# Research Papers — 2026-03 · bundle page 169 of 243 > Full-text markdown of papers #8401–8450 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/169 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-03/page/168.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-03/page/170.md) ### A Graph-Based Approach to Spectrum Demand Prediction Using Hierarchical Attention Networks Authors: Mohamad Alkadamani, Halim Yanikomeroglu, Amir Ghasemi Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.NI, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09859v1 The surge in wireless connectivity demand, coupled with the finite nature of spectrum resources, compels the development of efficient spectrum management approaches. Spectrum sharing presents a promising avenue, although it demands precise characterization of spectrum demand for informed policy-making. This paper introduces HR-GAT, a hierarchical resolution graph attention network model, designed to predict spectrum demand using geospatial data. HR-GAT adeptly handles complex spatial demand patterns and resolves issues of spatial autocorrelation that usually challenge standard machine learning models, often resulting in poor generalization. Tested across five major Canadian cities, HR-GAT improves predictive accuracy of spectrum demand by 21% over eight baseline models, underscoring its superior performance and reliability. --- ### SCENEBench: An Audio Understanding Benchmark Grounded in Assistive and Industrial Use Cases Authors: Laya Iyer, Angelina Wang, Sanmi Koyejo Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09853v1 Advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled significant capabilities in audio processing, resulting in state-of-the-art models now known as Large Audio Language Models (LALMs). However, minimal work has been done to measure audio understanding beyond automatic speech recognition (ASR). This paper closes that gap by proposing a benchmark suite, SCENEBench (Spatial, Cross-lingual, Environmental, Non-speech Evaluation), that targets a broad form of audio comprehension across four real-world categories: background sound understanding, noise localization, cross-linguistic speech understanding, and vocal characterizer recognition. These four categories are selected based on understudied needs from accessibility technology and industrial noise monitoring. In addition to performance, we also measure model latency. The purpose of this benchmark suite is to assess audio beyond just what words are said - rather, how they are said and the non-speech components of the audio. Because our audio samples are synthetically constructed (e.g., by overlaying two natural audio samples), we further validate our benchmark against 20 natural audio items per task, sub-sampled from existing datasets to match our task criteria, to assess ecological validity. We assess five state-of-the-art LALMs and find critical gaps: performance varies across tasks, with some tasks performing below random chance and others achieving high accuracy. These results provide direction for targeted improvements in model capabilities. --- ### A Unified Hierarchical Multi-Task Multi-Fidelity Framework for Data-Efficient Surrogate Modeling in Manufacturing Authors: Manan Mehta, Zhiqiao Dong, Yuhang Yang, Chenhui Shao Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ME, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09842v1 Surrogate modeling is an essential data-driven technique for quantifying relationships between input variables and system responses in manufacturing and engineering systems. Two major challenges limit its effectiveness: (1) large data requirements for learning complex nonlinear relationships, and (2) heterogeneous data collected from sources with varying fidelity levels. Multi-task learning (MTL) addresses the first challenge by enabling information sharing across related processes, while multi-fidelity modeling addresses the second by accounting for fidelity-dependent uncertainty. However, existing approaches typically address these challenges separately, and no unified framework simultaneously leverages inter-task similarity and fidelity-dependent data characteristics. This paper develops a novel hierarchical multi-task multi-fidelity (H-MT-MF) framework for Gaussian process-based surrogate modeling. The proposed framework decomposes each task's response into a task-specific global trend and a residual local variability component that is jointly learned across tasks using a hierarchical Bayesian formulation. The framework accommodates an arbitrary number of tasks, design points, and fidelity levels while providing predictive uncertainty quantification. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method using a 1D synthetic example and a real-world engine surface shape prediction case study. Compared to (1) a state-of-the-art MTL model that does not account for fidelity information and (2) a stochastic kriging model that learns tasks independently, the proposed approach improves prediction accuracy by up to 19% and 23%, respectively. The H-MT-MF framework provides a general and extensible solution for surrogate modeling in manufacturing systems characterized by heterogeneous data sources. --- ### CycleULM: A unified label-free deep learning framework for ultrasound localisation microscopy Authors: Su Yan, Clara Rodrigo Gonzalez, Vincent C. H. Leung, Herman Verinaz-Jadan, Jiakang Chen, Matthieu Toulemonde, Kai Riemer, Jipeng Yan, Clotilde Vié, Qingyuan Tan, Peter D. Weinberg, Pier Luigi Dragotti et al. Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09840v1 Super-resolution ultrasound via microbubble (MB) localisation and tracking, also known as ultrasound localisation microscopy (ULM), can resolve microvasculature beyond the acoustic diffraction limit. However, significant challenges remain in localisation performance and data acquisition and processing time. Deep learning methods for ULM have shown promise to address these challenges, however, they remain limited by in vivo label scarcity and the simulation-to-reality domain gap. We present CycleULM, the first unified label-free deep learning framework for ULM. CycleULM learns a physics-emulating translation between the real contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) data domain and a simplified MB-only domain, leveraging the power of CycleGAN without requiring paired ground truth data. With this translation, CycleULM removes dependence on high-fidelity simulators or labelled data, and makes MB localisation and tracking substantially easier. Deployed as modular plug-and-play components within existing pipelines or as an end-to-end processing framework, CycleULM delivers substantial performance gains across both in silico and in vivo datasets. Specifically, CycleULM improves image contrast (contrast-to-noise ratio) by up to 15.3 dB and sharpens CEUS resolution with a 2.5{\times} reduction in the full width at half maximum of the point spread function. CycleULM also improves MB localisation performance, with up to +40% recall, +46% precision, and a -14.0 μm mean localisation error, yielding more faithful vascular reconstructions. Importantly, CycleULM achieves real-time processing throughput at 18.3 frames per second with order-of-magnitude speed-ups (up to ~14.5{\times}). By combining label-free learning, performance enhancement, and computational efficiency, CycleULM provides a practical pathway toward robust, real-time ULM and accelerates its translation to clinical applications. --- ### Chow-Liu Ordering for Long-Context Reasoning in Chain-of-Agents Authors: Naman Gupta, Vaibhav Singh, Arun Iyer, Kirankumar Shiragur, Pratham Grover, Ramakrishna B. Bairi, Ritabrata Maiti, Sankarshan Damle, Shachee Mishra Gupta, Rishikesh Maurya, Vageesh D. C Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09835v1 Sequential multi-agent reasoning frameworks such as Chain-of-Agents (CoA) handle long-context queries by decomposing inputs into chunks and processing them sequentially using LLM-based worker agents that read from and update a bounded shared memory. From a probabilistic perspective, CoA aims to approximate the conditional distribution corresponding to a model capable of jointly reasoning over the entire long context. CoA achieves this through a latent-state factorization in which only bounded summaries of previously processed evidence are passed between agents. The resulting bounded-memory approximation introduces a lossy information bottleneck, making the final evidence state inherently dependent on the order in which chunks are processed. In this work, we study the problem of chunk ordering for long-context reasoning. We use the well-known Chow-Liu trees to learn a dependency structure that prioritizes strongly related chunks. Empirically, we show that a breadth-first traversal of the resulting tree yields chunk orderings that reduce information loss across agents and consistently outperform both default document-chunk ordering and semantic score-based ordering in answer relevance and exact-match accuracy across three long-context benchmarks. --- ### MA-EgoQA: Question Answering over Egocentric Videos from Multiple Embodied Agents Authors: Kangsan Kim, Yanlai Yang, Suji Kim, Woongyeong Yeo, Youngwan Lee, Mengye Ren, Sung Ju Hwang Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09827v2 As embodied models become powerful, humans will collaborate with multiple embodied AI agents at their workplace or home in the future. To ensure better communication between human users and the multi-agent system, it is crucial to interpret incoming information from agents in parallel and refer to the appropriate context for each query. Existing challenges include effectively compressing and communicating high volumes of individual sensory inputs in the form of video and correctly aggregating multiple egocentric videos to construct system-level memory. In this work, we first formally define a novel problem of understanding multiple long-horizon egocentric videos simultaneously collected from embodied agents. To facilitate research in this direction, we introduce MultiAgent-EgoQA (MA-EgoQA), a benchmark designed to systemically evaluate existing models in our scenario. MA-EgoQA provides 1.7k questions unique to multiple egocentric streams, spanning five categories: social interaction, task coordination, theory-of-mind, temporal reasoning, and environmental interaction. We further propose a simple baseline model for MA-EgoQA named EgoMAS, which leverages shared memory across embodied agents and agent-wise dynamic retrieval. Through comprehensive evaluation across diverse baselines and EgoMAS on MA-EgoQA, we find that current approaches are unable to effectively handle multiple egocentric streams, highlighting the need for future advances in system-level understanding across the agents. The code and benchmark are available at https://ma-egoqa.github.io. --- ### VLM-Loc: Localization in Point Cloud Maps via Vision-Language Models Authors: Shuhao Kang, Youqi Liao, Peijie Wang, Wenlong Liao, Qilin Zhang, Benjamin Busam, Xieyuanli Chen, Yun Liu Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09826v1 Text-to-point-cloud (T2P) localization aims to infer precise spatial positions within 3D point cloud maps from natural language descriptions, reflecting how humans perceive and communicate spatial layouts through language. However, existing methods largely rely on shallow text-point cloud correspondence without effective spatial reasoning, limiting their accuracy in complex environments. To address this limitation, we propose VLM-Loc, a framework that leverages the spatial reasoning capability of large vision-language models (VLMs) for T2P localization. Specifically, we transform point clouds into bird's-eye-view (BEV) images and scene graphs that jointly encode geometric and semantic context, providing structured inputs for the VLM to learn cross-modal representations bridging linguistic and spatial semantics. On top of these representations, we introduce a partial node assignment mechanism that explicitly associates textual cues with scene graph nodes, enabling interpretable spatial reasoning for accurate localization. To facilitate systematic evaluation across diverse scenes, we present CityLoc, a benchmark built from multi-source point clouds for fine-grained T2P localization. Experiments on CityLoc demonstrate VLM-Loc achieves superior accuracy and robustness compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our code, model, and dataset are available at \href{https://github.com/MCG-NKU/nku-3d-vision}{repository}. --- ### BrainSTR: Spatio-Temporal Contrastive Learning for Interpretable Dynamic Brain Network Modeling Authors: Guiliang Guo, Guangqi Wen, Lingwen Liu, Ruoxian Song, Peng Cao, Jinzhu Yang, Fei Wang, Xiaoli Liu, Osmar R. Zaiane Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09825v1 Dynamic functional connectivity captures time-varying brain states for better neuropsychiatric diagnosis and spatio-temporal interpretability, i.e., identifying when discriminative disease signatures emerge and where they reside in the connectivity topology. Reliable interpretability faces major challenges: diagnostic signals are often subtle and sparsely distributed across both time and topology, while nuisance fluctuations and non-diagnostic connectivities are pervasive. To address these issues, we propose BrainSTR, a spatio-temporal contrastive learning framework for interpretable dynamic brain network modeling. BrainSTR learns state-consistent phase boundaries via a data-driven Adaptive Phase Partition module, identifies diagnostically critical phases with attention, and extracts disease-related connectivity within each phase using an Incremental Graph Structure Generator regularized by binarization, temporal smoothness, and sparsity. Then, we introduce a spatio-temporal supervised contrastive learning approach that leverages diagnosis-relevant spatio-temporal patterns to refine the similarity metric between samples and capture more discriminative spatio-temporal features, thereby constructing a well-structured semantic space for coherent and interpretable representations. Experiments on ASD, BD, and MDD validate the effectiveness of BrainSTR, and the discovered critical phases and subnetworks provide interpretable evidence consistent with prior neuroimaging findings. Our code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/BrainSTR1. --- ### One-Eval: An Agentic System for Automated and Traceable LLM Evaluation Authors: Chengyu Shen, Yanheng Hou, Minghui Pan, Runming He, Zhen Hao Wong, Meiyi Qiang, Zhou Liu, Hao Liang, Peichao Lai, Zeang Sheng, Wentao Zhang Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09821v1 Reliable evaluation is essential for developing and deploying large language models, yet in practice it often requires substantial manual effort: practitioners must identify appropriate benchmarks, reproduce heterogeneous evaluation codebases, configure dataset schema mappings, and interpret aggregated metrics. To address these challenges, we present One-Eval, an agentic evaluation system that converts natural-language evaluation requests into executable, traceable, and customizable evaluation workflows. One-Eval integrates (i) NL2Bench for intent structuring and personalized benchmark planning, (ii) BenchResolve for benchmark resolution, automatic dataset acquisition, and schema normalization to ensure executability, and (iii) Metrics \& Reporting for task-aware metric selection and decision-oriented reporting beyond scalar scores. The system further incorporates human-in-the-loop checkpoints for review, editing, and rollback, while preserving sample evidence trails for debugging and auditability. Experiments show that One-Eval can execute end-to-end evaluations from diverse natural-language requests with minimal user effort, supporting more efficient and reproducible evaluation in industrial settings. Our framework is publicly available at https://github.com/OpenDCAI/One-Eval. --- ### ConfCtrl: Enabling Precise Camera Control in Video Diffusion via Confidence-Aware Interpolation Authors: Liudi Yang, George Eskandar, Fengyi Shen, Mohammad Altillawi, Yang Bai, Chi Zhang, Ziyuan Liu, Abhinav Valada Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09819v1 We address the challenge of novel view synthesis from only two input images under large viewpoint changes. Existing regression-based methods lack the capacity to reconstruct unseen regions, while camera-guided diffusion models often deviate from intended trajectories due to noisy point cloud projections or insufficient conditioning from camera poses. To address these issues, we propose ConfCtrl, a confidence-aware video interpolation framework that enables diffusion models to follow prescribed camera poses while completing unseen regions. ConfCtrl initializes the diffusion process by combining a confidence-weighted projected point cloud latent with noise as the conditioning input. It then applies a Kalman-inspired predict-update mechanism, treating the projected point cloud as a noisy measurement and using learned residual corrections to balance pose-driven predictions with noisy geometric observations. This allows the model to rely on reliable projections while down-weighting uncertain regions, yielding stable, geometry-aware generation. Experiments on multiple datasets show that ConfCtrl produces geometrically consistent and visually plausible novel views, effectively reconstructing occluded regions under large viewpoint changes. --- ### Correction of Transformer-Based Models with Smoothing Pseudo-Projector Authors: Vitaly Bulgakov Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09815v1 The pseudo-projector is a lightweight modification that can be integrated into existing language models and other neural networks without altering their core architecture. It can be viewed as a hidden-representation corrector that reduces sensitivity to noise by suppressing directions induced by label-irrelevant input content. The design is inspired by the multigrid (MG) paradigm, originally developed to accelerate the convergence of iterative solvers for partial differential equations and boundary value problems, and later extended to more general linear systems through algebraic multigrid methods. We refer to the method as a pseudo-projector because its linear prototype corresponds to a strictly idempotent orthogonal projector, whereas the practical formulation employs learnable restriction and prolongation operators and therefore does not, in general, satisfy the properties of an exact orthogonal projection. We evaluate the proposed approach on transformer-based text classification tasks, as well as controlled synthetic benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving training dynamics and robustness. Experimental results, together with supporting theoretical heuristics, indicate consistent improvements in training behavior across a range of settings, with no adverse effects observed otherwise. Our next step will be to extend this approach to language models. --- ### RA-SSU: Towards Fine-Grained Audio-Visual Learning with Region-Aware Sound Source Understanding Authors: Muyi Sun, Yixuan Wang, Hong Wang, Chen Su, Man Zhang, Xingqun Qi, Qi Li, Zhenan Sun Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09809v1 Audio-Visual Learning (AVL) is one fundamental task of multi-modality learning and embodied intelligence, displaying the vital role in scene understanding and interaction. However, previous researchers mostly focus on exploring downstream tasks from a coarse-grained perspective (e.g., audio-visual correspondence, sound source localization, and audio-visual event localization). Considering providing more specific scene perception details, we newly define a fine-grained Audio-Visual Learning task, termed Region-Aware Sound Source Understanding (RA-SSU), which aims to achieve region-aware, frame-level, and high-quality sound source understanding. To support this goal, we innovatively construct two corresponding datasets, i.e. fine-grained Music (f-Music) and fine-grained Lifescene (f-Lifescene), each containing annotated sound source masks and frame-by-frame textual descriptions. The f-Music dataset includes 3,976 samples across 22 scene types related to specific application scenarios, focusing on music scenes with complex instrument mixing. The f-Lifescene dataset contains 6,156 samples across 61 types representing diverse sounding objects in life scenarios. Moreover, we propose SSUFormer, a Sound-Source Understanding TransFormer benchmark that facilitates both the sound source segmentation and sound region description with a multi-modal input and multi-modal output architecture. Specifically, we design two modules for this framework, Mask Collaboration Module (MCM) and Mixture of Hierarchical-prompted Experts (MoHE), to respectively enhance the accuracy and enrich the elaboration of the sound source description. Extensive experiments are conducted on our two datasets to verify the feasibility of the task, evaluate the availability of the datasets, and demonstrate the superiority of the SSUFormer, which achieves SOTA performance on the Sound Source Understanding benchmark. --- ### Good Reasoning Makes Good Demonstrations: Implicit Reasoning Quality Supervision via In-Context Reinforcement Learning Authors: Tiehua Mei, Minxuan Lv, Leiyu Pan, Zhenpeng Su, Hongru Hou, Hengrui Chen, Ao Xu, Deqing Yang Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09803v2 Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves reasoning in large language models but treats all correct solutions equally, potentially reinforcing flawed traces that arrive at correct answers by chance. We observe that \emph{better reasoning makes better demonstrations}: high-quality solutions serve as more effective in-context examples than low-quality ones. We term this teaching ability \textbf{Demonstration Utility}, and show that the policy model's own in-context learning ability provides an efficient way to measure it, yielding a quality signal termed \textbf{Evidence Gain}. To leverage this signal during training, we introduce \textbf{In-Context RLVR}, which prepends demonstrations before each rollout. Theoretically, we prove that this simple input modification implicitly reweights rewards by a factor approximately proportional to Evidence Gain, assigning higher weights to high-quality traces without requiring costly computation. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in both accuracy and reasoning quality over standard RLVR baselines. Our codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/Mithas-114/IC-DAPO. --- ### MITRA: An AI Assistant for Knowledge Retrieval in Physics Collaborations Authors: Abhishikth Mallampalli, Sridhara Dasu Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG, hep-ex arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09800v1 Large-scale scientific collaborations, such as the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) at CERN, produce a vast and ever-growing corpus of internal documentation. Navigating this complex information landscape presents a significant challenge for both new and experienced researchers, hindering knowledge sharing and slowing down the pace of scientific discovery. To address this, we present a prototype of MITRA, a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) based system, designed to answer specific, context-aware questions about physics analyses. MITRA employs a novel, automated pipeline using Selenium for document retrieval from internal databases and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) with layout parsing for high-fidelity text extraction. Crucially, MITRA's entire framework, from the embedding model to the Large Language Model (LLM), is hosted on-premise, ensuring that sensitive collaboration data remains private. We introduce a two-tiered vector database architecture that first identifies the relevant analysis from abstracts before focusing on the full documentation, resolving potential ambiguities between different analyses. We demonstrate the prototype's superior retrieval performance against a standard keyword-based baseline on realistic queries and discuss future work towards developing a comprehensive research agent for large experimental collaborations. --- ### Test-time Ego-Exo-centric Adaptation for Action Anticipation via Multi-Label Prototype Growing and Dual-Clue Consistency Authors: Zhaofeng Shi, Heqian Qiu, Lanxiao Wang, Qingbo Wu, Fanman Meng, Lili Pan, Hongliang Li Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09798v2 Efficient adaptation between Egocentric (Ego) and Exocentric (Exo) views is crucial for applications such as human-robot cooperation. However, the success of most existing Ego-Exo adaptation methods relies heavily on target-view data for training, thereby increasing computational and data collection costs. In this paper, we make the first exploration of a Test-time Ego-Exo Adaptation for Action Anticipation (TE$^{2}$A$^{3}$) task, which aims to adjust the source-view-trained model online during test time to anticipate target-view actions. It is challenging for existing Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) methods to address this task due to the multi-action candidates and significant temporal-spatial inter-view gap. Hence, we propose a novel Dual-Clue enhanced Prototype Growing Network (DCPGN), which accumulates multi-label knowledge and integrates cross-modality clues for effective test-time Ego-Exo adaptation and action anticipation. Specifically, we propose a Multi-Label Prototype Growing Module (ML-PGM) to balance multiple positive classes via multi-label assignment and confidence-based reweighting for class-wise memory banks, which are updated by an entropy priority queue strategy. Then, the Dual-Clue Consistency Module (DCCM) introduces a lightweight narrator to generate textual clues indicating action progressions, which complement the visual clues containing various objects. Moreover, we constrain the inferred textual and visual logits to construct dual-clue consistency for temporally and spatially bridging Ego and Exo views. Extensive experiments on the newly proposed EgoMe-anti and the existing EgoExoLearn benchmarks show the effectiveness of our method, which outperforms related state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/ZhaofengSHI/DCPGN}{https://github.com/ZhaofengSHI/DCPGN}. --- ### Information Theoretic Bayesian Optimization over the Probability Simplex Authors: Federico Pavesi, Antonio Candelieri, Noémie Jaquier Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09793v2 Bayesian optimization is a data-efficient technique that has been shown to be extremely powerful to optimize expensive, black-box, and possibly noisy objective functions. Many applications involve optimizing probabilities and mixtures which naturally belong to the probability simplex, a constrained non-Euclidean domain defined by non-negative entries summing to one. This paper introduces $α$-GaBO, a novel family of Bayesian optimization algorithms over the probability simplex. Our approach is grounded in information geometry, a branch of Riemannian geometry which endows the simplex with a Riemannian metric and a class of connections. Based on information geometry theory, we construct Matérn kernels that reflect the geometry of the probability simplex, as well as a one-parameter family of geometric optimizers for the acquisition function. We validate our method on benchmark functions and on a variety of real-world applications including mixtures of components, mixtures of classifiers, and a robotic control task, showing its increased performance compared to constrained Euclidean approaches. --- ### Exploiting Adaptive Channel Pruning for Communication-Efficient Split Learning Authors: Jialei Tan, Zheng Lin, Xiangming Cai, Ruoxi Zhu, Zihan Fang, Pingping Chen, Wei Ni Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09792v2 Split learning (SL) transfers most of the training workload to the server, which alleviates computational burden on client devices. However, the transmission of intermediate feature representations, referred to as smashed data, incurs significant communication overhead, particularly when a large number of client devices are involved. To address this challenge, we propose an adaptive channel pruning-aided SL (ACP-SL) scheme. In ACP-SL, a label-aware channel importance scoring (LCIS) module is designed to generate channel importance scores, distinguishing important channels from less important ones. Based on these scores, an adaptive channel pruning (ACP) module is developed to prune less important channels, thereby compressing the corresponding smashed data and reducing the communication overhead. Experimental results show that ACP-SL consistently outperforms benchmark schemes in test accuracy. Furthermore, it reaches a target test accuracy in fewer training rounds, thereby reducing communication overhead. --- ### A Hybrid Quantum Circuit Born Machine Framework for Financial Volatility Forecasting: Quantum-Assisted Training and Classical Inference Authors: Yixiong Chen Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, quant-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09789v3 Accurate financial volatility forecasting is crucial but challenged by the non-linear, highly correlated nature of market data. Recently, quantum computing has emerged as a promising paradigm for solving complex high-dimensional sampling problems. To harness this, we propose a novel hybrid framework combining the temporal representation power of classical neural networks with the distribution-learning capabilities of quantum models. Specifically, we integrate a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network with a Quantum Circuit Born Machine (QCBM). The LSTM extracts dynamic features, while the QCBM acts as a learnable generative prior modeling complex market distributions to guide forecasting. Evaluated on 5-minute high-frequency data from the SSE Composite and CSI 300 indices, our model significantly outperforms a classical LSTM baseline across MSE, RMSE, and QLIKE metrics. Furthermore, by introducing a stochastic ``Drop-Prior" mechanism during training, the LSTM implicitly distills structured information from the quantum prior. This establishes a pragmatic paradigm of ``quantum-assisted training with classical-efficient inference", whereby the model retains its quantum-enhanced accuracy even when the quantum module is entirely disabled during deployment. This demonstrates a practical pathway for leveraging quantum computing to enhance classical models without real-time quantum inference latency. --- ### What is Missing? Explaining Neurons Activated by Absent Concepts Authors: Robin Hesse, Simone Schaub-Meyer, Janina Hesse, Bernt Schiele, Stefan Roth Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09787v2 Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) aims to provide human-interpretable insights into the behavior of deep neural networks (DNNs), typically by estimating a simplified causal structure of the model. In existing work, this causal structure often includes relationships where the presence of a concept is associated with a strong activation of a neuron. For example, attribution methods primarily identify input pixels that contribute most to a prediction, and feature visualization methods reveal inputs that cause high activation of a target neuron - the former implicitly assuming that the relevant information resides in the input, and the latter that neurons encode the presence of concepts. However, a largely overlooked type of causal relationship is that of encoded absences, where the absence of a concept increases neural activation. In this work, we show that such missing but relevant concepts are common and that mainstream XAI methods struggle to reveal them when applied in their standard form. To address this, we propose two simple extensions to attribution and feature visualization techniques that uncover encoded absences. Across experiments, we show how mainstream XAI methods can be used to reveal and explain encoded absences, how ImageNet models exploit them, and that debiasing can be improved when considering them. --- ### Quantifying the Necessity of Chain of Thought through Opaque Serial Depth Authors: Jonah Brown-Cohen, David Lindner, Rohin Shah Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09786v1 Large language models (LLMs) tend to externalize their reasoning in their chain of thought, making the chain of thought a good target for monitoring. This is partially an inherent feature of the Transformer architecture: sufficiently long serial cognition must pass through the chain of thought (Korbak et al., 2025). We formalize this argument through the notion of opaque serial depth, given by the length of the longest computation that can be done without the use of interpretable intermediate steps like chain of thought. Given this formalization, we compute numeric upper bounds on the opaque serial depth of Gemma 3 models, as well as asymptotic results for additional architectures beyond standard LLMs. We also open-source an automated method that can calculate upper bounds on the opaque serial depth of arbitrary neural networks, and use it to demonstrate that Mixture-of-Experts models likely have lower depth than dense models. Overall, our results suggest that opaque serial depth is a useful tool for understanding the potential for models to do significant reasoning that is not externalized. --- ### EPIC-EuroParl-UdS: Information-Theoretic Perspectives on Translation and Interpreting Authors: Maria Kunilovskaya, Christina Pollkläsener Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09785v3 This paper introduces an updated and combined version of the bidirectional English-German EPIC-UdS (spoken) and EuroParl-UdS (written) corpora containing original European Parliament speeches as well as their translations and interpretations. The new version corrects metadata and text errors identified through previous use, refines the content, updates linguistic annotations, and adds new layers, including word alignment and word-level surprisal indices. The combined resource is designed to support research using information-theoretic approaches to language variation, particularly studies comparing written and spoken modes, and examining disfluencies in speech, as well as traditional translationese studies, including parallel (source vs. target) and comparable (original vs. translated) analyses. The paper outlines the updates introduced in this release, summarises previous results based on the corpus, and presents a new illustrative study. The study validates the integrity of the rebuilt spoken data and evaluates probabilistic measures derived from base and fine-tuned GPT-2 and machine translation models on the task of filler particles prediction in interpreting. --- ### First Estimation of Model Parameters for Neutrino-Induced Nucleon Knockout Using Simulation-Based Inference Authors: Karla Tame-Narvaez, Steven Gardiner, Aleksandra Ćiprijanović, Giuseppe Cerati Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: hep-ph, cs.AI, hep-ex, physics.comp-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09778v1 To enable an accurate determination of oscillation parameters, accelerator-based neutrino experiments require detailed simulations of nuclear interaction physics in the GeV regime. While substantial effort from both theory and experiment is currently being invested to improve the fidelity of these simulations, their present deficiencies typically oblige experimental collaborations to resort to empirical tuning of simulation model parameters. As the precision requirements of the field continue to become more stringent, machine learning techniques may provide a powerful means of handling corresponding growth in the complexity of future neutrino interaction model tuning exercises. To study the suitability of simulation-based inference (SBI) for this physics application, in this paper we revisit a tuned configuration of the GENIE neutrino event generator that was originally developed by the MicroBooNE collaboration. Despite closely reproducing the adopted values of four physics parameters when confronted with the tuned cross-section predictions as input, we find that our trained SBI algorithm prefers modestly different values (within MicroBooNE's assigned uncertainties) and achieves slightly better goodness-of-fit when inference is run on the experimental data set originally used by MicroBooNE. We also find that our trained algorithm can create a fair approximation of an alternative neutrino scattering simulation, NuWro, that shares only a subset of its physics model parameters with GENIE. --- ### World2Mind: Cognition Toolkit for Allocentric Spatial Reasoning in Foundation Models Authors: Shouwei Ruan, Bin Wang, Zhenyu Wu, Qihui Zhu, Yuxiang Zhang, Hang Su, Yubin Wang Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09774v1 Achieving robust spatial reasoning remains a fundamental challenge for current Multimodal Foundation Models (MFMs). Existing methods either overfit statistical shortcuts via 3D grounding data or remain confined to 2D visual perception, limiting both spatial reasoning accuracy and generalization in unseen scenarios. Inspired by the spatial cognitive mapping mechanisms of biological intelligence, we propose World2Mind, a training-free spatial intelligence toolkit. At its core, World2Mind leverages 3D reconstruction and instance segmentation models to construct structured spatial cognitive maps, empowering MFMs to proactively acquire targeted spatial knowledge regarding interested landmarks and routes of interest. To provide robust geometric-topological priors, World2Mind synthesizes an Allocentric-Spatial Tree (AST) that uses elliptical parameters to model the top-down layout of landmarks accurately. To mitigate the inherent inaccuracies of 3D reconstruction, we introduce a three-stage reasoning chain comprising tool invocation assessment, modality-decoupled cue collection, and geometry-semantics interwoven reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that World2Mind boosts the performance of frontier models, such as GPT-5.2, by 5%~18%. Astonishingly, relying solely on the AST-structured text, purely text-only foundation models can perform complex 3D spatial reasoning, achieving performance approaching that of advanced multimodal models. --- ### Global universality via discrete-time signatures Authors: Mihriban Ceylan, David J. Prömel Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: math.PR, cs.LG, q-fin.MF arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09773v2 We establish global universal approximation theorems for non-anticipative and general path-dependent functionals on spaces of piecewise linear paths, stating that linear functionals of the corresponding signatures are dense with respect to $L^p$- and weighted norms. We verify that these approximation results are applicable to piecewise linear interpolations of a class of Gaussian processes, including Brownian motion and fractional Brownian motion with Hurst parameter $H>1/4$. Moreover, we derive quantitative convergence rates for signatures of piecewise linear approximations of Gaussian processes towards their continuous-time counterparts. Consequently, we obtain $L^p$-approximation results for path-dependent functionals of Gaussian processes, as well as for random ordinary differential equations and stochastic differential equations driven by Brownian motion. --- ### Global universality via discrete-time signatures Authors: Mihriban Ceylan, David J. Prömel Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: math.PR, cs.LG, q-fin.MF arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09773v1 We establish global universal approximation theorems on spaces of piecewise linear paths, stating that linear functionals of the corresponding signatures are dense with respect to $L^p$- and weighted norms, under an integrability condition on the underlying weight function. As an application, we show that piecewise linear interpolations of Brownian motion satisfies this integrability condition. Consequently, we obtain $L^p$-approximation results for path-dependent functionals, random ordinary differential equations, and stochastic differential equations driven by Brownian motion. --- ### Removing the Trigger, Not the Backdoor: Alternative Triggers and Latent Backdoors Authors: Gorka Abad, Ermes Franch, Stefanos Koffas, Stjepan Picek Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09772v1 Current backdoor defenses assume that neutralizing a known trigger removes the backdoor. We show this trigger-centric view is incomplete: \emph{alternative triggers}, patterns perceptually distinct from training triggers, reliably activate the same backdoor. We estimate the alternative trigger backdoor direction in feature space by contrasting clean and triggered representations, and then develop a feature-guided attack that jointly optimizes target prediction and directional alignment. First, we theoretically prove that alternative triggers exist and are an inevitable consequence of backdoor training. Then, we verify this empirically. Additionally, defenses that remove training triggers often leave backdoors intact, and alternative triggers can exploit the latent backdoor feature-space. Our findings motivate defenses targeting backdoor directions in representation space rather than input-space triggers. --- ### Ego: Embedding-Guided Personalization of Vision-Language Models Authors: Soroush Seifi, Simon Gardier, Vaggelis Dorovatas, Daniel Olmeda Reino, Rahaf Aljundi Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09771v2 AI assistants that support humans in daily life are becoming increasingly feasible, driven by the rapid advancements in multimodal language models. A key challenge lies in overcoming the generic nature of these models to deliver personalized experiences. Existing approaches to personalizing large vision language models often rely on additional training stages, which limit generality and scalability, or on engineered pipelines with external pre-trained modules, which hinder deployment efficiency. In this work, we propose an efficient personalization method that leverages the model's inherent ability to capture personalized concepts. Specifically, we extract visual tokens that predominantly represent the target concept by utilizing the model's internal attention mechanisms. These tokens serve as a memory of that specific concept, enabling the model to recall and describe it when it appears in test images. We conduct a comprehensive and unified evaluation of our approach and SOTA methods across various personalization settings including single-concept, multi-concept, and video personalization, demonstrating strong performance gains with minimal personalization overhead. --- ### PanoAffordanceNet: Towards Holistic Affordance Grounding in 360° Indoor Environments Authors: Guoliang Zhu, Wanjun Jia, Caoyang Shao, Yuheng Zhang, Zhiyong Li, Kailun Yang Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO, eess.IV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09760v2 Global perception is essential for embodied agents in 360° spaces, yet current affordance grounding remains largely object-centric and restricted to perspective views. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel task: Holistic Affordance Grounding in 360° Indoor Environments. This task faces unique challenges, including severe geometric distortions from Equirectangular Projection (ERP), semantic dispersion, and cross-scale alignment difficulties. We propose PanoAffordanceNet, an end-to-end framework featuring a Distortion-Aware Spectral Modulator (DASM) for latitude-dependent calibration and an Omni-Spherical Densification Head (OSDH) to restore topological continuity from sparse activations. By integrating multi-level constraints comprising pixel-wise, distributional, and region-text contrastive objectives, our framework effectively suppresses semantic drift under low supervision. Furthermore, we construct 360-AGD, the first high-quality panoramic affordance grounding dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PanoAffordanceNet significantly outperforms existing methods, establishing a solid baseline for scene-level perception in embodied intelligence. The source code and benchmark dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/GL-ZHU925/PanoAffordanceNet. --- ### LogoDiffuser: Training-Free Multilingual Logo Generation and Stylization via Letter-Aware Attention Control Authors: Mingyu Kang, Hyein Seo, Yuna Jeong, Junhyeong Park, Yong Suk Choi Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09759v1 Recent advances in text-to-image generation have been remarkable, but generating multilingual design logos that harmoniously integrate visual and textual elements remains a challenging task. Existing methods often distort character geometry when applying creative styles and struggle to support multilingual text generation without additional training. To address these challenges, we propose LogoDiffuser, a training-free method that synthesizes multilingual logo designs using the multimodal diffusion transformer. Instead of using textual prompts, we input the target characters as images, enabling robust character structure control regardless of language. We first analyze the joint attention mechanism to identify core tokens, which are tokens that strongly respond to textual structures. With this observation, our method integrates character structure and visual design by injecting the most informative attention maps. Furthermore, we perform layer-wise aggregation of attention maps to mitigate attention shifts across layers and obtain consistent core tokens. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in multilingual logo generation. --- ### Beyond Fine-Tuning: Robust Food Entity Linking under Ontology Drift with FoodOntoRAG Authors: Jan Drole, Ana Gjorgjevikj, Barbara Korouši'c Seljak, Tome Eftimov Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09758v1 Standardizing food terms from product labels and menus into ontology concepts is a prerequisite for trustworthy dietary assessment and safety reporting. The dominant approach to Named Entity Linking (NEL) in the food and nutrition domains fine-tunes Large Language Models (LLMs) on task-specific corpora. Although effective, fine-tuning incurs substantial computational cost, ties models to a particular ontology snapshot (i.e., version), and degrades under ontology drift. This paper presents FoodOntoRAG, a model- and ontology-agnostic pipeline that performs few-shot NEL by retrieving candidate entities from domain ontologies and conditioning an LLM on structured evidence (food labels, synonyms, definitions, and relations). A hybrid lexical--semantic retriever enumerates candidates; a selector agent chooses a best match with rationale; a separate scorer agent calibrates confidence; and, when confidence falls below a threshold, a synonym generator agent proposes reformulations to re-enter the loop. The pipeline approaches state-of-the-art accuracy while revealing gaps and inconsistencies in existing annotations. The design avoids fine-tuning, improves robustness to ontology evolution, and yields interpretable decisions through grounded justifications. --- ### LAP: A Language-Aware Planning Model For Procedure Planning In Instructional Videos Authors: Lei Shi, Victor Aregbede, Andreas Persson, Martin Längkvist, Amy Loutfi, Stephanie Lowry Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09743v1 Procedure planning requires a model to predict a sequence of actions that transform a start visual observation into a goal in instructional videos. While most existing methods rely primarily on visual observations as input, they often struggle with the inherent ambiguity where different actions can appear visually similar. In this work, we argue that language descriptions offer a more distinctive representation in the latent space for procedure planning. We introduce Language-Aware Planning (LAP), a novel method that leverages the expressiveness of language to bridge visual observation and planning. LAP uses a finetuned Vision Language Model (VLM) to translate visual observations into text descriptions and to predict actions and extract text embeddings. These text embeddings are more distinctive than visual embeddings and are used in a diffusion model for planning action sequences. We evaluate LAP on three procedure planning benchmarks: CrossTask, Coin, and NIV. LAP achieves new state-of-the-art performance across multiple metrics and time horizons by large margin, demonstrating the significant advantage of language-aware planning. --- ### Upper Generalization Bounds for Neural Oscillators Authors: Zifeng Huang, Konstantin M. Zuev, Yong Xia, Michael Beer Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.LG, math.DS, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09742v2 Neural oscillators that originate from second-order ordinary differential equations (ODEs) have shown competitive performance in learning mappings between dynamic loads and responses of complex nonlinear structural systems. Despite this empirical success, theoretically quantifying the generalization capacities of their neural network architectures remains undeveloped. In this study, the neural oscillator consisting of a second-order ODE followed by a multilayer perceptron (MLP) is considered. Its upper probably approximately correct (PAC) generalization bound for approximating causal and uniformly continuous operators between continuous temporal function spaces and that for approximating the uniformly asymptotically incrementally stable second-order dynamical systems are derived by leveraging the Rademacher complexity framework. These bounds are further extended to the squared Wasserstein-1 distances between the probability measures of quantities of interest calculated from target causal operators and the corresponding learned neural oscillators. The theoretical results show that the estimation errors grow polynomially with respect to both MLP sizes and the time length, thereby avoiding the curse of parametric complexity. Furthermore, the derived error bounds demonstrate that constraining the Lipschitz constants of the MLPs via loss function regularization can improve the generalization ability of the neural oscillator. Numerical studies considering a Bouc-Wen nonlinear system under stochastic seismic excitation validates the theoretically predicted power laws of the estimation errors with respect to the sample size and time length, and confirms the effectiveness of constraining MLPs' matrix and vector norms in enhancing the performance of the neural oscillator under limited training data. --- ### ENIGMA-360: An Ego-Exo Dataset for Human Behavior Understanding in Industrial Scenarios Authors: Francesco Ragusa, Rosario Leonardi, Michele Mazzamuto, Daniele Di Mauro, Camillo Quattrocchi, Alessandro Passanisi, Irene D'Ambra, Antonino Furnari, Giovanni Maria Farinella Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09741v2 Understanding human behavior from complementary egocentric (ego) and exocentric (exo) points of view enables the development of systems that can support workers in industrial environments and enhance their safety. However, progress in this area is hindered by the lack of datasets capturing both views in realistic industrial scenarios. To address this gap, we propose ENIGMA-360, a new ego-exo dataset acquired in a real industrial scenario. The dataset is composed of 180 egocentric and 180 exocentric procedural videos temporally synchronized offering complementary information of the same scene. The 360 videos have been labeled with temporal and spatial annotations, enabling the study of different aspects of human behavior in industrial domain. We provide baseline experiments for 3 foundational tasks for human behavior understanding: 1) Temporal Action Segmentation, 2) Keystep Recognition and 3) Egocentric Human-Object Interaction Detection, showing the limits of state-of-the-art approaches on this challenging scenario. These results highlight the need for new models capable of robust ego-exo understanding in real-world environments. We publicly release the dataset and its annotations at https://fpv-iplab.github.io/ENIGMA-360/. --- ### Let's Reward Step-by-Step: Step-Aware Contrastive Alignment for Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments Authors: Haoyuan Li, Rui Liu, Hehe Fan, Yi Yang Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09740v1 Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) requires agents to learn complex reasoning from long-horizon human interactions. While Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have driven recent progress, current training paradigms struggle to balance generalization capability, error recovery and training stability. Specifically, (i) policies derived from SFT suffer from compounding errors, struggling to recover from out-of-distribution states, and (ii) Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) methods e.g. GRPO are bottlenecked by sparse outcome rewards. Their binary feedback fails to assign credit to individual steps, leading to gradient signal collapse in failure dominant batches. To address these challenges, we introduce Step-Aware Contrastive Alignment (SACA), a framework designed to extract dense supervision from imperfect trajectories. At its core, the Perception-Grounded Step-Aware auditor evaluates progress step-by-step, disentangling failed trajectories into valid prefixes and exact divergence points. Leveraging these signals, Scenario-Conditioned Group Construction mechanism dynamically routes batches to specialized resampling and optimization strategies. Extensive experiments on VLN-CE benchmarks demonstrate that SACA achieves state-of-the-art performance. --- ### $M^2$-Occ: Resilient 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction for Autonomous Driving with Incomplete Camera Inputs Authors: Kaixin Lin, Kunyu Peng, Di Wen, Yufan Chen, Ruiping Liu, Kailun Yang Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO, eess.IV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09737v1 Semantic occupancy prediction enables dense 3D geometric and semantic understanding for autonomous driving. However, existing camera-based approaches implicitly assume complete surround-view observations, an assumption that rarely holds in real-world deployment due to occlusion, hardware malfunction, or communication failures. We study semantic occupancy prediction under incomplete multi-camera inputs and introduce $M^2$-Occ, a framework designed to preserve geometric structure and semantic coherence when views are missing. $M^2$-Occ addresses two complementary challenges. First, a Multi-view Masked Reconstruction (MMR) module leverages the spatial overlap among neighboring cameras to recover missing-view representations directly in the feature space. Second, a Feature Memory Module (FMM) introduces a learnable memory bank that stores class-level semantic prototypes. By retrieving and integrating these global priors, the FMM refines ambiguous voxel features, ensuring semantic consistency even when observational evidence is incomplete. We introduce a systematic missing-view evaluation protocol on the nuScenes-based SurroundOcc benchmark, encompassing both deterministic single-view failures and stochastic multi-view dropout scenarios. Under the safety-critical missing back-view setting, $M^2$-Occ improves the IoU by 4.93%. As the number of missing cameras increases, the robustness gap further widens; for instance, under the setting with five missing views, our method boosts the IoU by 5.01%. These gains are achieved without compromising full-view performance. The source code will be publicly released at https://github.com/qixi7up/M2-Occ. --- ### FetalAgents: A Multi-Agent System for Fetal Ultrasound Image and Video Analysis Authors: Xiaotian Hu, Junwei Huang, Mingxuan Liu, Kasidit Anmahapong, Yifei Chen, Yitong Luo, Yiming Huang, Xuguang Bai, Zihan Li, Yi Liao, Haibo Qu, Qiyuan Tian Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CV, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09733v1 Fetal ultrasound (US) is the primary imaging modality for prenatal screening, yet its interpretation relies heavily on the expertise of the clinician. Despite advances in deep learning and foundation models, existing automated tools for fetal US analysis struggle to balance task-specific accuracy with the whole-process versatility required to support end-to-end clinical workflows. To address these limitations, we propose FetalAgents, the first multi-agent system for comprehensive fetal US analysis. Through a lightweight, agentic coordination framework, FetalAgents dynamically orchestrates specialized vision experts to maximize performance across diagnosis, measurement, and segmentation. Furthermore, FetalAgents advances beyond static image analysis by supporting end-to-end video stream summarization, where keyframes are automatically identified across multiple anatomical planes, analyzed by coordinated experts, and synthesized with patient metadata into a structured clinical report. Extensive multi-center external evaluations across eight clinical tasks demonstrate that FetalAgents consistently delivers the most robust and accurate performance when compared against specialized models and multimodal large language models (MLLMs), ultimately providing an auditable, workflow-aligned solution for fetal ultrasound analysis and reporting. --- ### EXPLORE-Bench: Egocentric Scene Prediction with Long-Horizon Reasoning Authors: Chengjun Yu, Xuhan Zhu, Chaoqun Du, Pengfei Yu, Wei Zhai, Yang Cao, Zheng-Jun Zha Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09731v3 Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly considered as a foundation for embodied agents, yet it remains unclear whether they can reliably reason about the long-term physical consequences of actions from an egocentric viewpoint. We study this gap through a new task, Egocentric Scene Prediction with LOng-horizon REasoning: given an initial-scene image and a sequence of atomic action descriptions, a model is asked to predict the final scene after all actions are executed. To enable systematic evaluation, we introduce EXPLORE-Bench, a benchmark curated from real first-person videos spanning diverse scenarios. Each instance pairs long action sequences with structured final-scene annotations, including object categories, visual attributes, and inter-object relations, which supports fine-grained, quantitative assessment. Experiments on a range of proprietary and open-source MLLMs reveal a significant performance gap to humans, indicating that long-horizon egocentric reasoning remains a major challenge. We further analyze test-time scaling via stepwise reasoning and show that decomposing long action sequences can improve performance to some extent, while incurring non-trivial computational overhead. Overall, EXPLORE-Bench provides a principled testbed for measuring and advancing long-horizon reasoning for egocentric embodied perception. --- ### A Multi-Prototype-Guided Federated Knowledge Distillation Approach in AI-RAN Enabled Multi-Access Edge Computing System Authors: Luyao Zou, Hayoung Oh, Chu Myaet Thwal, Apurba Adhikary, Seohyeon Hong, Zhu Han Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09727v1 With the development of wireless network, Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-native Radio Access Network (RAN) have attracted significant attention. Particularly, the integration of AI-RAN and MEC is envisioned to transform network efficiency and responsiveness. Therefore, it is valuable to investigate AI-RAN enabled MEC system. Federated learning (FL) nowadays is emerging as a promising approach for AI-RAN enabled MEC system, in which edge devices are enabled to train a global model cooperatively without revealing their raw data. However, conventional FL encounters the challenge in processing the non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data. Single prototype obtained by averaging the embedding vectors per class can be employed in FL to handle the data heterogeneity issue. Nevertheless, this may result in the loss of useful information owing to the average operation. Therefore, in this paper, a multi-prototype-guided federated knowledge distillation (MP-FedKD) approach is proposed. Particularly, self-knowledge distillation is integrated into FL to deal with the non-IID issue. To cope with the problem of information loss caused by single prototype-based strategy, multi-prototype strategy is adopted, where we present a conditional hierarchical agglomerative clustering (CHAC) approach and a prototype alignment scheme. Additionally, we design a novel loss function (called LEMGP loss) for each local client, where the relationship between global prototypes and local embedding will be focused. Extensive experiments over multiple datasets with various non-IID settings showcase that the proposed MP-FedKD approach outperforms the considered state-of-the-art baselines regarding accuracy, average accuracy and errors (RMSE and MAE). --- ### RbtAct: Rebuttal as Supervision for Actionable Review Feedback Generation Authors: Sihong Wu, Yiling Ma, Yilun Zhao, Tiansheng Hu, Owen Jiang, Manasi Patwardhan, Arman Cohan Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09723v2 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used across the scientific workflow, including to draft peer-review reports. However, many AI-generated reviews are superficial and insufficiently actionable, leaving authors without concrete, implementable guidance and motivating the gap this work addresses. We propose RbtAct, which targets actionable review feedback generation and places existing peer review rebuttal at the center of learning. Rebuttals show which reviewer comments led to concrete revisions or specific plans, and which were only defended. Building on this insight, we leverage rebuttal as implicit supervision to directly optimize a feedback generator for actionability. To support this objective, we propose a new task called perspective-conditioned segment-level review feedback generation, in which the model is required to produce a single focused comment based on the complete paper and a specified perspective such as experiments and writing. We also build a large dataset named RMR-75K that maps review segments to the rebuttal segments that address them, with perspective labels and impact categories that order author uptake. We then train the Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct model with supervised fine-tuning on review segments followed by preference optimization using rebuttal derived pairs. Experiments with human experts and LLM-as-a-judge show consistent gains in actionability and specificity over strong baselines while maintaining grounding and relevance. --- ### FrameDiT: Diffusion Transformer with Matrix Attention for Efficient Video Generation Authors: Minh Khoa Le, Kien Do, Duc Thanh Nguyen, Truyen Tran Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09721v2 High-fidelity video generation remains challenging for diffusion models due to the difficulty of modeling complex spatio-temporal dynamics efficiently. Recent video diffusion methods typically represent a video as a sequence of spatio-temporal tokens which can be modeled using Diffusion Transformers (DiTs). However, this approach faces a trade-off between the strong but expensive Full 3D Attention and the efficient but temporally limited Local Factorized Attention. To resolve this trade-off, we propose Matrix Attention, a frame-level temporal attention mechanism that processes an entire frame as a matrix and generates query, key, and value matrices via matrix-native operations. By attending across frames rather than tokens, Matrix Attention effectively preserves global spatio-temporal structure and adapts to significant motion. We build FrameDiT-G, a DiT architecture based on MatrixAttention, and further introduce FrameDiT-H, which integrates Matrix Attention with Local Factorized Attention to capture both large and small motion. Extensive experiments show that FrameDiT-H achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple video generation benchmarks, offering improved temporal coherence and video quality while maintaining efficiency comparable to Local Factorized Attention. --- ### GSStream: 3D Gaussian Splatting based Volumetric Scene Streaming System Authors: Zhiye Tang, Qiudan Zhang, Lei Zhang, Junhui Hou, You Yang, Xu Wang Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09718v1 Recently, the 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) technique for real-time radiance field rendering has revolutionized the field of volumetric scene representation, providing users with an immersive experience. But in return, it also poses a large amount of data volume, which is extremely bandwidth-intensive. Cutting-edge researchers have tried to introduce different approaches and construct multiple variants for 3DGS to obtain a more compact scene representation, but it is still challenging for real-time distribution. In this paper, we propose GSStream, a novel volumetric scene streaming system to support 3DGS data format. Specifically, GSStream integrates a collaborative viewport prediction module to better predict users' future behaviors by learning collaborative priors and historical priors from multiple users and users' viewport sequences and a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based bitrate adaptation module to tackle the state and action space variability challenge of the bitrate adaptation problem, achieving efficient volumetric scene delivery. Besides, we first build a user viewport trajectory dataset for volumetric scenes to support the training and streaming simulation. Extensive experiments prove that our proposed GSStream system outperforms existing representative volumetric scene streaming systems in visual quality and network usage. Demo video: https://youtu.be/3WEe8PN8yvA. --- ### AutoAgent: Evolving Cognition and Elastic Memory Orchestration for Adaptive Agents Authors: Xiaoxing Wang, Ning Liao, Shikun Wei, Chen Tang, Feiyu Xiong Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09716v1 Autonomous agent frameworks still struggle to reconcile long-term experiential learning with real-time, context-sensitive decision-making. In practice, this gap appears as static cognition, rigid workflow dependence, and inefficient context usage, which jointly limit adaptability in open-ended and non-stationary environments. To address these limitations, we present AutoAgent, a self-evolving multi-agent framework built on three tightly coupled components: evolving cognition, on-the-fly contextual decision-making, and elastic memory orchestration. At the core of AutoAgent, each agent maintains structured prompt-level cognition over tools, self-capabilities, peer expertise, and task knowledge. During execution, this cognition is combined with live task context to select actions from a unified space that includes tool calls, LLM-based generation, and inter-agent requests. To support efficient long-horizon reasoning, an Elastic Memory Orchestrator dynamically organizes interaction history by preserving raw records, compressing redundant trajectories, and constructing reusable episodic abstractions, thereby reducing token overhead while retaining decision-critical evidence. These components are integrated through a closed-loop cognitive evolution process that aligns intended actions with observed outcomes to continuously update cognition and expand reusable skills, without external retraining. Empirical results across retrieval-augmented reasoning, tool-augmented agent benchmarks, and embodied task environments show that AutoAgent consistently improves task success, tool-use efficiency, and collaborative robustness over static and memory-augmented baselines. Overall, AutoAgent provides a unified and practical foundation for adaptive autonomous agents that must learn from experience while making reliable context-aware decisions in dynamic environments. --- ### Does the Question Really Matter? Training-Free Data Selection for Vision-Language SFT Authors: Peng Sun, Yi Yang, Huawen Shen, Yi Ban, Tianfan Fu, Yanbo Wang, Yuqiang Li Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09715v2 Visual instruction tuning is crucial for improving vision-language large models (VLLMs). However, many samples can be solved via linguistic patterns or common-sense shortcuts, without genuine cross-modal reasoning, limiting the effectiveness of multimodal learning. Prior data selection methods often rely on costly proxy model training and focus on difficulty or diversity, failing to capture a sample's true contribution to vision-language joint reasoning. In this paper, we propose CVS, a training-free data selection method based on the insight that, for high-quality multimodal samples, introducing the question should substantially alter the model's assessment of answer validity given an image. CVS leverages a frozen VLLM as an evaluator and measures the discrepancy in answer validity with and without conditioning on the question, enabling the identification of samples that require vision-language joint reasoning while filtering semantic-conflict noise. Experiments on Vision-Flan and The Cauldron show that CVS achieves solid performance across datasets. On Vision-Flan, CVS outperforms full-data training by 3.5% and 4.8% using only 10% and 15% of the data, respectively, and remains robust on the highly heterogeneous Cauldron dataset. Moreover, CVS reduces computational cost by 17.3% and 44.4% compared to COINCIDE and XMAS. --- ### MUGEN: Evaluating and Improving Multi-audio Understanding of Large Audio-Language Models Authors: Chih-Kai Yang, Yun-Shao Tsai, Yu-Kai Guo, Ping-Le Tsai, Yen-Ting Piao, Hung-Wei Chen, Ting-Lin Hsiao, Yun-Man Hsu, Ke-Han Lu, Hung-yi Lee Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI, cs.CL, eess.AS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09714v2 While multi-audio understanding is critical for large audio-language models (LALMs), it remains underexplored. We introduce MUGEN, a comprehensive benchmark evaluating this capability across speech, general audio, and music. Our experiments reveal consistent weaknesses in multi-audio settings, and performance degrades sharply as the number of concurrent audio inputs increases, identifying input scaling as a fundamental bottleneck. We further investigate training-free strategies and observe that Audio-Permutational Self-Consistency, which diversifies the order of audio candidates, helps models form more robust aggregated predictions, yielding up to 6.28% accuracy gains. Combining this permutation strategy with Chain-of-Thought further improves performance to 6.74%. These results expose blind spots in current LALMs and provide a foundation for evaluating complex auditory comprehension. --- ### OOD-MMSafe: Advancing MLLM Safety from Harmful Intent to Hidden Consequences Authors: Ming Wen, Kun Yang, Jingyu Zhang, Yuxuan Liu, shiwen cui, Shouling Ji, Xingjun Ma Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09706v1 While safety alignment for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has gained significant attention, current paradigms primarily target malicious intent or situational violations. We propose shifting the safety frontier toward consequence-driven safety, a paradigm essential for the robust deployment of autonomous and embodied agents. To formalize this shift, we introduce OOD-MMSafe, a benchmark comprising 455 curated query-image pairs designed to evaluate a model's ability to identify latent hazards within context-dependent causal chains. Our analysis reveals a pervasive causal blindness among frontier models, with the highest 67.5% failure rate in high-capacity closed-source models, and identifies a preference ceiling where static alignment yields format-centric failures rather than improved safety reasoning as model capacity grows. To address these bottlenecks, we develop the Consequence-Aware Safety Policy Optimization (CASPO) framework, which integrates the model's intrinsic reasoning as a dynamic reference for token-level self-distillation rewards. Experimental results demonstrate that CASPO significantly enhances consequence projection, reducing the failure ratio of risk identification to 7.3% for Qwen2.5-VL-7B and 5.7% for Qwen3-VL-4B while maintaining overall effectiveness. --- ### Evaluation of LLMs in retrieving food and nutritional context for RAG systems Authors: Maks Požarnik Vavken, Matevž Ogrinc, Tome Eftimov, Barbara Koroušić Seljak Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09704v2 In this article, we evaluate four Large Language Models (LLMs) and their effectiveness at retrieving data within a specialized Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system, using a comprehensive food composition database. Our method is focused on the LLMs ability to translate natural language queries into structured metadata filters, enabling efficient retrieval via a Chroma vector database. By achieving high accuracy in this critical retrieval step, we demonstrate that LLMs can serve as an accessible, high-performance tool, drastically reducing the manual effort and technical expertise previously required for domain experts, such as food compilers and nutritionists, to leverage complex food and nutrition data. However, despite the high performance on easy and moderately complex queries, our analysis of difficult questions reveals that reliable retrieval remains challenging when queries involve non-expressible constraints. These findings demonstrate that LLM-driven metadata filtering excels when constraints can be explicitly expressed, but struggles when queries exceed the representational scope of the metadata format. --- ### ProGS: Towards Progressive Coding for 3D Gaussian Splatting Authors: Zhiye Tang, Lingzhuo Liu, Shengjie Jiao, Qiudan Zhang, Junhui Hou, You Yang, Xu Wang Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09703v2 Progressive transmission of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) requires each completed transmission stage to be decodable from received data and directly renderable. This work presents ProGS, a progressive codec that organizes anchor-based 3DGS as parent-closed octree prefixes. ProGS combines parent-causal entropy coding, level-balanced anchor growth, bounded multi-prefix training, and lightweight parent-anchor refinement to improve early-prefix quality without altering the complete-model rendering path. One fixed-$λ$ training run yields five deployable rate--quality points from a single bitstream. Experiments on 17 scenes from three datasets evaluate rate--distortion performance, rendering speed, and transmission efficiency against progressive and single-rate baselines. On one representative scene per dataset, ProGS reaches a common quality target with 30.7 $\sim$ 60.7\% fewer bytes than HAC-Rand and 22.6 $\sim$ 53.4\% fewer bytes than HAC++-Rand. Across the three dataset averages, ProGS-LR uses 4.7 $\sim$ 6.1\% fewer bytes than HAC-high while improving SSIM by 0.002 $\sim$ 0.041 and reducing LPIPS by 4.8 $\sim$ 51.2\%. The parent-closed syntax makes every prefix causally decodable and directly renderable without future topology. ProGS-HR also yields higher endpoint SSIM and lower LPIPS than PCGS across all three dataset averages, and all five prefixes render in real time. Code is available at https://github.com/ZhiyeTang/ProGS-Official --- ### ProGS: Towards Progressive Coding for 3D Gaussian Splatting Authors: Zhiye Tang, Lingzhuo Liu, Shengjie Jiao, Qiudan Zhang, Junhui Hou, You Yang, Xu Wang Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09703v1 With the emergence of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), numerous pioneering efforts have been made to address the effective compression issue of massive 3DGS data. 3DGS offers an efficient and scalable representation of 3D scenes by utilizing learnable 3D Gaussians, but the large size of the generated data has posed significant challenges for storage and transmission. Existing methods, however, have been limited by their inability to support progressive coding, a crucial feature in streaming applications with varying bandwidth. To tackle this limitation, this paper introduce a novel approach that organizes 3DGS data into an octree structure, enabling efficient progressive coding. The proposed ProGS is a streaming-friendly codec that facilitates progressive coding for 3D Gaussian splatting, and significantly improves both compression efficiency and visual fidelity. The proposed method incorporates mutual information enhancement mechanisms to mitigate structural redundancy, leveraging the relevance between nodes in the octree hierarchy. By adapting the octree structure and dynamically adjusting the anchor nodes, ProGS ensures scalable data compression without compromising the rendering quality. ProGS achieves a remarkable 45X reduction in file storage compared to the original 3DGS format, while simultaneously improving visual performance by over 10%. This demonstrates that ProGS can provide a robust solution for real-time applications with varying network conditions. --- ### TriFusion-SR: Joint Tri-Modal Medical Image Fusion and SR Authors: Fayaz Ali Dharejo, Sharif S. M. A., Aiman Khalil, Nachiket Chaudhary, Rizwan Ali Naqvi, Radu Timofte Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09702v1 Multimodal medical image fusion facilitates comprehensive diagnosis by aggregating complementary structural and functional information, but its effectiveness is limited by resolution degradation and modality discrepancies. Existing approaches typically perform image fusion and super-resolution (SR) in separate stages, leading to artifacts and degraded perceptual quality. These limitations are further amplified in tri-modal settings that combine anatomical modalities (e.g., MRI, CT) with functional scans (e.g., PET, SPECT) due to pronounced frequency domain imbalances. We propose TriFusionSR, a wavelet-guided conditional diffusion framework for joint tri-modal fusion and SR. The framework explicitly decomposes multimodal features into frequency bands using the 2D Discrete Wavelet Transform, enabling frequency-aware crossmodal interaction. We further introduce a Rectified Wavelet Features (RWF) strategy for latent coefficient calibration, followed by an Adaptive Spatial-Frequency Fusion (ASFF) module with gated channel-spatial attention to enable structure-driven multimodal refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving 4.8-12.4% PSNR improvement and substantial reductions in RMSE and LPIPS across multiple upsampling scales. --- ### Mousse: Rectifying the Geometry of Muon with Curvature-Aware Preconditioning Authors: Yechen Zhang, Shuhao Xing, Junhao Huang, Kai Lv, Yunhua Zhou, Xipeng Qiu, Qipeng Guo, Kai Chen Published: 2026-03-10 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09697v2 Recent advances in spectral optimization, notably Muon, have demonstrated that constraining update steps to the Stiefel manifold can significantly accelerate training and improve generalization. However, Muon implicitly assumes an isotropic optimization landscape, enforcing a uniform spectral update norm across all eigen-directions. We argue that this "egalitarian" constraint is suboptimal for Deep Neural Networks, where the curvature spectrum is known to be highly heavy-tailed and ill-conditioned. In such landscapes, Muon risks amplifying instabilities in high-curvature directions while limiting necessary progress in flat directions. In this work, we propose \textbf{Mousse} (\textbf{M}uon \textbf{O}ptimization \textbf{U}tilizing \textbf{S}hampoo's \textbf{S}tructural \textbf{E}stimation), a novel optimizer that reconciles the structural stability of spectral methods with the geometric adaptivity of second-order preconditioning. Instead of applying Newton-Schulz orthogonalization directly to the momentum matrix, Mousse operates in a whitened coordinate system induced by Kronecker-factored statistics (derived from Shampoo). Mathematically, we formulate Mousse as the solution to a spectral steepest descent problem constrained by an anisotropic trust region, where the optimal update is derived via the polar decomposition of the whitened gradient. Empirical results across language models ranging from 160M to 800M parameters demonstrate that Mousse consistently outperforms Muon, achieving around $\sim$12\% reduction in training steps with negligible computational overhead. ---