# Research Papers — 2026-03 · bundle page 236 of 243 > Full-text markdown of papers #11751–11800 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/236 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-03/page/235.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-03/page/237.md) ### ToolRLA: Multiplicative Reward Decomposition for Tool-Integrated Agents Authors: Pengbo Liu Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01620v4 Tool-integrated agents that interleave reasoning with API calls are promising for complex tasks, yet aligning them for high-stakes, domain-specific deployment remains challenging: existing reinforcement learning approaches rely on coarse binary rewards that cannot distinguish tool selection errors from malformed parameters. We present ToolRLA, a three-stage post-training pipeline (SFT -> GRPO -> DPO) for domain-specific tool agents. The core contribution is a fine-grained reward function with multiplicative correctness decomposition spanning four dimensions -- format validity, tool selection, parameter accuracy, and regulatory compliance -- that encodes domain priority orderings as inductive biases in the reward landscape. Deployed on a financial advisory copilot (80+ advisors, 1,200+ daily queries), ToolRLA achieves over three months: a 47% improvement in task completion rate (62%->91%), a 63% reduction in tool invocation errors (38%->14%), and a 93% reduction in regulatory violations (12%->0.8%), within sub-2-second latency. Ablation studies show the multiplicative reward design accounts for 7 percentage points of improvement over additive alternatives. Generalization is further validated on ToolBench and API-Bank. --- ### Uncertainty-Aware Hierarchical Re-Localization in OpenStreetMap via Semantic Alignment Authors: Yuchen Zou, Xiao Hu, Lihuang Fang, Yuqing Tang Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01613v2 Monocular re-localization enables robots to estimate camera poses from visual observations. However, many existing methods rely on dense maps or large reference image databases, which face scalability limitations and privacy risks. OpenStreetMap (OSM), as a lightweight privacy-preserving map, offers semantic and geometric information with global scalability. Nonetheless, OSM localization remains challenging due to cross-modal discrepancies between natural images and OSM, as well as the high cost of global map-based localization. In this paper, we propose an uncertainty-aware hierarchical search framework with semantic alignment for localization in OSM. First, object-centric DINO-ViT tokens are exploited to reduce the semantic gap between ground-view observations and OSM vectors. Second, global dense matching is decomposed into coarse FFT correlation and uncertainty-controlled local refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves localization accuracy and speed. When trained on a single dataset, the 3$^\circ$ orientation recall of our method even outperforms the 5$^\circ$ recall of state-of-the-art methods. --- ### Evaluating and Understanding Scheming Propensity in LLM Agents Authors: Mia Hopman, Jannes Elstner, Maria Avramidou, Amritanshu Prasad, David Lindner Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01608v2 As frontier language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents pursuing complex, long-term objectives, there is increased risk of scheming: agents covertly pursuing misaligned goals. Prior work has focused on showing agents are capable of scheming, but their propensity to scheme in realistic scenarios remains underexplored. To understand when agents scheme, we decompose scheming incentives into agent factors and environmental factors. We develop realistic settings allowing us to systematically vary these factors, each with scheming opportunities for agents that pursue instrumentally convergent goals such as self-preservation, resource acquisition, and goal-guarding. We find only minimal instances of scheming despite high environmental incentives, and show this is unlikely due to evaluation awareness. While inserting adversarially-designed prompt snippets that encourage agency and goal-directedness into an agent's system prompt can induce high scheming rates, snippets used in real agent scaffolds rarely do. Surprisingly, in model organisms (Hubinger et al., 2023) built with these snippets, scheming behavior is remarkably brittle: removing a single tool can drop the scheming rate from 59% to 3%, and increasing oversight can raise rather than deter scheming by up to 25%. Our incentive decomposition enables systematic measurement of scheming propensity in settings relevant for deployment, which is necessary as agents are entrusted with increasingly consequential tasks. --- ### CARE: Towards Clinical Accountability in Multi-Modal Medical Reasoning with an Evidence-Grounded Agentic Framework Authors: Yuexi Du, Jinglu Wang, Shujie Liu, Nicha C. Dvornek, Yan Lu Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01607v2 Large visual language models (VLMs) have shown strong multi-modal medical reasoning ability, but most operate as end-to-end black boxes, diverging from clinicians' evidence-based, staged workflows and hindering clinical accountability. Complementarily, expert visual grounding models can accurately localize regions of interest (ROIs), providing explicit, reliable evidence that improves both reasoning accuracy and trust. In this paper, we introduce CARE, advancing Clinical Accountability in multi-modal medical Reasoning with an Evidence-grounded agentic framework. Unlike existing approaches that couple grounding and reasoning within a single generalist model, CARE decomposes the task into coordinated sub-modules to reduce shortcut learning and hallucination: a compact VLM proposes relevant medical entities; an expert entity-referring segmentation model produces pixel-level ROI evidence; and a grounded VLM reasons over the full image augmented by ROI hints. The VLMs are optimized with reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards to align answers with supporting evidence. Furthermore, a VLM coordinator plans tool invocation and reviews evidence-answer consistency, providing agentic control and final verification. Evaluated on standard medical VQA benchmarks, our CARE-Flow (coordinator-free) improves average accuracy by 10.9% over the same size (10B) state-of-the-art (SOTA). With dynamic planning and answer review, our CARE-Coord yields a further gain, outperforming the heavily pre-trained SOTA by 5.2%. Our experiments demonstrate that an agentic framework that emulates clinical workflows, incorporating decoupled specialized models and explicit evidence, yields more accurate and accountable medical AI. Project page: https://xypb.github.io/CARE-Project-Page/ --- ### What Helps---and What Hurts: Bidirectional Explanations for Vision Transformers Authors: Qin Su, Tie Luo Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01605v1 Vision Transformers (ViTs) achieve strong performance in visual recognition, yet their decision-making remains difficult to interpret. We propose BiCAM, a bidirectional class activation mapping method that captures both supportive (positive) and suppressive (negative) contributions to model predictions. Unlike prior CAM-based approaches that discard negative signals, BiCAM preserves signed attributions to produce more complete and contrastive explanations. BiCAM further introduces a Positive-to-Negative Ratio (PNR) that summarizes attribution balance and enables lightweight detection of adversarial examples without retraining. Across ImageNet, VOC, and COCO, BiCAM improves localization and faithfulness while remaining computationally efficient. It generalizes to multiple ViT variants, including DeiT and Swin. These results suggest the importance of modeling both supportive and suppressive evidence for interpreting transformer-based vision models. --- ### Sparse View Distractor-Free Gaussian Splatting Authors: Yi Gu, Zhaorui Wang, Jiahang Cao, Jiaxu Wang, Mingle Zhao, Dongjun Ye, Renjing Xu Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01603v1 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables efficient training and fast novel view synthesis in static environments. To address challenges posed by transient objects, distractor-free 3DGS methods have emerged and shown promising results when dense image captures are available. However, their performance degrades significantly under sparse input conditions. This limitation primarily stems from the reliance on the color residual heuristics to guide the training, which becomes unreliable with limited observations. In this work, we propose a framework to enhance distractor-free 3DGS under sparse-view conditions by incorporating rich prior information. Specifically, we first adopt the geometry foundation model VGGT to estimate camera parameters and generate a dense set of initial 3D points. Then, we harness the attention maps from VGGT for efficient and accurate semantic entity matching. Additionally, we utilize Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to further identify and preserve the large static regions in the scene. We also demonstrate how these priors can be seamlessly integrated into existing distractor-free 3DGS methods. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness and robustness of our approach in mitigating transient distractors for sparse-view 3DGS training. --- ### YCDa: YCbCr Decoupled Attention for Real-time Realistic Camouflaged Object Detection Authors: PeiHuang Zheng, Yunlong Zhao, Zheng Cui, Yang Li Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01602v1 Human vision exhibits remarkable adaptability in perceiving objects under camouflage. When color cues become unreliable, the visual system instinctively shifts its reliance from chrominance (color) to luminance (brightness and texture), enabling more robust perception in visually confusing environments. Drawing inspiration from this biological mechanism, we propose YCDa, an efficient early-stage feature processing strategy that embeds this "chrominance-luminance decoupling and dynamic attention" principle into modern real-time detectors. Specifically, YCDa separates color and luminance information in the input stage and dynamically allocates attention across channels to amplify discriminative cues while suppressing misleading color noise. The strategy is plug-and-play and can be integrated into existing detectors by simply replacing the first downsampling layer. Extensive experiments on multiple baselines demonstrate that YCDa consistently improves performance with negligible overhead as shown in Fig. Notably, YCDa-YOLO12s achieves a 112% improvement in mAP over the baseline on COD10K-D and sets new state-of-the-art results for real-time camouflaged object detection across COD-D datasets. --- ### Dehallu3D: Hallucination-Mitigated 3D Generation from Single Image via Cyclic View Consistency Refinement Authors: Xiwen Wang, Shichao Zhang, Hailun Zhang, Ruowei Wang, Mao Li, Chenyu Zhou, Qijun Zhao, Ji-Zhe Zhou Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01601v2 Large 3D reconstruction models have revolutionized the 3D content generation field, enabling broad applications in virtual reality and gaming. Just like other large models, large 3D reconstruction models suffer from hallucinations as well, introducing structural outliers (e.g., odd holes or protrusions) that deviate from the input data. However, unlike other large models, hallucinations in large 3D reconstruction models remain severely underexplored, leading to malformed 3D-printed objects or insufficient immersion in virtual scenes. Such hallucinations majorly originate from that existing methods reconstruct 3D content from sparsely generated multi-view images which suffer from large viewpoint gaps and discontinuities. To mitigate hallucinations by eliminating the outliers, we propose Dehallu3D for 3D mesh generation. Our key idea is to design a balanced multi-view continuity constraint to enforce smooth transitions across dense intermediate viewpoints, while avoiding over-smoothing that could erase sharp geometric features. Therefore, Dehallu3D employs a plug-and-play optimization module with two key constraints: (i) adjacent consistency to ensure geometric continuity across views, and (ii) adaptive smoothness to retain fine details.We further propose the Outlier Risk Measure (ORM) metric to quantify geometric fidelity in 3D generation from the perspective of outliers. Extensive experiments show that Dehallu3D achieves high-fidelity 3D generation by effectively preserving structural details while removing hallucinated outliers. --- ### Boosting Entropy with Bell Box Quantization Authors: Ningfeng Yang, Tor M. Aamodt Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01599v1 Quantization-Aware Pre-Training (QAPT) is an effective technique to reduce the compute and memory overhead of Deep Neural Networks while improving their energy efficiency on edge devices. Existing QAPT methods produce models stored in compute-efficient data types (e.g. integers) that are not information theoretically optimal (ITO). On the other hand, existing ITO data types (e.g. Quantile/NormalFloat Quantization) are not compute-efficient. We propose BBQ, the first ITO quantization method that is also compute-efficient. BBQ builds on our key insight that since learning is domain-agnostic, the output of a quantizer does not need to reside in the same domain as its input. BBQ performs ITO quantization in its input domain, and returns its output in a compute-efficient domain where ITO data types are mapped to compute-efficient data types. Without sacrificing compute efficiency, BBQ outperforms prior SOTA QAPT methods by a perplexity reduction of up to 2 points for 4-bit models, up to 4 points for 3-bit models, up to 5 points for 2-bit models, and up to 18 points for 1-bit models. Code is available at https://github.com/1733116199/bbq. --- ### Preference Score Distillation: Leveraging 2D Rewards to Align Text-to-3D Generation with Human Preference Authors: Jiaqi Leng, Shuyuan Tu, Haidong Cao, Sicheng Xie, Daoguo Dong, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01594v1 Human preference alignment presents a critical yet underexplored challenge for diffusion models in text-to-3D generation. Existing solutions typically require task-specific fine-tuning, posing significant hurdles in data-scarce 3D domains. To address this, we propose Preference Score Distillation (PSD), an optimization-based framework that leverages pretrained 2D reward models for human-aligned text-to-3D synthesis without 3D training data. Our key insight stems from the incompatibility of pixel-level gradients: due to the absence of noisy samples during reward model training, direct application of 2D reward gradients disturbs the denoising process. Noticing that similar issue occurs in the naive classifier guidance in conditioned diffusion models, we fundamentally rethink preference alignment as a classifier-free guidance (CFG)-style mechanism through our implicit reward model. Furthermore, recognizing that frozen pretrained diffusion models constrain performance, we introduce an adaptive strategy to co-optimize preference scores and negative text embeddings. By incorporating CFG during optimization, online refinement of negative text embeddings dynamically enhances alignment. To our knowledge, we are the first to bridge human preference alignment with CFG theory under score distillation framework. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of PSD in aesthetic metrics, seamless integration with diverse pipelines, and strong extensibility. --- ### PPEDCRF: Privacy-Preserving Enhanced Dynamic CRF for Location-Privacy Protection for Sequence Videos with Minimal Detection Degradation Authors: Bo Ma, Jinsong Wu, Weiqi Yan, Catherine Shi, Minh Nguyen Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01593v2 Dashcam videos collected by autonomous or assisted-driving systems are increasingly shared for safety auditing and model improvement. Even when explicit GPS metadata are removed, an attacker can still infer the recording location by matching background visual cues (e.g., buildings and road layouts) against large-scale street-view imagery. This paper studies location-privacy leakage under a background-based retrieval attacker, and proposes PPEDCRF, a privacy-preserving enhanced dynamic conditional random field framework that injects calibrated perturbations only into inferred location-sensitive background regions while preserving foreground detection utility. PPEDCRF consists of three components: (i) a dynamic CRF that enforces temporal consistency to discover and track location sensitive regions across frames, (ii) a normalized control penalty (NCP) that allocates perturbation strength according to a hierarchical sensitivity model, and (iii) a utility-preserving noise injection module that minimizes interference to object detection and segmentation. Experiments on public driving datasets demonstrate that PPEDCRF significantly reduces location-retrieval attack success (e.g., Top-k retrieval accuracy) while maintaining competitive detection performance (e.g., mAP and segmentation metrics) compared with common baselines such as global noise, white-noise masking, and feature-based anonymization. The source code is in https://github.com/mabo1215/PPEDCRF.git --- ### FAST-DIPS: Adjoint-Free Analytic Steps and Hard-Constrained Likelihood Correction for Diffusion-Prior Inverse Problems Authors: Minwoo Kim, Seunghyeok Shin, Hongki Lim Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01591v2 Training-free diffusion priors enable inverse-problem solvers without retraining, but for nonlinear forward operators data consistency often relies on repeated derivatives or inner optimization/MCMC loops with conservative step sizes, incurring many iterations and denoiser/score evaluations. We propose a training-free solver that replaces these inner loops with a hard measurement-space feasibility constraint (closed-form projection) and an analytic, model-optimal step size, enabling a small, fixed compute budget per noise level. Anchored at the denoiser prediction, the correction is approximated via an adjoint-free, ADMM-style splitting with projection and a few steepest-descent updates, using one VJP and either one JVP or a forward-difference probe, followed by backtracking and decoupled re-annealing. We prove local model optimality and descent under backtracking for the step-size rule, and derive an explicit KL bound for mode-substitution re-annealing under a local Gaussian conditional surrogate. We also develop a latent variant and a one-parameter pixel$\rightarrow$latent hybrid schedule. Experiments achieve competitive PSNR/SSIM/LPIPS with up to 19.5$\times$ speedup, without hand-coded adjoints or inner MCMC. --- ### IDProxy: CTR Prediction with Multimodal LLMs for Cold-Start Recommendation at Xiaohongshu Authors: Yubin Zhang, Haiming Xu, Guillaume Salha-Galvan, Ruiyan Han, Feiyang Xiao, Yanhua Huang, Li Lin, Yang Luo, Yao Hu Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.IR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01590v2 Content-driven platforms such as Xiaohongshu often leverage click-through rate (CTR) prediction models for recommendation. However, these models depend heavily on item ID embeddings, which perform poorly in item cold-start settings. In this paper, we present IDProxy, a production-scale system developed at Xiaohongshu to address this challenge. IDProxy leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to generate proxy embeddings from rich content signals, enabling CTR prediction for new items in the absence of usage data. Through a lightweight coarse-to-fine mechanism, these proxies are aligned with the ID embedding space and trained end-to-end with the ranking model, allowing seamless integration into production-facing pipelines. Extensive offline and online experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, which has been deployed in 2025 in Xiaohongshu's Content Feed and Display Ads features, reaching hundreds of millions of users daily. --- ### IDProxy: Cold-Start CTR Prediction for Ads and Recommendation at Xiaohongshu with Multimodal LLMs Authors: Yubin Zhang, Haiming Xu, Guillaume Salha-Galvan, Ruiyan Han, Feiyang Xiao, Yanhua Huang, Li Lin, Yang Luo, Yao Hu Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.IR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01590v1 Click-through rate (CTR) models in advertising and recommendation systems rely heavily on item ID embeddings, which struggle in item cold-start settings. We present IDProxy, a solution that leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to generate proxy embeddings from rich content signals, enabling effective CTR prediction for new items without usage data. These proxies are explicitly aligned with the existing ID embedding space and are optimized end-to-end under CTR objectives together with the ranking model, allowing seamless integration into existing large-scale ranking pipelines. Offline experiments and online A/B tests demonstrate the effectiveness of IDProxy, which has been successfully deployed in both Content Feed and Display Ads features of Xiaohongshu's Explore Feed, serving hundreds of millions of users daily. --- ### SafeSci: Safety Evaluation of Large Language Models in Science Domains and Beyond Authors: Xiangyang Zhu, Yuan Tian, Qi Jia, Kaiwei Zhang, Zicheng Zhang, Chunyi Li, Kaiyuan Ji, Dongrui Liu, Zijian Chen, Lu Sun, Renrui Zhang, Yan Teng et al. Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01589v2 The success of large language models (LLMs) in scientific domains has heightened safety concerns, prompting numerous benchmarks to evaluate their scientific safety. Existing benchmarks often suffer from limited risk coverage and a reliance on subjective evaluation. To address these problems, we introduce SafeSci, a comprehensive framework for safety evaluation and enhancement in scientific contexts. SafeSci comprises SafeSciBench, a multi-disciplinary benchmark with 0.25M samples, and SafeSciTrain, a large-scale dataset containing 1.5M samples for safety enhancement. SafeSciBench distinguishes between safety knowledge and risk to cover extensive scopes and employs objective metrics such as deterministically answerable questions to mitigate evaluation bias. We evaluate 24 advanced LLMs, revealing critical vulnerabilities in current models. We also observe that LLMs exhibit varying degrees of excessive refusal behaviors on safety-related issues. For safety enhancement, we demonstrate that fine-tuning on SafeSciTrain significantly enhances the safety alignment of models. Finally, we argue that knowledge is a double-edged sword, and determining the safety of a scientific question should depend on specific context, rather than universally categorizing it as safe or unsafe. Our work provides both a diagnostic tool and a practical resource for building safer scientific AI systems. --- ### Jump Like A Squirrel: Optimized Execution Step Order for Anytime Random Forest Inference Authors: Daniel Biebert, Christian Hakert, Kay Heider, Daniel Kuhse, Sebastian Buschjäger, Jian-Jia Chen Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01588v1 Due to their efficiency and small size, decision trees and random forests are popular machine learning models used for classification on resource-constrained systems. In such systems, the available execution time for inference in a random forest might not be sufficient for a complete model execution. Ideally, the already gained prediction confidence should be retained. An anytime algorithm is designed to be able to be aborted anytime, while giving a result with an increasing quality over time. Previous approaches have realized random forests as anytime algorithms on the granularity of trees, stopping after some but not all trees of a forest have been executed. However, due to the way decision trees subdivide the sample space in every step, an increase in prediction quality is achieved with every additional step in one tree. In this paper, we realize decision trees and random forest as anytime algorithms on the granularity of single steps in trees. This approach opens a design space to define the step order in a forest, which has the potential to optimize the mean accuracy. We propose the Optimal Order, which finds a step order with a maximal mean accuracy in exponential runtime and the polynomial runtime heuristics Forward Squirrel Order and Backward Squirrel Order, which greedily maximize the accuracy for each additional step taken down and up the trees, respectively. Our evaluation shows, that the Backward Squirrel Order performs $\sim94\%$ as well as the Optimal Order and $\sim99\%$ as well as all other step orders. --- ### InterCoG: Towards Spatially Precise Image Editing with Interleaved Chain-of-Grounding Reasoning Authors: Yecong Wan, Fan Li, Chunwei Wang, Hao Wu, Mingwen Shao, Wangmeng Zuo Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01586v3 Emerging unified editing models have demonstrated strong capabilities in general object editing tasks. However, it remains a significant challenge to perform fine-grained editing in complex multi-entity scenes, particularly those where targets are not visually salient and require spatial reasoning. To this end, we propose InterCoG, a novel text-vision Interleaved Chain-of-Grounding reasoning framework for fine-grained image editing in complex real-world scenes. The key insight of InterCoG is to first perform object position reasoning solely within text that includes spatial relation details to explicitly deduce the location and identity of the edited target. It then conducts visual grounding via highlighting the editing targets with generated bounding boxes and masks in pixel space, and finally rewrites the editing description to specify the intended outcomes. To further facilitate this paradigm, we propose two auxiliary training modules: multimodal grounding reconstruction supervision and multimodal grounding reasoning alignment to enforce spatial localization accuracy and reasoning interpretability, respectively. We also construct GroundEdit-45K, a dataset comprising 45K grounding-oriented editing samples with detailed reasoning annotations, and GroundEdit-Bench for grounding-aware editing evaluation. Extensive experiments substantiate the superiority of our approach in highly precise edits under spatially intricate and multi-entity scenes. --- ### KERV: Kinematic-Rectified Speculative Decoding for Embodied VLA Models Authors: Zihao Zheng, Zhihao Mao, Maoliang Li, Jiayu Chen, Xinhao Sun, Zhaobo Zhang, Donggang Cao, Hong Mei, Xiang Chen Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01581v2 Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models build a token-domain robot control paradigm, yet suffer from low speed. Speculative Decoding (SD) is an optimization strategy that can boost inference speed. Two key issues emerge when integrating VLA and SD: first, SD relies on re-inference to address token errors, which is computationally expensive; second, to mitigate token errors, the acceptance threshold in SD requires careful adjustment. Existing works fail to address the above two issues effectively. Meanwhile, as the bridge between AI and the physical world, existing embodied intelligence has overlooked the application of robotic kinematics. To address these issues, we innovatively combine token-domain VLA models with kinematic-domain prediction for SD, proposing a kinematic-rectified SD framework named KERV. We employ a kinematics-based Kalman Filter to predict actions and compensate for SD errors, avoiding costly re-inference. Moreover, we design a kinematics-based adjustment strategy to dynamically rectify the acceptance threshold, addressing the difficulty of threshold determination. Experimental results across diverse tasks and environments demonstrate that KERV achieves 27%~37% acceleration with nearly no Success Rate loss. --- ### Markovian ODE-guided scoring can assess the quality of offline reasoning traces in language models Authors: Arghodeep Nandi, Ojasva Saxena, Tanmoy Chakraborty Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01580v1 Reasoning traces produced by generative language models are increasingly used for tasks ranging from mathematical problem solving to automated fact checking. However, existing evaluation methods remain largely mechanical and fail to capture human-centric notions of reasoning quality in a way that generalizes across varied and progressively degraded reasoning. We introduce MarODE, an offline evaluation framework that assigns quality scores to reasoning traces. Its effectiveness is assessed using human-centric perturbations and human judgments, which jointly evaluate the fundamental dimensions of an evaluation metric - goodness and soundness. The approach is grounded in a Markovian formulation of reasoning progression and an ordinary differential equation based characterization of trace dynamics, enabling efficient evaluation of reasoning quality. In a large-scale evaluation, MarODE outperforms existing baselines by over 250% under Somers' D correlation. Our results emphasize the value of theory-driven evaluation frameworks as reasoning traces become central to language model-based systems. --- ### SkeleGuide: Explicit Skeleton Reasoning for Context-Aware Human-in-Place Image Synthesis Authors: Chuqiao Wu, Jin Song, Yiyun Fei Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01579v1 Generating realistic and structurally plausible human images into existing scenes remains a significant challenge for current generative models, which often produce artifacts like distorted limbs and unnatural poses. We attribute this systemic failure to an inability to perform explicit reasoning over human skeletal structure. To address this, we introduce SkeleGuide, a novel framework built upon explicit skeletal reasoning. Through joint training of its reasoning and rendering stages, SkeleGuide learns to produce an internal pose that acts as a strong structural prior, guiding the synthesis towards high structural integrity. For fine-grained user control, we introduce PoseInverter, a module that decodes this internal latent pose into an explicit and editable format. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SkeleGuide significantly outperforms both specialized and general-purpose models in generating high-fidelity, contextually-aware human images. Our work provides compelling evidence that explicitly modeling skeletal structure is a fundamental step towards robust and plausible human image synthesis. --- ### Cryo-Bench: Benchmarking Foundation Models for Cryosphere Applications Authors: Saurabh Kaushik, Lalit Maurya, Beth Tellman, Valerio Marsocci Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01576v3 Geo-Foundation Models (GFMs) have been evaluated across diverse Earth observation task including multiple domains and have demonstrated strong potential of producing reliable maps even with sparse labels. However, benchmarking GFMs for Cryosphere applications has remained limited, primarily due to the lack of suitable evaluation datasets. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{Cryo-Bench}, a benchmark compiled to evaluate GFM performance across key Cryospheric components. Cryo-Bench includes debris-covered glaciers, glacial lakes, sea ice, and calving fronts, spanning multiple sensors and broad geographic regions. We evaluate 14 GFMs alongside UNet and ViT baselines to assess their advantages, limitations, and optimal usage strategies. With a frozen encoder, UNet achieves the highest average mIoU of \textbf{66.38}, followed by TerraMind at \textbf{64.02} across five evluation dataset included in Cryo-Bench. In the few-shot setting (10\% input data), GFMs such as DOFA and TerraMind outperform UNet, achieving mIoU scores of \textbf{59.53}, \textbf{56.62}, and \textbf{56.60}, respectively, comapred to U-Net's 56.60. When fully finetuning GFMs, we observe inconsistent performance across datasets and models. However, tuning learning rate along with finetuning substantially improves GFM performance. For example, evaluation on two representative datasets (GLID and CaFFe) shows an average relative improvement of \textbf{12.77\%}. Despite having minimal Cryosphere representation in their pretraining data, GFMs exhibit notable domain adaptation capabilities and produce meaningful results across tasks. Based on our findings, We recommend encoder fine-tuning with hyperparameter optimization optimization to achieve the best possible performance, while using frozen encoders when users need quick results without extensive experimentation.(\href{https://github.com/Sk-2103/Cryo-Bench}{GitHub}). --- ### DualSentinel: A Lightweight Framework for Detecting Targeted Attacks in Black-box LLM via Dual Entropy Lull Pattern Authors: Xiaoyi Pang, Xuanyi Hao, Pengyu Liu, Qi Luo, Song Guo, Zhibo Wang Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01574v1 Recent intelligent systems integrate powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) through APIs, but their trustworthiness may be critically undermined by targeted attacks like backdoor and prompt injection attacks, which secretly force LLMs to generate specific malicious sequences. Existing defensive approaches for such threats typically rely on high access rights, impose prohibitive costs, and hinder normal inference, rendering them impractical for real-world scenarios. To solve these limitations, we introduce DualSentinel, a lightweight and unified defense framework that can accurately and promptly detect the activation of targeted attacks alongside the LLM generation process. We first identify a characteristic of compromised LLMs, termed Entropy Lull: when a targeted attack successfully hijacks the generation process, the LLM exhibits a distinct period of abnormally low and stable token probability entropy, indicating it is following a fixed path rather than making creative choices. DualSentinel leverages this pattern by developing an innovative dual-check approach. It first employs a magnitude and trend-aware monitoring method to proactively and sensitively flag an entropy lull pattern at runtime. Upon such flagging, it triggers a lightweight yet powerful secondary verification based on task-flipping. An attack is confirmed only if the entropy lull pattern persists across both the original and the flipped task, proving that the LLM's output is coercively controlled. Extensive evaluations show that DualSentinel is both highly effective (superior detection accuracy with near-zero false positives) and remarkably efficient (negligible additional cost), offering a truly practical path toward securing deployed LLMs. The source code can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18479273. --- ### Beyond Length Scaling: Synergizing Breadth and Depth for Generative Reward Models Authors: Qiyuan Zhang, Yufei Wang, Tianhe Wu, Can Xu, Qingfeng Sun, Kai Zheng, Xue Liu, Chen Ma Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01571v1 Recent advancements in Generative Reward Models (GRMs) have demonstrated that scaling the length of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning considerably enhances the reliability of evaluation. However, current works predominantly rely on unstructured length scaling, ignoring the divergent efficacy of different reasoning mechanisms: Breadth-CoT (B-CoT, i.e., multi-dimensional principle coverage) and Depth-CoT (D-CoT, i.e., substantive judgment soundness). To address this, we introduce Mix-GRM, a framework that reconfigures raw rationales into structured B-CoT and D-CoT through a modular synthesis pipeline, subsequently employing Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to internalize and optimize these mechanisms. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that Mix-GRM establishes a new state-of-the-art across five benchmarks, surpassing leading open-source RMs by an average of 8.2\%. Our results reveal a clear divergence in reasoning: B-CoT benefits subjective preference tasks, whereas D-CoT excels in objective correctness tasks. Consequently, misaligning the reasoning mechanism with the task directly degrades performance. Furthermore, we demonstrate that RLVR acts as a switching amplifier, inducing an emergent polarization where the model spontaneously allocates its reasoning style to match task demands. The synthesized data and models are released at \href{https://huggingface.co/collections/DonJoey/mix-grm}{Hugging Face}, and the code is released at \href{https://github.com/Don-Joey/Mix-GRM}{Github}. --- ### Adversarial Query Synthesis via Bayesian Optimization Authors: Jeffrey Tao, Yimeng Zeng, Haydn Thomas Jones, Natalie Maus, Osbert Bastani, Jacob R. Gardner, Ryan Marcus Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.DB, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01570v1 Benchmark workloads are extremely important to the database management research community, especially as more machine learning components are integrated into database systems. Here, we propose a Bayesian optimization technique to automatically search for difficult benchmark queries, significantly reducing the amount of manual effort usually required. In preliminary experiments, we show that our approach can generate queries with more than double the optimization headroom compared to existing benchmarks. --- ### Same Compression Principle, Different Geometry: Rate-Distortion Signatures Dissociate Biological and Artificial Visual Systems Authors: Leyla Roksan Caglar, Pedro A. M. Mediano, Baihan Lin Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV, cs.IT, q-bio.NC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01568v2 Efficient coding theory predicts that biological perceptual systems compress sensory input optimally under resource constraints, with the systematic structure of errors reflecting the geometry of that compression. Here we operationalize this principle using rate-distortion theory (RDT) to characterize how any system - biological or artificial - trades representational fidelity for informational efficiency. Treating stimulus-response behavior as an effective communication channel, we infer rate-distortion (RD) frontiers directly from confusion matrices and summarize each system with three geometric signatures: slope (beta), curvature (kappa), and area under the RD curve (AUC), capturing the marginal cost, abruptness, and overall efficiency of the accuracy-compression trade-off respectively. Applying this framework to human psychophysical data and 18 deep vision models across 12 families of controlled image perturbations at graded severities, we find that both biological and artificial systems follow a common lossy-compression principle but occupy systematically different regions of RD space. Humans exhibit smooth, flexible trade-offs characteristic of near-optimal efficient coding, while deep networks operate in steeper, more brittle regimes even at matched accuracy, with geometry dissociable from performance across training regimes. Critically, behavioral RD signatures track internal representational geometry, evidenced by the behaviorally inferred compression structure correlating with internal representational dissimilarity across all models. These results establish RD geometry as a compact diagnostic of perceptual compression strategy that recovers mechanistically interpretable structure in internal representations from behavioral input alone and extends naturally to the direct characterization of compression geometry in neural population activity. --- ### LFPO: Likelihood-Free Policy Optimization for Masked Diffusion Models Authors: Chenxing Wei, Jiazhen Kang, Hong Wang, Jianqing Zhang, Hao Jiang, Xiaolong Xu, Ningyuan Sun, Ying He, F. Richard Yu, Yao Shu, Bo Jiang Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01563v2 Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has achieved remarkable success in improving autoregressive models, especially in domains requiring correctness like mathematical reasoning and code generation. However, directly applying such paradigms to Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) is fundamentally hindered by the intractability of exact likelihood computation, which forces existing methods to rely on high-variance approximations. To bridge this gap, we propose Likelihood-Free Policy Optimization (LFPO), a native framework that maps the concept of vector field flow matching to the discrete token space. Specifically, LFPO formulates alignment as geometric velocity rectification, which directly optimizes denoising logits via contrastive updates. This design effectively bypasses the errors inherent in likelihood approximation, yielding the precise gradient estimation. Furthermore, LFPO enforce consistency by predicting final solutions from intermediate steps, effectively straightening the probability flow to enable high-quality generation with significantly fewer iterations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LFPO not only outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on code and reasoning benchmarks but also accelerates inference by approximately 20% through reduced diffusion steps. --- ### LFPO: Likelihood-Free Policy Optimization for Masked Diffusion Models Authors: Chenxing Wei, Jiazhen Kang, Hong Wang, Jianqing Zhang, Hao Jiang, Xiaolong Xu, Ningyuan Sun, Ying He, F. Richard Yu, Yao Shu, Bo Jiang Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01563v1 Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has achieved remarkable success in improving autoregressive models, especially in domains requiring correctness like mathematical reasoning and code generation. However, directly applying such paradigms to Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) is fundamentally hindered by the intractability of exact likelihood computation, which forces existing methods to rely on high-variance approximations. To bridge this gap, we propose Likelihood-Free Policy Optimization (LFPO), a native framework that maps the concept of vector field flow matching to the discrete token space. Specifically, LFPO formulates alignment as geometric velocity rectification, which directly optimizes denoising logits via contrastive updates. This design effectively bypasses the errors inherent in likelihood approximation, yielding the precise gradient estimation. Furthermore, LFPO enforce consistency by predicting final solutions from intermediate steps, effectively straightening the probability flow to enable high-quality generation with significantly fewer iterations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LFPO not only outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on code and reasoning benchmarks but also accelerates inference by approximately 20% through reduced diffusion steps. --- ### RubricBench: Aligning Model-Generated Rubrics with Human Standards Authors: Qiyuan Zhang, Junyi Zhou, Yufei Wang, Fuyuan Lyu, Yidong Ming, Can Xu, Qingfeng Sun, Kai Zheng, Peng Kang, Xue Liu, Chen Ma Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01562v2 As Large Language Model (LLM) alignment evolves from simple completions to complex, highly sophisticated generation, Reward Models are increasingly shifting toward rubric-guided evaluation to mitigate surface-level biases. However, the community lacks a unified benchmark to assess this evaluation paradigm, as existing benchmarks lack both the discriminative complexity and the ground-truth rubric annotations required for rigorous analysis. To bridge this gap, we introduce RubricBench, a curated benchmark with 1,147 pairwise comparisons specifically designed to assess the reliability of rubric-based evaluation. Our construction employs a multi-dimensional filtration pipeline to target hard samples featuring nuanced input complexity and misleading surface bias, augmenting each with expert-annotated, atomic rubrics derived strictly from instructions. Comprehensive experiments reveal a substantial capability gap between human-annotated and model-generated rubrics, indicating that even state-of-the-art models struggle to autonomously specify valid evaluation criteria, lagging considerably behind human-guided performance. --- ### TopoMaskV3: 3D Mask Head with Dense Offset and Height Predictions for Road Topology Understanding Authors: Muhammet Esat Kalfaoglu, Halil Ibrahim Ozturk, Ozsel Kilinc, Alptekin Temizel Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01558v2 Mask-based paradigms for road topology understanding, such as TopoMaskV2, offer a complementary alternative to query-based methods by generating centerlines via a dense rasterized intermediate representation. However, prior work was limited to 2D predictions and suffered from severe discretization artifacts, necessitating fusion with parametric heads. We introduce TopoMaskV3, which advances this pipeline into a robust, standalone 3D predictor via two novel dense prediction heads: a dense offset field for sub-grid discretization correction within the existing BEV resolution, and a dense height map for direct 3D estimation. Beyond the architecture, we are the first to address geographic data leakage in road topology evaluation by introducing (1) geographically distinct splits to prevent memorization and ensure fair generalization, and (2) a long-range (+/-100 m) benchmark. TopoMaskV3 achieves state-of-the-art 28.5 OLS on this geographically disjoint benchmark, surpassing all prior methods. Our analysis shows that the mask representation is more robust to geographic overfitting than Bezier, while LiDAR fusion is most beneficial at long range and exhibits larger relative gains on the overlapping original split, suggesting overlap-induced memorization effects. --- ### Benchmarking LLM Summaries of Multimodal Clinical Time Series for Remote Monitoring Authors: Aditya Shukla, Yining Yuan, Ben Tamo, Yifei Wang, Micky Nnamdi, Shaun Tan, Jieru Li, Benoit Marteau, Brad Willingham, May Wang Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01557v1 Large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent clinical summaries of remote therapeutic monitoring time series. However, it remains unclear whether these narratives faithfully capture clinically significant events, such as sustained abnormalities. Existing evaluation metrics primarily focus on semantic similarity and linguistic quality, leaving event-level correctness largely unmeasured. To address this gap, we introduce an event-based evaluation framework for multimodal time-series summarization using the Technology-Integrated Health Management (TIHM)-1.5 dementia monitoring dataset. Clinically grounded daily events are derived through rule-based abnormal thresholds and temporal persistence criteria. Model-generated summaries are then aligned with these structured facts. Our evaluation protocol measures abnormality recall, duration recall, measurement coverage, and hallucinated event mentions. We benchmark three approaches: zero-shot prompting, statistical prompting, and a vision-based pipeline that uses rendered time-series visualizations. The results reveal a striking decoupling between conventional metrics and clinical event fidelity. Models that achieve high semantic similarity scores often exhibit near-zero abnormality recall. In contrast, the vision-based approach demonstrates the strongest event alignment, achieving 45.7% abnormality recall and 100% duration recall. These findings underscore the importance of event-aware evaluation to ensure reliable clinical time-series summarization. --- ### S5-HES Agent: Society 5.0-driven Agentic Framework to Democratize Smart Home Environment Simulation Authors: Akila Siriweera, Janani Rangila, Keitaro Naruse, Incheon Paik, Isuru Jayanada Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01554v1 The smart home is a key domain within the Society 5.0 vision for a human-centered society. Smart home technologies rapidly evolve, and research should diversify while remaining aligned with Society 5.0 objectives. Democratizing smart home research would engage a broader community of innovators beyond traditional limited experts. This shift necessitates inclusive simulation frameworks that support research across diverse fields in industry and academia. However, existing smart home simulators require significant technical expertise, offer limited adaptability, and lack automated evolution, thereby failing to meet the holistic needs of Society 5.0. These constraints impede researchers from efficiently conducting simulations and experiments for security, energy, health, climate, and socio-economic research. To address these challenges, this paper presents the Society 5.0-driven Smart Home Environment Simulator Agent (S5-HES Agent), an agentic simulation framework that transforms traditional smart home simulation through autonomous AI orchestration. The framework coordinates specialized agents through interchangeable large language models (LLMs), enabling natural-language-driven end-to-end smart home simulation configuration without programming expertise. A retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline with semantic, keyword, and hybrid search retrieves smart home knowledge. Comprehensive evaluation on S5-HES Agent demonstrates that the RAG pipeline achieves near-optimal retrieval fidelity, simulated device behaviour and threat scenarios align with real-world IoT datasets, and simulation engine scales predictably across home configurations, establishing a stable foundation for Society 5.0 smart home research. Source code is available under the MIT License at https://github.com/AsiriweLab/S5-HES-Agent. --- ### State-Action Inpainting Diffuser for Continuous Control with Delay Authors: Dongqi Han, Wei Wang, Enze Zhang, Dongsheng Li Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01553v1 Signal delay poses a fundamental challenge in continuous control and reinforcement learning (RL) by introducing a temporal gap between interaction and perception. Current solutions have largely evolved along two distinct paradigms: model-free approaches which utilize state augmentation to preserve Markovian properties, and model-based methods which focus on inferring latent beliefs via dynamics modeling. In this paper, we bridge these perspectives by introducing State-Action Inpainting Diffuser (SAID), a framework that integrates the inductive bias of dynamics learning with the direct decision-making capability of policy optimization. By formulating the problem as a joint sequence inpainting task, SAID implicitly captures environmental dynamics while directly generating consistent plans, effectively operating at the intersection of model-based and model-free paradigms. Crucially, this generative formulation allows SAID to be seamlessly applied to both online and offline RL. Extensive experiments on delayed continuous control benchmarks demonstrate that SAID achieves state-of-the-art and robust performance. Our study suggests a new methodology to advance the field of RL with delay. --- ### Align-cDAE: Alzheimer's Disease Progression Modeling with Attention-Aligned Conditional Diffusion Auto-Encoder Authors: Ayantika Das, Keerthi Ram, Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01552v1 Generative AI framework-based modeling and prediction of longitudinal human brain images offer an efficient mechanism to track neurodegenerative progression, essential for the assessment of diseases like Alzheimer's. Among the existing generative approaches, recent diffusion-based models have emerged as an effective alternative to generate disease progression images. Incorporating multi-modal and non-imaging attributes as conditional information into diffusion frameworks has been shown to improve controllability during such generations. However, existing methods do not explicitly ensure that information from non-imaging conditioning modalities is meaningfully aligned with image features to introduce desirable changes in the generated images, such as modulation of progression-specific regions. Further, more precise control over the generation process can be achieved by introducing progression-relevant structure into the internal representations of the model, lacking in the existing approaches. To address these limitations, we propose a diffusion autoencoder-based framework for disease progression modeling that explicitly enforces alignment between different modalities. The alignment is enforced by introducing an explicit objective function that enables the model to focus on the regions exhibiting progression-related changes. Further, we devise a mechanism to better structure the latent representational space of the diffusion auto-encoding framework. Specifically, we assign separate latent subspaces for integrating progression-related conditions and retaining subject-specific identity information, allowing better-controlled image generation. These results demonstrate that enforcing alignment and better structuring of the latent representational space of diffusion auto-encoding framework leads to more anatomically precise modeling of Alzheimer's disease progression. --- ### Extracting Training Dialogue Data from Large Language Model based Task Bots Authors: Shuo Zhang, Junzhou Zhao, Junji Hou, Pinghui Wang, Chenxu Wang, Jing Tao Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01550v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely adopted to enhance Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (TODS) by modeling complex language patterns and delivering contextually appropriate responses. However, this integration introduces significant privacy risks, as LLMs, functioning as soft knowledge bases that compress extensive training data into rich knowledge representations, can inadvertently memorize training dialogue data containing not only identifiable information such as phone numbers but also entire dialogue-level events like complete travel schedules. Despite the critical nature of this privacy concern, how LLM memorization is inherited in developing task bots remains unexplored. In this work, we address this gap through a systematic quantitative study that involves evaluating existing training data extraction attacks, analyzing key characteristics of task-oriented dialogue modeling that render existing methods ineffective, and proposing novel attack techniques tailored for LLM-based TODS that enhance both response sampling and membership inference. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed data extraction attack. Our method can extract thousands of training labels of dialogue states with best-case precision exceeding 70%. Furthermore, we provide an in-depth analysis of training data memorization in LLM-based TODS by identifying and quantifying key influencing factors and discussing targeted mitigation strategies. --- ### Pri4R: Learning World Dynamics for Vision-Language-Action Models with Privileged 4D Representation Authors: Jisoo Kim, Jungbin Cho, Sanghyeok Chu, Ananya Bal, Jinhyung Kim, Gunhee Lee, Sihaeng Lee, Seung Hwan Kim, Bohyung Han, Hyunmin Lee, Laszlo A. Jeni, Seungryong Kim Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01549v2 Humans learn not only how their bodies move, but also how the surrounding world responds to their actions. In contrast, while recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models exhibit impressive semantic understanding, they often fail to capture the spatiotemporal dynamics governing physical interaction. In this paper, we introduce Pri4R, a simple yet effective approach that endows VLA models with an implicit understanding of world dynamics by leveraging privileged 4D information during training. Specifically, Pri4R augments VLAs with a lightweight point track head that predicts 3D point tracks. By injecting VLA features into this head to jointly predict future 3D trajectories, the model learns to incorporate evolving scene geometry within its shared representation space, enabling more physically aware context for precise control. Due to its architectural simplicity, Pri4R is compatible with dominant VLA design patterns with minimal changes. During inference, we run the model using the original VLA architecture unchanged; Pri4R adds no extra inputs, outputs, or computational overhead. Across simulation and real-world evaluations, Pri4R significantly improves performance on challenging manipulation tasks, including a +10% gain on LIBERO-Long and a +40% gain on RoboCasa. We further show that 3D point track prediction is an effective supervision target for learning action-world dynamics, and validate our design choices through extensive ablations. Project page: https://jiiiisoo.github.io/Pri4R/ --- ### Graph-Based Self-Healing Tool Routing for Cost-Efficient LLM Agents Authors: Neeraj Bholani Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01548v1 Tool-using LLM agents face a reliability-cost tradeoff: routing every decision through the LLM improves correctness but incurs high latency and inference cost, while pre-coded workflow graphs reduce cost but become brittle under unanticipated compound tool failures. We present Self-Healing Router, a fault-tolerant orchestration architecture that treats most agent control-flow decisions as routing rather than reasoning. The system combines (i) parallel health monitors that assign priority scores to runtime conditions such as tool outages and risk signals, and (ii) a cost-weighted tool graph where Dijkstra's algorithm performs deterministic shortest-path routing. When a tool fails mid-execution, its edges are reweighted to infinity and the path is recomputed -- yielding automatic recovery without invoking the LLM. The LLM is reserved exclusively for cases where no feasible path exists, enabling goal demotion or escalation. Prior graph-based tool-use systems (ControlLLM, ToolNet, NaviAgent) focus on tool selection and planning; our contribution is runtime fault tolerance with deterministic recovery and binary observability -- every failure is either a logged reroute or an explicit escalation, never a silent skip. Across 19 scenarios spanning three graph topologies (linear pipeline, dependency DAG, parallel fan-out), Self-Healing Router matches ReAct's correctness while reducing control-plane LLM calls by 93% (9 vs 123 aggregate) and eliminating the silent-failure cases observed in a well-engineered static workflow baseline under compound failures. --- ### PathMoE: Interpretable Multimodal Interaction Experts for Pediatric Brain Tumor Classification Authors: Jian Yu, Joakim Nguyen, Jinrui Fang, Awais Naeem, Zeyuan Cao, Sanjay Krishnan, Nicholas Konz, Tianlong Chen, Chandra Krishnan, Hairong Wang, Edward Castillo, Ying Ding et al. Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01547v1 Accurate classification of pediatric central nervous system tumors remains challenging due to histological complexity and limited training data. While pathology foundation models have advanced whole-slide image (WSI) analysis, they often fail to leverage the rich, complementary information found in clinical text and tissue microarchitecture. To this end, we propose PathMoE, an interpretable multimodal framework that integrates H\&E slides, pathology reports, and nuclei-level cell graphs via an interaction-aware mixture-of-experts architecture built on state-of-the-art foundation models for each modality. By training specialized experts to capture modality uniqueness, redundancy, and synergy, PathMoE employs an input-dependent gating mechanism that dynamically weights these interactions, providing sample-level interpretability. We evaluate our framework on two dataset-specific classification tasks on an internal pediatric brain tumor dataset (PBT) and external TCGA datasets. PathMoE improves macro-F1 from 0.762 to 0.799 (+0.037) on PBT when integrating WSI, text, and graph modalities; on TCGA, augmenting WSI with graph knowledge improves macro-F1 from 0.668 to 0.709 (+0.041). These results demonstrate significant performance gains over state-of-the-art image-only baselines while revealing the specific modality interactions driving individual predictions. This interpretability is particularly critical for rare tumor subtypes, where transparent model reasoning is essential for clinical trust and diagnostic validation. --- ### Training-Free Spatio-temporal Decoupled Reasoning Video Segmentation with Adaptive Object Memory Authors: Zhengtong Zhu, Jiaqing Fan, Zhixuan Liu, Fanzhang Li Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01545v1 Reasoning Video Object Segmentation (ReasonVOS) is a challenging task that requires stable object segmentation across video sequences using implicit and complex textual inputs. Previous methods fine-tune Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to produce segmentation outputs, which demand substantial resources. Additionally, some existing methods are coupled in the processing of spatio-temporal information, which affects the temporal stability of the model to some extent. To address these issues, we propose Training-Free \textbf{S}patio-temporal \textbf{D}ecoupled Reasoning Video Segmentation with \textbf{A}daptive Object \textbf{M}emory (SDAM). We aim to design a training-free reasoning video segmentation framework that outperforms existing methods requiring fine-tuning, using only pre-trained models. Meanwhile, we propose an Adaptive Object Memory module that selects and memorizes key objects based on motion cues in different video sequences. Finally, we propose Spatio-temporal Decoupling for stable temporal propagation. In the spatial domain, we achieve precise localization and segmentation of target objects, while in the temporal domain, we leverage key object temporal information to drive stable cross-frame propagation. Our method achieves excellent results on five benchmark datasets, including Ref-YouTubeVOS, Ref-DAVIS17, MeViS, ReasonVOS, and ReVOS. --- ### RA-Det: Towards Universal Detection of AI-Generated Images via Robustness Asymmetry Authors: Xinchang Wang, Yunhao Chen, Yuechen Zhang, Congcong Bian, Zihao Guo, Xingjun Ma, Hui Li Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01544v2 Recent image generators produce photo-realistic content that undermines the reliability of downstream recognition systems. As visual appearance cues become less pronounced, appearance-driven detectors that rely on forensic cues or high-level representations lose stability. This motivates a shift from appearance to behavior, focusing on how images respond to controlled perturbations rather than how they look. In this work, we identify a simple and universal behavioral signal. Natural images preserve stable semantic representations under small, structured perturbations, whereas generated images exhibit markedly larger feature drift. We refer to this phenomenon as robustness asymmetry and provide a theoretical analysis that establishes a lower bound connecting this asymmetry to memorization tendencies in generative models, explaining its prevalence across architectures. Building on this insight, we introduce Robustness Asymmetry Detection (RA-Det), a behavior-driven detection framework that converts robustness asymmetry into a reliable decision signal. Evaluated across 14 diverse generative models and against more than 10 strong detectors, RA-Det achieves superior performance, improving the average performance by 7.81 percent. The method is data- and model-agnostic, requires no generator fingerprints, and transfers across unseen generators. Together, these results indicate that robustness asymmetry is a stable, general cue for synthetic-image detection and that carefully designed probing can turn this cue into a practical, universal detector. The source code is publicly available at Github. --- ### Pharmacology Knowledge Graphs: Do We Need Chemical Structure for Drug Repurposing? Authors: Youssef Abo-Dahab, Ruby Hernandez, Ismael Caleb Arechiga Duran Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.AI, q-bio.BM, q-bio.QM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01537v1 The contributions of model complexity, data volume, and feature modalities to knowledge graph-based drug repurposing remain poorly quantified under rigorous temporal validation. We constructed a pharmacology knowledge graph from ChEMBL 36 comprising 5,348 entities including 3,127 drugs, 1,156 proteins, and 1,065 indications. A strict temporal split was enforced with training data up to 2022 and testing data from 2023 to 2025, together with biologically verified hard negatives mined from failed assays and clinical trials. We benchmarked five knowledge graph embedding models and a standard graph neural network with 3.44 million parameters that incorporates drug chemical structure using a graph attention encoder and ESM-2 protein embeddings. Scaling experiments ranging from 0.78 to 9.75 million parameters and from 25 to 100 percent of the data, together with feature ablation studies, were used to isolate the contributions of model capacity, graph density, and node feature modalities. Removing the graph attention based drug structure encoder and retaining only topological embeddings combined with ESM-2 protein features improved drug protein PR-AUC from 0.5631 to 0.5785 while reducing VRAM usage from 5.30 GB to 353 MB. Replacing the drug encoder with Morgan fingerprints further degraded performance, indicating that explicit chemical structure representations can be detrimental for predicting pharmacological network interactions. Increasing model size beyond 2.44 million parameters yielded diminishing returns, whereas increasing training data consistently improved performance. External validation confirmed 6 of the top 14 novel predictions as established therapeutic indications. These results show that drug pharmacological behavior can be accurately predicted using target-centric information and drug network topology alone, without requiring explicit chemical structure representations. --- ### Benchmarking Semantic Segmentation Models via Appearance and Geometry Attribute Editing Authors: Zijin Yin, Bing Li, Kongming Liang, Hao Sun, Zhongjiang He, Zhanyu Ma, Jun Guo Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01535v2 Semantic segmentation takes pivotal roles in various applications such as autonomous driving and medical image analysis. When deploying segmentation models in practice, it is critical to test their behaviors in varied and complex scenes in advance. In this paper, we construct an automatic data generation pipeline Gen4Seg to stress-test semantic segmentation models by generating various challenging samples with different attribute changes. Beyond previous evaluation paradigms focusing solely on global weather and style transfer, we investigate variations in both appearance and geometry attributes at the object and image level. These include object color, material, size, position, as well as image-level variations such as weather and style. To achieve this, we propose to edit visual attributes of existing real images with precise control of structural information, empowered by diffusion models. In this way, the existing segmentation labels can be reused for the edited images, which greatly reduces the labor costs. Using our pipeline, we construct two new benchmarks, Pascal-EA and COCO-EA. We benchmark a wide variety of semantic segmentation models, spanning from closed-set models to open-vocabulary large models. We have several key findings: 1) advanced open-vocabulary models do not exhibit greater robustness compared to closed-set methods under geometric variations; 2) data augmentation techniques, such as CutOut and CutMix, are limited in enhancing robustness against appearance variations; 3) our pipeline can also be employed as a data augmentation tool and improve both in-distribution and out-of-distribution performances. Our work suggests the potential of generative models as effective tools for automatically analyzing segmentation models, and we hope our findings will assist practitioners and researchers in developing more robust and reliable segmentation models. --- ### Boosting AI Reliability with an FSM-Driven Streaming Inference Pipeline: An Industrial Case Authors: Yutian Zhang, Zhongyi Pei, Yi Mao, Chen Wang, Lin Liu, Jianmin Wang Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01528v1 The widespread adoption of AI in industry is often hampered by its limited robustness when faced with scenarios absent from training data, leading to prediction bias and vulnerabilities. To address this, we propose a novel streaming inference pipeline that enhances data-driven models by explicitly incorporating prior knowledge. This paper presents the work on an industrial AI application that automatically counts excavator workloads from surveillance videos. Our approach integrates an object detection model with a Finite State Machine (FSM), which encodes knowledge of operational scenarios to guide and correct the AI's predictions on streaming data. In experiments on a real-world dataset of over 7,000 images from 12 site videos, encompassing more than 300 excavator workloads, our method demonstrates superior performance and greater robustness compared to the original solution based on manual heuristic rules. We will release the code at https://github.com/thulab/video-streamling-inference-pipeline. --- ### Scalable Multi-Task Low-Rank Model Adaptation Authors: Zichen Tian, Antoine Ledent, Qianru Sun Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01526v1 Scaling multi-task low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to a large number of tasks induces catastrophic performance degradation, such as an accuracy drop from 88.2% to 2.0% on DOTA when scaling from 5 to 15 tasks. This failure is due to parameter and representation misalignment. We find that existing solutions, like regularization and dynamic routing, fail at scale because they are constrained by a fundamental trade-off: strengthening regularization to reduce inter-task conflict inadvertently suppresses the essential feature discrimination required for effective routing. In this work, we identify two root causes for this trade-off. First, uniform regularization disrupts inter-task knowledge sharing: shared underlying knowledge concentrates in high-SV components (89% alignment on Flanv2->BBH). Uniform regularization forces high-SV components to update in orthogonal directions, directly disrupting the shared knowledge. Second, Conflict Amplification: Applying LoRA at the component-level (e.g., W_q, W_v) amplifies gradient conflicts; we show block-level adaptation reduces this conflict by 76% with only 50% parameters. Based on these insights, we propose mtLoRA, a scalable solution with three novel designs: 1) Spectral-Aware Regularization to selectively orthogonalize low-SV components while preserving high-SV shared knowledge, 2) Block-Level Adaptation to mitigate conflict amplification and largely improve parameter efficiency, and 3) Fine-Grained Routing using dimension-specific weights for superior expressive power. On four large-scale (15-25 tasks) vision (DOTA and iNat2018) and NLP (Dolly-15k and BBH) benchmarks, mtLoRA achieves 91.7%, 81.5%, 44.5% and 38.5% accuracy on DOTA, iNat2018, Dolly-15k and BBH respectively, outperforming the state-of-the-art by 2.3% on average while using 47% fewer parameters and 24% less training time. --- ### Better Matching, Less Forgetting: A Quality-Guided Matcher for Transformer-based Incremental Object Detection Authors: Qirui Wu, Shizhou Zhang, De Cheng, Yinghui Xing, Lingyan Ran, Dahu Shi, Peng Wang Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01524v1 Incremental Object Detection (IOD) aims to continuously learn new object classes without forgetting previously learned ones. A persistent challenge is catastrophic forgetting, primarily attributed to background shift in conventional detectors. While pseudo-labeling mitigates this in dense detectors, we identify a novel, distinct source of forgetting specific to DETR-like architectures: background foregrounding. This arises from the exhaustiveness constraint of the Hungarian matcher, which forcibly assigns every ground truth target to one prediction, even when predictions primarily cover background regions (i.e., low IoU). This erroneous supervision compels the model to misclassify background features as specific foreground classes, disrupting learned representations and accelerating forgetting. To address this, we propose a Quality-guided Min-Cost Max-Flow (Q-MCMF) matcher. To avoid forced assignments, Q-MCMF builds a flow graph and prunes implausible matches based on geometric quality. It then optimizes for the final matching that minimizes cost and maximizes valid assignments. This strategy eliminates harmful supervision from background foregrounding while maximizing foreground learning signals. Extensive experiments on the COCO dataset under various incremental settings demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches. --- ### FACE: A Face-based Autoregressive Representation for High-Fidelity and Efficient Mesh Generation Authors: Hanxiao Wang, Yuan-Chen Guo, Ying-Tian Liu, Zi-Xin Zou, Biao Zhang, Weize Quan, Ding Liang, Yan-Pei Cao, Dong-Ming Yan Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01515v2 Autoregressive models for 3D mesh generation suffer from a fundamental limitation: they flatten meshes into long vertex-coordinate sequences. This results in prohibitive computational costs, hindering the efficient synthesis of high-fidelity geometry. We argue this bottleneck stems from operating at the wrong semantic level. We introduce FACE, a novel Autoregressive Autoencoder (ARAE) framework that reconceptualizes the task by generating meshes at the face level. Our one-face-one-token strategy treats each triangle face, the fundamental building block of a mesh, as a single, unified token. This simple yet powerful design reduces the sequence length by a factor of nine, leading to an unprecedented compression ratio of 0.11, halving the previous state-of-the-art. This dramatic efficiency gain does not compromise quality; by pairing our face-level decoder with a powerful VecSet encoder, FACE achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality on standard benchmarks. The versatility of the learned latent space is further demonstrated by training a latent diffusion model that achieves high-fidelity, single-image-to-mesh generation. FACE provides a simple, scalable, and powerful paradigm that lowers the barrier to high-quality structured 3D content creation. --- ### Training Dynamics of Softmax Self-Attention: Fast Global Convergence via Preconditioning Authors: Gautam Goel, Mahdi Soltanolkotabi, Peter Bartlett Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01514v1 We study the training dynamics of gradient descent in a softmax self-attention layer trained to perform linear regression and show that a simple first-order optimization algorithm can converge to the globally optimal self-attention parameters at a geometric rate. Our analysis proceeds in two steps. First, we show that in the infinite-data limit the regression problem solved by the self-attention layer is equivalent to a nonconvex matrix factorization problem. Second, we exploit this connection to design a novel "structure-aware" variant of gradient descent which efficiently optimizes the original finite-data regression objective. Our optimization algorithm features several innovations over standard gradient descent, including a preconditioner and regularizer which help avoid spurious stationary points, and a data-dependent spectral initialization of parameters which lie near the manifold of global minima with high probability. --- ### Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts with Retrieval Augmentation for Protein Active Site Identification Authors: Jiayang Wu, Jiale Zhou, Rubo Wang, Xingyi Zhang, Xun Lin, Tianxu Lv, Leong Hou U, Yefeng Zheng Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01511v2 Accurate identification of protein active sites at the residue level is crucial for understanding protein function and advancing drug discovery. However, current methods face two critical challenges: vulnerability in single-instance prediction due to sparse training data, and inadequate modality reliability estimation that leads to performance degradation when unreliable modalities dominate fusion processes. To address these challenges, we introduce Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts with Retrieval Augmentation (MERA), the first retrieval-augmented framework for protein active site identification. MERA employs hierarchical multi-expert retrieval that dynamically aggregates contextual information from chain, sequence, and active-site perspectives through residue-level mixture-of-experts gating. To prevent modality degradation, we propose a reliability-aware fusion strategy based on Dempster-Shafer evidence theory that quantifies modality trustworthiness through belief mass functions and learnable discounting coefficients, enabling principled multimodal integration. Extensive experiments on ProTAD-Gen and TS125 datasets demonstrate that MERA achieves state-of-the-art performance, with 90% AUPRC on active site prediction and significant gains on peptide-binding site identification, validating the effectiveness of retrieval-augmented multi-expert modeling and reliability-guided fusion. --- ### Retrieval, Refinement, and Ranking for Text-to-Video Generation via Prompt Optimization and Test-Time Scaling Authors: Zillur Rahman, Alex Sheng, Cristian Meo Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01509v1 While large-scale datasets have driven significant progress in Text-to-Video (T2V) generative models, these models remain highly sensitive to input prompts, demonstrating that prompt design is critical to generation quality. Current methods for improving video output often fall short: they either depend on complex, post-editing models, risking the introduction of artifacts, or require expensive fine-tuning of the core generator, which severely limits both scalability and accessibility. In this work, we introduce 3R, a novel RAG based prompt optimization framework. 3R utilizes the power of current state-of-the-art T2V diffusion model and vision language model. It can be used with any T2V model without any kind of model training. The framework leverages three key strategies: RAG-based modifiers extraction for enriched contextual grounding, diffusion-based Preference Optimization for aligning outputs with human preferences, and temporal frame interpolation for producing temporally consistent visual contents. Together, these components enable more accurate, efficient, and contextually aligned text-to-video generation. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of 3R in enhancing the static fidelity and dynamic coherence of generated videos, underscoring the importance of optimizing user prompts. --- ### The Sentience Readiness Index: A Preliminary Framework for Measuring National Preparedness for the Possibility of Artificial Sentience Authors: Tony Rost Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01508v2 The scientific study of consciousness has begun to generate testable predictions about artificial systems. A landmark collaborative assessment evaluated current AI architectures against six leading theories of consciousness and found that none currently qualifies as a strong candidate, but that future systems might. A precautionary approach to AI sentience, which holds that credible possibility of sentience warrants governance action even without proof, has gained philosophical and institutional traction. Yet existing AI readiness indices, including the Oxford Insights Government AI Readiness Index, the IMF AI Preparedness Index, and the Stanford AI Index, measure economic, technological, and governance preparedness without assessing whether societies are prepared for the possibility that AI systems might warrant moral consideration. This paper introduces the Sentience Readiness Index (SRI), a preliminary composite index measuring national-level preparedness across six weighted categories for 31 jurisdictions. The SRI was constructed following the OECD/JRC framework for composite indicators and employs LLM-assisted expert scoring with iterative expert review to generate an initial dataset. No jurisdiction exceeds ``Partially Prepared'' (the United Kingdom leads at 49/100). Research Environment scores are universally the strongest category; Professional Readiness is universally the weakest. These exploratory findings suggest that if AI sentience becomes scientifically plausible, no society currently possesses adequate institutional, professional, or cultural infrastructure to respond. As a preliminary framework, the SRI provides an initial diagnostic baseline and highlights areas for future methodological refinement, including expanded expert validation, improved measurement instruments, and longitudinal data collection. --- ### OMG-Avatar: One-shot Multi-LOD Gaussian Head Avatar Authors: Jianqiang Ren, Lin Liu, Steven Hoi Published: 2026-03-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01506v2 We propose OMG-Avatar, a novel One-shot method that leverages a Multi-LOD (Level-of-Detail) Gaussian representation for animatable 3D head reconstruction from a single image in 0.2s. Our method enables LOD head avatar modeling using a unified model that accommodates diverse hardware capabilities and inference speed requirements. To capture both global and local facial characteristics, we employ a transformer-based architecture for global feature extraction and projection-based sampling for local feature acquisition. These features are effectively fused under the guidance of a depth buffer, ensuring occlusion plausibility. We further introduce a coarse-to-fine learning paradigm to support Level-of-Detail functionality and enhance the perception of hierarchical details. To address the limitations of 3DMMs in modeling non-head regions such as the shoulders, we introduce a multi-region decomposition scheme in which the head and shoulders are predicted separately and then integrated through cross-region combination. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OMG-Avatar outperforms state-of-the-art methods in reconstruction quality, reenactment performance, and computational efficiency. The project homepage is https://human3daigc.github.io/OMGAvatar_project_page/ . ---