# Research Papers — 2026-03 · bundle page 181 of 243

> Full-text markdown of papers #9001–9050 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/181
[← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-03/page/180.md)
[Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-03/page/182.md)

### SCL-GNN: Towards Generalizable Graph Neural Networks via Spurious Correlation Learning

Authors: Yuxiang Zhang, Enyan Dai
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08270v1

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable success across diverse tasks. However, their generalization capability is often hindered by spurious correlations between node features and labels in the graph. Our analysis reveals that GNNs tend to exploit imperceptible statistical correlations in training data, even when such correlations are unreliable for prediction. To address this challenge, we propose the Spurious Correlation Learning Graph Neural Network (SCL-GNN), a novel framework designed to enhance generalization on both Independent and Identically Distributed (IID) and Out-of-Distribution (OOD) graphs. SCL-GNN incorporates a principled spurious correlation learning mechanism, leveraging the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) to quantify correlations between node representations and class scores. This enables the model to identify and mitigate irrelevant but influential spurious correlations effectively. Additionally, we introduce an efficient bi-level optimization strategy to jointly optimize modules and GNN parameters, preventing overfitting. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that SCL-GNN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines under various distribution shifts, highlighting its robustness and generalization capabilities.

---

### SAIL: Test-Time Scaling for In-Context Imitation Learning with VLM

Authors: Makoto Sato, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yujin Tang, So Kuroki
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08269v2

In-context imitation learning allows robots to acquire skills from demonstrations, yet one-shot trajectory generation remains fragile under environmental variation. We propose SAIL, a framework that reframes robot imitation as an iterative refinement problem capable of scaling with test-time compute. SAIL utilizes Monte Carlo Tree Search, where each node is a complete trajectory and edges correspond to trajectory refinements. The process is guided by three core components: an automated archive of successful trajectories for contextually relevant retrieval, a vision language model-based scoring mechanism for trajectory evaluation, and a step-level feedback that provides trajectory-aligned scores for iterative refinement. Experiments across six diverse manipulation tasks in simulation and real-world validation clearly demonstrate that increasing test-time compute consistently improves success rates, achieving up to 95% on complex tasks. Our results suggest that trajectory-level test-time scaling is a robust path toward more generalizable robotic agents.

---

### SAIL: Test-Time Scaling for In-Context Imitation Learning with VLM

Authors: Makoto Sato, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yujin Tang, So Kuroki
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08269v1

In-context imitation learning allows robots to acquire skills from demonstrations, yet one-shot trajectory generation remains fragile under environmental variation. We propose SAIL, a framework that reframes robot imitation as an iterative refinement problem capable of scaling with test-time compute. SAIL utilizes Monte Carlo Tree Search, where each node is a complete trajectory and edges correspond to trajectory refinements. The process is guided by three core components: an automated archive of successful trajectories for contextually relevant retrieval, a vision language model-based scoring mechanism for trajectory evaluation, and a step-level feedback that provides trajectory-aligned scores for iterative refinement. Experiments across six diverse manipulation tasks in simulation and real-world validation clearly demonstrate that increasing test-time compute consistently improves success rates, achieving up to 95% on complex tasks. Our results suggest that trajectory-level test-time scaling is a robust path toward more generalizable robotic agents.

---

### Towards a more efficient bias detection in financial language models

Authors: Firas Hadj Kacem, Ahmed Khanfir, Mike Papadakis
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CE, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08267v1

Bias in financial language models constitutes a major obstacle to their adoption in real-world applications. Detecting such bias is challenging, as it requires identifying inputs whose predictions change when varying properties unrelated to the decision, such as demographic attributes. Existing approaches typically rely on exhaustive mutation and pairwise prediction analysis over large corpora, which is effective but computationally expensive-particularly for large language models and can become impractical in continuous retraining and releasing processes. Aiming at reducing this cost, we conduct a large-scale study of bias in five financial language models, examining similarities in their bias tendencies across protected attributes and exploring cross-model-guided bias detection to identify bias-revealing inputs earlier. Our study uses approximately 17k real financial news sentences, mutated to construct over 125k original-mutant pairs. Results show that all models exhibit bias under both atomic (0.58\%-6.05\%) and intersectional (0.75\%-5.97\%) settings. Moreover, we observe consistent patterns in bias-revealing inputs across models, enabling substantial reuse and cost reduction in bias detection. For example, up to 73\% of FinMA's biased behaviours can be uncovered using only 20\% of the input pairs when guided by properties derived from DistilRoBERTa outputs.

---

### Airborne Magnetic Anomaly Navigation with Neural-Network-Augmented Online Calibration

Authors: Antonia Hager, Sven Nebendahl, Alexej Klushyn, Jasper Krauser, Torleiv H. Bryne, Tor Arne Johansen
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08265v1

Airborne Magnetic Anomaly Navigation (MagNav) provides a jamming-resistant and robust alternative to satellite navigation but requires the real-time compensation of the aircraft platform's large and dynamic magnetic interference. State-of-the-art solutions often rely on extensive offline calibration flights or pre-training, creating a logistical barrier to operational deployment. We present a fully adaptive MagNav architecture featuring a "cold-start" capability that identifies and compensates for the aircraft's magnetic signature entirely in-flight. The proposed method utilizes an extended Kalman filter with an augmented state vector that simultaneously estimates the aircraft's kinematic states as well as the coefficients of the physics-based Tolles-Lawson calibration model and the parameters of a Neural Network to model aircraft interferences. The Kalman filter update is mathematically equivalent to an online Natural Gradient descent, integrating superior convergence and data efficiency of state-of-the-art second-order optimization directly into the navigation filter. To enhance operational robustness, the neural network is constrained to a residual learning role, modeling only the nonlinearities uncorrected by the explainable physics-based calibration baseline. Validated on the MagNav Challenge dataset, our framework effectively bounds inertial drift using a magnetometer-only feature set. The results demonstrate navigation accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art models trained offline, without requiring prior calibration flights or dedicated maneuvers.

---

### Event-based Motion & Appearance Fusion for 6D Object Pose Tracking

Authors: Zhichao Li, Chiara Bartolozzi, Lorenzo Natale, Arren Glover
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08264v2

Object pose tracking is a fundamental and essential task for robotics to perform tasks in the home and industrial settings. The most commonly used sensors to do so are RGB-D cameras, which can hit limitations in highly dynamic environments due to motion blur and frame-rate constraints. Event cameras have remarkable features such as high temporal resolution and low latency, which make them a potentially ideal vision sensors for object pose tracking at high speed. Even so, there are still only few works on 6D pose tracking with event cameras. In this work, we take advantage of the high temporal resolution and propose a method that uses both a propagation step fused with a pose correction strategy. Specifically, we use 6D object velocity obtained from event-based optical flow for pose propagation, after which, a template-based local pose correction module is utilized for pose correction. Our learning-free method has comparable performance to the state-of-the-art algorithms, and in some cases out performs them for fast-moving objects. The results indicate the potential for using event cameras in highly-dynamic scenarios where the use of deep network approaches are limited by low update rates.

---

### FinToolBench: Evaluating LLM Agents for Real-World Financial Tool Use

Authors: Jiaxuan Lu, Kong Wang, Yemin Wang, Qingmei Tang, Hongwei Zeng, Xiang Chen, Jiahao Pi, Shujian Deng, Lingzhi Chen, Yi Fu, Kehua Yang, Xiao Sun
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08262v2

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into the financial domain is driving a paradigm shift from passive information retrieval to dynamic, agentic interaction. While general-purpose tool learning has witnessed a surge in benchmarks, the financial sector, characterized by high stakes, strict compliance, and rapid data volatility, remains critically underserved. Existing financial evaluations predominantly focus on static textual analysis or document-based QA, ignoring the complex reality of tool execution. Conversely, general tool benchmarks lack the domain-specific rigor required for finance, often relying on toy environments or a negligible number of financial APIs. To bridge this gap, we introduce FinToolBench, the first real-world, runnable benchmark dedicated to evaluating financial tool learning agents. Unlike prior works limited to a handful of mock tools, FinToolBench establishes a realistic ecosystem coupling 760 executable financial tools with 295 rigorous, tool-required queries. We propose a novel evaluation framework that goes beyond binary execution success, assessing agents on finance-critical dimensions: timeliness, intent type, and regulatory domain alignment. Furthermore, we present FATR, a finance-aware tool retrieval and reasoning baseline that enhances stability and compliance. By providing the first testbed for auditable, agentic financial execution, FinToolBench sets a new standard for trustworthy AI in finance. The tool manifest, execution environment, and evaluation code will be open-sourced to facilitate future research.

---

### WaDi: Weight Direction-aware Distillation for One-step Image Synthesis

Authors: Lei Wang, Yang Cheng, Senmao Li, Ge Wu, Yaxing Wang, Jian Yang
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08258v1

Despite the impressive performance of diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion (SD) in image generation, their slow inference limits practical deployment. Recent works accelerate inference by distilling multi-step diffusion into one-step generators. To better understand the distillation mechanism, we analyze U-Net/DiT weight changes between one-step students and their multi-step teacher counterparts. Our analysis reveals that changes in weight direction significantly exceed those in weight norm, highlighting it as the key factor during distillation. Motivated by this insight, we propose the Low-rank Rotation of weight Direction (LoRaD), a parameter-efficient adapter tailored to one-step diffusion distillation. LoRaD is designed to model these structured directional changes using learnable low-rank rotation matrices. We further integrate LoRaD into Variational Score Distillation (VSD), resulting in Weight Direction-aware Distillation (WaDi)-a novel one-step distillation framework. WaDi achieves state-of-the-art FID scores on COCO 2014 and COCO 2017 while using only approximately 10% of the trainable parameters of the U-Net/DiT. Furthermore, the distilled one-step model demonstrates strong versatility and scalability, generalizing well to various downstream tasks such as controllable generation, relation inversion, and high-resolution synthesis.

---

### Beyond ReinMax: Low-Variance Gradient Estimators for Discrete Latent Variables

Authors: Daniel Wang, Thang D. Bui
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08257v1

Machine learning models involving discrete latent variables require gradient estimators to facilitate backpropagation in a computationally efficient manner. The most recent addition to the Straight-Through family of estimators, ReinMax, can be viewed from a numerical ODE perspective as incorporating an approximation via Heun's method to reduce bias, but at the cost of high variance. In this work, we introduce the ReinMax-Rao and ReinMax-CV estimators which incorporate Rao-Blackwellisation and control variate techniques into ReinMax to reduce its variance. Our estimators demonstrate superior performance on training variational autoencoders with discrete latent spaces. Furthermore, we investigate the possibility of leveraging alternative numerical methods for constructing more accurate gradient approximations and present an alternative view of ReinMax from a simpler numerical integration perspective.

---

### NCL-UoR at SemEval-2026 Task 5: Embedding-Based Methods, Fine-Tuning, and LLMs for Word Sense Plausibility Rating

Authors: Tong Wu, Thanet Markchom, Huizhi Liang
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08256v2

Word sense plausibility rating requires predicting the human-perceived plausibility of a given word sense on a 1-5 scale in the context of short narrative stories containing ambiguous homonyms. This paper systematically compares three approaches: (1) embedding-based methods pairing sentence embeddings with standard regressors, (2) transformer fine-tuning with parameter-efficient adaptation, and (3) large language model (LLM) prompting with structured reasoning and explicit decision rules. The best-performing system employs a structured prompting strategy that decomposes evaluation into narrative components (precontext, target sentence, ending) and applies explicit decision rules for rating calibration. The analysis reveals that structured prompting with decision rules outperforms both fine-tuned models and embedding-based approaches, and that prompt design matters more than model scale for this task.

---

### FlowTouch: View-Invariant Visuo-Tactile Prediction

Authors: Seongjin Bien, Carlo Kneissl, Tobias Jülg, Frank Fundel, Thomas Ressler-Antal, Florian Walter, Björn Ommer, Gitta Kutyniok, Wolfram Burgard
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08255v1

Tactile sensation is essential for contact-rich manipulation tasks. It provides direct feedback on object geometry, surface properties, and interaction forces, enhancing perception and enabling fine-grained control. An inherent limitation of tactile sensors is that readings are available only when an object is touched. This precludes their use during planning and the initial execution phase of a task. Predicting tactile information from visual information can bridge this gap. A common approach is to learn a direct mapping from camera images to the output of vision-based tactile sensors. However, the resulting model will depend strongly on the specific setup and on how well the camera can capture the area where an object is touched. In this work, we introduce FlowTouch, a novel model for view-invariant visuo-tactile prediction. Our key idea is to use an object's local 3D mesh to encode rich information for predicting tactile patterns while abstracting away from scene-dependent details. FlowTouch integrates scene reconstruction and Flow Matching-based models for image generation. Our results show that FlowTouch is able to bridge the sim-to-real gap and generalize to new sensor instances. We further show that the resulting tactile images can be used for downstream grasp stability prediction. Our code, datasets and videos are available at https://flowtouch.github.io/

---

### DynamicVGGT: Learning Dynamic Point Maps for 4D Scene Reconstruction in Autonomous Driving

Authors: Zhuolin He, Jing Li, Guanghao Li, Xiaolei Chen, Jiacheng Tang, Siyang Zhang, Zhounan Jin, Feipeng Cai, Bin Li, Jian Pu, Jia Cai, Xiangyang Xue
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08254v1

Dynamic scene reconstruction in autonomous driving remains a fundamental challenge due to significant temporal variations, moving objects, and complex scene dynamics. Existing feed-forward 3D models have demonstrated strong performance in static reconstruction but still struggle to capture dynamic motion. To address these limitations, we propose DynamicVGGT, a unified feed-forward framework that extends VGGT from static 3D perception to dynamic 4D reconstruction. Our goal is to model point motion within feed-forward 3D models in a dynamic and temporally coherent manner. To this end, we jointly predict the current and future point maps within a shared reference coordinate system, allowing the model to implicitly learn dynamic point representations through temporal correspondence. To efficiently capture temporal dependencies, we introduce a Motion-aware Temporal Attention (MTA) module that learns motion continuity. Furthermore, we design a Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting Head that explicitly models point motion by predicting Gaussian velocities using learnable motion tokens under scene flow supervision. It refines dynamic geometry through continuous 3D Gaussian optimization. Extensive experiments on autonomous driving datasets demonstrate that DynamicVGGT significantly outperforms existing methods in reconstruction accuracy, achieving robust feed-forward 4D dynamic scene reconstruction under complex driving scenarios.

---

### FedPrism: Adaptive Personalized Federated Learning under Non-IID Data

Authors: Prakash Kumbhakar, Shrey Srivastava, Haroon R Lone
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08252v2

Federated Learning (FL) suffers significant performance degradation in real-world deployments characterized by moderate to extreme statistical heterogeneity (non-IID client data). While global aggregation strategies promote broad generalization, they often fail to capture the diversity of local data distributions, leading to suboptimal personalization. We address this problem with FedPrism, a framework that uses two main strategies. First, it uses a Prism Decomposition method that builds each client's model from three parts: a global foundation, a shared group part for similar clients, and a private part for unique local data. This allows the system to group similar users together automatically and adapt if their data changes. Second, we include a Dual-Stream design that runs a general model alongside a local specialist. The system routes predictions between the general model and the local specialist based on the specialist's confidence. Through systematic experiments on non-IID data partitions, we demonstrate that FedPrism exceeds static aggregation and hard-clustering baselines, achieving significant accuracy gains under high heterogeneity. These results establish FedPrism as a robust and flexible solution for federated learning in heterogeneous environments, effectively balancing generalizable knowledge with adaptive personalization.

---

### Not All Queries Need Deep Thought: CoFiCot for Adaptive Coarse-to-fine Stateful Refinement

Authors: Dongxu Zhang, Hongqiang Lin, Yiding Sun, Pengyu Wang, Qirui Wang, Ning Yang, Jihua Zhu
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08251v1

Scaling test-time computation enhances LLM reasoning ability but faces a uniform computation paradox. Allocating identical resources leads to over-correction on simple tasks and insufficient refinement on complex ones. To address this, we propose CoFiCot, a coarse-to-fine adaptive framework that dynamically tailors inference strategies to problem difficulty. Specifically, we implement a multi-metric classifier that triages queries by synthesizing semantic entropy, consensus reliability, and predicted reasoning depth . This enables a differentiated refinement stage that applies efficient aggregation for simple queries while routing complex ones to a context-aware correction loop . We formalize correction as a stateful sequential propagation process , where each repair is strictly conditioned on the verified history of prior rectifications. By integrating Process Reward Models (PRMs) within this state-dependent trajectory, CoFiCot effectively bridges the gap between granular error localization and global logical coherence, preventing the context fragmentation typical of stateless refinement methods.

---

### Bootstrapping Audiovisual Speech Recognition in Zero-AV-Resource Scenarios with Synthetic Visual Data

Authors: Pol Buitrago, Pol Gàlvez, Oriol Pareras, Javier Hernando
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: eess.AS, cs.CL, eess.IV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08249v1

Audiovisual speech recognition (AVSR) combines acoustic and visual cues to improve transcription robustness under challenging conditions but remains out of reach for most under-resourced languages due to the lack of labeled video corpora for training. We propose a zero-AV-resource AVSR framework that relies on synthetic visual streams generated by lip-syncing static facial images with real audio. We first evaluate synthetic visual augmentation on Spanish benchmarks, then apply it to Catalan, a language with no annotated audiovisual corpora. We synthesize over 700 hours of talking-head video and fine-tune a pre-trained AV-HuBERT model. On a manually annotated Catalan benchmark, our model achieves near state-of-the-art performance with much fewer parameters and training data, outperforms an identically trained audio-only baseline, and preserves multimodal advantages in noise. Scalable synthetic video thus offers a viable substitute for real recordings in zero-AV-resource AVSR.

---

### Topologically Stable Hough Transform

Authors: Stefan Huber, Kristóf Huszár, Michael Kerber, Martin Uray
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.CG, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08245v2

We propose an alternative formulation of the well-known Hough transform to detect lines in point clouds. Replacing the discretized voting scheme of the classical Hough transform by a continuous score function, its persistent features in the sense of persistent homology give a set of candidate lines. We also devise and implement an algorithm to efficiently compute these candidate lines.

---

### Optimising antibiotic switching via forecasting of patient physiology

Authors: Magnus Ross, Nel Swanepoel, Akish Luintel, Emma McGuire, Ingemar J. Cox, Steve Harris, Vasileios Lampos
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.LG, stat.AP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08242v1

Timely transition from intravenous (IV) to oral antibiotic therapy shortens hospital stays, reduces catheter-related infections, and lowers healthcare costs, yet one in five patients in England remain on IV antibiotics despite meeting switching criteria. Clinical decision support systems can improve switching rates, but approaches that learn from historical decisions reproduce the delays and inconsistencies of routine practice. We propose using neural processes to model vital sign trajectories probabilistically, predicting switch-readiness by comparing forecasts against clinical guidelines rather than learning from past actions, and ranking patients to prioritise clinical review. The design yields interpretable outputs, adapts to updated guidelines without retraining, and preserves clinical judgement. Validated on MIMIC-IV (US intensive care, 6,333 encounters) and UCLH (a large urban academic UK hospital group, 10,584 encounters), the system selects 2.2-3.2$\times$ more relevant patients than random. Our results demonstrate that forecasting patient physiology offers a principled foundation for decision support in antibiotic stewardship.

---

### Sensivity of LLMs' Explanations to the Training Randomness:Context, Class & Task Dependencies

Authors: Romain Loncour, Jérémie Bogaert, François-Xavier Standaert
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08241v1

Transformer models are now a cornerstone in natural language processing. Yet, explaining their decisions remains a challenge. It was shown recently that the same model trained on the same data with a different randomness can lead to very different explanations. In this paper, we investigate how the (syntactic) context, the classes to be learned and the tasks influence this explanations' sensitivity to randomness. We show that they all have statistically significant impact: smallest for the (syntactic) context, medium for the classes and largest for the tasks.

---

### SiMO: Single-Modality-Operable Multimodal Collaborative Perception

Authors: Jiageng Wen, Shengjie Zhao, Bing Li, Jiafeng Huang, Kenan Ye, Hao Deng
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08240v1

Collaborative perception integrates multi-agent perspectives to enhance the sensing range and overcome occlusion issues. While existing multimodal approaches leverage complementary sensors to improve performance, they are highly prone to failure--especially when a key sensor like LiDAR is unavailable. The root cause is that feature fusion leads to semantic mismatches between single-modality features and the downstream modules. This paper addresses this challenge for the first time in the field of collaborative perception, introducing Single-Modality-Operable Multimodal Collaborative Perception (SiMO). By adopting the proposed Length-Adaptive Multi-Modal Fusion (LAMMA), SiMO can adaptively handle remaining modal features during modal failures while maintaining consistency of the semantic space. Additionally, leveraging the innovative "Pretrain-Align-Fuse-RD" training strategy, SiMO addresses the issue of modality competition--generally overlooked by existing methods--ensuring the independence of each individual modality branch. Experiments demonstrate that SiMO effectively aligns multimodal features while simultaneously preserving modality-specific features, enabling it to maintain optimal performance across all individual modalities. The implementation details can be found in https://github.com/dempsey-wen/SiMO.

---

### Fibration Policy Optimization

Authors: Chang Li, Tshihao Tsu, Yaren Zhang, Chao Xue, Xiaodong He
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08239v1

Large language models are increasingly trained as heterogeneous systems spanning multiple domains, expert partitions, and agentic pipelines, yet prevalent proximal objectives operate at a single scale and lack a principled mechanism for coupling token-level, trajectory-level, and higher-level hierarchical stability control. To bridge this gap, we derive the Aggregational Policy Censoring Objective (APC-Obj), the first exact unconstrained reformulation of sample-based TV-TRPO, establishing that clipping-based surrogate design and trust-region optimization are dual formulations of the same problem. Building on this foundation, we develop Fiber Bundle Gating (FBG), an algebraic framework that organizes sampled RL data as a fiber bundle and decomposes ratio gating into a base-level gate on trajectory aggregates and a fiber-level gate on per-token residuals, with provable first-order agreement with the true RL objective near on-policy. From APC-Obj and FBG we derive Fibration Policy Optimization (or simply, FiberPO), a concrete objective whose Jacobian is block-diagonal over trajectories, reduces to identity at on-policy, and provides better update direction thus improving token efficiency. The compositional nature of the framework extends beyond the trajectory-token case: fibrations compose algebraically into a Fibration Gating Hierarchy (FGH) that scales the same gating mechanism to arbitrary hierarchical depth without new primitives, as demonstrated by FiberPO-Domain, a four-level instantiation with independent trust-region budgets at the domain, prompt group, trajectory, and token levels. Together, these results connect the trust-region theory, a compositional algebraic structure, and practical multi-scale stability control into a unified framework for LLM policy optimization.

---

### Exploring Deep Learning and Ultra-Widefield Imaging for Diabetic Retinopathy and Macular Edema

Authors: Pablo Jimenez-Lizcano, Sergio Romero-Tapiador, Ruben Tolosana, Aythami Morales, Guillermo González de Rivera, Ruben Vera-Rodriguez, Julian Fierrez
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08235v2

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) and diabetic macular edema (DME) are leading causes of preventable blindness among working-age adults. Traditional approaches in the literature focus on standard color fundus photography (CFP) for the detection of these conditions. Nevertheless, recent ultra-widefield imaging (UWF) offers a significantly wider field of view in comparison to CFP. Motivated by this, the present study explores state-of-the-art deep learning (DL) methods and UWF imaging on three clinically relevant tasks: i) image quality assessment for UWF, ii) identification of referable diabetic retinopathy (RDR), and iii) identification of DME. Using the publicly available UWF4DR Challenge dataset, released as part of the MICCAI 2024 conference, we benchmark DL models in the spatial (RGB) and frequency domains, including popular convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as well as recent vision transformers (ViTs) and foundation models. In addition, we explore a final feature-level fusion to increase robustness. Finally, we also analyze the decisions of the DL models using Grad-CAM, increasing the explainability. Our proposal achieves consistently strong performance across all architectures, underscoring the competitiveness of emerging ViTs and foundation models and the promise of feature-level fusion and frequency-domain representations for UWF analysis.

---

### The Struggle Between Continuation and Refusal: A Mechanistic Analysis of the Continuation-Triggered Jailbreak in LLMs

Authors: Yonghong Deng, Zhen Yang, Ping Jian, Xinyue Zhang, Zhongbin Guo, Chengzhi Li, Junxi Yin
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08234v2

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), the safety of LLMs has become a critical concern. Despite significant efforts in safety alignment, current LLMs remain vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks. However, the root causes of such vulnerabilities are still poorly understood, necessitating a rigorous investigation into jailbreak mechanisms across both academic and industrial communities. In this work, we focus on a continuation-triggered jailbreak phenomenon, whereby simply relocating a continuation-triggered instruction suffix can substantially increase jailbreak success rates. To uncover the intrinsic mechanisms of this phenomenon, we conduct a comprehensive mechanistic interpretability analysis at the level of attention heads. Through causal interventions and activation scaling, we show that this jailbreak behavior primarily arises from an inherent competition between the model's intrinsic continuation drive and the safety defenses acquired through alignment training. Furthermore, we perform a detailed behavioral analysis of the identified safety-critical attention heads, revealing notable differences in the behaviors of safety heads across different model architectures. Grounded in these mechanistic findings, we propose Head Competition Steering (HCS), a mechanistically grounded inference-time strategy that explicitly leverages the competition between safety heads and continuation heads to suppress harmful generation, and further distill its behavioral signal into a student model via knowledge distillation, achieving inference-time safety improvements without additional computational overhead.

---

### The Struggle Between Continuation and Refusal: A Mechanistic Analysis of the Continuation-Triggered Jailbreak in LLMs

Authors: Yonghong Deng, Zhen Yang, Ping Jian, Xinyue Zhang, Zhongbin Guo, Chengzhi Li
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08234v1

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), the safety of LLMs has become a critical concern. Despite significant efforts in safety alignment, current LLMs remain vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks. However, the root causes of such vulnerabilities are still poorly understood, necessitating a rigorous investigation into jailbreak mechanisms across both academic and industrial communities. In this work, we focus on a continuation-triggered jailbreak phenomenon, whereby simply relocating a continuation-triggered instruction suffix can substantially increase jailbreak success rates. To uncover the intrinsic mechanisms of this phenomenon, we conduct a comprehensive mechanistic interpretability analysis at the level of attention heads. Through causal interventions and activation scaling, we show that this jailbreak behavior primarily arises from an inherent competition between the model's intrinsic continuation drive and the safety defenses acquired through alignment training. Furthermore, we perform a detailed behavioral analysis of the identified safety-critical attention heads, revealing notable differences in the functions and behaviors of safety heads across different model architectures. These findings provide a novel mechanistic perspective for understanding and interpreting jailbreak behaviors in LLMs, offering both theoretical insights and practical implications for improving model safety.

---

### Quantifying Cross-Lingual Transfer in Paralinguistic Speech Tasks

Authors: Pol Buitrago, Oriol Pareras, Federico Costa, Javier Hernando
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: eess.AS, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08231v1

Paralinguistic speech tasks are often considered relatively language-agnostic, as they rely on extralinguistic acoustic cues rather than lexical content. However, prior studies report performance degradation under cross-lingual conditions, indicating non-negligible language dependence. Still, these studies typically focus on isolated language pairs or task-specific settings, limiting comparability and preventing a systematic assessment of task-level language dependence. We introduce the Cross-Lingual Transfer Matrix (CLTM), a systematic method to quantify cross-lingual interactions between pairs of languages within a given task. We apply the CLTM to two paralinguistic tasks, gender identification and speaker verification, using a multilingual HuBERT-based encoder, to analyze how donor-language data affects target-language performance during fine-tuning. Our results reveal distinct transfer patterns across tasks and languages, reflecting systematic, language-dependent effects.

---

### Disentangling Reasoning in Large Audio-Language Models for Ambiguous Emotion Prediction

Authors: Xiaofeng Yu, Jiaheng Dong, Jean Honorio, Abhirup Ghosh, Hong Jia, Ting Dang
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI, eess.AS
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08230v1

Speech emotion recognition plays an important role in various applications. However, most existing approaches predict a single emotion label, oversimplifying the inherently ambiguous nature of human emotional expression. Recent large audio-language models show promise in generating richer outputs, but their reasoning ability for ambiguous emotional understanding remains limited. In this work, we reformulate ambiguous emotion recognition as a distributional reasoning problem and present the first systematic study of ambiguity-aware reasoning in LALMs. Our framework comprises two complementary components: an ambiguity-aware objective that aligns predictions with human perceptual distributions, and a structured ambiguity-aware chain-of-thought supervision that guides reasoning over emotional cues. Experiments on IEMOCAP and CREMA-D demonstrate consistent improvements across SFT, DPO, and GRPO training strategies.

---

### GarmentPainter: Efficient 3D Garment Texture Synthesis with Character-Guided Diffusion Model

Authors: Jinbo Wu, Xiaobo Gao, Xing Liu, Chen Zhao, Jialun Liu
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08228v1

Generating high-fidelity, 3D-consistent garment textures remains a challenging problem due to the inherent complexities of garment structures and the stringent requirement for detailed, globally consistent texture synthesis. Existing approaches either rely on 2D-based diffusion models, which inherently struggle with 3D consistency, require expensive multi-step optimization or depend on strict spatial alignment between 2D reference images and 3D meshes, which limits their flexibility and scalability. In this work, we introduce GarmentPainter, a simple yet efficient framework for synthesizing high-quality, 3D-aware garment textures in UV space. Our method leverages a UV position map as the 3D structural guidance, ensuring texture consistency across the garment surface during texture generation. To enhance control and adaptability, we introduce a type selection module, enabling fine-grained texture generation for specific garment components based on a character reference image, without requiring alignment between the reference image and the 3D mesh. GarmentPainter efficiently integrates all guidance signals into the input of a diffusion model in a spatially aligned manner, without modifying the underlying UNet architecture. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GarmentPainter achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of visual fidelity, 3D consistency, and computational efficiency, outperforming existing methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.

---

### SRNeRV: A Scale-wise Recursive Framework for Neural Video Representation

Authors: Jia Wang, Jun Zhu, Xinfeng Zhang
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08227v1

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for video representation and compression. However, existing multi-scale INR generators often suffer from significant parameter redundancy by stacking independent processing blocks for each scale. Inspired by the principle of scale self-similarity in the generation process, we propose SRNeRV, a novel scale-wise recursive framework that replaces this stacked design with a parameter-efficient shared architecture. The core of our approach is a hybrid sharing scheme derived from decoupling the processing block into a scale-specific spatial mixing module and a scale-invariant channel mixing module. We recursively apply the same shared channel mixing module, which contains the majority of the parameters, across all scales, significantly reducing the model size while preserving the crucial capacity to learn scale-specific spatial patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SRNeRV achieves a significant rate-distortion performance boost, especially in INR-friendly scenarios, validating that our sharing scheme successfully amplifies the core strengths of the INR paradigm.

---

### SAVE: Speech-Aware Video Representation Learning for Video-Text Retrieval

Authors: Ruixiang Zhao, Zhihao Xu, Bangxiang Lan, Zijie Xin, Jingyu Liu, Xirong Li
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08224v2

For video-text retrieval, the use of CLIP has been a de facto choice. Since CLIP provides only image and text encoders, this consensus has led to a biased paradigm that entirely ignores the sound track of videos. While several attempts have been made to reintroduce audio -- typically by incorporating an audio encoder and fusing its output with visual features -- these methods face two challenges: ineffective representation of speech content and suboptimal vision-audio fusion. To address these issues jointly, we propose SAVE, a Speech Aware Video rEpresentation learning method. SAVE improves upon AVIGATE, a SOTA audiovisual method, with a dedicated speech branch for more effective speech embedding. Furthermore, we introduce soft-ALBEF for early vision-audio alignment that facilitates fusion. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks show that SAVE compares favorably against the SOTA, outperforming AVIGATE by +4.1% on MSRVTT-9k, +1.9% on MSRVTT-7k, +2.5% on VATEX, +9.8% on Charades, and +2.1% on LSMDC, in light of the SumR metric.

---

### SplitAgent: A Privacy-Preserving Distributed Architecture for Enterprise-Cloud Agent Collaboration

Authors: Jianshu She
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08221v1

Enterprise adoption of cloud-based AI agents faces a fundamental privacy dilemma: leveraging powerful cloud models requires sharing sensitive data, while local processing limits capability. Current agent frameworks like MCP and A2A assume complete data sharing, making them unsuitable for enterprise environments with confidential information. We present SplitAgent, a novel distributed architecture that enables privacy-preserving collaboration between enterprise-side privacy agents and cloud-side reasoning agents. Our key innovation is context-aware dynamic sanitization that adapts privacy protection based on task semantics -- contract review requires different sanitization than code review or financial analysis. SplitAgent extends existing agent protocols with differential privacy guarantees, zero-knowledge tool verification, and privacy budget management. Through comprehensive experiments on enterprise scenarios, we demonstrate that SplitAgent achieves 83.8\% task accuracy while maintaining 90.1\% privacy protection, significantly outperforming static approaches (73.2\% accuracy, 79.7\% privacy). Context-aware sanitization improves task utility by 24.1\% over static methods while reducing privacy leakage by 67\%. Our architecture provides a practical path for enterprise AI adoption without compromising sensitive data.

---

### Wiener Chaos Expansion based Neural Operator for Singular Stochastic Partial Differential Equations

Authors: Dai Shi, Luke Thompson, Andi Han, Peiyan Hu, Junbin Gao, José Miguel Hernández-Lobato
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08219v1

In this paper, we explore how our recently developed Wiener Chaos Expansion (WCE)-based neural operator (NO) can be applied to singular stochastic partial differential equations, e.g., the dynamic $\boldsymbolΦ^4_2$ model simulated in the recent works. Unlike the previous WCE-NO which solves SPDEs by simply inserting Wick-Hermite features into the backbone NO model, we leverage feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM) to appropriately capture the dependency between the solution of singular SPDE and its smooth remainder. The resulting WCE-FiLM-NO shows excellent performance on $\boldsymbolΦ^4_2$, as measured by relative $L_2$ loss, out-of-distribution $L_2$ loss, and autocorrelation score; all without the help of renormalisation factor. In addition, we also show the potential of simulating $\boldsymbolΦ^4_3$ data, which is more aligned with real scientific practice in statistical quantum field theory. To the best of our knowledge, this is among the first works to develop an efficient data-driven surrogate for the dynamical $\boldsymbolΦ^4_3$ model.

---

### DualTurn: Learning Turn-Taking from Dual-Channel Generative Speech Pretraining

Authors: Shangeth Rajaa
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: eess.AS, cs.CL, cs.SD
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08216v1

Speech-to-speech models handle turn-taking naturally but offer limited support for tool-calling or complex reasoning, while production ASR-LLM-TTS voice pipelines offer these capabilities but rely on silence timeouts, which lead to unnatural turn-taking. We present DualTurn, which narrows this gap through generative pretraining on dual-channel conversational audio. The model generates both speakers' future audio autoregressively, implicitly learning conversational dynamics without any labels, and is then fine-tuned to predict interpretable turn-taking signals that map directly to agent actions. DualTurn monitors both channels continuously, anticipating turn boundaries and producing five agent actions. On standard benchmarks, DualTurn (0.5B) outperforms both VAP on agent action prediction (wF1 0.633 vs. 0.389) and a 3.1B audio-text model on word-level turn prediction (AUC 0.930 vs. 0.880), while anticipating turn boundaries earlier with fewer interruptions.

---

### Revisiting Gradient Staleness: Evaluating Distance Metrics for Asynchronous Federated Learning Aggregation

Authors: Patrick Wilhelm, Odej Kao
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08211v1

In asynchronous federated learning (FL), client devices send updates to a central server at varying times based on their computational speed, often using stale versions of the global model. This staleness can degrade the convergence and accuracy of the global model. Previous work, such as AsyncFedED, proposed an adaptive aggregation method using Euclidean distance to measure staleness. In this paper, we extend this approach by exploring alternative distance metrics to more accurately capture the effect of gradient staleness. We integrate these metrics into the aggregation process and evaluate their impact on convergence speed, model performance, and training stability under heterogeneous clients and non-IID data settings. Our results demonstrate that certain metrics lead to more robust and efficient asynchronous FL training, offering a stronger foundation for practical deployment.

---

### Video2LoRA: Unified Semantic-Controlled Video Generation via Per-Reference-Video LoRA

Authors: Zexi Wu, Baolu Li, Jing Dai, Yiming Zhang, Yue Ma, Qinghe Wang, Xu Jia, Hongming Xu
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08210v3

Achieving semantic alignment across diverse video generation conditions remains a significant challenge. Methods that rely on explicit structural guidance often enforce rigid spatial constraints that limit semantic flexibility, whereas models tailored for individual control types lack interoperability and adaptability. These design bottlenecks hinder progress toward flexible and efficient semantic video generation. To address this, we propose Video2LoRA, a scalable and generalizable framework for semantic-controlled video generation that conditions on a reference video. Video2LoRA employs a lightweight hypernetwork to predict personalized LoRA weights for each semantic input, which are combined with auxiliary matrices to form adaptive LoRA modules integrated into a frozen diffusion backbone. This design enables the model to generate videos consistent with the reference semantics while preserving key style and content variations, eliminating the need for any per-condition training. Notably, the final model weights less than 150MB, making it highly efficient for storage and deployment. Video2LoRA achieves coherent, semantically aligned generation across diverse conditions and exhibits strong zero-shot generalization to unseen semantics.

---

### Multi-Objective Evolutionary Optimization of Chance-Constrained Multiple-Choice Knapsack Problems with Implicit Probability Distributions

Authors: Xuanfeng Li, Shengcai Liu, Wenjie Chen, Yew-Soon Ong, Ke Tang
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.NE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08209v1

The multiple-choice knapsack problem (MCKP) is a classic combinatorial optimization with wide practical applications. This paper investigates a significant yet underexplored extension of MCKP: the multi-objective chance-constrained MCKP (MO-CCMCKP) under implicit probability distributions. The goal of the problem is to simultaneously minimize the total cost and maximize the confidence level of satisfying the capacity constraint, capturing essential trade-offs in domains like 5G network configuration. To address the computational challenge of evaluating chance constraints under implicit distributions, we first propose an order-preserving efficient resource allocation Monte Carlo (OPERA-MC) method. This approach adaptively allocates sampling resources to preserve dominance relationships while reducing evaluation time significantly. Further, we develop NHILS, a hybrid evolutionary algorithm that integrates specialized initialization and local search into NSGA-II to navigate sparse feasible regions. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks and real-world 5G network configuration benchmarks demonstrate that NHILS consistently outperforms several state-of-the-art multi-objective optimizers in convergence, diversity, and feasibility. The benchmark instances and source code will be made publicly available to facilitate research in this area.

---

### Alignment-Aware and Reliability-Gated Multimodal Fusion for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Detection Across Heterogeneous Thermal-Visual Sensors

Authors: Ishrat Jahan, Molla E Majid, M Murugappan, Muhammad E. H. Chowdhury, N. B. Prakash, Saad Bin Abul Kashem, Balamurugan Balusamy, Amith Khandakar
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08208v1

Reliable unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) detection is critical for autonomous airspace monitoring but remains challenging when integrating sensor streams that differ substantially in resolution, perspective, and field of view. Conventional fusion methods-such as wavelet-, Laplacian-, and decision-level approaches-often fail to preserve spatial correspondence across modalities and suffer from annotation of inconsistencies, limiting their robustness in real-world settings. This study introduces two fusion strategies, Registration-aware Guided Image Fusion (RGIF) and Reliability-Gated Modality-Attention Fusion (RGMAF), designed to overcome these limitations. RGIF employs Enhanced Correlation Coefficient (ECC)-based affine registration combined with guided filtering to maintain thermal saliency while enhancing structural detail. RGMAF integrates affine and optical-flow registration with a reliability-weighted attention mechanism that adaptively balances thermal contrast and visual sharpness. Experiments were conducted on the Multi-Sensor and Multi-View Fixed-Wing (MMFW)-UAV dataset comprising 147,417 annotated air-to-air frames collected from infrared, wide-angle, and zoom sensors. Among single-modality detectors, YOLOv10x demonstrated the most stable cross-domain performance and was selected as the detection backbone for evaluating fused imagery. RGIF improved the visual baseline by 2.13% mAP@50 (achieving 97.65%), while RGMAF attained the highest recall of 98.64%. These findings show that registration-aware and reliability-adaptive fusion provides a robust framework for integrating heterogeneous modalities, substantially enhancing UAV detection performance in multimodal environments.

---

### The Conundrum of Trustworthy Research on Attacking Personally Identifiable Information Removal Techniques

Authors: Sebastian Ochs, Ivan Habernal
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08207v1

Removing personally identifiable information (PII) from texts is necessary to comply with various data protection regulations and to enable data sharing without compromising privacy. However, recent works show that documents sanitized by PII removal techniques are vulnerable to reconstruction attacks. Yet, we suspect that the reported success of these attacks is largely overestimated. We critically analyze the evaluation of existing attacks and find that data leakage and data contamination are not properly mitigated, leaving the question whether or not PII removal techniques truly protect privacy in real-world scenarios unaddressed. We investigate possible data sources and attack setups that avoid data leakage and conclude that only truly private data can allow us to objectively evaluate vulnerabilities in PII removal techniques. However, access to private data is heavily restricted - and for good reasons - which also means that the public research community cannot address this problem in a transparent, reproducible, and trustworthy manner.

---

### Distributional Regression with Tabular Foundation Models: Evaluating Probabilistic Predictions via Proper Scoring Rules

Authors: Jonas Landsgesell, Pascal Knoll, Tizian Wenzel
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08206v5

Modern tabular foundation models such as TabPFN and TabICL naturally produce full predictive distributions, while the benchmarks used to evaluate them (TabArena, TALENT, and others) still rely almost exclusively on point-estimate metrics (RMSE, $R^2$). This mismatch implicitly rewards machine learning models or pipelines that elicit a good conditional mean while ignoring the quality of the predictive distribution. We make the case for using proper scoring rules for training, fine-tuning, and benchmarking (ranking) of tabular foundation models. Although all strictly proper scoring rules are theoretically equivalent at the population level, they may differ on finite data: We demonstrate analytically and empirically that different scoring rules can induce different inductive biases during finite-sample optimization, leading to different model performance. We validate this finding by running fine-tuning experiments with TabPFN and TabICL using different scoring rules for various data sets, revealing non-trivial interactions between training objectives and evaluation metrics. Our results show that practitioners can adapt tabular foundation models to task-specific scoring objectives, and that the choice of scoring rule can influence model behavior in practice.

---

### MM-TS: Multi-Modal Temperature and Margin Schedules for Contrastive Learning with Long-Tail Data

Authors: Siarhei Sheludzko, Dhimitrios Duka, Bernt Schiele, Hilde Kuehne, Anna Kukleva
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08202v1

Contrastive learning has become a fundamental approach in both uni-modal and multi-modal frameworks. This learning paradigm pulls positive pairs of samples closer while pushing negatives apart. In the uni-modal setting (e.g., image-based learning), previous research has shown that the strength of these forces can be controlled through the temperature parameter. In this work, we propose Multi-Modal Temperature and Margin Schedules (MM-TS), extending the concept of uni-modal temperature scheduling to multi-modal contrastive learning. Our method dynamically adjusts the temperature in the contrastive loss during training, modulating the attraction and repulsion forces in the multi-modal setting. Additionally, recognizing that standard multi-modal datasets often follow imbalanced, long-tail distributions, we adapt the temperature based on the local distribution of each training sample. Specifically, samples from dense clusters are assigned a higher temperature to better preserve their semantic structure. Furthermore, we demonstrate that temperature scheduling can be effectively integrated within a max-margin framework, thereby unifying the two predominant approaches in multi-modal contrastive learning: InfoNCE loss and max-margin objective. We evaluate our approach on four widely used image- and video-language datasets, Flickr30K, MSCOCO, EPIC-KITCHENS-100, and YouCook2, and show that our dynamic temperature and margin schedules improve performance and lead to new state-of-the-art results in the field.

---

### Fusion-Poly: A Polyhedral Framework Based on Spatial-Temporal Fusion for 3D Multi-Object Tracking

Authors: Xian Wu, Yitao Wu, Xiaoyu Li, Zijia Li, Lijun Zhao, Lining Sun
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08199v2

LiDAR-camera 3D multi-object tracking (MOT) combines rich visual semantics with accurate depth cues to improve trajectory consistency and tracking reliability. In practice, however, LiDAR and cameras operate at different sampling rates. To maintain temporal alignment, existing data pipelines usually synchronize heterogeneous sensor streams and annotate them at a reduced shared frequency, forcing most prior methods to perform spatial fusion only at synchronized timestamps through projection-based or learnable cross-sensor association. As a result, abundant asynchronous observations remain underexploited, despite their potential to support more frequent association and more robust trajectory estimation over short temporal intervals. To address this limitation, we propose Fusion-Poly, a spatial-temporal fusion framework for 3D MOT that integrates asynchronous LiDAR and camera data. Fusion-Poly associates trajectories with multi-modal observations at synchronized timestamps and with single-modal observations at asynchronous timestamps, enabling higher-frequency updates of motion and existence states. The framework contains three key components: a frequency-aware cascade matching module that adapts to synchronized and asynchronous frames according to available detection modalities; a frequency-aware trajectory estimation module that maintains trajectories through high-frequency motion prediction, differential updates, and confidence-calibrated lifecycle management; and a full-state observation alignment module that improves cross-modal consistency at synchronized timestamps by optimizing image-projection errors. On the nuScenes test set, Fusion-Poly achieves 76.5% AMOTA, establishing a new state of the art among tracking-by-detection 3D MOT methods. Extensive ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each component. Code will be released.

---

### Supporting Workflow Reproducibility by Linking Bioinformatics Tools across Papers and Executable Code

Authors: Clémence Sebe, Olivier Ferret, Aurélie Névéol, Mahdi Esmailoghli, Ulf Leser, Sarah Cohen-Boulakia
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08195v2

Motivation: The rapid growth of biological data has intensified the need for transparent, reproducible, and well-documented computational workflows. The ability to clearly connect the steps of a workflow in the code with their description in a paper would improve workflow comprehension, support reproducibility, and facilitate reuse. This task requires the linking of bioinformatics tools in workflow code with their mentions in a published workflow description. Results: We present CoPaLink, an automated approach that integrates three components: named entity recognition (NER) for identifying tool mentions in scientific text, NER for tool mentions in workflow code, and entity resolution based on word embedding similarity. We propose approaches for all three steps, achieving a high individual F1-measure (77 - 90) and a joint accuracy of 66 when evaluated on Nextflow workflows using Sentence-BERT. CoPaLink leverages corpora of scientific articles and workflow executable code with curated tool annotations to bridge the gap between narrative descriptions and workflow implementations. Availability: The code is available at https://gitlab.liris.cnrs.fr/sharefair/copalink-experiments and https://gitlab.liris.cnrs.fr/sharefair/copalink. The corpora are also available: CPL-Article (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20746904), CPL-Code (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20746970) and CPL-Gold-Entity-Resolution (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20746994).

---

### Sequential Service Region Design with Capacity-Constrained Investment and Spillover Effect

Authors: Tingting Chen, Feng Chu, Jiantong Zhang
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08188v1

Service region design determines the geographic coverage of service networks, shaping long-term operational performance. Capital and operational constraints preclude simultaneous large-scale deployment, requiring expansion to proceed sequentially. The resulting challenge is to determine when and where to invest under demand uncertainty, balancing intertemporal trade-offs between early and delayed investment and accounting for network effects whereby each deployment reshapes future demand through inter-regional connectivity. This study addresses a sequential service region design (SSRD) problem incorporating two practical yet underexplored factors: a $k$-region constraint that limits the number of regions investable per period and a stochastic spillover effect linking investment decisions to demand evolution. The resulting problem requires sequencing regional portfolios under uncertainty, leading to a combinatorial explosion in feasible investment sequences. To address this challenge, we propose a solution framework that integrates real options analysis (ROA) with a Transformer-based Proximal Policy Optimization (TPPO) algorithm. ROA evaluates the intertemporal option value of investment sequences, while TPPO learns sequential policies that directly generate high option-value sequences without exhaustive enumeration. Numerical experiments on realistic multi-region settings demonstrate that TPPO converges faster than benchmark DRL methods and consistently identifies sequences with superior option value. Case studies and sensitivity analyses further confirm robustness and provide insights on investment concurrency, regional prioritization, and the increasing benefits of adaptive expansion via our approach under stronger spillovers and dynamic market conditions.

---

### SERQ: Saliency-Aware Low-Rank Error Reconstruction for LLM Quantization

Authors: Yeonsik Park, Hyeonseong Kim, Seungkyu Choi
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08185v1

Post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as a prevailing technique for deploying large language models (LLMs) efficiently in terms of both memory and computation, across edge devices and server platforms. Existing PTQ methods primarily aim to reduce precision in weights and activations by mitigating quantization errors caused by channel-wise outlier activations (e.g., pre-quantization scaling, online transformations, or low-rank error reconstruction). Among these approaches, error reconstruction with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has proven particularly effective, as it introduces a lightweight auxiliary computation path without requiring heavy optimization or additional online layers. However, prior studies reveal severe accuracy degradation under W4A4 settings, and conventional low-rank adaptations rely on two sequential factors, necessitating intermediate quantization during inference and thereby limiting low-precision efficiency. In this work, we propose SERQ, a saliency-aware error reconstruction method for low-bit LLM inference that employs a single low-rank compensation matrix. SERQ preserves efficient 4-bit matrix multiplication in linear layers by jointly mitigating quantization errors arising from both activation and weight saliency through three stages: (1) static activation flattening, (2) saliency-aware error reconstruction, and (3) offline weight permutation. The method incurs additional computation only for low-rank error reconstruction via a single decomposition, while all other operations are performed offline, thereby keeping latency overhead minimal. Empirically, SERQ outperforms prior error reconstruction methods under both W4A8 and W4A4 settings, and achieves higher accuracy than state-of-the-art rotation-based W4A4 approaches, while substantially reducing calibration complexity.

---

### TildeOpen LLM: Leveraging Curriculum Learning to Achieve Equitable Language Representation

Authors: Toms Bergmanis, Martins Kronis, Ingus Jānis Pretkalniņš, Dāvis Nicmanis, Jeļizaveta Jelinska, Roberts Rozis, Rinalds Vīksna, Mārcis Pinnis
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08182v2

Large language models often underperform in many European languages due to the dominance of English and a few high-resource languages in training data. This paper presents TildeOpen LLM, a 30-billion-parameter open-weight foundational model trained for 34 European languages to promote linguistic equity and improve performance for low-resource languages. To address the data imbalance, we combine dataset upsampling with a curriculum-based training schedule that alternates between uniform and natural language distributions. The resulting model performs favorably compared to other multilingual LLMs despite being trained with significantly fewer computing resources. Evaluation across multiple multilingual benchmarks shows that TildeOpen surpasses existing open-weight models in text generation and comprehension, particularly for Baltic, Finno-Ugric, and Slavic languages. Human evaluations confirm an up to tenfold reduction in linguistic errors relative to leading baselines. The model and associated resources are fully open-weight and publicly available at huggingface.co/TildeAI/TildeOpen-30b. These outcomes demonstrate that careful data curation and balanced training strategies can substantially enhance multilingual model quality without increasing model size or training volume.

---

### AutoAdapt: An Automated Domain Adaptation Framework for LLMs

Authors: Sidharth Sinha, Anson Bastos, Xuchao Zhang, Akshay Nambi, Chetan Bansal, Saravan Rajmohan
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08181v1

Large language models (LLMs) excel in open domains but struggle in specialized settings with limited data and evolving knowledge. Existing domain adaptation practices rely heavily on manual trial-and-error processes, incur significant hyperparameter complexity, and are highly sensitive to data and user preferences, all under the high cost of LLM training. Moreover, the interactions and transferability of hyperparameter choices across models/domains remain poorly understood, making adaptation gains uncertain even with substantial effort. To solve these challenges, we present AutoAdapt, a novel end-to-end automated framework for efficient and reliable LLM domain adaptation. AutoAdapt leverages curated knowledge bases from literature and open-source resources to reduce expert intervention. To narrow the search space, we design a novel multi-agent debating system in which proposal and critic agents iteratively interact to align user intent and incorporate data signals and best practices into the planning process. To optimize hyperparameters under tight budgets, we propose AutoRefine, a novel LLM-based surrogate that replaces costly black-box search. Across 10 tasks, AutoAdapt achieves a 25% average relative accuracy improvement over state-of-the-art Automated Machine Learning baselines with minimal overhead.

---

### ALOOD: Exploiting Language Representations for LiDAR-based Out-of-Distribution Object Detection

Authors: Michael Kösel, Marcel Schreiber, Michael Ulrich, Claudius Gläser, Klaus Dietmayer
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08180v1

LiDAR-based 3D object detection plays a critical role for reliable and safe autonomous driving systems. However, existing detectors often produce overly confident predictions for objects not belonging to known categories, posing significant safety risks. This is caused by so-called out-of-distribution (OOD) objects, which were not part of the training data, resulting in incorrect predictions. To address this challenge, we propose ALOOD (Aligned LiDAR representations for Out-Of-Distribution Detection), a novel approach that incorporates language representations from a vision-language model (VLM). By aligning the object features from the object detector to the feature space of the VLM, we can treat the detection of OOD objects as a zero-shot classification task. We demonstrate competitive performance on the nuScenes OOD benchmark, establishing a novel approach to OOD object detection in LiDAR using language representations. The source code is available at https://github.com/uulm-mrm/mmood3d.

---

### Privacy-Preserving End-to-End Full-Duplex Speech Dialogue Models

Authors: Nikita Kuzmin, Tao Zhong, Jiajun Deng, Yingke Zhu, Tristan Tsoi, Tianxiang Cao, Simon Lui, Kong Aik Lee, Eng Siong Chng
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: eess.AS, cs.AI, eess.SP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08179v1

End-to-end full-duplex speech models feed user audio through an always-on LLM backbone, yet the speaker privacy implications of their hidden representations remain unexamined. Following the VoicePrivacy 2024 protocol with a lazy-informed attacker, we show that the hidden states of SALM-Duplex and Moshi leak substantial speaker identity across all transformer layers. Layer-wise and turn-wise analyses reveal that leakage persists across all layers, with SALM-Duplex showing stronger leakage in early layers while Moshi leaks uniformly, and that Linkability rises sharply within the first few turns. We propose two streaming anonymization setups using Stream-Voice-Anon: a waveform-level front-end (Anon-W2W) and a feature-domain replacement (Anon-W2F). Anon-W2F raises EER by over 3.5x relative to the discrete encoder baseline (11.2% to 41.0%), approaching the 50% random-chance ceiling, while Anon-W2W retains 78-93% of baseline sBERT across setups with sub-second response latency (FRL under 0.8 s).

---

### Is continuous CoT better suited for multi-lingual reasoning?

Authors: Ali Hamza Bashir, Behzad Shomali, Markus Frey, Mehdi Ali, Rafet Sifa, David Berghaus
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08177v1

We investigate whether performing reasoning in a continuous latent space leads to more robust multilingual capabilities. We compare Continuous Chain-of-Thought (using the CODI framework) against standard supervised fine-tuning across five typologically diverse languages: English, Chinese, German, French, and Urdu. Our experiments on GSM8k and CommonsenseQA demonstrate that continuous reasoning significantly outperforms explicit reasoning on low-resource languages, particularly in zero-shot settings where the target language was not seen during training. Additionally, this approach achieves extreme efficiency, compressing reasoning traces by approximately $29\times$ to $50\times$. These findings indicate that continuous latent representations naturally exhibit greater language invariance, offering a scalable solution for cross-lingual reasoning.

---

### MERLIN: Building Low-SNR Robust Multimodal LLMs for Electromagnetic Signals

Authors: Junyu Shen, Zhendong She, Chenghanyu Zhang, Yuchuang Sun, Luqing Luo, Dingwei Tan, Zonghao Guo, Bo Guo, Zehua Han, Wupeng Xie, Yaxin Mu, Peng Zhang et al.
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08174v2

The paradigm of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offers a promising blueprint for advancing the electromagnetic (EM) domain. However, prevailing approaches often deviate from the native MLLM paradigm, instead using task-specific or pipelined architectures that lead to fundamental limitations in model performance and generalization. Fully realizing the MLLM potential in EM domain requires overcoming three main challenges: (1) Data. The scarcity of high-quality datasets with paired EM signals and descriptive text annotations used for MLLMs pre-training; (2) Benchmark. The absence of comprehensive benchmarks to systematically evaluate and compare the performance of models on EM signal-to-text tasks; (3) Model. A critical fragility in low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) environments, where critical signal features can be obscured, leading to significant performance degradation. To address these challenges, we introduce a tripartite contribution to establish a foundation for MLLMs in the EM domain. First, to overcome data scarcity, we construct and release EM-100k, a large-scale dataset comprising over 100,000 EM signal-text pairs. Second, to enable rigorous and standardized evaluation, we propose EM-Bench, the most comprehensive benchmark featuring diverse downstream tasks spanning from perception to reasoning. Finally, to tackle the core modeling challenge, we present MERLIN, a novel training framework designed not only to align low-level signal representations with high-level semantic text, but also to explicitly enhance model robustness and performance in challenging low-SNR environments. Comprehensive experiments validate our method, showing that MERLIN is state-of-the-art in the EM-Bench and exhibits remarkable robustness in low-SNR settings.

---

### Evolution Strategy-Based Calibration for Low-Bit Quantization of Speech Models

Authors: Lucas Rakotoarivony
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08173v2

Quantization has become essential for the efficient deployment of speech processing systems. Although widely studied, most existing quantization methods were developed for vision and NLP architectures, while the specific challenges of audio signals remain largely overlooked. In particular, we show that audio activations can exhibit large calibration ranges, leading to significant information loss when standard calibration techniques are applied. To address this, we propose ESC, an Evolution Strategy-based Calibration method that formulates activation scaling as an optimization problem and solves it using a two-step local-global scheme driven by an evolution strategy. ESC enables unaltered performance under full INT8 quantization and is the first calibration method to achieve near-lossless performance for full INT4 quantization across multiple speech tasks. Integrating ESC with PTQ methods further reduces performance loss, achieving a 1% relative accuracy degradation on the AST model.

---

### Evidence-Driven Reasoning for Industrial Maintenance Using Heterogeneous Data

Authors: Fearghal O'Donncha, Nianjun Zhou, Natalia Martinez, James T Rayfield, Fenno F. Heath, Abigail Langbridge, Roman Vaculin
Published: 2026-03-09
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08171v1

Industrial maintenance platforms contain rich but fragmented evidence, including free-text work orders, heterogeneous operational sensors or indicators, and structured failure knowledge. These sources are often analyzed in isolation, producing alerts or forecasts that do not support conditional decision-making: given this asset history and behavior, what is happening and what action is warranted? We present Condition Insight Agent, a deployed decision-support framework that integrates maintenance language, behavioral abstractions of operational data, and engineering failure semantics to produce evidence-grounded explanations and advisory actions. The system constrains reasoning through deterministic evidence construction and structured failure knowledge, and applies a rule-based verification loop to suppress unsupported conclusions. Case studies from production CMMS deployments show that this verification-first design operates reliably under heterogeneous and incomplete data while preserving human oversight. Our results demonstrate how constrained LLM-based reasoning can function as a governed decision-support layer for industrial maintenance.

---