# Research Papers — 2026-03 · bundle page 226 of 243

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### R3GW: Relightable 3D Gaussians for Outdoor Scenes in the Wild

Authors: Margherita Lea Corona, Wieland Morgenstern, Peter Eisert, Anna Hilsmann
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02801v1

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has established itself as a leading technique for 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis of static scenes, achieving outstanding rendering quality and fast training. However, the method does not explicitly model the scene illumination, making it unsuitable for relighting tasks. Furthermore, 3DGS struggles to reconstruct scenes captured in the wild by unconstrained photo collections featuring changing lighting conditions. In this paper, we present R3GW, a novel method that learns a relightable 3DGS representation of an outdoor scene captured in the wild. Our approach separates the scene into a relightable foreground and a non-reflective background (the sky), using two distinct sets of Gaussians. R3GW models view-dependent lighting effects in the foreground reflections by combining Physically Based Rendering with the 3DGS scene representation in a varying illumination setting. We evaluate our method quantitatively and qualitatively on the NeRF-OSR dataset, offering state-of-the-art performance and enhanced support for physically-based relighting of unconstrained scenes. Our method synthesizes photorealistic novel views under arbitrary illumination conditions. Additionally, our representation of the sky mitigates depth reconstruction artifacts, improving rendering quality at the sky-foreground boundary

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### Guideline-Grounded Evidence Accumulation for High-Stakes Agent Verification

Authors: Yichi Zhang, Nabeel Seedat, Yinpeng Dong, Peng Cui, Jun Zhu, Mihaela van de Schaar
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02798v1

As LLM-powered agents have been used for high-stakes decision-making, such as clinical diagnosis, it becomes critical to develop reliable verification of their decisions to facilitate trustworthy deployment. Yet, existing verifiers usually underperform owing to a lack of domain knowledge and limited calibration. To address this, we establish GLEAN, an agent verification framework with Guideline-grounded Evidence Accumulation that compiles expert-curated protocols into trajectory-informed, well-calibrated correctness signals. GLEAN evaluates the step-wise alignment with domain guidelines and aggregates multi-guideline ratings into surrogate features, which are accumulated along the trajectory and calibrated into correctness probabilities using Bayesian logistic regression. Moreover, the estimated uncertainty triggers active verification, which selectively collects additional evidence for uncertain cases via expanding guideline coverage and performing differential checks. We empirically validate GLEAN with agentic clinical diagnosis across three diseases from the MIMIC-IV dataset, surpassing the best baseline by 12% in AUROC and 50% in Brier score reduction, which confirms the effectiveness in both discrimination and calibration. In addition, the expert study with clinicians recognizes GLEAN's utility in practice.

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### VSearcher: Long-Horizon Multimodal Search Agent via Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Ruiyang Zhang, Qianguo Sun, Chao Song, Yiyan Qi, Zhedong Zheng
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02795v2

Large models are increasingly becoming autonomous agents that interact with real-world environments and use external tools to augment their static capabilities. However, most recent progress has focused on text-only large language models, which are limited to a single modality and therefore have narrower application scenarios. On the other hand, multimodal large models, while offering stronger perceptual capabilities, remain limited to static knowledge and lack the ability to access and leverage up-to-date web information. In this paper, we propose VSearcher, turning static multimodal model into multimodal search agent capable of long-horizon, multi-turn tool use in real-world web environments, including text search, image search, and web browsing, via reinforcement learning. Specifically, we introduce Iterative Injection Data Synthesis pipeline to generate large-scale, complex multimodal QA questions, which are further filtered with comprehensive metrics to ensure high quality and sufficient difficulty. We then adopt an SFT-then-RL training pipeline to turn base multimodal models to agent capable of multi-turn tool calling in real-world web environments. Besides, we propose a multimodal search benchmark MM-SearchExam dedicated to evaluating search capabilities of multimodal search agents, which proves highly challenging for recent proprietary models. Extensive evaluations across multiple multimodal search benchmarks reveal effectiveness of our method. VSearcher achieves superior performance compared to recent multimodal search agents and even surpasses several proprietary models on multimodal web search tasks.

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### An Interpretable, Controllable Time-Varying IIR Denoiser for On-Device Assistive Hearing

Authors: Riccardo Rota, Kiril Ratmanski, Jozef Coldenhoff, Milos Cernak
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI, cs.LG, eess.AS
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02794v4

We present TVBC (Time-Varying Biquad Cascade), an interpretable, low-latency speech enhancement model for real-time, on-device assistive hearing. A lightweight neural controller predicts, in real time, the coefficients of a differentiable cascade of 35 second-order IIR filters (biquads), so the model tracks non-stationary noise while keeping a fully interpretable processing chain: every spectral modification is an explicit, adjustable equalizer curve rather than an opaque `black-box' transform. Because the biquad cascade carries the signal processing, the controller can be made very small, driving the cascade with only 24k parameters at a 10.7ms algorithmic latency, within hearing-aid budgets, and running entirely on-device so that audio never leaves the device. We also expose the suppression-versus-preservation trade-off as an explicit control: it can be set during training through the loss weighting, and adjusted at inference, with no retraining, by mixing the noisy input with the denoised output. On hearing-aid metrics (HASPI/HASQI) the 24k model stays within about 0.02 of DFNet3 (2.3M parameters, almost two orders of magnitude larger) while using about 29X fewer multiply-accumulates, although larger black-box models still lead on reference metrics such as PESQ. We present TVBC as a proof of concept for a compact, interpretable, and controllable denoiser for on-device assistive hearing.

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### An Interpretable, Controllable Time-Varying IIR Denoiser for On-Device Assistive Hearing

Authors: Riccardo Rota, Kiril Ratmanski, Jozef Coldenhoff, Milos Cernak
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI, cs.LG, eess.AS
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02794v3

We present TVF (Time-Varying Filtering), an interpretable, low-latency speech enhancement model for real-time, on-device assistive hearing. A lightweight neural controller predicts, in real time, the coefficients of a differentiable cascade of 35 second-order IIR filters (biquads), so the model tracks non-stationary noise while keeping a fully interpretable processing chain: every spectral modification is an explicit, adjustable equalizer curve rather than an opaque `black-box' transform. Because the biquad cascade carries the signal processing, the controller can be made very small, driving the cascade with only 24k parameters at a 10.7ms algorithmic latency, within hearing-aid budgets, and running entirely on-device so that audio never leaves the device. We also expose the suppression-versus-preservation trade-off as an explicit control: it can be set during training through the loss weighting, and adjusted at inference, with no retraining, by mixing the noisy input with the denoised output. On hearing-aid metrics (HASPI/HASQI) the 24k model stays within about 0.02 of DFNet3 (2.3M parameters, almost two orders of magnitude larger) while using about 29X fewer multiply-accumulates, although larger black-box models still lead on reference metrics such as PESQ. We present TVF as a proof of concept for a compact, interpretable, and controllable denoiser for on-device assistive hearing.

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### From Heuristic Selection to Automated Algorithm Design: LLMs Benefit from Strong Priors

Authors: Qi Huang, Furong Ye, Ananta Shahane, Thomas Bäck, Niki van Stein
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.LG, cs.NE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02792v2

Large Language Models (LLMs) have already been widely adopted for automated algorithm design, demonstrating strong abilities in generating and evolving algorithms across various fields. Existing work has largely focused on examining their effectiveness in solving specific problems, with search strategies primarily guided by adaptive prompt designs. In this paper, through investigating the token-wise attribution of the prompts to LLM-generated algorithmic codes, we show that providing high-quality algorithmic code examples can substantially improve the performance of the LLM-driven optimization. Building upon this insight, we propose leveraging prior benchmark algorithms to guide LLM-driven optimization and demonstrate superior performance on two black-box optimization benchmarks: the pseudo-Boolean optimization suite (pbo) and the black-box optimization suite (bbob). Our findings highlight the value of integrating benchmarking studies to enhance both efficiency and robustness of the LLM-driven black-box optimization methods.

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### Designing UNICORN: a Unified Benchmark for Imaging in Computational Pathology, Radiology, and Natural Language

Authors: Michelle Stegeman, Lena Philipp, Fennie van der Graaf, Marina D'Amato, Clément Grisi, Luc Builtjes, Joeran S. Bosma, Judith Lefkes, Rianne A. Weber, James A. Meakin, Thomas Koopman, Anne Mickan et al.
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02790v2

Foundation models are changing the way we develop medical artificial intelligence. By learning broadly generalizable features across diverse data modalities, a single model can be rapidly adapted to address multiple modalities and tasks with minimal supervision. This potential comes with the urgent need to reliably benchmark, understand and compare the performance and clinical impact of foundation models across data modalities and clinical tasks. We introduce UNICORN, a fundamentally new benchmarking concept for medical foundation models. UNICORN brings four main contributions to medical artificial intelligence. First, a framework that enables a one-to-many benchmarking approach, where a single foundation model is tested across multiple tasks and data modalities. Here, we populate it with 20 tasks across radiology, pathology, and clinical text, covering classification, detection, segmentation, regression, and vision-language generation. Second, a publicly available evaluation platform that implements, for the first time, a two-step approach to run foundation models for data encoding followed by custom task-specific adaptation via few-shot learning and linear probing mechanisms. Third, we create a meta-model that combines state-of-the-art foundation models in pathology, radiology and language with novel task-specific adapters that address all UNICORN tasks, which we refer to as Unicorn Model-0 (UM-0). Finally, we design a novel UNICORN score to benchmark and compare model performance across all tasks. We present the results of UM-0 using sequestered test data from over 2,400 patients, 3,700 vision cases, and 2,400 clinical reports from 17 institutions across eight countries, spanning eight anatomical regions and four imaging modalities. Data, baselines, and evaluation platform are publicly accessible at unicorn.grand-challenge.org.

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### Designing UNICORN: a Unified Benchmark for Imaging in Computational Pathology, Radiology, and Natural Language

Authors: Michelle Stegeman, Lena Philipp, Fennie van der Graaf, Marina D'Amato, Clément Grisi, Luc Builtjes, Joeran S. Bosma, Judith Lefkes, Rianne A. Weber, James A. Meakin, Thomas Koopman, Anne Mickan et al.
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02790v1

Medical foundation models show promise to learn broadly generalizable features from large, diverse datasets. This could be the base for reliable cross-modality generalization and rapid adaptation to new, task-specific goals, with only a few task-specific examples. Yet, evidence for this is limited by the lack of public, standardized, and reproducible evaluation frameworks, as existing public benchmarks are often fragmented across task-, organ-, or modality-specific settings, limiting assessment of cross-task generalization. We introduce UNICORN, a public benchmark designed to systematically evaluate medical foundation models under a unified protocol. To isolate representation quality, we built the benchmark on a novel two-step framework that decouples model inference from task-specific evaluation based on standardized few-shot adaptation. As a central design choice, we constructed indirectly accessible sequestered test sets derived from clinically relevant cohorts, along with standardized evaluation code and a submission interface on an open benchmarking platform. Performance is aggregated into a single UNICORN Score, a new metric that we introduce to support direct comparison of foundation models across diverse medical domains, modalities, and task types. The UNICORN test dataset includes data from more than 2,400 patients, including over 3,700 vision cases and over 2,400 clinical reports collected from 17 institutions across eight countries. The benchmark spans eight anatomical regions and four imaging modalities. Both task-specific and aggregated leaderboards enable accessible, standardized, and reproducible evaluation. By standardizing multi-task, multi-modality assessment, UNICORN establishes a foundation for reproducible benchmarking of medical foundation models. Data, baseline methods, and the evaluation platform are publicly available via unicorn.grand-challenge.org.

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### OCR or Not? Rethinking Document Information Extraction in the MLLMs Era with Real-World Large-Scale Datasets

Authors: Jiyuan Shen, Peiyue Yuan, Atin Ghosh, Yifan Mai, Daniel Dahlmeier
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02789v1

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) enhance the potential of natural language processing. However, their actual impact on document information extraction remains unclear. In particular, it is unclear whether an MLLM-only pipeline--while simpler--can truly match the performance of traditional OCR+MLLM setups. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale benchmarking study that evaluates various out-of-the-box MLLMs on business-document information extraction. To examine and explore failure modes, we propose an automated hierarchical error analysis framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to diagnose error patterns systematically. Our findings suggest that OCR may not be necessary for powerful MLLMs, as image-only input can achieve comparable performance to OCR-enhanced approaches. Moreover, we demonstrate that carefully designed schema, exemplars, and instructions can further enhance MLLMs performance. We hope this work can offer practical guidance and valuable insight for advancing document information extraction.

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### Agentified Assessment of Logical Reasoning Agents

Authors: Zhiyu Ni, Yifeng Xiao, Zheng Liang
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02788v4

We present a framework for evaluating and benchmarking logical reasoning agents when assessment itself must be reproducible, auditable, and robust to execution failures. Building on agentified assessment, we use an assessor agent to issue tasks, enforce execution budgets, parse outputs, and record structured failure types, while the agent under test only needs to expose a standardized agent-to-agent interface. As a case study, we benchmark an auto-formalization agent for first-order logic (FOL) reasoning on a solver-verified and repaired split of FOLIO. The agent translates natural language premises and conclusions into executable Z3Py programs and employs satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) solving to determine logical entailment. On the cleaned FOLIO validation set, the auto-formalization agent achieves 86.70% accuracy under the assessor protocol, outperforming a chain-of-thought baseline (73.89%).

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### Rethinking Code Similarity for Automated Algorithm Design with LLMs

Authors: Rui Zhang, Zhichao Lu
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02787v1

The rise of Large Language Model-based Automated Algorithm Design (LLM-AAD) has transformed algorithm development by autonomously generating code implementations of expert-level algorithms. Unlike traditional expert-driven algorithm development, in the LLM-AAD paradigm, the main design principle behind an algorithm is often implicitly embedded in the generated code. Therefore, assessing algorithmic similarity directly from code, distinguishing genuine algorithmic innovation from mere syntactic variation, becomes essential. While various code similarity metrics exist, they fail to capture algorithmic similarity, as they focus on surface-level syntax or output equivalence rather than the underlying algorithmic logic. We propose BehaveSim, a novel method to measure algorithmic similarity through the lens of problem-solving behavior as a sequence of intermediate solutions produced during execution, dubbed as problem-solving trajectories (PSTrajs). By quantifying the alignment between PSTrajs using dynamic time warping (DTW), BehaveSim distinguishes algorithms with divergent logic despite syntactic or output-level similarities. We demonstrate its utility in two key applications: (i) Enhancing LLM-AAD: Integrating BehaveSim into existing LLM-AAD frameworks (e.g., FunSearch, EoH) promotes behavioral diversity, significantly improving performance on three AAD tasks. (ii) Algorithm analysis: BehaveSim clusters generated algorithms by behavior, enabling systematic analysis of problem-solving strategies--a crucial tool for the growing ecosystem of AI-generated algorithms. Data and code of this work are open-sourced at https://github.com/RayZhhh/behavesim.

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### HiLoRA: Hierarchical Low-Rank Adaptation for Personalized Federated Learning

Authors: Zihao Peng, Nan Zou, Jiandian Zeng, Guo Li, Ke Chen, Boyuan Li, Tian Wang
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02785v1

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have been widely adopted in vision tasks due to their strong transferability. In Federated Learning (FL), where full fine-tuning is communication heavy, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) provides an efficient and communication-friendly way to adapt ViTs. However, existing LoRA-based federated tuning methods overlook latent client structures in real-world settings, limiting shared representation learning and hindering effective adaptation to unseen clients. To address this, we propose HiLoRA, a hierarchical LoRA framework that places adapters at three levels: root, cluster, and leaf, each designed to capture global, subgroup, and client-specific knowledge, respectively. Through cross-tier orthogonality and cascaded optimization, HiLoRA separates update subspaces and aligns each tier with its residual personalized objective. In particular, we develop a LoRA-Subspace Adaptive Clustering mechanism that infers latent client groups via subspace similarity analysis, thereby facilitating knowledge sharing across structurally aligned clients. Theoretically, we establish a tier-wise generalization analysis that supports HiLoRA's design. Experiments on ViT backbones with CIFAR-100 and DomainNet demonstrate consistent improvements in both personalization and generalization.

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### Generative adversarial imitation learning for robot swarms: Learning from human demonstrations and trained policies

Authors: Mattes Kraus, Jonas Kuckling
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG, cs.MA
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02783v1

In imitation learning, robots are supposed to learn from demonstrations of the desired behavior. Most of the work in imitation learning for swarm robotics provides the demonstrations as rollouts of an existing policy. In this work, we provide a framework based on generative adversarial imitation learning that aims to learn collective behaviors from human demonstrations. Our framework is evaluated across six different missions, learning both from manual demonstrations and demonstrations derived from a PPO-trained policy. Results show that the imitation learning process is able to learn qualitatively meaningful behaviors that perform similarly well as the provided demonstrations. Additionally, we deploy the learned policies on a swarm of TurtleBot 4 robots in real-robot experiments. The exhibited behaviors preserved their visually recognizable character and their performance is comparable to the one achieved in simulation.

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### Scores Know Bobs Voice: Speaker Impersonation Attack

Authors: Chanwoo Hwang, Sunpill Kim, Yong Kiam Tan, Tianchi Liu, Seunghun Paik, Dongsoo Kim, Mondal Soumik, Khin Mi Mi Aung, Jae Hong Seo
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02781v1

Advances in deep learning have enabled the widespread deployment of speaker recognition systems (SRSs), yet they remain vulnerable to score-based impersonation attacks. Existing attacks that operate directly on raw waveforms require a large number of queries due to the difficulty of optimizing in high-dimensional audio spaces. Latent-space optimization within generative models offers improved efficiency, but these latent spaces are shaped by data distribution matching and do not inherently capture speaker-discriminative geometry. As a result, optimization trajectories often fail to align with the adversarial direction needed to maximize victim scores. To address this limitation, we propose an inversion-based generative attack framework that explicitly aligns the latent space of the synthesis model with the discriminative feature space of SRSs. We first analyze the requirements of an inverse model for score-based attacks and introduce a feature-aligned inversion strategy that geometrically synchronizes latent representations with speaker embeddings. This alignment ensures that latent updates directly translate into score improvements. Moreover, it enables new attack paradigms, including subspace-projection-based attacks, which were previously infeasible due to the absence of a faithful feature-to-audio mapping. Experiments show that our method significantly improves query efficiency, achieving competitive attack success rates with on average 10x fewer queries than prior approaches. In particular, the enabled subspace-projection-based attack attains up to 91.65% success using only 50 queries. These findings establish feature-aligned inversion as a key tool for evaluating the robustness of modern SRSs against score-based impersonation threats.

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### From Solver to Tutor: Evaluating the Pedagogical Intelligence of LLMs with KMP-Bench

Authors: Weikang Shi, Houxing Ren, Junting Pan, Aojun Zhou, Ke Wang, Zimu Lu, Yunqiao Yang, Yuxuan Hu, Linda Wei, Mingjie Zhan, Hongsheng Li
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02775v1

Large Language Models (LLMs) show significant potential in AI mathematical tutoring, yet current evaluations often rely on simplistic metrics or narrow pedagogical scenarios, failing to assess comprehensive, multi-turn teaching effectiveness. In this paper, we introduce KMP-Bench, a comprehensive K-8 Mathematical Pedagogical Benchmark designed to assess LLMs from two complementary perspectives. The first module, KMP-Dialogue, evaluates holistic pedagogical capabilities against six core principles (e.g., Challenge, Explanation, Feedback), leveraging a novel multi-turn dialogue dataset constructed by weaving together diverse pedagogical components. The second module, KMP-Skills, provides a granular assessment of foundational tutoring abilities, including multi-turn problem-solving, error detection and correction, and problem generation. Our evaluations on KMP-Bench reveal a key disparity: while leading LLMs excel at tasks with verifiable solutions, they struggle with the nuanced application of pedagogical principles. Additionally, we present KMP-Pile, a large-scale (150K) dialogue dataset. Models fine-tuned on KMP-Pile show substantial improvement on KMP-Bench, underscoring the value of pedagogically-rich training data for developing more effective AI math tutors.

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### ITO: Images and Texts as One via Synergizing Multiple Alignment and Training-Time Fusion

Authors: Hanpeng Liu, Yaqian Li, Zidan Wang, Shuoxi Zhang, Zonglin Zhao, Zihao Bo, Rinyoichi Takezoe, Kaiwen Long, Kun He
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02767v3

Image-text contrastive pretraining has become a dominant paradigm for visual representation learning, yet existing methods often yield representations that remain partially organized by modality. We propose ITO, a framework addressing this limitation through two synergistic mechanisms. Multimodal multiple alignment enriches supervision by mining diverse image-text correspondences, while a lightweight training-time multimodal fusion module enforces structured cross-modal interaction. Crucially, the fusion module is discarded at inference, preserving the efficiency of standard dual-encoder architectures. Extensive experiments show that ITO consistently outperforms strong baselines across classification, retrieval, and multimodal benchmarks. Our analysis reveals that while multiple alignment drives discriminative power, training-time fusion acts as a critical structural regularizer -- eliminating the modality gap and stabilizing training dynamics to prevent the early saturation often observed in aggressive contrastive learning.

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### EvoSkill: Automated Skill Discovery for Multi-Agent Systems

Authors: Salaheddin Alzubi, Noah Provenzano, Jaydon Bingham, Weiyuan Chen, Tu Vu
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02766v1

Coding agents are increasingly used as general-purpose problem solvers, but their flexibility does not by itself confer the domain expertise needed for specialized tasks. Recent work addresses this through \textit{agent skills}: reusable workflows, and code, that augment agents with domain-specific capabilities. Most skills today are hand-crafted, and existing evolutionary approaches optimize low-level artifacts (e.g. prompts \&amp; code) that are tightly coupled to specific models and tasks. We introduce \textbf{EvoSkill}, a self-evolving framework that automatically discovers and refines agent skills through iterative failure analysis. EvoSkill analyzes execution failures, proposes new skills or edits to existing ones, and materializes them into structured, reusable skill folders. A Pareto frontier of agent programs governs selection, retaining only skills that improve held-out validation performance while the underlying model remains frozen. We evaluate EvoSkill on two benchmarks: OfficeQA, a grounded reasoning benchmark over U.S.\ Treasury data, where it improves exact-match accuracy by \textbf{7.3\%} (60.6\% $\to$ 67.9\%); and SealQA, a search-augmented QA benchmark with noisy retrieval, where it yields a \textbf{12.1\%} gain (26.6\% $\to$ 38.7\%). We also investigate the zero-shot transfer capabilties of skills evolved on one task to the other; in particular: skills evolved from SealQA transfers zero-shot to BrowseComp, improving accuracy by \textbf{5.3\%} without modification demonstrating that skill-level optimization produces transferable capabilities beyond the training task.

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### Next Embedding Prediction Makes World Models Stronger

Authors: George Bredis, Nikita Balagansky, Daniil Gavrilov, Ruslan Rakhimov
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02765v1

Capturing temporal dependencies is critical for model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) in partially observable, high-dimensional domains. We introduce NE-Dreamer, a decoder-free MBRL agent that leverages a temporal transformer to predict next-step encoder embeddings from latent state sequences, directly optimizing temporal predictive alignment in representation space. This approach enables NE-Dreamer to learn coherent, predictive state representations without reconstruction losses or auxiliary supervision. On the DeepMind Control Suite, NE-Dreamer matches or exceeds the performance of DreamerV3 and leading decoder-free agents. On a challenging subset of DMLab tasks involving memory and spatial reasoning, NE-Dreamer achieves substantial gains. These results establish next-embedding prediction with temporal transformers as an effective, scalable framework for MBRL in complex, partially observable environments.

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### Efficient Self-Evaluation for Diffusion Language Models via Sequence Regeneration

Authors: Linhao Zhong, Linyu Wu, Wen Wang, Yuling Xi, Chenchen Jing, Jiaheng Zhang, Hao Chen, Chunhua Shen
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02760v2

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have recently attracted significant attention for their ability to enhance diversity, controllability, and parallelism. However, their non-sequential, bidirectionally masked generation makes quality assessment difficult, underscoring the need for effective self-evaluation. In this work, we propose DiSE, a simple yet effective self-evaluation confidence quantification method for dLLMs. DiSE quantifies confidence by computing the probability of regenerating the tokens in the entire generated sequence, given the full context. This method enables more efficient and reliable quality assessment by leveraging token regeneration probabilities, facilitating both likelihood estimation and robust uncertainty quantification. Building upon DiSE, we further introduce a flexible-length generation framework, which adaptively controls the sequence length based on the model's self-assessment of its own output. We analyze and validate the feasibility of DiSE from the perspective of dLLM generalization, and empirically demonstrate that DiSE is positively correlated with both semantic coherence and answer accuracy. Extensive experiments on likelihood evaluation, uncertainty quantification, and flexible-length generation further confirm the effectiveness of the proposed DiSE. Project page: https://zhongzero.github.io/DiSE/

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### Efficient Self-Evaluation for Diffusion Language Models via Sequence Regeneration

Authors: Linhao Zhong, Linyu Wu, Wen Wang, Yuling Xi, Chenchen Jing, Jiaheng Zhang, Hao Chen, Chunhua Shen
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02760v1

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have recently attracted significant attention for their ability to enhance diversity, controllability, and parallelism. However, their non-sequential, bidirectionally masked generation makes quality assessment difficult, underscoring the need for effective self-evaluation. In this work, we propose DiSE, a simple yet effective self-evaluation confidence quantification method for dLLMs. DiSE quantifies confidence by computing the probability of regenerating the tokens in the entire generated sequence, given the full context. This method enables more efficient and reliable quality assessment by leveraging token regeneration probabilities, facilitating both likelihood estimation and robust uncertainty quantification. Building upon DiSE, we further introduce a flexible-length generation framework, which adaptively controls the sequence length based on the model's self-assessment of its own output. We analyze and validate the feasibility of DiSE from the perspective of dLLM generalization, and empirically demonstrate that DiSE is positively correlated with both semantic coherence and answer accuracy. Extensive experiments on likelihood evaluation, uncertainty quantification, and flexible-length generation further confirm the effectiveness of the proposed DiSE.

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### Rethinking Time Series Domain Generalization via Structure-Stratified Calibration

Authors: Jinyang Li, Shuhao Mei, Xiaoyu Xiao, Shuhang Li, Ruoxi Yun, Jinbo Sun
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02756v1

For time series arising from latent dynamical systems, existing cross-domain generalization methods commonly assume that samples are comparably meaningful within a shared representation space. In real-world settings, however, different datasets often originate from structurally heterogeneous families of dynamical systems, leading to fundamentally distinct feature distributions. Under such circumstances, performing global alignment while neglecting structural differences is highly prone to establishing spurious correspondences and inducing negative transfer. From the new perspective of cross-domain structural correspondence failure, we revisit this problem and propose a structurally stratified calibration framework. This approach explicitly distinguishes structurally consistent samples and performs amplitude calibration exclusively within structurally compatible sample clusters, thereby effectively alleviating generalization failures caused by structural incompatibility. Notably, the proposed framework achieves substantial performance improvements through a concise and computationally efficient calibration strategy. Evaluations on 19 public datasets (100.3k samples) demonstrate that SSCF significantly outperforms strong baselines under the zero-shot setting. These results confirm that establishing structural consistency prior to alignment constitutes a more reliable and effective pathway for improving cross-domain generalization of time series governed by latent dynamical systems.

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### Seeing Clearly without Training: Mitigating Hallucinations in Multimodal LLMs for Remote Sensing

Authors: Yi Liu, Jing Zhang, Di Wang, Xiaoyu Tian, Haonan Guo, Bo Du
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02754v1

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) suffer from pronounced hallucinations in remote sensing visual question-answering (RS-VQA), primarily caused by visual grounding failures in large-scale scenes or misinterpretation of fine-grained small targets. To systematically analyze these issues, we introduce RSHBench, a protocol-based benchmark for fine-grained diagnosis of factual and logical hallucinations. To mitigate grounding-induced factual hallucinations, we further propose Relative Attention-Driven Actively Reasoning (RADAR), a training-free inference method that leverages intrinsic attention in MLLMs to guide progressive localization and fine-grained local reasoning at test time. Extensive experiments across diverse MLLMs demonstrate that RADAR consistently improves RS-VQA performance and reduces both factual and logical hallucinations. Code and data will be publicly available at: https://github.com/MiliLab/RADAR

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### Deep learning-guided evolutionary optimization for protein design

Authors: Erik Hartman, Di Tang, Johan Malmström
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.LG, q-bio.QM, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02753v1

Designing novel proteins with desired characteristics remains a significant challenge due to the large sequence space and the complexity of sequence-function relationships. Efficient exploration of this space to identify sequences that meet specific design criteria is crucial for advancing therapeutics and biotechnology. Here, we present BoGA (Bayesian Optimization Genetic Algorithm), a framework that combines evolutionary search with Bayesian optimization to efficiently navigate the sequence space. By integrating a genetic algorithm as a stochastic proposal generator within a surrogate modeling loop, BoGA prioritizes candidates based on prior evaluations and surrogate model predictions, enabling data-efficient optimization. We demonstrate the utility of BoGA through benchmarking on sequence and structure design tasks, followed by its application in designing peptide binders against pneumolysin, a key virulence factor of \textit{Streptococcus pneumoniae}. BoGA accelerates the discovery of high-confidence binders, demonstrating the potential for efficient protein design across diverse objectives. The algorithm is implemented within the BoPep suite and is available under an MIT license at \href{https://github.com/ErikHartman/bopep}{GitHub}.

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### iGVLM: Dynamic Instruction-Guided Vision Encoding for Question-Aware Multimodal Understanding

Authors: Hanpeng Liu, Yaqian Li, Zidan Wang, Shuoxi Zhang, Zihao Bo, Rinyoichi Takezoe, Kaiwen Long, Kun He
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02748v2

Despite the success of Large Vision--Language Models (LVLMs), most existing architectures suffer from a representation bottleneck: they rely on static, instruction-agnostic vision encoders whose visual representations are utilized in an invariant manner across different textual tasks. This rigidity hinders fine-grained reasoning where task-specific visual cues are critical. To address this issue, we propose iGVLM, a general framework for instruction-guided visual modulation. iGVLM introduces a decoupled dual-branch architecture: a frozen representation branch that preserves task-agnostic visual representations learned during pre-training, and a dynamic conditioning branch that performs affine feature modulation via Adaptive Layer Normalization (AdaLN). This design enables a smooth transition from general-purpose perception to instruction-aware reasoning while maintaining the structural integrity and stability of pre-trained visual priors. Beyond standard benchmarks, we introduce MM4, a controlled diagnostic probe for quantifying logical consistency under multi-query, multi-instruction settings. Extensive results show that iGVLM consistently enhances instruction sensitivity across diverse language backbones, offering a plug-and-play paradigm for bridging passive perception and active reasoning.

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### Enhancing User Throughput in Multi-panel mmWave Radio Access Networks for Beam-based MU-MIMO Using a DRL Method

Authors: Ramin Hashemi, Vismika Ranasinghe, Teemu Veijalainen, Petteri Kela, Risto Wichman
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.IT, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02745v1

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication systems, particularly those leveraging multi-user multiple-input and multiple-output (MU-MIMO) with hybrid beamforming, face challenges in optimizing user throughput and minimizing latency due to the high complexity of dynamic beam selection and management. This paper introduces a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach for enhancing user throughput in multi-panel mmWave radio access networks in a practical network setup. Our DRL-based formulation utilizes an adaptive beam management strategy that models the interaction between the communication agent and its environment as a Markov decision process (MDP), optimizing beam selection based on real-time observations. The proposed framework exploits spatial domain (SD) characteristics by incorporating the cross-correlation between the beams in different antenna panels, the measured reference signal received power (RSRP), and the beam usage statistics to dynamically adjust beamforming decisions. As a result, the spectral efficiency is improved and end-to-end latency is reduced. The numerical results demonstrate an increase in throughput of up to 16% and a reduction in latency by factors 3-7x compared to baseline (legacy beam management).

---

### MultiShadow: Multi-Object Shadow Generation for Image Compositing via Diffusion Model

Authors: Waqas Ahmed, Dean Diepeveen, Ferdous Sohel
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02743v4

Realistic shadow generation is crucial for achieving seamless image compositing, yet existing methods primarily focus on single-object insertion and often fail to generalize when multiple foreground objects are composited into a background scene. In practice, however, modern compositing pipelines and real-world applications often insert multiple objects simultaneously, necessitating shadows that are jointly consistent in terms of geometry, attachment, and location. In this paper, we address the under-explored problem of multi-object shadow generation, aiming to synthesize physically plausible shadows for multiple inserted objects. Our approach exploits the multimodal capabilities of a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model. An image pathway injects dense, multi-scale features to provide fine-grained spatial guidance, while a text-based pathway encodes per-object shadow bounding boxes as learned positional tokens and fuses them via cross-attention. An attention-alignment loss further grounds these tokens to their corresponding shadow regions. To support this task, we augment the DESOBAv2 dataset by constructing composite scenes with multiple inserted objects and automatically derive prompts combining object category and shadow positioning information. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both single and multi-object shadow generation settings.

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### MultiShadow: Multi-Object Shadow Generation for Image Compositing via Diffusion Model

Authors: Waqas Ahmed, Dean Diepeveen, Ferdous Sohel
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02743v3

Realistic shadow generation is crucial for achieving seamless image compositing, yet existing methods primarily focus on single-object insertion and often fail to generalize when multiple foreground objects are composited into a background scene. In practice, however, modern compositing pipelines and real-world applications often insert multiple objects simultaneously, necessitating shadows that are jointly consistent in terms of geometry, attachment, and location. In this paper, we address the under-explored problem of multi-object shadow generation, aiming to synthesize physically plausible shadows for multiple inserted objects. Our approach exploits the multimodal capabilities of a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model. An image pathway injects dense, multi-scale features to provide fine-grained spatial guidance, while a text-based pathway encodes per-object shadow bounding boxes as learned positional tokens and fuses them via cross-attention. An attention-alignment loss further grounds these tokens to their corresponding shadow regions. To support this task, we augment the DESOBAv2 dataset by constructing composite scenes with multiple inserted objects and automatically derive prompts combining object category and shadow positioning information. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both single and multi-object shadow generation settings.

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### Practical FP4 Training for Large-Scale MoE Models on Hopper GPUs

Authors: Wuyue Zhang, Chongdong Huang, Chunbo You, Cheng Gu, Fengjuan Wang, Mou Sun
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02731v1

Training large-scale Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models is bottlenecked by activation memory and expert-parallel communication, yet FP4 training remains impractical on Hopper-class GPUs without native MXFP4 or NVFP4 support. In this work, we present a training recipe that enables MXFP4 efficiency for MoE models on Hopper architectures without native 4-bit computation support. A central challenge is to integrate FP4 into an existing BF16/FP8 hybrid training pipeline without incurring costly precision round-trips (e.g., FP4 $\leftrightarrow$ BF16 $\leftrightarrow$ FP8). We address this challenge by introducing direct FP8-to-FP4 quantization and de-quantization, together with scaling-aware FP4 row-wise to column-wise conversion, enabling FP4 activations and expert-parallel communication with minimal overhead. Core MoE computations are executed in FP8, while activations and expert-parallel communication are compressed using MXFP4, achieving substantial memory and bandwidth savings without degrading convergence. At the 671B parameter scale, our method achieves end-to-end training performance comparable to strong FP8 baselines, while reducing peak activation memory by 14.8\% (11.8 GB) and improving training throughput by 12.5\%, from 1157 to 1302 tokens per GPU per second. These results show that FP4 efficiency can be practically realized for large-scale MoE training through careful software-hardware co-design, even without native FP4 Tensor Core support.

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### The power of small initialization in noisy low-tubal-rank tensor recovery

Authors: ZHiyu Liu, Haobo Geng, Xudong Wang, Yandong Tang, Zhi Han, Yao Wang
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.LG, math.OC, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02729v1

We study the problem of recovering a low-tubal-rank tensor $\mathcal{X}\_\star\in \mathbb{R}^{n \times n \times k}$ from noisy linear measurements under the t-product framework. A widely adopted strategy involves factorizing the optimization variable as $\mathcal{U} * \mathcal{U}^\top$, where $\mathcal{U} \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times R \times k}$, followed by applying factorized gradient descent (FGD) to solve the resulting optimization problem. Since the tubal-rank $r$ of the underlying tensor $\mathcal{X}_\star$ is typically unknown, this method often assumes $r &lt; R \le n$, a regime known as over-parameterization. However, when the measurements are corrupted by some dense noise (e.g., Gaussian noise), FGD with the commonly used spectral initialization yields a recovery error that grows linearly with the over-estimated tubal-rank $R$. To address this issue, we show that using a small initialization enables FGD to achieve a nearly minimax optimal recovery error, even when the tubal-rank $R$ is significantly overestimated. Using a four-stage analytic framework, we analyze this phenomenon and establish the sharpest known error bound to date, which is independent of the overestimated tubal-rank $R$. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical guarantee showing that an easy-to-use early stopping strategy can achieve the best known result in practice. All these theoretical findings are validated through a series of simulations and real-data experiments.

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### Gated Differential Linear Attention: A Linear-Time Decoder for High-Fidelity Medical Segmentation

Authors: Hongbo Zheng, Afshin Bozorgpour, Dorit Merhof, Minjia Zhang
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02727v4

Medical image segmentation requires models that preserve fine anatomical boundaries while remaining practical for clinical deployment. Transformers capture long-range dependencies but incur quadratic attention cost, whereas CNNs are efficient but less effective at global reasoning. Linear attention offers \(\mathcal{O}(N)\) scaling, but often produces diffuse feature aggregation that weakens boundary-sensitive prediction. We introduce a gated differential linear-attention mixer for medical image segmentation. Its global path, Gated Differential Linear Attention (GDLA), performs differential subtraction between two kernelized attention branches over complementary query/key subspaces to suppress redundant responses, and employs a data-dependent gate for token refinement. A parallel local token-mixing branch with depthwise convolution strengthens neighborhood interactions for better refinement, and the two branches are fused while preserving \(\mathcal{O}(N)\) complexity. When instantiated in a pretrained Pyramid Vision Transformer (PVT)-based encoder--decoder model, \name achieves state-of-the-art results on the evaluated 2D medical segmentation benchmarks spanning CT, MRI, ultrasound, and dermoscopy, with a favorable accuracy--efficiency trade-off over closely related baselines. The code is publicly available at \href{https://github.com/xmindflow/gdla}{https://github.com/xmindflow/gdla}.

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### Cross-view geo-localization, Image retrieval, Multiscale geometric modeling, Frequency domain enhancement

Authors: Hongying Zhang, ShuaiShuai Ma
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02726v1

Cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) aims to establish spatial correspondences between images captured from significantly different viewpoints and constitutes a fundamental technique for visual localization in GNSS-denied environments. Nevertheless, CVGL remains challenging due to severe geometric asymmetry, texture inconsistency across imaging domains, and the progressive degradation of discriminative local information. Existing methods predominantly rely on spatial domain feature alignment, which is inherently sensitive to large scale viewpoint variations and local disturbances. To alleviate these limitations, this paper proposes the Spatial and Frequency Domain Enhancement Network (SFDE), which leverages complementary representations from spatial and frequency domains. SFDE adopts a three branch parallel architecture to model global semantic context, local geometric structure, and statistical stability in the frequency domain, respectively, thereby characterizing consistency across domains from the perspectives of scene topology, multiscale structural patterns, and frequency invariance. The resulting complementary features are jointly optimized in a unified embedding space via progressive enhancement and coupled constraints, enabling the learning of cross-view representations with consistency across multiple granularities. Comprehensive experiments show that SFDE achieves competitive performance and in many cases even surpasses state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining a lightweight and computationally efficient design. {Our code is available at https://github.com/Mashuaishuai669/SFDE

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### Single Microphone Own Voice Detection based on Simulated Transfer Functions for Hearing Aids

Authors: Mathuranathan Mayuravaani, W. Bastiaan Kleijn, Andrew Lensen, Charlotte Sørensen
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.SD, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02724v2

This paper presents a simulation-based approach to own voice detection (OVD) in hearing aids using a single microphone. While OVD can significantly improve user comfort and speech intelligibility, enabling reliable OVD with a single microphone is desirable for simplifying hardware and reducing power consumption in compact hearing devices. However, most existing solutions rely on multiple microphones or additional sensors, increasing device complexity and cost. To enable ML-based OVD without requiring costly transfer-function measurements, we propose a data augmentation strategy based on simulated acoustic transfer functions (ATFs) that expose the model to a wide range of spatial propagation conditions. A transformer-based classifier is trained using analytically generated ATFs and further fine-tuned using numerically simulated ATFs with increasing geometric realism. This hierarchical adaptation enables the model to refine its spatial understanding while maintaining generalization. Experimental results show 95.52% accuracy on simulated head-and-torso test data and 90.02% accuracy for one-second speech segments, demonstrating robustness to short durations. When evaluated on real-world hearing-aid recordings, few-shot fine-tuning using a small subset achieves 91% accuracy, demonstrating that limited real-world data can effectively adapt the simulation-trained model. These results highlight the potential of simulation-based training for enabling practical single-microphone OVD systems in hearing aids.

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### Single Microphone Own Voice Detection based on Simulated Transfer Functions for Hearing Aids

Authors: Mathuranathan Mayuravaani, W. Bastiaan Kleijn, Andrew Lensen, Charlotte Sørensen
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.SD, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02724v1

This paper presents a simulation-based approach to own voice detection (OVD) in hearing aids using a single microphone. While OVD can significantly improve user comfort and speech intelligibility, existing solutions often rely on multiple microphones or additional sensors, increasing device complexity and cost. To enable ML-based OVD without requiring costly transfer-function measurements, we propose a data augmentation strategy based on simulated acoustic transfer functions (ATFs) that expose the model to a wide range of spatial propagation conditions. A transformer-based classifier is first trained on analytically generated ATFs and then progressively fine-tuned using numerically simulated ATFs, transitioning from a rigid-sphere model to a detailed head-and-torso representation. This hierarchical adaptation enabled the model to refine its spatial understanding while maintaining generalization. Experimental results show 95.52% accuracy on simulated head-and-torso test data. Under short-duration conditions, the model maintained 90.02% accuracy with one-second utterances. On real hearing aid recordings, the model achieved 80% accuracy without fine-tuning, aided by lightweight test-time feature compensation. This highlights the model's ability to generalize from simulated to real-world conditions, demonstrating practical viability and pointing toward a promising direction for future hearing aid design.

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### Tensor Decomposition Structure Search Framework from an Interaction Perspective

Authors: Ting-Wei Zhou, Xi-Le Zhao, Sheng Liu, Wei-Hao Wu, Yu-Bang Zheng, Deyu Meng
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02720v2

Recently, tensor decompositions have attracted increasing attention. Fundamentally, different interactions among factors induce distinct tensor decomposition structures (i.e., tensor decomposition). Identifying an appropriate interaction-induced tensor decomposition structure for given data is a fundamental yet challenging problem in tensor modeling, and remains largely under-explored. Existing tensor decomposition structure search methods are typically restricted to a predefined interaction family, such as tensor contraction. To address this problem, we suggest a tensor decomposition structure search framework (I-TSS) from an interaction perspective that can identify either a single structure beyond a predefined interaction family or a mixture of structures involving heterogeneous interaction families. Specifically, we first systematically review existing tensor decomposition structures from an interaction perspective and construct a heterogeneous interaction-induced candidate structure set. Based on it, we propose a unified energy-based rank estimation scheme for heterogeneous interaction-induced candidate structure set. We then introduce the top-$k$ gating mechanism with learnable gating scores to dynamically select a suitable single-candidate structure or combine suitable multi-candidate structures, thereby identifying the tensor decomposition structure in a data-adaptive manner. Theoretically, we derive an approximation error bound for I-TSS, thereby establishing its approximation capability. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that I-TSS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art tensor decomposition methods.

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### TenExp: Mixture-of-Experts-Based Tensor Decomposition Structure Search Framework

Authors: Ting-Wei Zhou, Xi-Le Zhao, Sheng Liu, Wei-Hao Wu, Yu-Bang Zheng, Deyu Meng
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02720v1

Recently, tensor decompositions continue to emerge and receive increasing attention. Selecting a suitable tensor decomposition to exactly capture the low-rank structures behind the data is at the heart of the tensor decomposition field, which remains a challenging and relatively under-explored problem. Current tensor decomposition structure search methods are still confined by a fixed factor-interaction family (e.g., tensor contraction) and cannot deliver the mixture of decompositions. To address this problem, we elaborately design a mixture-of-experts-based tensor decomposition structure search framework (termed as TenExp), which allows us to dynamically select and activate suitable tensor decompositions in an unsupervised fashion. This framework enjoys two unique advantages over the state-of-the-art tensor decomposition structure search methods. Firstly, TenExp can provide a suitable single decomposition beyond a fixed factor-interaction family. Secondly, TenExp can deliver a suitable mixture of decompositions beyond a single decomposition. Theoretically, we also provide the approximation error bound of TenExp, which reveals the approximation capability of TenExp. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and realistic datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed TenExp compared to the state-of-the-art tensor decomposition-based methods.

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### An Empirical Analysis of Calibration and Selective Prediction in Multimodal Clinical Condition Classification

Authors: L. Julián Lechuga López, Farah E. Shamout, Tim G. J. Rudner
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02719v4

As artificial intelligence systems move toward clinical deployment, ensuring reliable prediction behavior is fundamental for safety-critical decision-making tasks. One proposed safeguard is selective prediction, where models can defer uncertain predictions to human experts for review. In this work, we empirically evaluate the reliability of uncertainty-based selective prediction in multilabel clinical condition classification using multimodal ICU data. Across a range of state-of-the-art unimodal and multimodal models, we find that selective prediction can substantially degrade performance despite strong standard evaluation metrics. This failure is driven by severe class-dependent miscalibration, whereby models assign high uncertainty to correct predictions and low uncertainty to incorrect ones, particularly for underrepresented clinical conditions. Our results show that commonly used aggregate metrics can obscure these effects, limiting their ability to assess selective prediction behavior in this setting. Taken together, our findings characterize a task-specific failure mode of selective prediction in multimodal clinical condition classification and highlight the need for calibration-aware evaluation to provide strong guarantees of safety and robustness in clinical AI.

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### From "What" to "How": Constrained Reasoning for Autoregressive Image Generation

Authors: Ruxue Yan, Xubo Liu, Wenya Guo, Zhengkun Zhang, Ying Zhang, Xiaojie Yuan
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CV, cs.MM, eess.IV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02712v1

Autoregressive image generation has seen recent improvements with the introduction of chain-of-thought and reinforcement learning. However, current methods merely specify "What" details to depict by rewriting the input prompt, yet fundamentally fail to reason about "How" to structure the overall image. This inherent limitation gives rise to persistent issues, such as spatial ambiguity directly causing unrealistic object overlaps. To bridge this gap, we propose CoR-Painter, a novel framework that pioneers a "How-to-What" paradigm by introducing Constrained Reasoning to guide the autoregressive generation. Specifically, it first deduces "How to draw" by deriving a set of visual constraints from the input prompt, which explicitly govern spatial relationships, key attributes, and compositional rules. These constraints steer the subsequent generation of a detailed description "What to draw", providing a structurally sound and coherent basis for accurate visual synthesis. Additionally, we introduce a Dual-Objective GRPO strategy that specifically optimizes the textual constrained reasoning and visual projection processes to ensure the coherence and quality of the entire generation pipeline. Extensive experiments on T2I-CompBench, GenEval, and WISE demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, with significant improvements in spatial metrics (e.g., +5.41% on T2I-CompBench).

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### A Natural Language Agentic Approach to Study Affective Polarization

Authors: Stephanie Anneris Malvicini, Ewelina Gajewska, Arda Derbent, Katarzyna Budzynska, Jarosław A. Chudziak, Maria Vanina Martinez
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02711v1

Affective polarization has been central to political and social studies, with growing focus on social media, where partisan divisions are often exacerbated. Real-world studies tend to have limited scope, while simulated studies suffer from insufficient high-quality training data, as manually labeling posts is labor-intensive and prone to subjective biases. The lack of adequate tools to formalize different definitions of affective polarization across studies complicates result comparison and hinders interoperable frameworks. We present a multi-agent model providing a comprehensive approach to studying affective polarization in social media. To operationalize our framework, we develop a platform leveraging large language models (LLMs) to construct virtual communities where agents engage in discussions. We showcase the potential of our platform by (1) analyzing questions related to affective polarization, as explored in social science literature, providing a fresh perspective on this phenomenon, and (2) introducing scenarios that allow observation and measurement of polarization at different levels of granularity and abstraction. Experiments show that our platform is a flexible tool for computational studies of complex social dynamics such as affective polarization. It leverages advanced agent models to simulate rich, context-sensitive interactions and systematically explore research questions traditionally addressed through human-subject studies.

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### MiM-DiT: MoE in MoE with Diffusion Transformers for All-in-One Image Restoration

Authors: Lingshun Kong, Jiawei Zhang, Zhengpeng Duan, Xiaohe Wu, Yueqi Yang, Xiaotao Wang, Dongqing Zou, Lei Lei, Jinshan Pan
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02710v1

All-in-one image restoration is challenging because different degradation types, such as haze, blur, noise, and low-light, impose diverse requirements on restoration strategies, making it difficult for a single model to handle them effectively. In this paper, we propose a unified image restoration framework that integrates a dual-level Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with a pretrained diffusion model. The framework operates at two levels: the Inter-MoE layer adaptively combines expert groups to handle major degradation types, while the Intra-MoE layer further selects specialized sub-experts to address fine-grained variations within each type. This design enables the model to achieve coarse-grained adaptation across diverse degradation categories while performing fine-grained modulation for specific intra-class variations, ensuring both high specialization in handling complex, real-world corruptions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art approaches on multiple image restoration task.

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### Sensory-Aware Sequential Recommendation via Review-Distilled Representations

Authors: Yeo Chan Yoon, Chanjun Park, Kyuhan Koh
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02709v3

We propose a novel framework for sensory-aware sequential recommendation that enriches item representations with linguistically extracted sensory attributes from product reviews. Our approach, ASER (Attribute-based Sensory-Enhanced Representation), introduces an offline extraction-and-distillation pipeline in which a large language model is first fine-tuned as a teacher to extract structured sensory attribute-value pairs, such as color: matte black and scent: vanilla, from unstructured review text. The extracted structures are then distilled into a compact student transformer that produces fixed-dimensional sensory embeddings for each item. These embeddings encode experiential semantics in a reusable form and are incorporated into standard sequential recommender architectures as additional item-level representations. We evaluate our method on five Amazon domains and integrate the learned sensory embeddings into SASRec, BERT4Rec, BSARec, and DIFF. Across 20 domain-backbone combinations, sensory-enhanced models improve over matched non-sensory counterparts in 19 cases for both HR@10 and NDCG@10, with average relative gains of 7.9% in HR@10 and 11.2% in NDCG@10. Qualitative analysis further shows that the extracted attributes align closely with human perceptions of products, enabling interpretable connections between natural language descriptions and recommendation behavior. Overall, this work demonstrates that sensory attribute distillation offers a principled and scalable way to bridge information extraction and sequential recommendation through structured semantic representation learning.

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### Intelligent Pathological Diagnosis of Gestational Trophoblastic Diseases via Visual-Language Deep Learning Model

Authors: Yuhang Liu, Yueyang Cang, Wenge Que, Xinru Bai, Xingtong Wang, Kuisheng Chen, Jingya Li, Xiaoteng Zhang, Xinmin Li, Lixia Zhang, Pingge Hu, Qiaoting Xie et al.
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02704v1

The pathological diagnosis of gestational trophoblastic disease(GTD) takes a long time, relies heavily on the experience of pathologists, and the consistency of initial diagnosis is low, which seriously threatens maternal health and reproductive outcomes. We developed an expert model for GTD pathological diagnosis, named GTDoctor. GTDoctor can perform pixel-based lesion segmentation on pathological slides, and output diagnostic conclusions and personalized pathological analysis results. We developed a software system, GTDiagnosis, based on this technology and conducted clinical trials. The retrospective results demonstrated that GTDiagnosis achieved a mean precision of over 0.91 for lesion detection in pathological slides (n=679 slides). In prospective studies, pathologists using GTDiagnosis attained a Positive Predictive Value of 95.59% (n=68 patients). The tool reduced average diagnostic time from 56 to 16 seconds per case (n=285 patients). GTDoctor and GTDiagnosis offer a novel solution for GTD pathological diagnosis, enhancing diagnostic performance and efficiency while maintaining clinical interpretability.

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### FinTexTS: Financial Text-Paired Time-Series Dataset via Semantic-Based and Multi-Level Pairing

Authors: Jaehoon Lee, Suhwan Park, Taeyoon Lim, Seunghan Lee, Jun Seo, Dongwan Kang, Hwanil Choi, Minjae Kim, Sungdong Yoo, Soonyoung Lee, Yongjae Lee, Wonbin Ahn
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02702v3

The financial domain involves a variety of important time-series problems. Recently, time-series analysis methods that jointly leverage textual and numerical information have gained increasing attention. Accordingly, numerous efforts have been made to construct text-paired time-series datasets in the financial domain. However, financial markets are characterized by complex interdependencies, in which a company's stock price is influenced not only by company-specific events but also by events in other companies and broader macroeconomic factors. Existing approaches that pair text with financial time-series data based on simple keyword matching often fail to capture such complex relationships. To address this limitation, we propose a semantic-based and multi-level pairing framework. Specifically, we extract company-specific context for the target company from SEC filings and apply an embedding-based matching mechanism to retrieve semantically relevant news articles based on this context. Furthermore, we classify news articles into four levels (macro-level, sector-level, related company-level, and target company-level) using large language models (LLMs), enabling multi-level pairing of news articles with the target company. Applying this framework to publicly-available news datasets, we construct FinTexTS, a new large-scale text-paired stock price dataset. Experimental results on FinTexTS demonstrate the effectiveness of our semantic-based and multi-level pairing strategy in stock price forecasting. In addition to publicly-available news underlying FinTexTS, we show that applying our method to proprietary yet carefully curated news sources leads to higher-quality paired data and improved stock price forecasting performance.

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### Graph-GRPO: Stabilizing Multi-Agent Topology Learning via Group Relative Policy Optimization

Authors: Yueyang Cang, Xiaoteng Zhang, Erlu Zhao, Zehua Ji, Yuhang Liu, Yuchen He, Zhiyuan Ning, Chen Yijun, Wenge Que, Li Shi
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02701v1

Optimizing communication topology is fundamental to the efficiency and effectiveness of Large Language Model (LLM)-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). While recent approaches utilize reinforcement learning to dynamically construct task-specific graphs, they typically rely on single-sample policy gradients with absolute rewards (e.g., binary correctness). This paradigm suffers from severe gradient variance and the credit assignment problem: simple queries yield non-informative positive rewards for suboptimal structures, while difficult queries often result in failures that provide no learning signal. To address these challenges, we propose Graph-GRPO, a novel topology optimization framework that integrates Group Relative Policy Optimization. Instead of evaluating a single topology in isolation, Graph-GRPO samples a group of diverse communication graphs for each query and computes the advantage of specific edges based on their relative performance within the group. By normalizing rewards across the sampled group, our method effectively mitigates the noise derived from task difficulty variance and enables fine-grained credit assignment. Extensive experiments on reasoning and code generation benchmarks demonstrate that Graph-GRPO significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving superior training stability and identifying critical communication pathways previously obscured by reward noise.

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### Neural quantum support vector data description for one-class classification

Authors: Changjae Im, Hyeondo Oh, Daniel K. Park
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: quant-ph, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02700v1

One-class classification (OCC) is a fundamental problem in machine learning with numerous applications, such as anomaly detection and quality control. With the increasing complexity and dimensionality of modern datasets, there is a growing demand for advanced OCC techniques with better expressivity and efficiency. We introduce Neural Quantum Support Vector Data Description (NQSVDD), a classical-quantum hybrid framework for OCC that performs end-to-end optimized hierarchical representation learning. NQSVDD integrates a classical neural network with trainable quantum data encoding and a variational quantum circuit, enabling the model to learn nonlinear feature transformations tailored to the OCC objective. The hybrid architecture maps input data into an intermediate high-dimensional feature space and subsequently projects it into a compact latent space defined through quantum measurements. Importantly, both the feature embedding and the latent representation are jointly optimized such that normal data form a compact cluster, for which a minimum-volume enclosing hypersphere provides an effective decision boundary. Experimental evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate that NQSVDD achieves competitive or superior AUC performance compared to classical Deep SVDD and quantum baselines, while maintaining parameter efficiency and robustness under realistic noise conditions.

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### ShareVerse: Multi-Agent Consistent Video Generation for Shared World Modeling

Authors: Jiayi Zhu, Jianing Zhang, Yiying Yang, Wei Cheng, Xiaoyun Yuan
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02697v2

This paper presents ShareVerse, a video generation framework enabling multi-agent shared world modeling, addressing the gap in existing works that lack support for unified shared world construction with multi-agent interaction. ShareVerse leverages the generation capability of large video models and integrates three key innovations: 1) A dataset for large-scale multi-agent interactive world modeling is built on the CARLA simulation platform, featuring diverse scenes, weather conditions, and interactive trajectories with paired multi-view videos (front/ rear/ left/ right views per agent) and camera data. 2) We propose a spatial concatenation strategy for four-view videos of independent agents to model a broader environment and to ensure internal multi-view geometric consistency. 3) We integrate cross-agent attention blocks into the pretrained video model, which enable interactive transmission of spatial-temporal information across agents, guaranteeing shared world consistency in overlapping regions and reasonable generation in non-overlapping regions. ShareVerse, which supports 49-frame large-scale video generation, accurately perceives the position of dynamic agents and achieves consistent shared world modeling.

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### Addressing Missing and Noisy Modalities in One Solution: Unified Modality-Quality Framework for Low-quality Multimodal Data

Authors: Sijie Mai, Shiqin Han, Haifeng Hu
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02695v1

Multimodal data encountered in real-world scenarios are typically of low quality, with noisy modalities and missing modalities being typical forms that severely hinder model performance and robustness. However, prior works often handle noisy and missing modalities separately. In contrast, we jointly address missing and noisy modalities to enhance model robustness in low-quality data scenarios. We regard both noisy and missing modalities as a unified low-quality modality problem, and propose a unified modality-quality (UMQ) framework to enhance low-quality representations for multimodal affective computing. Firstly, we train a quality estimator with explicit supervised signals via a rank-guided training strategy that compares the relative quality of different representations by adding a ranking constraint, avoiding training noise caused by inaccurate absolute quality labels. Then, a quality enhancer for each modality is constructed, which uses the sample-specific information provided by other modalities and the modality-specific information provided by the defined modality baseline representation to enhance the quality of unimodal representations. Finally, we propose a quality-aware mixture-of-experts module with particular routing mechanism to enable multiple modality-quality problems to be addressed more specifically. UMQ consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on multiple datasets under the settings of complete, missing, and noisy modalities.

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### FiDeSR: High-Fidelity and Detail-Preserving One-Step Diffusion Super-Resolution

Authors: Aro Kim, Myeongjin Jang, Chaewon Moon, Youngjin Shin, Jinwoo Jeong, Sang-hyo Park
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02692v1

Diffusion-based approaches have recently driven remarkable progress in real-world image super-resolution (SR). However, existing methods still struggle to simultaneously preserve fine details and ensure high-fidelity reconstruction, often resulting in suboptimal visual quality. In this paper, we propose FiDeSR, a high-fidelity and detail-preserving one-step diffusion super-resolution framework. During training, we introduce a detail-aware weighting strategy that adaptively emphasizes regions where the model exhibits higher prediction errors. During inference, low- and high-frequency adaptive enhancers further refine the reconstruction without requiring model retraining, enabling flexible enhancement control. To further improve the reconstruction accuracy, FiDeSR incorporates a residual-in-residual noise refinement, which corrects prediction errors in the diffusion noise and enhances fine detail recovery. FiDeSR achieves superior real-world SR performance compared to existing diffusion-based methods, producing outputs with both high perceptual quality and faithful content restoration. The source code will be released at: https://github.com/Ar0Kim/FiDeSR.

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### ReCo-Diff: Residual-Conditioned Deterministic Sampling for Cold Diffusion in Sparse-View CT

Authors: Yong Eun Choi, Hyoung Suk Park, Kiwan Jeon, Hyun-Cheol Park, Sung Ho Kang
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02691v1

Cold and generalized diffusion models have recently shown strong potential for sparse-view CT reconstruction by explicitly modeling deterministic degradation processes. However, existing sampling strategies often rely on ad hoc sampling controls or fixed schedules, which remain sensitive to error accumulation and sampling instability. We propose ReCo-Diff, a residual-conditioned diffusion framework that leverages observation residuals through residual-conditioned self-guided sampling. At each sampling step, ReCo-Diff first produces a null (unconditioned) baseline reconstruction and then conditions subsequent predictions on the observation residual between the predicted image and the measured sparse-view input. This residual-driven guidance provides continuous, measurement-aware correction while preserving a deterministic sampling schedule, without requiring heuristic interventions. Experimental results demonstrate that ReCo-Diff consistently outperforms existing cold diffusion sampling baselines, achieving higher reconstruction accuracy, improved stability, and enhanced robustness under severe sparsity.

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### Retrieval-Augmented Robots via Retrieve-Reason-Act

Authors: Izat Temiraliev, Diji Yang, Yi Zhang
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.AI, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02688v1

To achieve general-purpose utility, we argue that robots must evolve from passive executors into active Information Retrieval users. In strictly zero-shot settings where no prior demonstrations exist, robots face a critical information gap, such as the exact sequence required to assemble a complex furniture kit, that cannot be satisfied by internal parametric knowledge (common sense) or past internal memory. While recent robotic works attempt to use search before action, they primarily focus on retrieving past kinematic trajectories (analogous to searching internal memory) or text-based safety rules (searching for constraints). These approaches fail to address the core information need of active task construction: acquiring unseen procedural knowledge from external, unstructured documentation. In this paper, we define the paradigm as Retrieval-Augmented Robotics (RAR), empowering the robot with the information-seeking capability that bridges the gap between visual documentation and physical actuation. We formulate the task execution as an iterative Retrieve-Reason-Act loop: the robot or embodied agent actively retrieves relevant visual procedural manuals from an unstructured corpus, grounds the abstract 2D diagrams to 3D physical parts via cross-modal alignment, and synthesizes executable plans. We validate this paradigm on a challenging long-horizon assembly benchmark. Our experiments demonstrate that grounding robotic planning in retrieved visual documents significantly outperforms baselines relying on zero-shot reasoning or few-shot example retrieval. This work establishes the basis of RAR, extending the scope of Information Retrieval from answering user queries to driving embodied physical actions.

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### HateMirage: An Explainable Multi-Dimensional Dataset for Decoding Faux Hate and Subtle Online Abuse

Authors: Sai Kartheek Reddy Kasu, Shankar Biradar, Sunil Saumya, Md. Shad Akhtar
Published: 2026-03-03
Categories: cs.CL, cs.SI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02684v1

Subtle and indirect hate speech remains an underexplored challenge in online safety research, particularly when harmful intent is embedded within misleading or manipulative narratives. Existing hate speech datasets primarily capture overt toxicity, underrepresenting the nuanced ways misinformation can incite or normalize hate. To address this gap, we present HateMirage, a novel dataset of Faux Hate comments designed to advance reasoning and explainability research on hate emerging from fake or distorted narratives. The dataset was constructed by identifying widely debunked misinformation claims from fact-checking sources and tracing related YouTube discussions, resulting in 4,530 user comments. Each comment is annotated along three interpretable dimensions: Target (who is affected), Intent (the underlying motivation or goal behind the comment), and Implication (its potential social impact). Unlike prior explainability datasets such as HateXplain and HARE, which offer token-level or single-dimensional reasoning, HateMirage introduces a multi-dimensional explanation framework that captures the interplay between misinformation, harm, and social consequence. We benchmark multiple open-source language models on HateMirage using ROUGE-L F1 and Sentence-BERT similarity to assess explanation coherence. Results suggest that explanation quality may depend more on pretraining diversity and reasoning-oriented data rather than on model scale alone. By coupling misinformation reasoning with harm attribution, HateMirage establishes a new benchmark for interpretable hate detection and responsible AI research.

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