# Research Papers — 2026-03 · bundle page 224 of 243 > Full-text markdown of papers #11151–11200 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/224 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-03/page/223.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-03/page/225.md) ### Reinforcement Learning with Symbolic Reward Machines Authors: Thomas Krug, Daniel Neider Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03068v1 Reward Machines (RMs) are an established mechanism in Reinforcement Learning (RL) to represent and learn sparse, temporally extended tasks with non-Markovian rewards. RMs rely on high-level information in the form of labels that are emitted by the environment alongside the observation. However, this concept requires manual user input for each environment and task. The user has to create a suitable labeling function that computes the labels. These limitations lead to poor applicability in widely adopted RL frameworks. We propose Symbolic Reward Machines (SRMs) together with the learning algorithms QSRM and LSRM to overcome the limitations of RMs. SRMs consume only the standard output of the environment and process the observation directly through guards that are represented by symbolic formulas. In our evaluation, our SRM methods outperform the baseline RL approaches and generate the same results as the existing RM methods. At the same time, our methods adhere to the widely used environment definition and provide interpretable representations of the task to the user. --- ### EduVQA: Towards Concept-Aware Assessment of Educational AI-Generated Videos Authors: Baoliang Chen, Xinlong Bu, Hanwei Zhu, Lingyu Zhu, Jieyu Zhan Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03066v3 Existing AI-generated video quality assessment (AIGVQA) methods mainly focus on global perceptual realism and coarse text-video alignment, while overlooking a critical requirement in educational scenarios: concept correctness. In early mathematics education, subtle errors in numerical quantities, geometric relations, or spatial configurations may fundamentally alter the conveyed knowledge despite visually plausible generation. To address this problem, we introduce EduAVQABench, the first benchmark for concept-aware educational AIGV assessment, containing 1,130 videos generated by ten state-of-the-art T2V models together with over 310,650 fine-grained human annotations spanning perceptual quality and semantic alignment. Built upon this benchmark, we further propose EduVQA, a concept-aware AIGVQA framework equipped with a Structured 2D Mixture-of-Experts (S2D-MoE) architecture. By jointly modeling fine-grained concept assessment and overall quality prediction through shared experts and adaptive two-dimensional routing, EduVQA effectively captures subtle concept-level inconsistencies overlooked by conventional global scoring methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EduVQA consistently outperforms existing AIGVQA approaches across both perceptual and semantic evaluation tasks while exhibiting strong generalization capability on unseen benchmarks. Code and dataset will be publicly available at: https://github.com/EduVQA/EduVQA. --- ### Incremental Graph Construction Enables Robust Spectral Clustering of Texts Authors: Marko Pranjić, Boshko Koloski, Nada Lavrač, Senja Pollak, Marko Robnik-Šikonja Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03056v2 Neighborhood graphs are a critical but often fragile step in spectral clustering of text embeddings. On realistic text datasets, standard $k$-NN graphs can contain many disconnected components at practical sparsity levels (small $k$), making spectral clustering degenerate and sensitive to hyperparameters. We introduce a simple incremental $k$-NN graph construction that preserves connectivity by design: each new node is linked to its $k$ nearest previously inserted nodes, which guarantees a connected graph for any $k$. We provide an inductive proof of connectedness and discuss implications for incremental updates when new documents arrive. We validate the approach on spectral clustering of SentenceTransformer embeddings using Laplacian eigenmaps across six clustering datasets from the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark. Compared to standard $k$-NN graphs, our method outperforms in the low-$k$ regime where disconnected components are prevalent, and matches standard $k$-NN at larger $k$. --- ### PrivMedChat: End-to-End Differentially Private RLHF for Medical Dialogue Systems Authors: Sudip Bhujel Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03054v2 Large language models are increasingly used for patient-facing medical assistance and clinical decision support, but adapting them to clinical dialogue often requires supervision derived from doctor-patient conversations that may contain sensitive information. Conventional supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) can amplify memorization, enabling membership inference and disclosure of rare training-set details. We present PrivMedChat (Private Medical Chat), an end-to-end framework for differentially private RLHF (DP-RLHF) for medical dialogue systems. Our approach enforces differential privacy at each training stage that accesses dialogue-derived supervision, combining DP-SGD for supervised fine-tuning and reward model learning from preference pairs, and DP-aware policy optimization for alignment. To avoid costly clinician labeling, we introduce an annotation-free preference construction strategy that pairs physician responses with filtered non-expert generations. We evaluate PrivMedChat across medical dialogue tasks and assess utility, safety, and privacy under consistent privacy accounting, thereby providing a practical pathway to align medical chatbots while offering formal privacy guarantees. We open-source our code at https://github.com/sudip-bhujel/privmedchat. --- ### TrustMH-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating the Trustworthiness of Large Language Models in Mental Health Authors: Zixin Xiong, Ziteng Wang, Haotian Fan, Xinjie Zhang, Wenxuan Wang Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03047v1 While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate significant potential in providing accessible mental health support, their practical deployment raises critical trustworthiness concerns due to the domains high-stakes and safety-sensitive nature. Existing evaluation paradigms for general-purpose LLMs fail to capture mental health-specific requirements, highlighting an urgent need to prioritize and enhance their trustworthiness. To address this, we propose TrustMH-Bench, a holistic framework designed to systematically quantify the trustworthiness of mental health LLMs. By establishing a deep mapping from domain-specific norms to quantitative evaluation metrics, TrustMH-Bench evaluates models across eight core pillars: Reliability, Crisis Identification and Escalation, Safety, Fairness, Privacy, Robustness, Anti-sycophancy, and Ethics. We conduct extensive experiments across six general-purpose LLMs and six specialized mental health models. Experimental results indicate that the evaluated models underperform across various trustworthiness dimensions in mental health scenarios, revealing significant deficiencies. Notably, even generally powerful models (e.g., GPT-5.1) fail to maintain consistently high performance across all dimensions. Consequently, systematically improving the trustworthiness of LLMs has become a critical task. Our data and code are released. --- ### QFlowNet: Fast, Diverse, and Efficient Unitary Synthesis with Generative Flow Networks Authors: Inhoe Koo, Hyunho Cha, Jungwoo Lee Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: quant-ph, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03045v2 Unitary Synthesis, the decomposition of a unitary matrix into a sequence of quantum gates, is a fundamental challenge in quantum compilation. Prevailing reinforcement learning (RL) approaches are often hampered by sparse reward signals, which necessitate complex reward shaping or long training times, and typically converge to a single policy, lacking solution diversity. In this work, we propose QFlowNet, a novel framework that learns efficiently from sparse signals by pairing a Generative Flow Network (GFlowNet) with Transformers. Our approach addresses two key challenges. First, the GFlowNet framework is fundamentally designed to learn a diverse policy that samples solutions proportional to their reward, overcoming the single-solution limitation of RL while offering faster inference than other generative models like diffusion. Second, the Transformers act as a powerful encoder, capturing the non-local structure of unitary matrices and compressing a high-dimensional state into a dense latent representation for the policy network. Our agent achieves an overall success rate of 99.7% on a 3-qubit benchmark(lengths 1-12) and discovers a diverse set of compact circuits, establishing QFlowNet as an efficient and diverse paradigm for unitary synthesis. --- ### IoUCert: Robustness Verification for Anchor-based Object Detectors Authors: Benedikt Brückner, Alejandro J. Mercado, Yanghao Zhang, Panagiotis Kouvaros, Alessio Lomuscio Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CR, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03043v3 While formal robustness verification has seen significant success in image classification, scaling these guarantees to object detection remains notoriously difficult due to complex non-linear coordinate transformations and Intersection-over-Union (IoU) metrics. As a fundamental step towards verifying complete detection pipelines, we introduce IoUCert, a novel formal verification framework designed specifically to overcome these core mathematical bottlenecks. By isolating the object localisation task in single-object settings, we propose a coordinate transformation that circumvents precision-degrading relaxations of non-linear box prediction functions. This approach allows us to optimise bounds directly with respect to anchor box offsets, enabling a novel Interval Bound Propagation method that derives optimal IoU bounds. We demonstrate that IoUCert enables, for the first time, the robustness verification of foundational, anchor-based architectures including tractable variants of SSD, YOLOv2, and YOLOv3 against various input perturbations, providing a rigorous theoretical basis for future end-to-end detector verification. --- ### cPNN: Continuous Progressive Neural Networks for Evolving Streaming Time Series Authors: Federico Giannini, Giacomo Ziffer, Emanuele Della Valle Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03040v1 Dealing with an unbounded data stream involves overcoming the assumption that data is identically distributed and independent. A data stream can, in fact, exhibit temporal dependencies (i.e., be a time series), and data can change distribution over time (concept drift). The two problems are deeply discussed, and existing solutions address them separately: a joint solution is absent. In addition, learning multiple concepts implies remembering the past (a.k.a. avoiding catastrophic forgetting in Neural Networks' terminology). This work proposes Continuous Progressive Neural Networks (cPNN), a solution that tames concept drifts, handles temporal dependencies, and bypasses catastrophic forgetting. cPNN is a continuous version of Progressive Neural Networks, a methodology for remembering old concepts and transferring past knowledge to fit the new concepts quickly. We base our method on Recurrent Neural Networks and exploit the Stochastic Gradient Descent applied to data streams with temporal dependencies. Results of an ablation study show a quick adaptation of cPNN to new concepts and robustness to drifts. --- ### Generalized Bayes for Causal Inference Authors: Emil Javurek, Dennis Frauen, Yuxin Wang, Stefan Feuerriegel Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03035v1 Uncertainty quantification is central to many applications of causal machine learning, yet principled Bayesian inference for causal effects remains challenging. Standard Bayesian approaches typically require specifying a probabilistic model for the data-generating process, including high-dimensional nuisance components such as propensity scores and outcome regressions. Standard posteriors are thus vulnerable to strong modeling choices, including complex prior elicitation. In this paper, we propose a generalized Bayesian framework for causal inference. Our framework avoids explicit likelihood modeling; instead, we place priors directly on the causal estimands and update these using an identification-driven loss function, which yields generalized posteriors for causal effects. As a result, our framework turns existing loss-based causal estimators into estimators with full uncertainty quantification. Our framework is flexible and applicable to a broad range of causal estimands (e.g., ATE, CATE). Further, our framework can be applied on top of state-of-the-art causal machine learning pipelines (e.g., Neyman-orthogonal meta-learners). For Neyman-orthogonal losses, we show that the generalized posteriors converge to their oracle counterparts and remain robust to first-stage nuisance estimation error. With calibration, we thus obtain valid frequentist uncertainty even when nuisance estimators converge at slower-than-parametric rates. Empirically, we demonstrate that our proposed framework offers causal effect estimation with calibrated uncertainty across several causal inference settings. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first flexible framework for constructing generalized Bayesian posteriors for causal machine learning. --- ### Step-Level Sparse Autoencoder for Reasoning Process Interpretation Authors: Xuan Yang, Jiayu Liu, Yuhang Lai, Hao Xu, Zhenya Huang, Ning Miao Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03031v3 Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong complex reasoning capabilities through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, their reasoning patterns remain too complicated to analyze. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for interpretability, existing approaches predominantly operate at the token level, creating a granularity mismatch when capturing more critical step-level information, such as reasoning direction and semantic transitions. In this work, we propose step-level sparse autoencoder (SSAE), which serves as an analytical tool to disentangle different aspects of LLMs' reasoning steps into sparse features. Specifically, by precisely controlling the sparsity of a step feature conditioned on its context, we form an information bottleneck in step reconstruction, which splits incremental information from background information and disentangles it into several sparsely activated dimensions. Experiments on multiple base models and reasoning tasks show the effectiveness of the extracted features. By linear probing, we can easily predict surface-level information, such as generation length and first token distribution, as well as more complicated properties, such as the correctness and logicality of the step. These observations indicate that LLMs should already at least partly know about these properties during generation, which provides the foundation for the self-verification ability of LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/Miaow-Lab/SSAE. --- ### BRIGHT: A Collaborative Generalist-Specialist Foundation Model for Breast Pathology Authors: Xiaojing Guo, Jiatai Lin, Yumian Jia, Jingqi Huang, Zeyan Xu, Weidong Li, Longfei Wang, Jingjing Chen, Qin Li, Weiwei Wang, Lifang Cui, Wen Yue et al. Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03030v2 Generalist pathology foundation models (PFMs), pretrained on large-scale multi-organ datasets, have demonstrated remarkable predictive capabilities across diverse clinical applications. However, their proficiency on the full spectrum of clinically essential tasks within a specific organ system remains an open question due to the lack of large-scale validation cohorts for a single organ as well as the absence of a tailored training paradigm that can effectively translate broad histomorphological knowledge into the organ-specific expertise required for specialist-level interpretation. In this study, we propose BRIGHT, the first PFM specifically designed for breast pathology, trained on over 51,000 breast whole-slide images derived from a cohort of over 40,000 patients across 19 hospitals. BRIGHT employs a collaborative generalist-specialist framework to capture both universal and organ-specific features. To comprehensively evaluate the performance of PFMs on breast oncology, we curate the largest multi-institutional cohorts to date for downstream task development and evaluation, comprising over 25,000 WSIs across 10 hospitals. The validation cohorts cover the full spectrum of breast pathology across 25 distinct clinical tasks spanning diagnosis, biomarker prediction, treatment response and survival prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BRIGHT outperforms five leading generalist PFMs, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in 25 of 25 internal validation tasks and in 4 of 11 external validation tasks with excellent heatmap interpretability. By evaluating on large-scale validation cohorts, this study not only demonstrates BRIGHT's clinical utility in breast oncology but also validates a collaborative generalist-specialist paradigm, providing a scalable template for developing PFMs on a specific organ system, accelerating the translation of foundation models into ... --- ### Any Resolution Any Geometry: From Multi-View To Multi-Patch Authors: Wenqing Cui, Zhenyu Li, Mykola Lavreniuk, Jian Shi, Ramzi Idoughi, Xiangjun Tang, Peter Wonka Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03026v1 Joint estimation of surface normals and depth is essential for holistic 3D scene understanding, yet high-resolution prediction remains difficult due to the trade-off between preserving fine local detail and maintaining global consistency. To address this challenge, we propose the Ultra Resolution Geometry Transformer (URGT), which adapts the Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) into a unified multi-patch transformer for monocular high-resolution depth--normal estimation. A single high-resolution image is partitioned into patches that are augmented with coarse depth and normal priors from pre-trained models, and jointly processed in a single forward pass to predict refined geometric outputs. Global coherence is enforced through cross-patch attention, which enables long-range geometric reasoning and seamless propagation of information across patches within a shared backbone. To further enhance spatial robustness, we introduce a GridMix patch sampling strategy that probabilistically samples grid configurations during training, improving inter-patch consistency and generalization. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on UnrealStereo4K, jointly improving depth and normal estimation, reducing AbsRel from 0.0582 to 0.0291, RMSE from 2.17 to 1.31, and lowering mean angular error from 23.36 degrees to 18.51 degrees, while producing sharper and more stable geometry. The proposed multi-patch framework also demonstrates strong zero-shot and cross-domain generalization and scales effectively to very high resolutions, offering an efficient and extensible solution for high-quality geometry refinement. --- ### MA-CoNav: A Master-Slave Multi-Agent Framework with Hierarchical Collaboration and Dual-Level Reflection for Long-Horizon Embodied VLN Authors: Ling Luo, Qianqian Bai Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03024v1 Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) aims to empower robots with the ability to perform long-horizon navigation in unfamiliar environments based on complex linguistic instructions. Its success critically hinges on establishing an efficient ``language-understanding -- visual-perception -- embodied-execution'' closed loop. Existing methods often suffer from perceptual distortion and decision drift in complex, long-distance tasks due to the cognitive overload of a single agent. Inspired by distributed cognition theory, this paper proposes MA-CoNav, a Multi-Agent Collaborative Navigation framework. This framework adopts a ``Master-Slave'' hierarchical agent collaboration architecture, decoupling and distributing the perception, planning, execution, and memory functions required for navigation tasks to specialized agents. Specifically, the Master Agent is responsible for global orchestration, while the Subordinate Agent group collaborates through a clear division of labor: an Observation Agent generates environment descriptions, a Planning Agent performs task decomposition and dynamic verification, an Execution Agent handles simultaneous mapping and action, and a Memory Agent manages structured experiences. Furthermore, the framework introduces a ``Local-Global'' dual-stage reflection mechanism to dynamically optimize the entire navigation pipeline. Empirical experiments were conducted using a real-world indoor dataset collected by a Limo Pro robot, with no scene-specific fine-tuning performed on the models throughout the process. The results demonstrate that MA-CoNav comprehensively outperforms existing mainstream VLN methods across multiple metrics. --- ### SEHFS: Structural Entropy-Guided High-Order Correlation Learning for Multi-View Multi-Label Feature Selection Authors: Cheng Peng, Yonghao Li, Wanfu Gao, Jie Wen, Weiping Ding Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03022v1 In recent years, multi-view multi-label learning (MVML) has attracted extensive attention due to its close alignment to real-world scenarios. Information-theoretic methods have gained prominence for learning nonlinear correlations. However, two key challenges persist: first, features in real-world data commonly exhibit high-order structural correlations, but existing information-theoretic methods struggle to learn such correlations; second, commonly relying on heuristic optimization, information-theoretic methods are prone to converging to local optima. To address these two challenges, we propose a novel method called Structural Entropy Guided High-Order Correlation Learning for Multi-View Multi-Label Feature Selection (SEHFS). The core idea of SEHFS is to convert the feature graph into a structural-entropy-minimizing encoding tree, quantifying the information cost of high-order dependencies and thus learning high-order feature correlations beyond pairwise correlations. Specifically, features exhibiting strong high-order redundancy are grouped into a single cluster within the encoding tree, while inter-cluster feaeture correlations are minimized, thereby eliminating redundancy both within and across clusters. Furthermore, a new framework based on the fusion of information theory and matrix methods is adopted, which learns a shared semantic matrix and view-specific contribution matrices to reconstruct a global view matrix, thereby enhancing the information-theoretic method and balancing the global and local optimization. The ability of structural entropy to learn high-order correlations is theoretically established, and and both experiments on eight datasets from various domains and ablation studies demonstrate that SEHFS achieves superior performance in feature selection. --- ### REGAL: A Registry-Driven Architecture for Deterministic Grounding of Agentic AI in Enterprise Telemetry Authors: Yuvraj Agrawal Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03018v1 Enterprise engineering organizations produce high-volume, heterogeneous telemetry from version control systems, CI/CD pipelines, issue trackers, and observability platforms. Large Language Models (LLMs) enable new forms of agentic automation, but grounding such agents on private telemetry raises three practical challenges: limited model context, locally defined semantic concepts, and evolving metric interfaces. We present REGAL, a registry-driven architecture for deterministic grounding of agentic AI systems in enterprise telemetry. REGAL adopts an explicitly architectural approach: deterministic telemetry computation is treated as a first-class primitive, and LLMs operate over a bounded, version-controlled action space rather than raw event streams. The architecture combines (1) a Medallion ELT pipeline that produces replayable, semantically compressed Gold artifacts, and (2) a registry-driven compilation layer that synthesizes Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools from declarative metric definitions. The registry functions as an "interface-as-code" layer, ensuring alignment between tool specification and execution, mitigating tool drift, and embedding governance policies directly at the semantic boundary. A prototype implementation and case study validate the feasibility of deterministic grounding and illustrate its implications for latency, token efficiency, and operational governance. This work systematizes an architectural pattern for enterprise LLM grounding; it does not propose new learning algorithms, but rather elevates deterministic computation and semantic compilation to first-class design primitives for agentic systems. --- ### Breaking the Prototype Bias Loop: Confidence-Aware Federated Contrastive Learning for Highly Imbalanced Clients Authors: Tian-Shuang Wu, Shen-Huan Lyu, Ning Chen, Yi-Xiao He, Bing Tang, Baoliu Ye, Qingfu Zhang Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.LG, cs.DC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03007v1 Local class imbalance and data heterogeneity across clients often trap prototype-based federated contrastive learning in a prototype bias loop: biased local prototypes induced by imbalanced data are aggregated into biased global prototypes, which are repeatedly reused as contrastive anchors, accumulating errors across communication rounds. To break this loop, we propose Confidence-Aware Federated Contrastive Learning (CAFedCL), a novel framework that improves the prototype aggregation mechanism and strengthens the contrastive alignment guided by prototypes. CAFedCL employs a confidence-aware aggregation mechanism that leverages predictive uncertainty to downweight high-variance local prototypes. In addition, generative augmentation for minority classes and geometric consistency regularization are integrated to stabilize the structure between classes. From a theoretical perspective, we provide an expectation-based analysis showing that our aggregation reduces estimation variance, thereby bounding global prototype drift and ensuring convergence. Extensive experiments under varying levels of class imbalance and data heterogeneity demonstrate that CAFedCL consistently outperforms representative federated baselines in both accuracy and client fairness. --- ### OrchMAS: Orchestrated Reasoning with Multi Collaborative Heterogeneous Scientific Expert Structured Agents Authors: Yichao Feng, Haoran Luo, Zhenghong Lin, Yiqun Sun, Pengfei Wei, Lawrence B. Hsieh, Anh Tuan Luu Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03005v1 Multi-agent large language model frameworks are promising for complex multi step reasoning, yet existing systems remain weak for scientific and knowledge intensive domains due to static prompts and agent roles, rigid workflows, and homogeneous model reliance, leading to poor domain adaptation, limited reasoning flexibility, and high latency on heterogeneous or long-horizon scientific tasks. They also struggle to revise earlier decisions when intermediate reasoning diverges, reducing reliability in structured and calculation heavy settings. To address these limitations, we propose a scientific domain oriented interactive two tier multi model orchestration framework. A dedicated orchestration model analyzes each task, dynamically constructs a domain aware reasoning pipeline, and instantiates specialized expert agents with tailored prompts, while an execution model performs each step under generated role and instruction specifications. The orchestrator iteratively updates the pipeline based on intermediate feedback, enabling dynamic replanning, role reallocation, and prompt refinement across multi turn interactions, strengthening robustness and specialization for scientific reasoning through structured heterogeneous model collaboration. The framework is model agnostic and supports heterogeneous LLM integration with different capacities or costs, enabling flexible performance efficiency trade offs in practical scientific deployments. Experiments show consistent improvements over existing multi agent systems and strong baselines across diverse reasoning and scientific style benchmarks. --- ### SpatialText: A Pure-Text Cognitive Benchmark for Spatial Understanding in Large Language Models Authors: Peiyao Jiang, Zequn Qin, Xi Li Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03002v1 Genuine spatial reasoning relies on the capacity to construct and manipulate coherent internal spatial representations, often conceptualized as mental models, rather than merely processing surface linguistic associations. While large language models exhibit advanced capabilities across various domains, existing benchmarks fail to isolate this intrinsic spatial cognition from statistical language heuristics. Furthermore, multimodal evaluations frequently conflate genuine spatial reasoning with visual perception. To systematically investigate whether models construct flexible spatial mental models, we introduce SpatialText, a theory-driven diagnostic framework. Rather than functioning simply as a dataset, SpatialText isolates text-based spatial reasoning through a dual-source methodology. It integrates human-annotated descriptions of real 3D indoor environments, which capture natural ambiguities, perspective shifts, and functional relations, with code-generated, logically precise scenes designed to probe formal spatial deduction and epistemic boundaries. Systematic evaluation across state-of-the-art models reveals fundamental representational limitations. Although models demonstrate proficiency in retrieving explicit spatial facts and operating within global, allocentric coordinate systems, they exhibit critical failures in egocentric perspective transformation and local reference frame reasoning. These systematic errors provide strong evidence that current models rely heavily on linguistic co-occurrence heuristics rather than constructing coherent, verifiable internal spatial representations. SpatialText thus serves as a rigorous instrument for diagnosing the cognitive boundaries of artificial spatial intelligence. --- ### MaBERT:A Padding Safe Interleaved Transformer Mamba Hybrid Encoder for Efficient Extended Context Masked Language Modeling Authors: Jinwoong Kim, Sangjin Park Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03001v1 Self attention encoders such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers(BERT) scale quadratically with sequence length, making long context modeling expensive. Linear time state space models, such as Mamba, are efficient; however, they show limitations in modeling global interactions and can suffer from padding induced state contamination. We propose MaBERT, a hybrid encoder that interleaves Transformer layers for global dependency modeling with Mamba layers for linear time state updates. This design alternates global contextual integration with fast state accumulation, enabling efficient training and inference on long inputs. To stabilize variable length batching, we introduce paddingsafe masking, which blocks state propagation through padded positions, and mask aware attention pooling, which aggregates information only from valid tokens. On GLUE, MaBERT achieves the best mean score on five of the eight tasks, with strong performance on the CoLA and sentence pair inference tasks. When extending the context from 512 to 4,096 tokens, MaBERT reduces training time and inference latency by 2.36x and 2.43x, respectively, relative to the average of encoder baselines, demonstrating a practical long context efficient encoder. --- ### Why Does RLAIF Work At All? Authors: Robin Young Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03000v1 Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) enables language models to improve by training on their own preference judgments, yet no theoretical account explains why this self-improvement seemingly works for value learning. We propose the latent value hypothesis, that pretraining on internet-scale data encodes human values as directions in representation space, and constitutional prompts elicit these latent values into preference judgments. We formalize this intuition under a linear model where the constitution acts as a projection operator selecting value-relevant directions. Our analysis yields several results. RLAIF improves alignment when the constitution-activated direction correlates with true values better than the model's default generation direction thus explaining the generation-judgment gap; the ceiling on RLAIF quality is determined by how well representations encode values, which scales with model capacity; and adversarial constitutions exist that can activate anti-social value directions encoded from harmful pretraining data. Our account unifies scattered empirical findings including the refusal direction, low-rank safety subspaces, and RLAIF scaling behavior. --- ### VIRGi: View-dependent Instant Recoloring of 3D Gaussians Splats Authors: Alessio Mazzucchelli, Ivan Ojeda-Martin, Fernando Rivas-Manzaneque, Elena Garces, Adrian Penate-Sanchez, Francesc Moreno-Noguer Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02986v1 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently transformed the fields of novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction due to its ability to accurately model complex 3D scenes and its unprecedented rendering performance. However, a significant challenge persists: the absence of an efficient and photorealistic method for editing the appearance of the scene's content. In this paper we introduce VIRGi, a novel approach for rapidly editing the color of scenes modeled by 3DGS while preserving view-dependent effects such as specular highlights. Key to our method are a novel architecture that separates color into diffuse and view-dependent components, and a multi-view training strategy that integrates image patches from multiple viewpoints. Improving over the conventional single-view batch training, our 3DGS representation provides more accurate reconstruction and serves as a solid representation for the recoloring task. For 3DGS recoloring, we then introduce a rapid scheme requiring only one manually edited image of the scene from the end-user. By fine-tuning the weights of a single MLP, alongside a module for single-shot segmentation of the editable area, the color edits are seamlessly propagated to the entire scene in just two seconds, facilitating real-time interaction and providing control over the strength of the view-dependent effects. An exhaustive validation on diverse datasets demonstrates significant quantitative and qualitative advancements over competitors based on Neural Radiance Fields representations. --- ### The Dresden Dataset for 4D Reconstruction of Non-Rigid Abdominal Surgical Scenes Authors: Reuben Docea, Rayan Younis, Yonghao Long, Maxime Fleury, Jinjing Xu, Chenyang Li, André Schulze, Ann Wierick, Johannes Bender, Micha Pfeiffer, Qi Dou, Martin Wagner et al. Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02985v1 The D4D Dataset provides paired endoscopic video and high-quality structured-light geometry for evaluating 3D reconstruction of deforming abdominal soft tissue in realistic surgical conditions. Data were acquired from six porcine cadaver sessions using a da Vinci Xi stereo endoscope and a Zivid structured-light camera, registered via optical tracking and manually curated iterative alignment methods. Three sequence types - whole deformations, incremental deformations, and moved-camera clips - probe algorithm robustness to non-rigid motion, deformation magnitude, and out-of-view updates. Each clip provides rectified stereo images, per-frame instrument masks, stereo depth, start/end structured-light point clouds, curated camera poses and camera intrinsics. In postprocessing, ICP and semi-automatic registration techniques are used to register data, and instrument masks are created. The dataset enables quantitative geometric evaluation in both visible and occluded regions, alongside photometric view-synthesis baselines. Comprising over 300,000 frames and 369 point clouds across 98 curated recordings, this resource can serve as a comprehensive benchmark for developing and evaluating non-rigid SLAM, 4D reconstruction, and depth estimation methods. --- ### Variance reduction in lattice QCD observables via normalizing flows Authors: Ryan Abbott, Denis Boyda, Yang Fu, Daniel C. Hackett, Gurtej Kanwar, Fernando Romero-López, Phiala E. Shanahan, Julian M. Urban Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: hep-lat, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02984v2 Normalizing flows can be used to construct unbiased, reduced-variance estimators for lattice field theory observables that are defined by a derivative with respect to action parameters. This work implements the approach for observables involving gluonic operator insertions in the SU(3) Yang-Mills theory and two-flavor Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) in four space-time dimensions. Variance reduction by factors of $10$-$60$ is achieved in glueball correlation functions and in gluonic matrix elements related to hadron structure, with demonstrated computational advantages. The observed variance reduction is found to be approximately independent of the lattice volume, so that volume transfer can be utilized to minimize training costs. --- ### Variance reduction in lattice QCD observables via normalizing flows Authors: Ryan Abbott, Denis Boyda, Yang Fu, Daniel C. Hackett, Gurtej Kanwar, Fernando Romero-López, Phiala E. Shanahan, Julian M. Urban Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: hep-lat, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02984v1 Normalizing flows can be used to construct unbiased, reduced-variance estimators for lattice field theory observables that are defined by a derivative with respect to action parameters. This work implements the approach for observables involving gluonic operator insertions in the SU(3) Yang-Mills theory and two-flavor Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) in four space-time dimensions. Variance reduction by factors of $10$-$60$ is achieved in glueball correlation functions and in gluonic matrix elements related to hadron structure, with demonstrated computational advantages. The observed variance reduction is found to be approximately independent of the lattice volume, so that volume transfer can be utilized to minimize training costs. --- ### Contextualized Privacy Defense for LLM Agents Authors: Yule Wen, Yanzhe Zhang, Jianxun Lian, Xiaoyuan Yi, Xing Xie, Diyi Yang Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02983v1 LLM agents increasingly act on users' personal information, yet existing privacy defenses remain limited in both design and adaptability. Most prior approaches rely on static or passive defenses, such as prompting and guarding. These paradigms are insufficient for supporting contextual, proactive privacy decisions in multi-step agent execution. We propose Contextualized Defense Instructing (CDI), a new privacy defense paradigm in which an instructor model generates step-specific, context-aware privacy guidance during execution, proactively shaping actions rather than merely constraining or vetoing them. Crucially, CDI is paired with an experience-driven optimization framework that trains the instructor via reinforcement learning (RL), where we convert failure trajectories with privacy violations into learning environments. We formalize baseline defenses and CDI as distinct intervention points in a canonical agent loop, and compare their privacy-helpfulness trade-offs within a unified simulation framework. Results show that our CDI consistently achieves a better balance between privacy preservation (94.2%) and helpfulness (80.6%) than baselines, with superior robustness to adversarial conditions and generalization. --- ### Spatial Autoregressive Modeling of DINOv3 Embeddings for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection Authors: Ertunc Erdil, Nico Schulthess, Guney Tombak, Ender Konukoglu Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02974v2 DINO models provide rich patch-level representations that have recently enabled strong performance in unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD). Most existing methods extract patch embeddings from normal images and model them independently, ignoring spatial and neighborhood relationships between patches. This implicitly assumes that self-attention and positional encodings sufficiently encode contextual information within each patch embedding. In addition, the normative distribution is often modeled as memory banks or prototype-based representations, which require storing large numbers of features and performing costly comparisons at inference time, leading to substantial memory and computational overhead. In this work, we explicitly model spatial and contextual dependencies between patch embeddings using a 2D autoregressive (AR) model, allowing us to use a simple and efficient model for normative modeling. Instead of storing embeddings or clustering prototypes, our approach learns a compact parametric model of the normative distribution via an AR convolutional neural network (CNN). At test time, anomaly detection reduces to a single forward pass through the network and enables fast and memory-efficient inference. We evaluate our method on the BMAD benchmark, comprising three medical imaging datasets, and the VisA dataset, comprising 12 industrial object categories, and compare it against existing methods, including recent DINO-based approaches. Experimental results demonstrate that explicitly modeling spatial dependencies achieves competitive anomaly detection performance while substantially reducing inference time and memory requirements. Code is available at the project page: https://eerdil.github.io/spatial-ar-dinov3-uad/ --- ### Spatial Autoregressive Modeling of DINOv3 Embeddings for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection Authors: Ertunc Erdil, Nico Schulthess, Guney Tombak, Ender Konukoglu Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02974v1 DINO models provide rich patch-level representations that have recently enabled strong performance in unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD). Most existing methods extract patch embeddings from ``normal'' images and model them independently, ignoring spatial and neighborhood relationships between patches. This implicitly assumes that self-attention and positional encodings sufficiently encode contextual information within each patch embedding. In addition, the normative distribution is often modeled as memory banks or prototype-based representations, which require storing large numbers of features and performing costly comparisons at inference time, leading to substantial memory and computational overhead. In this work, we address both limitations by proposing a simple and efficient framework that explicitly models spatial and contextual dependencies between patch embeddings using a 2D autoregressive (AR) model. Instead of storing embeddings or clustering prototypes, our approach learns a compact parametric model of the normative distribution via an AR convolutional neural network (CNN). At test time, anomaly detection reduces to a single forward pass through the network and enables fast and memory-efficient inference. We evaluate our method on the BMAD benchmark, which comprises three medical imaging datasets, and compare it against existing work including recent DINO-based methods. Experimental results demonstrate that explicitly modeling spatial dependencies achieves competitive anomaly detection performance while substantially reducing inference time and memory requirements. Code is available at the project page: https://eerdil.github.io/spatial-ar-dinov3-uad/. --- ### On the Topology of Neural Network Superlevel Sets Authors: Bahman Gharesifard Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.LG, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02973v1 We show that neural networks with activations satisfying a Riccati-type ordinary differential equation condition, an assumption arising in recent universal approximation results in the uniform topology, produce Pfaffian outputs on analytic domains with format controlled only by the architecture. Consequently, superlevel sets, as well as Lie bracket rank drop loci for neural network parameterized vector fields, admit architecture-only bounds on topological complexity, in particular on total Betti numbers, uniformly over all weights. --- ### TagaVLM: Topology-Aware Global Action Reasoning for Vision-Language Navigation Authors: Jiaxing Liu, Zexi Zhang, Xiaoyan Li, Boyue Wang, Yongli Hu, Baocai Yin Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02972v2 Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) presents a unique challenge for Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) due to their inherent architectural mismatch: VLMs are primarily pretrained on static, disembodied vision-language tasks, which fundamentally clash with the dynamic, embodied, and spatially-structured nature of navigation. Existing large-model-based methods often resort to converting rich visual and spatial information into text, forcing models to implicitly infer complex visual-topological relationships or limiting their global action capabilities. To bridge this gap, we propose TagaVLM (Topology-Aware Global Action reasoning), an end-to-end framework that explicitly injects topological structures into the VLM backbone. To introduce topological edge information, Spatial Topology Aware Residual Attention (STAR-Att) directly integrates it into the VLM's self-attention mechanism, enabling intrinsic spatial reasoning while preserving pretrained knowledge. To enhance topological node information, an Interleaved Navigation Prompt strengthens node-level visual-text alignment. Finally, with the embedded topological graph, the model is capable of global action reasoning, allowing for robust path correction. On the R2R benchmark, TagaVLM achieves state-of-the-art performance among large-model-based methods, with a Success Rate (SR) of 51.09% and SPL of 47.18 in unseen environments, outperforming prior work by 3.39% in SR and 9.08 in SPL. This demonstrates that, for embodied spatial reasoning, targeted enhancements on smaller open-source VLMs can be more effective than brute-force model scaling. The code can be found on our project page: https://apex-bjut.github.io/Taga-VLM --- ### LAGO: A Local-Global Optimization Framework Combining Trust Region Methods and Bayesian Optimization Authors: Eliott Van Dieren, Tommaso Vanzan, Fabio Nobile Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.LG, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02970v2 We introduce LAGO, a LocAl-Global Optimization framework coupling Bayesian Optimization (BO) and gradient-based trust region local refinement through an adaptive competition mechanism for smooth expensive-to-evaluate objective functions with available gradients. At each iteration, global and local optimization strategies independently propose candidate points, and the next evaluation is selected based on predicted improvement. LAGO separates global exploration from local refinement at the proposal level: the BO acquisition function is optimized outside the active trust region, while local candidates are proposed within the trust region. Points in the vicinity of the accepted local step are incorporated in the global GP dataset only when satisfying a lengthscale-based minimum-distance criterion, hence reducing the risk of numerical instability during local exploitation. LAGO enhances BO with efficient local refinement when reaching promising regions, and reverts to exploratory behavior when local steps are not competitive. --- ### Integrating Homomorphic Encryption and Synthetic Data in FL for Privacy and Learning Quality Authors: Yenan Wang, Carla Fabiana Chiasserini, Elad Michael Schiller Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02969v1 Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative training of machine learning models without sharing sensitive client data, making it a cornerstone for privacy-critical applications. However, FL faces the dual challenge of ensuring learning quality and robust privacy protection while keeping resource consumption low, particularly when using computationally expensive techniques such as homomorphic encryption (HE). In this work, we enhance an FL process that preserves privacy using HE by integrating it with synthetic data generation and an interleaving strategy. Specifically, our solution, named Alternating Federated Learning (Alt-FL), consists of alternating between local training with authentic data (authentic rounds) and local training with synthetic data (synthetic rounds) and transferring the encrypted and plaintext model parameters on authentic and synthetic rounds (resp.). Our approach improves learning quality (e.g., model accuracy) through datasets enhanced with synthetic data, preserves client data privacy via HE, and keeps manageable encryption and decryption costs through our interleaving strategy. We evaluate our solution against data leakage attacks, such as the DLG attack, demonstrating robust privacy protection. Also, Alt-FL provides 13.4% higher model accuracy and decreases HE-related costs by up to 48% with respect to Selective HE. --- ### Improving Anomaly Detection with Foundation-Model Synthesis and Wavelet-Domain Attention Authors: Wensheng Wu, Zheming Lu, Ziqian Lu, Zewei He, Xuecheng Sun, Zhao Wang, Jungong Han, Yunlong Yu Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02964v1 Industrial anomaly detection faces significant challenges due to the scarcity of anomalous samples and the complexity of real-world anomalies. In this paper, we propose a foundation model-based anomaly synthesis pipeline (FMAS) that generates highly realistic anomalous samples without fine-tuning or class-specific training. Motivated by the distinct frequency-domain characteristics of anomalies, we introduce aWavelet Domain Attention Module (WDAM), which exploits adaptive sub-band processing to enhance anomaly feature extraction. The combination of FMAS and WDAM significantly improves anomaly detection sensitivity while maintaining computational efficiency. Comprehensive experiments on MVTec AD and VisA datasets demonstrate that WDAM, as a plug-and-play module, achieves substantial performance gains against existing baselines. --- ### Delegation and Verification Under AI Authors: Lingxiao Huang, Wenyang Xiao, Nisheeth K. Vishnoi Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.GT, cs.AI, cs.CY, econ.TH arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02961v2 As AI systems enter institutional workflows, workers must decide whether to delegate task execution to AI and how much effort to invest in verifying AI outputs, while institutions evaluate workers using outcome-based standards that may misalign with workers' private costs. We model delegation and verification as the solution to a rational worker's optimization problem, and define worker quality by evaluating an institution-centered utility (distinct from the worker's objective) at the resulting optimal action. We formally characterize optimal worker workflows and show that AI induces *phase transitions*, where arbitrarily small differences in verification ability lead to sharply different behaviors. As a result, AI can amplify workers with strong verification reliability while degrading institutional worker quality for others who rationally over-delegate and reduce oversight, even when baseline task success improves and no behavioral biases are present. These results identify a structural mechanism by which AI reshapes institutional worker quality and amplifies quality disparities between workers with different verification reliability. --- ### Architecting Trust in Artificial Epistemic Agents Authors: Nahema Marchal, Stephanie Chan, Matija Franklin, Manon Revel, Geoff Keeling, Roberta Fischli, Bilva Chandra, Iason Gabriel Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02960v2 Large language models increasingly function as epistemic agents -- entities that can 1) autonomously pursue epistemic goals and 2) actively shape our shared knowledge environment. They curate the information we receive, often supplanting traditional search-based methods, and are frequently used to generate both personal and deeply specialized advice. How they perform these functions, including whether they are reliable and properly calibrated to both individual and collective epistemic norms, is therefore highly consequential for the choices we make. We argue that the potential impact of epistemic AI agents on practices of knowledge creation, curation and synthesis, particularly in the context of complex multi-agent interactions, creates new informational interdependencies that necessitate a fundamental shift in evaluation and governance of AI. While a well-calibrated ecosystem could augment human judgment and collective decision-making, poorly aligned agents risk causing cognitive deskilling and epistemic drift, making the calibration of these models to human norms a high-stakes necessity. To ensure a beneficial human-AI knowledge ecosystem, we propose a framework centered on building and cultivating the trustworthiness of epistemic AI agents; aligning AI these agents with human epistemic goals; and reinforcing the surrounding socio-epistemic infrastructure. In this context, trustworthy AI agents must demonstrate epistemic competence, robust falsifiability, and epistemically virtuous behaviors, supported by technical provenance systems and "knowledge sanctuaries" designed to protect human resilience. This normative roadmap provides a path toward ensuring that future AI systems act as reliable partners in a robust and inclusive knowledge ecosystem. --- ### Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Adaptation of Vision-Language Models Authors: Julio Silva-Rodríguez, Ender Konukoglu Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02959v1 Vision-language models (VLMs) pre-trained on large, heterogeneous data sources are becoming increasingly popular, providing rich multi-modal embeddings that enable efficient transfer to new tasks. A particularly relevant application is few-shot adaptation, where only a handful of annotated examples are available to adapt the model through multi-modal linear probes. In medical imaging, specialized VLMs have shown promising performance in zero- and few-shot image classification, which is valuable for mitigating the high cost of expert annotations. However, challenges remain in extremely low-shot regimes: the inherent class imbalances in medical tasks often lead to underrepresented categories, penalizing overall model performance. To address this limitation, we propose leveraging unlabeled data by introducing an efficient semi-supervised solver that propagates text-informed pseudo-labels during few-shot adaptation. The proposed method enables lower-budget annotation pipelines for adapting VLMs, reducing labeling effort by >50% in low-shot regimes. --- ### Layer-wise QUBO-Based Training of CNN Classifiers for Quantum Annealing Authors: Mostafa Atallah, Rebekah Herrman Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: quant-ph, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02958v1 Variational quantum circuits for image classification suffer from barren plateaus, while quantum kernel methods scale quadratically with dataset size. We propose an iterative framework based on Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) for training the classifier head of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) via quantum annealing, entirely avoiding gradient-based circuit optimization. Following the Extreme Learning Machine paradigm, convolutional filters are randomly initialized and frozen, and only the fully connected layer is optimized. At each iteration, a convex quadratic surrogate derived from the feature Gram matrix replaces the non-quadratic cross-entropy loss, yielding an iteration-stable curvature proxy. A per-output decomposition splits the $C$-class problem into $C$ independent QUBOs, each with $(d+1)K$ binary variables, where $d$ is the feature dimension and $K$ is the bit precision, so that problem size depends on the image resolution and bit precision, not on the number of training samples. We evaluate the method on six image-classification benchmarks (sklearn digits, MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, EMNIST, KMNIST). A precision study shows that accuracy improves monotonically with bit resolution, with 10 bits representing a practical minimum for effective optimization; the 15-bit formulation remains within the qubit and coupler limits of current D-Wave Advantage hardware. The 20-bit formulation matches or exceeds classical stochastic gradient descent on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and EMNIST, while remaining competitive on CIFAR-10 and KMNIST. All experiments use simulated annealing, establishing a baseline for direct deployment on quantum annealing hardware. --- ### Leveraging Label Proportion Prior for Class-Imbalanced Semi-Supervised Learning Authors: Kohki Akiba, Shinnosuke Matsuo, Shota Harada, Ryoma Bise Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02957v1 Semi-supervised learning (SSL) often suffers under class imbalance, where pseudo-labeling amplifies majority bias and suppresses minority performance. We address this issue with a lightweight framework that, to our knowledge, is the first to introduce Proportion Loss from learning from label proportions (LLP) into SSL as a regularization term. Proportion Loss aligns model predictions with the global class distribution, mitigating bias across both majority and minority classes. To further stabilize training, we formulate a stochastic variant that accounts for fluctuations in mini-batch composition. Experiments on the Long-tailed CIFAR-10 benchmark show that integrating Proportion Loss into FixMatch and ReMixMatch consistently improves performance over the baselines across imbalance severities and label ratios, and achieves competitive or superior results compared to existing CISSL methods, particularly under scarce-label conditions. --- ### Sparse autoencoders reveal organized biological knowledge but minimal regulatory logic in single-cell foundation models: a comparative atlas of Geneformer and scGPT Authors: Ihor Kendiukhov Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: q-bio.GN, cs.LG, q-bio.CB arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02952v1 Background: Single-cell foundation models such as Geneformer and scGPT encode rich biological information, but whether this includes causal regulatory logic rather than statistical co-expression remains unclear. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) can resolve superposition in neural networks by decomposing dense activations into interpretable features, yet they have not been systematically applied to biological foundation models. Results: We trained TopK SAEs on residual stream activations from all layers of Geneformer V2-316M (18 layers, d=1152) and scGPT whole-human (12 layers, d=512), producing atlases of 82525 and 24527 features, respectively. Both atlases confirm massive superposition, with 99.8 percent of features invisible to SVD. Systematic characterization reveals rich biological organization: 29 to 59 percent of features annotate to Gene Ontology, KEGG, Reactome, STRING, or TRRUST, with U-shaped layer profiles reflecting hierarchical abstraction. Features organize into co-activation modules (141 in Geneformer, 76 in scGPT), exhibit causal specificity (median 2.36x), and form cross-layer information highways (63 to 99.8 percent). When tested against genome-scale CRISPRi perturbation data, only 3 of 48 transcription factors (6.2 percent) show regulatory-target-specific feature responses. A multi-tissue control yields marginal improvement (10.4 percent, 5 of 48 TFs), establishing model representations as the bottleneck. Conclusions: These models have internalized organized biological knowledge, including pathway membership, protein interactions, functional modules, and hierarchical abstraction, yet they encode minimal causal regulatory logic. We release both feature atlases as interactive web platforms enabling exploration of more than 107000 features across 30 layers of two leading single-cell foundation models. --- ### CGL: Advancing Continual GUI Learning via Reinforcement Fine-Tuning Authors: Zhenquan Yao, Zitong Huang, Yihan Zeng, Jianhua Han, Hang Xu, Chun-Mei Feng, Jianwei Ma, Wangmeng Zuo Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02951v2 Graphical User Interface (GUI) Agents, benefiting from recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLM), have achieved significant development. However, due to the frequent updates of GUI applications, adapting to new tasks without forgetting old tasks in GUI continual learning remains an open problem. In this work, we reveal that while Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) facilitates fast adaptation, it often triggers knowledge overwriting, whereas Reinforcement Learning (RL) demonstrates an inherent resilience that shields prior interaction logic from erasure. Based on this insight, we propose a \textbf{C}ontinual \textbf{G}UI \textbf{L}earning (CGL) framework that dynamically balances adaptation efficiency and skill retention by enhancing the synergy between SFT and RL. Specifically, we introduce an SFT proportion adjustment mechanism guided by policy entropy to dynamically control the weight allocation between the SFT and RL training phases. To resolve explicit gradient interference, we further develop a specialized gradient surgery strategy. By projecting exploratory SFT gradients onto GRPO-based anchor gradients, our method explicitly clips the components of SFT gradients that conflict with GRPO. On top of that, we establish an AndroidControl-CL benchmark, which divides GUI applications into distinct task groups to effectively simulate and evaluate the performance of continual GUI learning. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed CGL framework across continual learning scenarios. The benchmark, code, and model will be made publicly available. --- ### Path Dependence under Adaptive AI Delegation Authors: Lingxiao Huang, Nisheeth K. Vishnoi Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI, cs.GT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02950v2 Repeated AI assistance can improve immediate task performance while reducing the skill available for future independent work. We develop a mathematical framework for this long-run tradeoff. The model tracks two state variables: a latent human skill level governing expected independent performance, and a delegation level representing the learner's evolving tendency to rely on AI. Skill changes through error-driven learning under practice and decay under delegation; delegation responds to observed performance, increasing when AI-assisted work appears to outperform independent work. We analyze the resulting dynamics and contrast them with fixed delegation. With fixed delegation, skill follows a one-dimensional learning-decay process with a single stable equilibrium. With adaptive delegation, the coupled system has two attracting equilibria separated by the stable manifold of an interior saddle. The existence and geometry of this separatrix require a global phase-plane analysis of the coupled dynamics. The system is path-dependent: small differences in initial skill or reliance can lead to different long-run outcomes. We use this characterization to show that AI assistance can improve short-run performance while producing worse long-run performance than a no-AI baseline. Increasing AI capability can enlarge the basin of attraction of the low-skill equilibrium, making delegation appear beneficial for longer while increasing the risk of eventual skill loss. The qualitative picture is observed to persist across alternative specifications. Together, these results show that the risk is not AI assistance itself, but the coupling between performance-driven reliance and use-dependent skill change. --- ### SEALing the Gap: A Reference Framework for LLM Inference Carbon Estimation via Multi-Benchmark Driven Embodiment Authors: Priyavanshi Pathania, Rohit Mehra, Vibhu Saujanya Sharma, Vikrant Kaulgud, Tiffani Nevels, Sanjay Podder, Adam P. Burden Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02949v1 Large Language Models are rapidly gaining traction in software engineering, yet their growing carbon footprint raises pressing sustainability concerns. While training emissions are substantial, inference quickly surpasses them due to the sheer volume of prompts processed. This shift underscores the urgent need for accurate, prompt-level carbon measurement during inference to enable informed, sustainability-focused decision-making. To address the limitations of existing approaches, in this paper, we outline the guiding principles for a novel reference framework for LLM inference carbon estimation that can guide the design of future tools and provide a systematic foundation for advancing sustainability research in this domain. We also introduce SEAL, an early embodiment of these principles that leverages a multi-benchmark-driven approach for per-prompt carbon estimation. Its initial validation shows promising results, positioning SEAL as a foundation for standardized sustainability assessment across the LLM ecosystem. --- ### Enhancing Physics-Informed Neural Networks with Domain-aware Fourier Features: Towards Improved Performance and Interpretable Results Authors: Alberto Miño Calero, Luis Salamanca, Konstantinos E. Tatsis Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CE, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02948v2 Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) incorporate physics into neural networks by embedding partial differential equations (PDEs) into their loss function. Despite their success in learning the underlying physics, PINN models remain difficult to train and interpret. In this work, a novel modeling approach is proposed, which relies on the use of Domain-aware Fourier Features (DaFFs) for the positional encoding of the input space. These features encapsulate all the domain-specific characteristics, such as the geometry and boundary conditions, and unlike Random Fourier Features (RFFs), eliminate the need for explicit boundary condition loss terms and loss balancing schemes, while simplifying the optimization process and reducing the computational cost associated with training. We further develop an LRP-based explainability framework tailored to PINNs, enabling the extraction of relevance attribution scores for the input space. It is demonstrated that PINN-DaFFs achieve orders-of-magnitude lower errors and allow faster convergence compared to vanilla PINNs and RFFs-based PINNs. Furthermore, LRP analysis reveals that the proposed leads to more physically consistent feature attributions, while PINN-RFFs and vanilla PINNs display more scattered and less physics-relevant patterns. These results demonstrate that DaFFs not only enhance PINNs' accuracy and efficiency but also improve interpretability, laying the ground for more robust and informative physics-informed learning. --- ### Enhancing Physics-Informed Neural Networks with Domain-aware Fourier Features: Towards Improved Performance and Interpretable Results Authors: Alberto Miño Calero, Luis Salamanca, Konstantinos E. Tatsis Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CE, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02948v1 Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) incorporate physics into neural networks by embedding partial differential equations (PDEs) into their loss function. Despite their success in learning the underlying physics, PINN models remain difficult to train and interpret. In this work, a novel modeling approach is proposed, which relies on the use of Domain-aware Fourier Features (DaFFs) for the positional encoding of the input space. These features encapsulate all the domain-specific characteristics, such as the geometry and boundary conditions, and unlike Random Fourier Features (RFFs), eliminate the need for explicit boundary condition loss terms and loss balancing schemes, while simplifying the optimization process and reducing the computational cost associated with training. We further develop an LRP-based explainability framework tailored to PINNs, enabling the extraction of relevance attribution scores for the input space. It is demonstrated that PINN-DaFFs achieve orders-of-magnitude lower errors and allow faster convergence compared to vanilla PINNs and RFFs-based PINNs. Furthermore, LRP analysis reveals that the proposed leads to more physically consistent feature attributions, while PINN-RFFs and vanilla PINNs display more scattered and less physics-relevant patterns. These results demonstrate that DaFFs not only enhance PINNs' accuracy and efficiency but also improve interpretability, laying the ground for more robust and informative physics-informed learning. --- ### ACE-Merging: Data-Free Model Merging with Adaptive Covariance Estimation Authors: Bo Xu, Haotian Wu, Hehai Lin, Weiquan Huang, Beier Zhu, Yao Shu, Chengwei Qin Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02945v2 Model merging aims to combine multiple task-specific expert models into a single model while preserving generalization across diverse tasks. However, interference among experts, especially when they are trained on different objectives, often leads to significant performance degradation. Despite recent progress, resolving this interference without data access, retraining, or architectural modification remains a fundamental challenge. This paper provides a theoretical analysis demonstrating that the input covariance of each task, which is a key factor for optimal merging, can be implicitly estimated from the parameter differences of its fine-tuned model, even in a fully data-free setting. Building on this insight, we introduce \acem, an Adaptive Covariance Estimation framework that effectively mitigates inter-task interference. Our approach features a principled, closed-form solution that contrasts with prior iterative or heuristic methods. Extensive experiments on both vision and language benchmarks demonstrate that \acem sets a new state-of-the-art among data-free methods. It consistently outperforms existing baselines; for example, \acem achieves an average absolute improvement of 4\% over the previous methods across seven tasks on GPT-2. Owing to its efficient closed-form formulation, \acem delivers superior performance with a modest computational cost, providing a practical and theoretically grounded solution for model merging. --- ### TC-Padé: Trajectory-Consistent Padé Approximation for Diffusion Acceleration Authors: Benlei Cui, Shaoxuan He, Bukun Huang, Zhizeng Ye, Yunyun Sun, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Yang Yang, Jingqun Tang, Zhou Zhao, Haiwen Hong Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02943v2 Despite achieving state-of-the-art generation quality, diffusion models are hindered by the substantial computational burden of their iterative sampling process. While feature caching techniques achieve effective acceleration at higher step counts (e.g., 50 steps), they exhibit critical limitations in the practical low-step regime of 20-30 steps. As the interval between steps increases, polynomial-based extrapolators like TaylorSeer suffer from error accumulation and trajectory drift. Meanwhile, conventional caching strategies often overlook the distinct dynamical properties of different denoising phases. To address these challenges, we propose Trajectory-Consistent Padé approximation, a feature prediction framework grounded in Padé approximation. By modeling feature evolution through rational functions, our approach captures asymptotic and transitional behaviors more accurately than Taylor-based methods. To enable stable and trajectory-consistent sampling under reduced step counts, TC-Padé incorporates (1) adaptive coefficient modulation that leverages historical cached residuals to detect subtle trajectory transitions, and (2) step-aware prediction strategies tailored to the distinct dynamics of early, mid, and late sampling stages. Extensive experiments on DiT-XL/2, FLUX.1-dev, and Wan2.1 across both image and video generation demonstrate the effectiveness of TC-Padé. For instance, TC-Padé achieves 2.88x acceleration on FLUX.1-dev and 1.72x on Wan2.1 while maintaining high quality across FID, CLIP, Aesthetic, and VBench-2.0 metrics, substantially outperforming existing feature caching methods. --- ### TC-Padé: Trajectory-Consistent Padé Approximation for Diffusion Acceleration Authors: Benlei Cui, Shaoxuan He, Bukun Huang, Zhizeng Ye, Yunyun Sun, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Yang Yang, Jingqun Tang, Zhou Zhao, Haiwen Hong Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02943v1 Despite achieving state-of-the-art generation quality, diffusion models are hindered by the substantial computational burden of their iterative sampling process. While feature caching techniques achieve effective acceleration at higher step counts (e.g., 50 steps), they exhibit critical limitations in the practical low-step regime of 20-30 steps. As the interval between steps increases, polynomial-based extrapolators like TaylorSeer suffer from error accumulation and trajectory drift. Meanwhile, conventional caching strategies often overlook the distinct dynamical properties of different denoising phases. To address these challenges, we propose Trajectory-Consistent Padé approximation, a feature prediction framework grounded in Padé approximation. By modeling feature evolution through rational functions, our approach captures asymptotic and transitional behaviors more accurately than Taylor-based methods. To enable stable and trajectory-consistent sampling under reduced step counts, TC-Padé incorporates (1) adaptive coefficient modulation that leverages historical cached residuals to detect subtle trajectory transitions, and (2) step-aware prediction strategies tailored to the distinct dynamics of early, mid, and late sampling stages. Extensive experiments on DiT-XL/2, FLUX.1-dev, and Wan2.1 across both image and video generation demonstrate the effectiveness of TC-Padé. For instance, TC-Padé achieves 2.88x acceleration on FLUX.1-dev and 1.72x on Wan2.1 while maintaining high quality across FID, CLIP, Aesthetic, and VBench-2.0 metrics, substantially outperforming existing feature caching methods. --- ### ShipTraj-R1: Reinforcing Ship Trajectory Prediction in Large Language Models via Group Relative Policy Optimization Authors: Yang Zhan, Yunhao Li, Zhang Chao, Yuxu Lu, Yan Li Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02939v1 Recent advancements in reinforcement fine-tuning have significantly improved the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). In particular, methods such as group relative policy optimization (GRPO) have demonstrated strong capabilities across various fields. However, applying LLMs to ship trajectory prediction remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose ShipTraj-R1, a novel LLM-based framework that reformulates ship trajectory prediction as a text-to-text generation problem. (1) We design a dynamic prompt containing trajectory information about conflicting ships to guide the model to achieve adaptive chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. (2) We introduce a comprehensive rule-based reward mechanism to incentivize the reasoning format and prediction accuracy of the model. (3) Our ShipTraj-R1 is reinforced through the GRPO mechanism guided by domain-specific prompts and rewards, and utilizes the Qwen3 as the model backbone. Extensive experimental results on two complex and real-world maritime datasets show that the proposed ShipTraj-R1 achieves the least error compared with state-of-the-art deep learning and LLM-based baselines. --- ### Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Adaptive Subgraph Denoising for Zero-Shot Graph Learning with Large Language Models Authors: Fengzhi Li, Liang Zhang, Yuan Zuo, Ruiqing Zhao, YanSong Liu, Yunfei Ma, Fanyu Meng, Junlan Feng Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02938v2 Graph-based tasks in the zero-shot setting remain a significant challenge due to data scarcity and the inability of traditional Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to generalize to unseen domains or label spaces. While recent advancements have transitioned toward leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) as predictors to enhance GNNs, these methods often suffer from cross-modal alignment issues. A recent paradigm (i.e., Graph-R1) overcomes the aforementioned architectural dependencies by adopting a purely text-based format and utilizing LLM-based graph reasoning, showing improved zero-shot generalization. However, it employs a task-agnostic, one-size-fits-all subgraph extraction strategy, which inevitably introduces significant structural noise--irrelevant neighbors and edges--that distorts the LLMs' receptive field and leads to suboptimal predictions. To address this limitation, we introduce GraphSSR, a novel framework designed for adaptive subgraph extraction and denoising in zero-shot LLM-based graph reasoning. Specifically, we propose the SSR pipeline, which dynamically tailors subgraph extraction to specific contexts through a "Sample-Select-Reason" process, enabling the model to autonomously filter out task-irrelevant neighbors and overcome the one-size-fits-all issue. To internalize this capability, we develop SSR-SFT, a data synthesis strategy that generates high-quality SSR-style graph reasoning traces for supervised fine-tuning of LLMs. Furthermore, we propose SSR-RL, a two-stage reinforcement learning framework that explicitly regulates sampling and selection operations within the proposed SSR pipeline designed for adaptive subgraph denoising. By incorporating Authenticity-Reinforced and Denoising-Reinforced RL, we guide the model to achieve accurate predictions using parsimonious, denoised subgraphs for reasoning. --- ### Bias and Fairness in Self-Supervised Acoustic Representations for Cognitive Impairment Detection Authors: Kashaf Gulzar, Korbinian Riedhammer, Elmar Nöth, Andreas K. Maier, Paula Andrea Pérez-Toro Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: eess.AS, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02937v1 Speech-based detection of cognitive impairment (CI) offers a promising non-invasive approach for early diagnosis, yet performance disparities across demographic and clinical subgroups remain underexplored, raising concerns around fairness and generalizability. This study presents a systematic bias analysis of acoustic-based CI and depression classification using the DementiaBank Pitt Corpus. We compare traditional acoustic features (MFCCs, eGeMAPS) with contextualized speech embeddings from Wav2Vec 2.0 (W2V2), and evaluate classification performance across gender, age, and depression-status subgroups. For CI detection, higher-layer W2V2 embeddings outperform baseline features (UAR up to 80.6\%), but exhibit performance disparities; specifically, females and younger participants demonstrate lower discriminative power (\(AUC\): 0.769 and 0.746, respectively) and substantial specificity disparities (\(Δ_{spec}\) up to 18\% and 15\%, respectively), leading to a higher risk of misclassifications than their counterparts. These disparities reflect representational biases, defined as systematic differences in model performance across demographic or clinical subgroups. Depression detection within CI subjects yields lower overall performance, with mild improvements from low and mid-level W2V2 layers. Cross-task generalization between CI and depression classification is limited, indicating that each task depends on distinct representations. These findings emphasize the need for fairness-aware model evaluation and subgroup-specific analysis in clinical speech applications, particularly in light of demographic and clinical heterogeneity in real-world applications. --- ### Temporal Consistency Improves Generalization in Contextual Offline Meta Reinforcement Learning Authors: Mohammadreza Nakheai, Aidan Scannell, Kevin Luck, Joni Pajarinen Published: 2026-03-03 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02935v2 Offline meta-reinforcement learning seeks to learn a policy that generalizes to new related tasks online. Context-based methods infer a task representation from transition histories, yet learning an effective task representation without supervision remains challenging. Existing methods relying on contrastive learning learn discriminative task representations, but fail to identify task-specific dynamics, while relying on reconstruction can be insufficient to model long-horizon dependencies, limiting generalization to new tasks. We investigate the impact of temporal consistency in latent space on task representation learning, showing that enforcing multi-step predictions in latent space encourages task representations that are able to capture task-dependent dynamics while preventing representation collapse. We provide theoretical analysis characterizing sources of error in value estimation and show through extensive experiments on MuJoCo, Contextual DeepMind Control, and MetaWorld benchmarks that temporal consistency significantly improves both zero-shot and few-shot generalization. ---