews during model training. In this work, we extend the original study's geographical scope. Specifically, we evaluate this extended approach across multiple countries in the European Union (EU), moving beyond localized experiments to test the method's resilience across diverse agricultural environments. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of DirPA across different geographical regions. We show that DirPA not only improves system robustness and stabilizes training under extreme long-tailed distributions, regardless of the target region, but also substantially improves individual class-specific performance by proactively simulating priors. --- ### Spectral-Geometric Neural Fields for Pose-Free LiDAR View Synthesis Authors: Yinuo Jiang, Jun Cheng, Yiran Wang, Cheng Cheng Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12903v1 Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have shown remarkable success in image novel view synthesis (NVS), inspiring extensions to LiDAR NVS. However, most methods heavily rely on accurate camera poses for scene reconstruction. The sparsity and textureless nature of LiDAR data also present distinct challenges, leading to geometric holes and discontinuous surfaces. To address these issues, we propose SG-NLF, a pose-free LiDAR NeRF framework that integrates spectral information with geometric consistency. Specifically, we design a hybrid representation based on spectral priors to reconstruct smooth geometry. For pose optimization, we construct a confidence-aware graph based on feature compatibility to achieve global alignment. In addition, an adversarial learning strategy is introduced to enforce cross-frame consistency, thereby enhancing reconstruction quality. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, especially in challenging low-frequency scenarios. Compared to previous state-of-the-art methods, SG-NLF improves reconstruction quality and pose accuracy by over 35.8% and 68.8%. Our work can provide a novel perspective for LiDAR view synthesis. --- ### A theory of learning data statistics in diffusion models, from easy to hard Authors: Lorenzo Bardone, Claudia Merger, Sebastian Goldt Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: stat.ML, cond-mat.dis-nn, cs.IT, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12901v2 While diffusion models have emerged as a powerful class of generative models, their learning dynamics remain poorly understood. We address this issue first by empirically showing that standard diffusion models trained on natural images exhibit a distributional simplicity bias, learning simple, pair-wise input statistics before specializing to higher-order correlations. We reproduce this behaviour in simple denoisers trained on a minimal data model, the mixed cumulant model, where we precisely control both pair-wise and higher-order correlations of the inputs. We identify a scalar invariant of the model that governs the sample complexity of learning pair-wise and higher-order correlations that we call the diffusion information exponent, in analogy to related invariants in different learning paradigms. Using this invariant, we prove that the denoiser learns simple, pair-wise statistics of the inputs at linear sample complexity, while more complex higher-order statistics, such as the fourth cumulant, require at least cubic sample complexity. We also prove that the sample complexity of learning the fourth cumulant is linear if pair-wise and higher-order statistics share a correlated latent structure. Our work describes a key mechanism for how diffusion models can learn distributions of increasing complexity. --- ### Human-Centered Evaluation of an LLM-Based Process Modeling Copilot: A Mixed-Methods Study with Domain Experts Authors: Chantale Lauer, Peter Pfeiffer, Nijat Mehdiyev Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12895v1 Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into business process management tools promises to democratize Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) modeling for non-experts. While automated frameworks assess syntactic and semantic quality, they miss human factors like trust, usability, and professional alignment. We conducted a mixed-methods evaluation of our proposed solution, an LLM-powered BPMN copilot, with five process modeling experts using focus groups and standardized questionnaires. Our findings reveal a critical tension between acceptable perceived usability (mean CUQ score: 67.2/100) and notably lower trust (mean score: 48.8\%), with reliability rated as the most critical concern (M=1.8/5). Furthermore, we identified output-quality issues, prompting difficulties, and a need for the LLM to ask more in-depth clarifying questions about the process. We envision five use cases ranging from domain-expert support to enterprise quality assurance. We demonstrate the necessity of human-centered evaluation complementing automated benchmarking for LLM modeling agents. --- ### Finite Difference Flow Optimization for RL Post-Training of Text-to-Image Models Authors: David McAllister, Miika Aittala, Tero Karras, Janne Hellsten, Angjoo Kanazawa, Timo Aila, Samuli Laine Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.NE, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12893v2 Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard technique for post-training diffusion-based image synthesis models, as it enables learning from reward signals to explicitly improve desirable aspects such as image quality and prompt alignment. In this paper, we propose an online RL variant that reduces the variance in the model updates by sampling paired trajectories and pulling the flow velocity in the direction of the more favorable image. Unlike existing methods that treat each sampling step as a separate policy action, we consider the entire sampling process as a single action. We experiment with both high-quality vision language models and off-the-shelf quality metrics for rewards, and evaluate the outputs using a broad set of metrics. Our method converges faster and yields higher output quality and prompt alignment than previous approaches. --- ### Forecasting Epileptic Seizures from Contactless Camera via Cross-Species Transfer Learning Authors: Mingkai Zhai, Wei Wang, Zongsheng Li, Quanying Liu Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12887v1 Epileptic seizure forecasting is a clinically important yet challenging problem in epilepsy research. Existing approaches predominantly rely on neural signals such as electroencephalography (EEG), which require specialized equipment and limit long-term deployment in real-world settings. In contrast, video data provide a non-invasive and accessible alternative, yet existing video-based studies mainly focus on post-onset seizure detection, leaving seizure forecasting largely unexplored. In this work, we formulate a novel task of video-based epileptic seizure forecasting, where short pre-ictal video segments (3-10 seconds) are used to predict whether a seizure will occur within the subsequent 5 seconds. To address the scarcity of annotated human epilepsy videos, we propose a cross-species transfer learning framework that leverages large-scale rodent video data for auxiliary pretraining. This enables the model to capture seizure-related behavioral dynamics that generalize across species. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves over 70% prediction accuracy under a strictly video-only setting and outperforms existing baselines. These findings highlight the potential of cross-species learning for building non-invasive, scalable early-warning systems for epilepsy. --- ### A protocol for evaluating robustness to H&E staining variation in computational pathology models Authors: Lydia A. Schönpflug, Nikki van den Berg, Sonali Andani, Nanda Horeweg, Jurriaan Barkey Wolf, Tjalling Bosse, Viktor H. Koelzer, Maxime W. Lafarge Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12886v1 Sensitivity to staining variation remains a major barrier to deploying computational pathology (CPath) models as hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining varies across laboratories, requiring systematic assessment of how this variability affects model prediction. In this work, we developed a three-step protocol for evaluating robustness to H&E staining variation in CPath models. Step 1: Select reference staining conditions, Step 2: Characterize test set staining properties, Step 3: Apply CPath model(s) under simulated reference staining conditions. Here, we first created a new reference staining library based on the PLISM dataset. As an exemplary use case, we applied the protocol to assess the robustness properties of 306 microsatellite instability (MSI) classification models on the unseen SurGen colorectal cancer dataset (n=738), including 300 attention-based multiple instance learning models trained on the TCGA-COAD/READ datasets across three feature extractors (UNI2-h, H-Optimus-1, Virchow2), alongside six public MSI classification models. Classification performance was measured as AUC, and robustness as the min-max AUC range across four simulated staining conditions (low/high H&E intensity, low/high H&E color similarity). Across models and staining conditions, classification performance ranged from AUC 0.769-0.911 ($Δ$ = 0.142). Robustness ranged from 0.007-0.079 ($Δ$ = 0.072), and showed a weak inverse correlation with classification performance (Pearson r=-0.22, 95% CI (-0.34, -0.11)). Thus, we show that the proposed evaluation protocol enables robustness-informed CPath model selection and provides insight into performance shifts across H&E staining conditions, supporting the identification of operational ranges for reliable model deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/CTPLab/staining-robustness-evaluation . --- ### Enhanced Drug-drug Interaction Prediction Using Adaptive Knowledge Integration Authors: Pengfei Liu, Jun Tao, Zhixiang Ren Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12885v1 Drug-drug interaction event (DDIE) prediction is crucial for preventing adverse reactions and ensuring optimal therapeutic outcomes. However, existing methods often face challenges with imbalanced datasets, complex interaction mechanisms, and poor generalization to unknown drug combinations. To address these challenges, we propose a knowledge augmentation framework that adaptively infuses prior drug knowledge into a large language model (LLM). This framework utilizes reinforcement learning techniques to facilitate adaptive knowledge extraction and synthesis, thereby efficiently optimizing the strategy space to enhance the accuracy of LLMs for DDIE predictions. As a result of few-shot learning, we achieved a notable improvement compared to the baseline. This approach establishes an effective framework for scientific knowledge learning for DDIE predictions. --- ### Explainable AI Using Inherently Interpretable Components for Wearable-based Health Monitoring Authors: Maurice Kuschel, Solveig Vieluf, Claus Reinsberger, Tobias Loddenkemper, Tanuj Hasija Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: eess.SP, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12880v1 The use of wearables in medicine and wellness, enabled by AI-based models, offers tremendous potential for real-time monitoring and interpretable event detection. Explainable AI (XAI) is required to assess what models have learned and build trust in model outputs, for patients, healthcare professionals, model developers, and domain experts alike. Explaining AI decisions made on time-series data recorded by wearables is especially challenging due to the data's complex nature and temporal dependencies. Too often, explainability using interpretable features leads to performance loss. We propose a novel XAI method that combines explanation spaces and concept-based explanations to explain AI predictions on time-series data. By using Inherently Interpretable Components (IICs), which encapsulate domain-specific, interpretable concepts within a custom explanation space, we preserve the performance of models trained on time series while achieving the interpretability of concept-based explanations based on extracted features. Furthermore, we define a domain-specific set of IICs for wearable-based health monitoring and demonstrate their usability in real applications, including state assessment and epileptic seizure detection. --- ### Test-time RL alignment exposes task familiarity artifacts in LLM benchmarks Authors: Kun Wang, Reinhard Heckel Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12875v1 Direct evaluation of LLMs on benchmarks can be misleading because comparatively strong performance may reflect task familiarity rather than capability. The train-before-test approach controls for task familiarity by giving each model task-relevant training before evaluation, originally through supervised finetuning. However, suitable training data is often hard to come by, and evaluation results vary with the data chosen. In this paper, we propose a two-stage test-time reinforcement learning (RL) alignment method for train-before-test. First, RL with a single sample provides a first alignment of the model to the task format, and second, test-time RL with majority-voting reward aligns the model to the benchmark distribution. Our test-time RL alignment method aligns similarly well as SFT-based train-before test, but without requiring a task-specific training set. On a domain-specific benchmark without training data, we show that direct evaluation underestimates base models which perform substantially better once aligned, yielding a more faithful evaluation of their capabilities. Moreover, for reasoning tasks, the performance gap between fine-tuned models and their base models largely disappears after alignment, suggesting that many gains from RLVR/SFT reported in the literature are not a difference in reasoning capability, but rather artifacts of task familiarity. --- ### TRACE: Structure-Aware Character Encoding for Robust and Generalizable Document Watermarking Authors: Jiale Meng, Jie Zhang, Runyi Hu, Zhe-Ming Lu, Tianwei Zhang, Yiming Li Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12873v1 We propose TRACE, a structure-aware framework leveraging diffusion models for localized character encoding to embed data. Unlike existing methods that rely on edge features or pre-defined codebooks, TRACE exploits character structures that provide inherent resistance to noise interference due to their stability and unified representation across diverse characters. Our framework comprises three key components: (1) adaptive diffusion initialization that automatically identifies handle points, target points, and editing regions through specialized algorithms including movement probability estimator (MPE), target point estimation (TPE) and mask drawing model (MDM), (2) guided diffusion encoding for precise movement of selected point, and (3) masked region replacement with a specialized loss function to minimize feature alterations after the diffusion process. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate \name{}'s superior performance over state-of-the-art methods, achieving more than 5 dB improvement in PSNR and 5\% higher extraction accuracy following cross-media transmission. \name{} achieves broad generalizability across multiple languages and fonts, making it particularly suitable for practical document security applications. --- ### CLARIN-PT-LDB: An Open LLM Leaderboard for Portuguese to assess Language, Culture and Civility Authors: João Silva, Luís Gomes, António Branco Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12872v1 This paper reports on the development of a leaderboard of Open Large Language Models (LLM) for European Portuguese (PT-PT), and on its associated benchmarks. This leaderboard comes as a way to address a gap in the evaluation of LLM for European Portuguese, which so far had no leaderboard dedicated to this variant of the language. The paper also reports on novel benchmarks, including some that address aspects of performance that so far have not been available in benchmarks for European Portuguese, namely model safeguards and alignment to Portuguese culture. The leaderboard is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/PORTULAN/portuguese-llm-leaderboard. --- ### Surrogates for Physics-based and Data-driven Modelling of Parametric Systems: Review and New Perspectives Authors: Matteo Giacomini, Pedro Díez Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: math.NA, cs.CE, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12870v1 Surrogate models provide compact relations between user-defined input parameters and output quantities of interest, enabling the efficient evaluation of complex parametric systems in many-query settings. Such capabilities are essential in a wide range of applications, including optimisation, control, data assimilation, uncertainty quantification, and emerging digital twin technologies in various fields such as manufacturing, personalised healthcare, smart cities, and sustainability. This article reviews established methodologies for constructing surrogate models exploiting either knowledge of the governing laws and the dynamical structure of the system (physics-based) or experimental observations (data-driven), as well as hybrid approaches combining these two paradigms. By revisiting the design of a surrogate model as a functional approximation problem, existing methodologies are reviewed in terms of the choice of (i) a reduced basis and (ii) a suitable approximation criterion. The paper reviews methodologies pertaining to the field of Scientific Machine Learning, and it aims at synthesising established knowledge, recent advances, and new perspectives on: dimensionality reduction, physics-based, and data-driven surrogate modelling based on proper orthogonal decomposition, proper generalised decomposition, and artificial neural networks; multi-fidelity methods to exploit information from sources with different fidelities; adaptive sampling, enrichment, and data augmentation techniques to enhance the quality of surrogate models. --- ### Composing Driving Worlds through Disentangled Control for Adversarial Scenario Generation Authors: Yifan Zhan, Zhengqing Chen, Qingjie Wang, Zhuo He, Muyao Niu, Xiaoyang Guo, Wei Yin, Weiqiang Ren, Qian Zhang, Yinqiang Zheng Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12864v1 A major challenge in autonomous driving is the "long tail" of safety-critical edge cases, which often emerge from unusual combinations of common traffic elements. Synthesizing these scenarios is crucial, yet current controllable generative models provide incomplete or entangled guidance, preventing the independent manipulation of scene structure, object identity, and ego actions. We introduce CompoSIA, a compositional driving video simulator that disentangles these traffic factors, enabling fine-grained control over diverse adversarial driving scenarios. To support controllable identity replacement of scene elements, we propose a noise-level identity injection, allowing pose-agnostic identity generation across diverse element poses, all from a single reference image. Furthermore, a hierarchical dual-branch action control mechanism is introduced to improve action controllability. Such disentangled control enables adversarial scenario synthesis-systematically combining safe elements into dangerous configurations that entangled generators cannot produce. Extensive comparisons demonstrate superior controllable generation quality over state-of-the-art baselines, with a 17% improvement in FVD for identity editing and reductions of 30% and 47% in rotation and translation errors for action control. Furthermore, downstream stress-testing reveals substantial planner failures: across editing modalities, the average collision rate of 3s increases by 173%. --- ### Wear Classification of Abrasive Flap Wheels using a Hierarchical Deep Learning Approach Authors: Falko Kähler, Maxim Wille, Ole Schmedemann, Thorsten Schüppstuhl Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12852v1 Abrasive flap wheels are common for finishing complex free-form surfaces due to their flexibility. However, this flexibility results in complex wear patterns such as concave/convex flap profiles or flap tears, which influence the grinding result. This paper proposes a novel, vision-based hierarchical classification framework to automate the wear condition monitoring of flap wheels. Unlike monolithic classification approaches, we decompose the problem into three logical levels: (1) state detection (new vs. worn), (2) wear type identification (rectangular, concave, convex) and flap tear detection, and (3) severity assessment (partial vs. complete deformation). A custom-built dataset of real flap wheel images was generated and a transfer learning approach with EfficientNetV2 architecture was used. The results demonstrate high robustness with classification accuracies ranging from 93.8% (flap tears) to 99.3% (concave severity). Furthermore, Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) is utilized to validate that the models learn physically relevant features and examine false classifications. The proposed hierarchical method provides a basis for adaptive process control and wear consideration in automated flap wheel grinding. --- ### On Linear Separability of the MNIST Handwritten Digits Dataset Authors: Ákos Hajnal Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12850v1 The MNIST dataset containing thousands of handwritten digit images is still a fundamental benchmark for evaluating various pattern-recognition and image-classification models. Linear separability is a key concept in many statistical and machine-learning techniques. Despite the long history of the MNIST dataset and its relative simplicity in size and resolution, the question of whether the dataset is linearly separable has never been fully answered -- scientific and informal sources share conflicting claims. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive empirical investigation to address this question, distinguishing pairwise and one-vs-rest separation of the training, the test and the combined sets, respectively. It reviews the theoretical approaches to assessing linear separability, alongside state-of-the-art methods and tools, then systematically examines all relevant assemblies, and reports the findings. --- ### Team LEYA in 10th ABAW Competition: Multimodal Ambivalence/Hesitancy Recognition Approach Authors: Elena Ryumina, Alexandr Axyonov, Dmitry Sysoev, Timur Abdulkadirov, Kirill Almetov, Yulia Morozova, Dmitry Ryumin Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12848v1 Ambivalence/hesitancy recognition in unconstrained videos is a challenging problem due to the subtle, multimodal, and context-dependent nature of this behavioral state. In this paper, a multimodal approach for video-level ambivalence/hesitancy recognition is presented for the 10th ABAW Competition. The proposed approach integrates four complementary modalities: scene, face, audio, and text. Scene dynamics are captured with a VideoMAE-based model, facial information is encoded through emotional frame-level embeddings aggregated by statistical pooling, acoustic representations are extracted with EmotionWav2Vec2.0 and processed by a Mamba-based temporal encoder, and linguistic cues are modeled using fine-tuned transformer-based text models. The resulting unimodal embeddings are further combined using multimodal fusion models, including prototype-augmented variants. Experiments on the BAH corpus demonstrate clear gains of multimodal fusion over all unimodal baselines. The best unimodal configuration achieved an average MF1 of 70.02%, whereas the best multimodal fusion model reached 83.25%. The highest final test performance, 71.43%, was obtained by an ensemble of five prototype-augmented fusion models. The obtained results highlight the importance of complementary multimodal cues and robust fusion strategies for ambivalence/hesitancy recognition. --- ### Hierarchical Reference Sets for Robust Unsupervised Detection of Scattered and Clustered Outliers Authors: Yiqun Zhang, Zexi Tan, Xiaopeng Luo, Yunlin Liu Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12847v1 Most real-world IoT data analysis tasks, such as clustering and anomaly event detection, are unsupervised and highly susceptible to the presence of outliers. In addition to sporadic scattered outliers caused by factors such as faulty sensor readings, IoT systems often exhibit clustered outliers. These occur when multiple devices or nodes produce similar anomalous measurements, for instance, owing to localized interference, emerging security threats, or regional false alarms, forming micro-clusters. These clustered outliers can be easily mistaken for normal behavior because of their relatively high local density, thereby obscuring the detection of both scattered and contextual anomalies. To address this, we propose a novel outlier detection paradigm that leverages the natural neighboring relationships using graph structures. This facilitates multi-perspective anomaly evaluation by incorporating reference sets at both local and global scales derived from the graph. Our approach enables the effective recognition of scattered outliers without interference from clustered anomalies, whereas the graph structure simultaneously helps reflect and isolate clustered outlier groups. Extensive experiments, including comparative performance analysis, ablation studies, validation on downstream clustering tasks, and evaluation of hyperparameter sensitivity, demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method. The source code is available at https://github.com/gordonlok/DROD. --- ### Multimodal Protein Language Models for Enzyme Kinetic Parameters: From Substrate Recognition to Conformational Adaptation Authors: Fei Wang, Xinye Zheng, Kun Li, Yanyan Wei, Yuxin Liu, Ganpeng Hu, Tong Bao, Jingwen Yang Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12845v2 Predicting enzyme kinetic parameters quantifies how efficiently an enzyme catalyzes a specific substrate under defined biochemical conditions. Canonical parameters such as the turnover number ($k_\text{cat}$), Michaelis constant ($K_\text{m}$), and inhibition constant ($K_\text{i}$) depend jointly on the enzyme sequence, the substrate chemistry, and the conformational adaptation of the active site during binding. Many learning pipelines simplify this process to a static compatibility problem between the enzyme and substrate, fusing their representations through shallow operations and regressing a single value. Such formulations overlook the staged nature of catalysis, which involves both substrate recognition and conformational adaptation. In this regard, we reformulate kinetic prediction as a staged multimodal conditional modeling problem and introduce the Enzyme-Reaction Bridging Adapter (ERBA), which injects cross-modal information via fine-tuning into Protein Language Models (PLMs) while preserving their biochemical priors. ERBA performs conditioning in two stages: Molecular Recognition Cross-Attention (MRCA) first injects substrate information into the enzyme representation to capture specificity; Geometry-aware Mixture-of-Experts (G-MoE) then integrates active-site structure and routes samples to pocket-specialized experts to reflect induced fit. To maintain semantic fidelity, Enzyme-Substrate Distribution Alignment (ESDA) enforces distributional consistency within the PLM manifold in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. Experiments across three kinetic endpoints and multiple PLM backbones, ERBA delivers consistent gains and stronger out-of-distribution performance compared with sequence-only and shallow-fusion baselines, offering a biologically grounded route to scalable kinetic prediction and a foundation for adding cofactors, mutations, and time-resolved structural cues. --- ### DAST: A Dual-Stream Voice Anonymization Attacker with Staged Training Authors: Ridwan Arefeen, Xiaoxiao Miao, Rong Tong, Aik Beng Ng, Simon See, Timothy Liu Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12840v2 Voice anonymization masks vocal traits while preserving linguistic content, which may still leak speaker-specific patterns. To assess and strengthen privacy evaluation, we propose a dual-stream attacker that fuses spectral and self-supervised learning features via parallel encoders with a three-stage training strategy. Stage I establishes foundational speaker-discriminative representations. Stage II leverages the shared identity-transformation characteristics of voice conversion and anonymization, exposing the model to diverse converted speech to build cross-system robustness. Stage III provides lightweight adaptation to target anonymized data. Results on the VoicePrivacy Attacker Challenge (VPAC) dataset demonstrate that Stage II is the primary driver of generalization, enabling strong attacking performance on unseen anonymization datasets. With Stage III, fine-tuning on only 10\% of the target anonymization dataset surpasses current state-of-the-art attackers in terms of EER. --- ### A New Kernel Regularity Condition for Distributed Mirror Descent: Broader Coverage and Simpler Analysis Authors: Junwen Qiu, Ziyang Zeng, Leilei Mei, Junyu Zhang Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: math.OC, cs.DC, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12838v2 Existing convergence analyses of distributed optimization methods in non-Euclidean geometries typically rely on kernel assumptions: (i) global Lipschitz smoothness and (ii) bi-convexity of the associated Bregman divergence function. Unfortunately, these conditions are violated by nearly all kernels used in practice, leaving a huge theory-practice gap. This work closes this gap by developing a unified analytical tool that guarantees convergence under mild conditions. Specifically, we introduce Hessian relative uniform continuity (HRUC), a regularity satisfied by nearly all standard kernels. Importantly, HRUC is closed under concatenation, positive scaling, composition, and various kernel combinations. Leveraging the geometric structure induced by HRUC, we derive convergence guarantees for mirror-descent-based gradient tracking without imposing any restrictive assumptions. More broadly, our analysis techniques extend seamlessly to other decentralized optimization methods in genuinely non-Euclidean and non-Lipschitz settings. --- ### A New Kernel Regularity Condition for Distributed Mirror Descent: Broader Coverage and Simpler Analysis Authors: Junwen Qiu, Ziyang Zeng, Leilei Mei, Junyu Zhang Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: math.OC, cs.DC, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12838v1 Existing convergence of distributed optimization methods in non-Euclidean geometries typically rely on kernel assumptions: (i) global Lipschitz smoothness and (ii) bi-convexity of the associated Bregman divergence function. Unfortunately, these conditions are violated by nearly all kernels used in practice, leaving a huge theory-practice gap. This work closes this gap by developing a unified analytical tool that guarantees convergence under mild conditions. Specifically, we introduce Hessian relative uniform continuity (HRUC), a regularity satisfied by nearly all standard kernels. Importantly, HRUC is closed under concatenation, positive scaling, composition, and various kernel combinations. Leveraging the geometric structure induced by HRUC, we derive convergence guarantees for mirror descent-based gradient tracking without imposing any restrictive assumptions. More broadly, our analysis techniques extend seamlessly to other decentralized optimization methods in genuinely non-Euclidean and non-Lipschitz settings. --- ### Mask2Flow-TSE: Two-Stage Target Speaker Extraction with Masking and Flow Matching Authors: Junwon Moon, Seungbeom Kim, Hansol Park, Hyunjin Choi, Hoseong Ahn, Heeseung Kim, Kyuhong Shim Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12837v2 Target speaker extraction (TSE) extracts the target speaker's voice from overlapping speech given a reference utterance. Existing masking-based approaches are lightweight and effective but suffer from an inability to synthesize missing content, leading to degraded perceptual quality. On the other hand, recent generative TSE models typically synthesize high-quality speech with diffusion, but require numerous iterative steps resulting in high computational costs and latency. We propose Mask2Flow-TSE, a two-stage framework combining the strengths of both paradigms. We introduce the deletion/insertion (D/I) proportion, an analytical tool that reveals early flow steps predominantly remove signal components rather than synthesize them. Based on this finding, we decouple deletion from insertion: a masking-based module handles the deletion-dominant early steps, while a single flow-matching step performs the remaining insertion for high-quality reconstruction. Specifically, the first stage uses lightweight convolution for the masking module, while the second stage employs a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) adapted for TSE with speaker conditioning. Unlike prior approaches that start from Gaussian noise, our method starts from the masked spectrogram, enabling high-quality reconstruction in a single inference step. Experiments show that Mask2Flow-TSE produces high-quality extractions with only 85M parameters and one-step inference, while preserving clean single-speaker inputs with minimal degradation. --- ### Hierarchical Dual-Change Collaborative Learning for UAV Scene Change Captioning Authors: Fuhai Chen, Pengpeng Huang, Junwen Wu, Hehong Zhang, Shiping Wang, Xiaoguang Ma, Xuri Ge Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12832v1 This paper proposes a novel task for UAV scene understanding - UAV Scene Change Captioning (UAV-SCC) - which aims to generate natural language descriptions of semantic changes in dynamic aerial imagery captured from a movable viewpoint. Unlike traditional change captioning that mainly describes differences between image pairs captured from a fixed camera viewpoint over time, UAV scene change captioning focuses on image-pair differences resulting from both temporal and spatial scene variations dynamically captured by a moving camera. The key challenge lies in understanding viewpoint-induced scene changes from UAV image pairs that share only partially overlapping scene content due to viewpoint shifts caused by camera rotation, while effectively exploiting the relative orientation between the two images. To this end, we propose a Hierarchical Dual-Change Collaborative Learning (HDC-CL) method for UAV scene change captioning. In particular, a novel transformer, \emph{i.e.} Dynamic Adaptive Layout Transformer (DALT) is designed to adaptively model diverse spatial layouts of the image pair, where the interrelated features derived from the overlapping and non-overlapping regions are learned within the flexible and unified encoding layer. Furthermore, we propose a Hierarchical Cross-modal Orientation Consistency Calibration (HCM-OCC) method to enhance the model's sensitivity to viewpoint shift directions, enabling more accurate change captioning. To facilitate in-depth research on this task, we construct a new benchmark dataset, named UAV-SCC dataset, for UAV scene change captioning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on this task. The dataset and code will be publicly released upon acceptance of this paper. --- ### coDrawAgents: A Multi-Agent Dialogue Framework for Compositional Image Generation Authors: Chunhan Li, Qifeng Wu, Jia-Hui Pan, Ka-Hei Hui, Jingyu Hu, Yuming Jiang, Bin Sheng, Xihui Liu, Wenjuan Gong, Zhengzhe Liu Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12829v1 Text-to-image generation has advanced rapidly, but existing models still struggle with faithfully composing multiple objects and preserving their attributes in complex scenes. We propose coDrawAgents, an interactive multi-agent dialogue framework with four specialized agents: Interpreter, Planner, Checker, and Painter that collaborate to improve compositional generation. The Interpreter adaptively decides between a direct text-to-image pathway and a layout-aware multi-agent process. In the layout-aware mode, it parses the prompt into attribute-rich object descriptors, ranks them by semantic salience, and groups objects with the same semantic priority level for joint generation. Guided by the Interpreter, the Planner adopts a divide-and-conquer strategy, incrementally proposing layouts for objects with the same semantic priority level while grounding decisions in the evolving visual context of the canvas. The Checker introduces an explicit error-correction mechanism by validating spatial consistency and attribute alignment, and refining layouts before they are rendered. Finally, the Painter synthesizes the image step by step, incorporating newly planned objects into the canvas to provide richer context for subsequent iterations. Together, these agents address three key challenges: reducing layout complexity, grounding planning in visual context, and enabling explicit error correction. Extensive experiments on benchmarks GenEval and DPG-Bench demonstrate that coDrawAgents substantially improves text-image alignment, spatial accuracy, and attribute binding compared to existing methods. --- ### From AI Weather Prediction to Infrastructure Resilience: A Real-Time Correction-Downscaling Framework for Tropical Cyclone Impact Forecasting Authors: You Wu, Zhenguo Wang, Naiyu Wang Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: eess.SY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12828v2 This paper addresses a missing capability in infrastructure resilience: turning fast, global AI weather forecasts into asset-scale, actionable risk intelligence. We introduce the AI-based Correction-Downscaling Framework (ACDF), which combines real-time bias correction, terrain-informed downscaling, and fragility-based power transmission system risk assessment for tropical cyclone impacts. ACDF separates storm-scale bias correction from terrain-aware refinement, mitigating error propagation while restoring the sub-kilometer wind variability that governs structural loading. Tested on 11 typhoons affecting Zhejiang, China under leave-one-storm-out evaluation, ACDF produces 500 m wind fields over a province-scale domain, reduces station-scale wind-speed MAE by 38.8% relative to Pangu-Weather, and runs in approximately 25 s per 12-h cycle on a single GPU. In the Typhoon Hagupit case, ACDF reproduced observed high-wind tails, identified a coastal high-risk corridor, and flagged the transmission line that subsequently failed, demonstrating actionable guidance at tower and line scales. ACDF provides an end-to-end pathway from global AI weather forecasts to operational, impact-based early warning for critical infrastructure. --- ### Rethinking Multiple-Choice Questions for RLVR: Unlocking Potential via Distractor Design Authors: Xu Guo, Qiming Ge, Jian Tong, Kedi Chen, Jin Zhang, Xiaogui Yang, Xuan Gao, Haijun Lv, Zhihui Lu, Yicheng Zou, Qipeng Guo Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12826v1 Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. When applied to RLVR, Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQs) offer a scalable source of verifiable data but risk inducing reward hacking, where models shortcut reasoning via random guessing or simple elimination. Current approaches often mitigate this by converting MCQs to open-ended formats, thereby discarding the contrastive signal provided by expert-designed distractors. In this work, we systematically investigate the impact of option design on RLVR. Our analysis highlights two primary insights: (1) Mismatches in option counts between training and testing degrade performance. (2) Strong distractors effectively mitigate random guessing, enabling effective RLVR training even with 2-way questions. Motivated by these findings, we propose Iterative Distractor Curation (IDC), a framework that actively constructs high-quality distractors to block elimination shortcuts and promote deep reasoning. Experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that our method effectively enhances distractor quality and yields significant gains in RLVR training compared to the original data. --- ### NanoVDR: Distilling a 2B Vision-Language Retriever into a 70M Text-Only Encoder for Visual Document Retrieval Authors: Zhuchenyang Liu, Yao Zhang, Yu Xiao Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.IR, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12824v3 Vision-Language Model (VLM) based retrievers have advanced visual document retrieval (VDR) to impressive quality. They require the same multi-billion parameter encoder for both document indexing and query encoding, incurring high latency and GPU dependence even for plain-text queries. We observe that this design is unnecessarily symmetric: documents are visually complex and demand strong visual understanding, whereas queries are just short text strings. NanoVDR exploits this query--document asymmetry by decoupling the two encoding paths: a frozen 2B VLM teacher indexes documents offline, while a distilled text-only student as small as 69M parameters encodes queries at inference. The key design choice is the distillation objective. Through systematic comparison of six objectives across three backbones and 22 ViDoRe benchmark datasets, we find that pointwise cosine alignment on query text consistently outperforms ranking-based and contrastive alternatives, while requiring only pre-cached teacher query embeddings and no document processing during training. Furthermore, we identify cross-lingual transfer as the primary performance bottleneck, and resolve it cheaply by augmenting training data with machine-translated queries. The resulting NanoVDR-S-Multi (DistilBERT, 69M) retains 95.1\% of teacher quality and outperforms DSE-Qwen2 (2B) on v2 and v3 with 32$\times$ fewer parameters and 50$\times$ lower CPU query latency, at a total training cost under 13 GPU-hours. --- ### NanoVDR: Distilling a 2B Vision-Language Retriever into a 70M Text-Only Encoder for Visual Document Retrieval Authors: Zhuchenyang Liu, Yao Zhang, Yu Xiao Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.IR, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12824v2 Vision-Language Model (VLM) based retrievers have advanced visual document retrieval (VDR) to impressive quality. They require the same multi-billion parameter encoder for both document indexing and query encoding, incurring high latency and GPU dependence even for plain-text queries. We observe that this design is unnecessarily symmetric: documents are visually complex and demand strong visual understanding, whereas queries are just short text strings. NanoVDR exploits this query--document asymmetry by decoupling the two encoding paths: a frozen 2B VLM teacher indexes documents offline, while a distilled text-only student as small as 69M parameters encodes queries at inference. The key design choice is the distillation objective. Through systematic comparison of six objectives across three backbones and 22 ViDoRe benchmark datasets, we find that pointwise cosine alignment on query text consistently outperforms ranking-based and contrastive alternatives, while requiring only pre-cached teacher query embeddings and no document processing during training. Furthermore, we identify cross-lingual transfer as the primary performance bottleneck, and resolve it cheaply by augmenting training data with machine-translated queries. The resulting NanoVDR-S-Multi (DistilBERT, 69M) retains 95.1\% of teacher quality and outperforms DSE-Qwen2 (2B) on v2 and v3 with 32$\times$ fewer parameters and 50$\times$ lower CPU query latency, at a total training cost under 13 GPU-hours. --- ### Adaptive Vision-Language Model Routing for Computer Use Agents Authors: Xunzhuo Liu, Bowei He, Xue Liu, Andy Luo, Haichen Zhang, Huamin Chen Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12823v1 Computer Use Agents (CUAs) translate natural-language instructions into Graphical User Interface (GUI) actions such as clicks, keystrokes, and scrolls by relying on a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to interpret screenshots and predict grounded tool calls. However, grounding accuracy varies dramatically across VLMs, while current CUA systems typically route every action to a single fixed model regardless of difficulty. We propose \textbf{Adaptive VLM Routing} (AVR), a framework that inserts a lightweight semantic routing layer between the CUA orchestrator and a pool of VLMs. For each tool call, AVR estimates action difficulty from multimodal embeddings, probes a small VLM to measure confidence, and routes the action to the cheapest model whose predicted accuracy satisfies a target reliability threshold. For \textit{warm} agents with memory of prior UI interactions, retrieved context further narrows the capability gap between small and large models, allowing many actions to be handled without escalation. We formalize routing as a cost--accuracy trade-off, derive a threshold-based policy for model selection, and evaluate AVR using ScreenSpot-Pro grounding data together with the OpenClaw agent routing benchmark. Across these settings, AVR projects inference cost reductions of up to 78\% while staying within 2 percentage points of an all-large-model baseline. When combined with the Visual Confused Deputy guardrail, AVR also escalates high-risk actions directly to the strongest available model, unifying efficiency and safety within a single routing framework. Materials are also provided Model, benchmark, and code: https://github.com/vllm-project/semantic-router. --- ### Residual SODAP: Residual Self-Organizing Domain-Adaptive Prompting with Structural Knowledge Preservation for Continual Learning Authors: Gyutae Oh, Jungwoo Bae, Jitae Shin Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12816v1 Continual learning (CL) suffers from catastrophic forgetting, which is exacerbated in domain-incremental learning (DIL) where task identifiers are unavailable and storing past data is infeasible. While prompt-based CL (PCL) adapts representations with a frozen backbone, we observe that prompt-only improvements are often insufficient due to suboptimal prompt selection and classifier-level instability under domain shifts. We propose Residual SODAP, which jointly performs prompt-based representation adaptation and classifier-level knowledge preservation. Our framework combines $α$-entmax sparse prompt selection with residual aggregation, data-free distillation with pseudo-feature replay, prompt-usage--based drift detection, and uncertainty-aware multi-loss balancing. Across three DIL benchmarks without task IDs or extra data storage, Residual SODAP achieves state-of-the-art AvgACC/AvgF of 0.850/0.047 (DR), 0.760/0.031 (Skin Cancer), and 0.995/0.003 (CORe50). --- ### Context is all you need: Towards autonomous model-based process design using agentic AI in flowsheet simulations Authors: Pascal Schäfer, Lukas J. Krinke, Martin Wlotzka, Norbert Asprion Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12813v1 Agentic AI systems integrating large language models (LLMs) with reasoning and tooluse capabilities are transforming various domains - in particular, software development. In contrast, their application in chemical process flowsheet modelling remains largely unexplored. In this work, we present an agentic AI framework that delivers assistance in an industrial flowsheet simulation environment. To this end, we show the capabilities of GitHub Copilot (GitHub, Inc., 2026), when using state-of-the-art LLMs, such as Claude Opus 4.6 (Anthropic, PBC, 2026), to generate valid syntax for our in-house process modelling tool Chemasim using the technical documentation and a few commented examples as context. Based on this, we develop a multi-agent system that decomposes process development tasks with one agent solving the abstract problem using engineering knowledge and another agent implementing the solution as Chemasim code. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework for typical flowsheet modelling examples, including (i) a reaction/separation process, (ii) a pressure-swing distillation, and (iii) a heteroazeotropic distillation including entrainer selection. Along these lines, we discuss current limitations of the framework and outline future research directions to further enhance its capabilities. --- ### OARS: Process-Aware Online Alignment for Generative Real-World Image Super-Resolution Authors: Shijie Zhao, Xuanyu Zhang, Bin Chen, Weiqi Li, Qunliang Xing, Kexin Zhang, Yan Wang, Junlin Li, Li Zhang, Jian Zhang, Tianfan Xue Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12811v1 Aligning generative real-world image super-resolution models with human visual preference is challenging due to the perception--fidelity trade-off and diverse, unknown degradations. Prior approaches rely on offline preference optimization and static metric aggregation, which are often non-interpretable and prone to pseudo-diversity under strong conditioning. We propose OARS, a process-aware online alignment framework built on COMPASS, a MLLM-based reward that evaluates the LR to SR transition by jointly modeling fidelity preservation and perceptual gain with an input-quality-adaptive trade-off. To train COMPASS, we curate COMPASS-20K spanning synthetic and real degradations, and introduce a three-stage perceptual annotation pipeline that yields calibrated, fine-grained training labels. Guided by COMPASS, OARS performs progressive online alignment from cold-start flow matching to full-reference and finally reference-free RL via shallow LoRA optimization for on-policy exploration. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate consistent perceptual improvements while maintaining fidelity, achieving state-of-the-art performance on Real-ISR benchmarks. --- ### A Multitask Large Reasoning Model for Molecular Science Authors: Pengfei Liu, Shuang Ge, Xiaobo Wang, Xin Liu, Jun Tao, Yan Li, Chao Liu, Ling Chen, Zhixiang Ren Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12808v2 Artificial intelligence in molecular science must move beyond pattern recognition toward chemically valid and interpretable reasoning. We present a task-adaptive large reasoning model that integrates chemical knowledge through a synergistic multispecialist architecture, chain-of-thought supervision, and molecule-informed reinforcement learning. Task-conditioned routing coordinates prediction and inference specialists across 10 molecular tasks spanning molecular description and generation, nomenclature translation, property prediction, and reaction prediction. The model outperforms more than 20 general-purpose and molecular large language models, improves aggregate performance over the base model by 50.3%, and surpasses the leading molecular multitask baseline on most tasks. Analyses of specialist representations and reasoning pathways reveal task-specific adaptation while retaining interpretable chemical inference. A case study further demonstrates an integrated workflow for central nervous system candidate generation, property screening, molecular interpretation, and retrosynthetic planning. These results demonstrate a versatile multi-task framework for knowledge-guided molecular reasoning and design, with the potential to serve as a core task engine for future molecular science agents. --- ### A Multi-task Large Reasoning Model for Molecular Science Authors: Pengfei Liu, Shuang Ge, Jun Tao, Zhixiang Ren Published: 2026-03-13 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12808v1 Advancements in artificial intelligence for molecular science are necessitating a paradigm shift from purely data-driven predictions to knowledge-guided computational reasoning. Existing molecular models are predominantly proprietary, lacking general molecular intelligence and generalizability. This underscores the necessity for computational methods that can effectively integrate scientific logic with deep learning architectures. Here we introduce a multi-task large reasoning model designed to emulate the cognitive processes of molecular scientists through structured reasoning and reflection. Our approach incorporates multi-specialist modules to provide versatile molecular expertise and a chain-of-thought (CoT) framework enhanced by reinforcement learning infused with molecular knowledge, enabling structured and reflective reasoning. Systematic evaluations across 10 molecular tasks and 47 metrics demonstrate that our model achieves an average 50.3% improvement over the base architecture, outperforming over 20 state-of-the-art baselines, including ultra-large-parameter foundation models, despite using significantly fewer training data and computational resources. This validates that embedding explicit reasoning mechanisms enables high-efficiency learning, allowing smaller-scale models to surpass massive counterparts in both efficacy and interpretability. The practical utility of this computational framework was validated through a case study on the design of central nervous system (CNS) drug candidates, illustrating its capacity to bridge data-driven and knowledge-integrated approaches for intelligent molecular design. ---