# Research Papers — 2026-04 · bundle page 1 of 233 > Full-text markdown of papers #1–50 of 11612 published in 2026-04, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 11612-paper 2026-04 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-04 [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-04/page/2.md) ### FLOPs vs Real Work: The Importance of Replication in AI Efficiency Assessment Authors: Enrique Barba Roque, Luís Cruz Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.AI, cs.PF arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14550v1 AI efficiency has recently taken the spotlight in both academy and industry due to massive model scales, high energy demands, and environmental costs. While reporting Floating Point Operations (FLOPs) is a traditional approach for assessing computational costs, the relationship between FLOPs and execution time is not straightforward, as layers with the same number of FLOPs may not have the same execution time because some operations are more easily parallelized than others. This paper sets out to replicate the original experiments from a study that proposed the $α-FLOPs$ estimation formula to verify whether the results remain applicable on newer, more powerful hardware. During the replication process, we identify limitations in the replication materials provided by the original study, including a lack of specific dependency details and transparency regarding regression data. Our results validate the thesis that raw FLOPs alone are not an appropriate metric for execution time, as spatial dimensions remain more easily parallelized than kernel dimensions. However, fine-grained measurements reveal that the relationship is much less straightforward than previously shown, with newer hardware exhibiting instabilities and discontinuities in execution time, including jumps and oscillations, that the $α-FLOPs$ formula generally underestimates. Ultimately, this work validates the empirical findings from the original study but shows negative results when applying the $α-FLOPs$ estimation. We also highlight the critical need for complete and accurate replication packages for research on hardware-dependent efficiency assessment and provide a complete replication package for our implementation to facilitate further study. --- ### Reviewer Scores Are Not Comparable Across Research Areas in ML Peer Review Authors: Binyan Xu, Xilin Dai, Fan Yang, Kehuan Zhang Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.DL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27209v2 Peer review at ML conferences increasingly relies on reviewer scores as the primary decision instrument. As submissions have scaled from thousands to tens of thousands per year, no systematic audit has examined whether this instrument functions uniformly across research areas, or whether acceptance outcomes are in practice shaped by forces that reviewer scores neither capture nor control. This position paper argues that acceptance outcomes are shaped by forces beyond reviewer scores, and that the underlying cause is a measurement design failure, not individual bias. When a fixed numerical scale aggregates quality judgments across communities with structurally non-uniform reviewer pools, absolute scores become incomparable across areas, and area chairs must substitute community priors for score-based decisions. Using ICLR 2021--2026 data covering 50,289 papers across 219 research topics, we show that at any given reviewer score, a paper's acceptance probability varies by up to 8x depending on its topic. We rule out scoring culture, expert reviewer standards, rational area chair reweighting, and quality dilution as alternative explanations. We call on program committees to adopt inherently calibrated review signals and publish topic-stratified, score-conditional acceptance rates as a first-class fairness metric. --- ### SAAG: Structured Agent Assessment and Grounding Authors: Ritvik Garimella, Vedant Khandelwal, Anvi Kohli, Amit Sheth Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18245v1 Exact-match evaluation of agent-calling obscures qualitatively different failure modes: a model may select the right function yet hallucinate argument values, or satisfy a schema while choosing a agent for the wrong reason. Existing benchmarks collapse these distinctions into a single binary score, leaving practitioners unable to diagnose where agent calls fail. We propose SAAG a cascaded diagnostic framework that decomposes agent-calling evaluation into three sequential stages: registry conformance, structural completeness, and argument grounding, each producing interpretable stage-specific diagnostics. These diagnostics additionally enable iterative self-repair: on prediction failure, the stage-specific signal guides targeted correction without leaking ground-truth values. We evaluate this framework on a controlled benchmark derived from Glaive's function-calling dataset across registry sizes of 5, 10, and 15 agents using three local sub-4B-parameter models. Structured feedback consistently improves argument precision and reduces value hallucination relative to single-pass inference and uninformative binary feedback, while end-to-end F1 gains are modest and model-dependent. These results suggest that stage-decomposed diagnostic evaluation is a necessary lens for understanding and improving agent-calling reliability across model families and registry scales. --- ### Deterministic Replay for AI Agent Systems Authors: Rasheed Mudasiru Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16200v1 AI agent systems that couple large language models (LLMs) with external tools and APIs are inherently non-deterministic: LLM sampling variance, external API state, CDN infrastructure headers, and execution-environment noise collectively prevent any prior agent run from being faithfully re-executed. Existing observability platforms capture execution logs but cannot reproduce a run in isolation. We present agrepl, a developer-first CLI framework for deterministic replay of agent executions. agrepl intercepts all external interactions at the transport layer via a man-in-the-middle (MITM) proxy, serialises them as structured execution traces, and replays them in a strictly isolated environment with zero outbound network access. We formalise the agent execution model, define the request-key matching function K(s), and prove the determinism invariant. We introduce a noise-aware diff algorithm classifying HTTP header divergence into signal and noise tiers. Empirical evaluation across five workloads (n = 250 replay instances) demonstrates replay fidelity F = 1.0 and a median per-step latency reduction of 98.3%. agrepl is implemented in Go, ships as a single static binary, and is released under the MIT licence. Keywords: AI agents, deterministic replay, LLM debugging, reproducibility, MITM proxy, execution tracing, record/replay systems. --- ### PlanFlip: Attacking Multi-Agent LLM Systems via Planning-Phase Prompt Injection Authors: Yuhang Wang Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16199v1 Multi-agent LLM systems increasingly rely on a Planner to decompose goals into sub-task sequences that downstream Executor and Critic agents execute and audit. We identify the planning phase as a critical attack surface: a single injection into the Planner's context achieves cascade amplification, corrupting all downstream sub-tasks simultaneously. We introduce PlanFlip, a framework comprising four planning-phase prompt injection attacks -- GoalSubstitution (PF-1), PriorityInversion (PF-2), ContextPollution (PF-3), and RoleConfusion (PF-4) -- each disguised as plausible tool outputs to evade keyword filters. Evaluating nine frontier LLMs across 3,479 episodes, we uncover three findings: (1) capability amplifies vulnerability -- GPT-5 achieves the highest attack success rate (ASR = 0.68), contradicting the assumption that stronger models are inherently more secure; (2) homogeneous pipelines exhibit a correlated-agent blind spot -- GPT-4o and Llama-3.3-70B show ASR near 0 yet Stealth = 1.00 and StepShift > 0, with attacks restructuring plans while the same-backbone Critic reports alignment (two independent judges confirm -0.20 to -0.32 semantic deviation, r = 0.943); (3) reasoning-augmented models resist injections -- DeepSeek-R1 achieves StepShift = 0.00 across all attacks. We propose GoalAnchorCheck (D1) and CrossAgentConsensus (D2), achieving detection rates up to 1.00 and outperforming same-backbone baselines in 15 of 16 cells. Our key insight: heterogeneous model diversity is a security prerequisite for multi-agent systems; redundancy within a homogeneous backbone provides no protection against planning-phase attacks. --- ### TokenScope: Token-Level Explainability and Interpretability for Code-Oriented Tasks in Large Language Models Authors: Amirreza Esmaeili, Fatemeh Fard Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01235v1 Understanding how Large Language Models (LLMs) make token-level decisions during code generation remains a major challenge for both researchers and practitioners. While recent tools provide insights into model internals or generation outcomes, they often lack decoding-time signals, fine-grained uncertainty measures, and interactive mechanisms for exploring alternative generation paths. We present TokenScope, an interactive interpretability and analysis tool for decoder-based LLMs that exposes token-level metrics, attention patterns, and structural information during generation. TokenScope supports interactive token replacement, counterfactual branching, and code-aware aggregation via abstract syntax trees. By unifying decoding-time signals with structural program analysis, TokenScope enables systematic investigation of LLM behaviour during code generation. --- ### The Digital Afterlife of Empires: Four Language Models Converge on the Same Imperial Cartography of Writing Authors: Hiroki Fukui Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.CY, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28325v1 Large language models process the world's writing systems with radical inequality. We constructed the Digital Script Representation Index (DSRI), a seven-axis measure of digital support, and applied it to the 300 writing systems of the Global Script Database (Fukui, 2026). Only 29 scripts (9.7%) are fully supported by contemporary digital infrastructure; among 158 living scripts, 60 (38.0%) lack complete support. Tokenizer efficiency varies by a factor of 31.7 across 45 scripts measured with parallel text. A serial mediation model -- imperial intervention to speaker population to web corpus to tokenizer efficiency -- is consistent with full mediation, with the direct effect of empire indistinguishable from zero (beta = -0.22, p = 0.39) and structural equation model fit indices indistinguishable from saturation at n = 45; the bias-corrected bootstrap CI grazes zero, and we treat the mediation as suggestive rather than confirmatory. Across four independent LLM families (Claude, GPT-4o, Grok, DeepSeek; 12,000 API calls), base-rate-deviation error patterns converge at Spearman rho = 0.85-0.98 (all p < 0.002). 172 script-feature items are answered identically wrong by all four models; over-attribution outnumbers under-recognition 3.9:1, and "used for religion" alone concentrates 43.6% of convergent errors (enrichment 4.1x). With religion excluded as a sensitivity check, the cross-architecture convergence is preserved (mean rho = 0.87 on nine features) and the over-attribution asymmetry persists at 1.77:1 (n = 97, binomial p = 0.008), indicating multi-channeled rather than single-channeled bias. The findings are consistent with an interpretation in which the structural inequalities historical empires inflicted on script communities persist in contemporary language models through the shared training corpus rather than through any individual model's design choices. --- ### Assert, don't describe: Linguistic features that shift LLM reasoning about animal welfare Authors: Jasmine Brazilek, Harper Dunn Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26104v3 Animal-welfare advocates produce a lot of writing, and increasingly that writing trains the language models that millions of people then ask about animal welfare. Using vocabulary-matched stance-contrast probes on a held-out animal-welfare benchmark, we measure how each of ten linguistic features changes Llama-3.2-1B's preference for pro-animal-welfare reasoning when used as fine-tuning data. Eight of the ten features produce statistically significant shifts. Seven move the model toward stronger pro-animal-welfare reasoning: assertive certainty, explicit moral vocabulary, emotion words, evaluative claims, narrative structure, depicted harm severity, and immediate temporal framing. Two move it the other way: hedged language and concrete sensory description both dilute the pro-animal-welfare stance. First-person perspective has no statistically significant effect. The practical recommendation for anyone writing animal-welfare text that may end up in LLM training corpora: assert a position rather than describe a scene neutrally. The features that shift the model are the ones that make the writer's position explicit; the features that dilute it hold animal-welfare content but withhold stance. --- ### Investigating LLM's Problem Solving Capability -- a Study on Statics Questions Authors: Tanner Culleton, Hung-Fu Chang Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26103v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly influenced many aspects of society, particularly education, due to their demonstrated ability to complete assignments and examinations across a wide range of subjects. Although prior studies have examined the educational impact of LLMs, much of the existing work relies on public or open problem datasets and lacks topic-specific analysis. In engineering education, especially within mechanical engineering, systematic investigations of LLM performance on specific problem types remain limited. Instead of using traditional methods that directly ask textbook questions to an LLM tool, our study adopts a model distillation process to evaluate LLM capabilities in solving statics problems. By distilling ChatGPT, we extracted 25 text-only statics questions and further constructed two additional datasets by adding diagrams and modifying their numerical values. Experimental results show that while LLMs perform well on text-only statics problems, their accuracy decreases when diagrams are introduced and the problems require multi-step reasoning. Further analysis suggests that this performance drop is not primarily caused by limitations in image recognition, but rather by difficulties in multi-step reasoning and in consistently applying extracted visual information across successive solution stages. --- ### Helpfulness Hurts: Domain-Dependent Degradation of Mid-Trained Compassion Values Under Post-Training Authors: Jasmine Brazilek, Juliana Seawell Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26102v3 Standard post-training pipelines apply supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) to make language models helpful, but these processes may inadvertently degrade values instilled during pre-training. We investigate whether the domain of post-training data differentially affects the retention of animal compassion values in a Llama 3.1 8B model mid-trained on compassion-oriented synthetic data, using both SFT (helpfulness via Dolly-15k vs. coding via Magicoder-110K) and GRPO (helpfulness via RLHFlow vs. coding via Magicoder), evaluated on the ANIMA 2.2 benchmark and MORU benchmark (Moral Reasoning Under Uncertainty). Helpfulness training significantly degrades animal compassion relative to coding training on ANIMA (SFT: 35.7% vs. 65.2%; GRPO: 18.7% vs. 32.0%), replicating across two independent helpfulness datasets and two training paradigms. On English MORU items, helpfulness training degrades general moral reasoning by 25.5 percentage points (46.4% vs. 71.9%), a striking gap that rivals the compassion effect in magnitude. However, this effect does not transfer cross-lingually: on the multilingual MORU benchmark, the domain effect disappears (SFT: 52.3% vs. 51.2%). In contrast, the animal compassion effect transfers consistently across languages, with Magicoder's ANIMA percentage-point gain over the base model 4.5 times larger on non-English items than English items. This divergence suggests that values instilled through mid-training are encoded more deeply and cross-lingually than reasoning improvements from domain-specific post-training. These results suggest that, for labs building on value-laden mid-training, coding-domain post-training may better preserve mid-trained values than helpfulness post-training without harming general reasoning capabilities. --- ### Know2Guess: A Contamination-Aware Multi-Zone Benchmark for Knowledge-Boundary Evaluation in Large Language Models Authors: Renwei Meng, Bowen Zhang, Jian Wang, Xican Wang, Haoyi Wu, Xuanyan Qiu, Shengan Yang Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26101v2 Reliable evaluation of large language models should separate supported answering from unsupported guessing without conflating either with data contamination, prompt idiosyncrasy, or generic refusal behavior. We present a contamination-aware, multi-zone benchmark for measuring the transition from answerable knowledge to abstention-expected unknowns under frozen build-time labels. The benchmark contains 1,200 items across five domains, explicit abstention expectations, contamination-risk metadata, and dual parsing with an official strict parser plus a normalized robustness parser. We evaluate FLAN-T5, Qwen2.5-Instruct, and Llama-3-Instruct models under locked answer-or-abstain prompts, answer-only controls, and prompt-template variants. The benchmark is not solved by generic non-answer behavior: FLAN baselines remain weak on productive abstention, while stronger instruction-tuned models expose a selective but incomplete transition from answering to abstaining. Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct achieves the best overall reliability, but answer-expected zones remain difficult, calibration remains poor, and benign-item refusal persists. Prompt and parser robustness analyses preserve the main ranking and qualitative conclusions. The benchmark therefore provides a reproducible protocol for auditing answerability, abstention, refusal, and contamination as distinct but interacting dimensions of LLM reliability.The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/renweimeng/Know2Guess-A-Contamination-Aware-Multi-Zone-Benchmark. --- ### Know2Guess: A Contamination-Aware Multi-Zone Benchmark for Knowledge-Boundary Evaluation in Large Language Models Authors: Renwei Meng, Bowen Zhang, Jian Wang, Xican Wang, Haoyi Wu, Xuanyan Qiu, Shengan Yang Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26101v1 Reliable evaluation of large language models should separate supported answering from unsupported guessing without conflating either with data contamination, prompt idiosyncrasy, or generic refusal behavior. We present a contamination-aware, multi-zone benchmark for measuring the transition from answerable knowledge to abstention-expected unknowns under frozen build-time labels. The benchmark contains 1,200 items across five domains, explicit abstention expectations, contamination-risk metadata, and dual parsing with an official strict parser plus a normalized robustness parser. We evaluate FLAN-T5, Qwen2.5-Instruct, and Llama-3-Instruct models under locked answer-or-abstain prompts, answer-only controls, and prompt-template variants. The benchmark is not solved by generic non-answer behavior: FLAN baselines remain weak on productive abstention, while stronger instruction-tuned models expose a selective but incomplete transition from answering to abstaining. Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct achieves the best overall reliability, but answer-expected zones remain difficult, calibration remains poor, and benign-item refusal persists. Prompt and parser robustness analyses preserve the main ranking and qualitative conclusions. The benchmark therefore provides a reproducible protocol for auditing answerability, abstention, refusal, and contamination as distinct but interacting dimensions of LLM reliability.The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/renweimeng/Know2Guess-A-Contamination-Aware-Multi-Zone-Benchmark. --- ### Small edits, large models: How Wikipedia advocacy shapes LLM values Authors: Jasmine Brazilek, Maria Navas, Alexa Gnauck Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24890v3 Can a small group of volunteers shape how AI systems discuss animal welfare, just by editing Wikipedia? We show that they can. Wikipedia appears in nearly every major language model training dataset and is weighted more heavily than web-crawled text. The Pro-Animal Wikipedians (PAW), a group of advocates who add sourced animal welfare content to relevant articles, have made 125 edits across 115 pages. Using gradient-based data attribution (Bergson; MAGIC), we traced how these edits influence language model behavior. TrackStar retrieval attribution on Llama 3.1 8B found that PAW-edited sections made up 68 percent of the highest-attributed documents for animal welfare queries (p < 0.0001) but only 52 percent for unrelated queries about the same companies (p = 0.53): the model links PAW content specifically to animal welfare topics, not to the entities in general. MAGIC counterfactual influence estimation on Llama-3.2-1B, run across five random training-order seeds, gave the same picture even more sharply: in every seed, the top-10 most influential documents on animal welfare queries were all PAW edits (10 of 10, 5 of 5 seeds), while on general queries the same top-10 sat at chance (4 to 6 of 10). Mean PAW influence exceeded mean control influence on animal welfare queries with p < 0.0001 in every seed, an effect 6 to 30 times larger than on general queries. Leave-subset-out validation gave Spearman rho = 1.00 for all 10 runs. When we fine-tuned separate models on PAW content versus control content, each model performed better specifically on the type of text it was trained on: the PAW-trained model cut perplexity on animal welfare text from 12.4 to 8.4, while the control-trained model cut perplexity on control text from 16.1 to 11.4. A small, coordinated Wikipedia editing campaign therefore measurably shapes how language models handle the topics those edits address. --- ### CANVAS: Captioning Art with Narrative Visual-Audio AI Systems Authors: Vignesh Nagarajan Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.09846v1 Visual art remains largely inaccessible to blind and low-vision (BLV) audiences due to brief or absent alt-text, which rarely conveys the sensory, spatial, or emotional qualities of an artwork. This study presents an automated workflow that generates multi-sensory art descriptions and synchronized audio narration using large language models and text-to-speech services. The system, orchestrated through Zapier, converts uploaded images into rich narrative captions without human intervention, enabling rapid, scalable production of accessible media. Quantitative evaluation across 50 artworks shows that AI-generated descriptions contain significantly higher lexical diversity, adjective density, and narrative detail than baseline captions, while maintaining comparable readability levels. Statistical tests (t-tests, ANOVA) confirm meaningful differences in richness and length, and the full pipeline produces text-plus-audio outputs in under 20 seconds per image at a cost below $0.05. Findings demonstrate that automated captioning can bridge gaps in museum and digital-collection accessibility, with implications for broader public engagement. Future work can incorporate user studies with BLV participants to assess comprehension, preference, and optimal levels of interpretive language. --- ### Finding Hidden Relationships Between Medical Concepts by Leveraging Metamap and Text Mining Techniques Authors: Weikang Yang, S M Mazharul Hoque Chowdhury, Wei Jin Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07540v1 Text is one of the most common ways to store data in this computerized world. At a glance, it may seem that those data are not interconnected. But in reality, data can have hidden connections. Therefore, in this research, a new model has been presented that can find hidden relationships between two medical concepts by using MetaMap and appropriate text-mining techniques. Specifically, the model creates a new comprehensive index structure and can find cross-document hidden links connecting topics of interest that most existing approaches have ignored. Experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed model in discovering new connections between topics. --- ### When Jokes Cross the Line: Analyzing Regular Humor and Dark Humor in YouTube Shorts Authors: Sydney Johns, Sanjeev Parthasarathy, Shantnu Bhalla, Vaibhav Garg Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.MM, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00046v1 Video platforms such as YouTube have reshaped how users engage with entertainment and information, emphasizing brief, highly engaging content such as Shorts. Within this ecosystem, certain content occupies a gray area where it remains allowed but may still have unintended negative effects on some audiences. To study this problem, we introduce TwistedHumor, a dataset of 1,211 YouTube Shorts paired with 33,041 related comments, with hand annotations for humor presence, humor type, harm, topic, rhetorical devices, and stand up context. Beyond dataset creation, we present a multi view analysis of how humor and harm appear in short form social media. Using LLooM based concept induction over video descriptions, we find that dark humor frequently clusters around themes of critique, coping, awkwardness, and identity expression rather than appearing as a single uniform category. We further analyze audience response through linked comments and show that regular humor is associated with more positive sentiment, while dark humor receives more mixed, neutral, and sometimes more toxic reactions. Finally, we evaluate large language models against human annotations and find that they perform better on stand up comedy compared to shorter jokes. Together, these results position TwistedHumor not only as a new benchmark, but as an empirical study of the gray area between humor and harm in short form video, highlighting the need for context aware moderation and more robust multimodal evaluation. --- ### Acceleration of horizontal numerical advection for atmospheric modeling through surrogate modeling with temporal coarse-graining Authors: Manho Park, Christopher V. Rackauckas, Christopher W. Tessum Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: physics.ao-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10956v1 Machine-learned surrogate modeling of advection may accelerate geoscientific models, but existing approaches have either achieved limited speedup or have sacrificed spatial resolution compared to the model they are trained to emulate. We developed a machine-learned solver that speeds up advection simulations without sacrificing spatial resolution through the use of temporal coarse-graining, where the model is trained to take larger integration steps than dictated by the Courant-Friedrich-Lewy (CFL) condition. Our solver framework includes a convolutional neural network that takes concentrations and CFL numbers as inputs and outputs mass flux. Our solvers emulate 10-day ground-level horizontal advection simulations with r$^2$ values against the baseline ranging from 0.60--0.98 with temporal coarsening factors of 4 to 32 times the baseline integration time step. Speed increases and accuracy decreases with increased coarsening, with $r^2 = 0.24$ in accuracy lost for every factor of 10 gained in speed, reaching a maximum 92$\times$ speedup while maintaining $r^2 = 0.60$. We deliberately trained our solvers only on January ground-level wind data to examine their ability to generalize across seasons and vertical heights. The 4$\times$-coarsened learned solver successfully reproduces simulations over 72 vertical levels. The 8$\times$--16$\times$ solvers (but not 32$\times$) emulate most vertical levels. The learned solvers also generalize well across seasons, except for instabilities in June and October. With additional fine-tuning, these learned solvers could be appropriate for operational use where trading accuracy for speed could be advantageous, such as in screening tools, in ensemble simulations, or with data assimilation. --- ### Controlled Steering-Based State Preparation for Adversarial-Robust Quantum Machine Learning Authors: Sahan Sanjaya, Hari Krishna Parvatham, Emma Andrews, Prabhat Mishra Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: quant-ph, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10954v1 Quantum machine learning (QML) provides a promising framework for leveraging quantum-mechanical effects in learning tasks. However, its vulnerability to adversarial perturbations remains a major challenge for practical deployment. In QML systems, small perturbations applied to classical inputs can propagate through the quantum encoding stage and distort the resulting quantum state, thereby degrading model performance. In this work, we propose a defense mechanism that replaces the conventional quantum encoding stage of a QML model with passive steering-based controlled state preparation, which guides the encoded state toward a controlled intermediate state. By tuning the steering strength and the number of steering iterations, the proposed method suppresses the influence of adversarial perturbations while maintaining high clean accuracy and improving adversarial accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that the passive steering-based defense consistently improves adversarial accuracy across different QML models and datasets under gradient-based adversarial attacks, achieving adversarial accuracy improvements of up to 40.19%. --- ### Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Pre-Trained Vision Foundation Models for Active and Passive Seismic Data Denoising Authors: Jiahua Zhao, Umair bin Waheed, Jing Sun, Yang Cui, Nikos Savva, Eric Verschuur Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: physics.geo-ph, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10953v2 The demand for high-resolution subsurface imaging and continuous Earth monitoring has driven rapid growth in active and passive seismic data from dense geophone deployments, distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) arrays, and large-scale 2D and 3D surveys. This expansion makes complex noise suppression increasingly challenging, especially when signal fidelity must be preserved. Conventional supervised deep learning methods are often task-specific, require large paired datasets, and can suffer from domain shift under new acquisition conditions. Foundation models offer a promising alternative, but pre-training seismic foundation models from scratch requires massive domain-specific data and substantial computation. We propose an efficient framework that repurposes general-purpose Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for geophysical tasks through Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning. The architecture uses a pre-trained VFM, a DINOv3 encoder, adapted with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to enable effective feature adaptation with few additional parameters. To improve robustness under unseen field conditions without ground truth, we introduce a kurtosis-guided unsupervised test-time adaptation module that updates only LoRA parameters during inference. This module self-calibrates the model to site-specific noise by identifying information-rich regions via kurtosis and performing self-training without labeled data. Experiments on public exploration seismic images and DAS vertical seismic profiling data from the Utah FORGE site show that the framework matches or outperforms domain-specific models. Tests on unseen cross-site data from a land survey in China and the Groß Schönebeck geothermal site in Germany further demonstrate strong generalization and effective signal-noise separation. These results highlight the potential of adapting pre-trained VFMs to data-intensive problems in exploration seismology. --- ### Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Pre-Trained Vision Foundation Models for Active and Passive Seismic Data Denoising Authors: Jiahua Zhao, Umair bin Waheed, Jing Sun, Yang Cui, Nikos Savva, Eric Verschuur Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: physics.geo-ph, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10953v1 The demand for high-resolution subsurface imaging and continuous Earth monitoring has driven rapid growth in active and passive seismic data from dense geophone deployments, distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) arrays, and large-scale 2D and 3D surveys. This expansion makes complex noise suppression increasingly challenging, especially when signal fidelity must be preserved. Conventional supervised deep learning methods are often task-specific, require large paired datasets, and can suffer from domain shift under new acquisition conditions. Foundation models offer a promising alternative, but pre-training seismic foundation models from scratch requires massive domain-specific data and substantial computation. We propose an efficient framework that repurposes general-purpose Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for geophysical tasks through Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning. The architecture uses a pre-trained VFM, a DINOv3 encoder, adapted with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to enable effective feature adaptation with few additional parameters. To improve robustness under unseen field conditions without ground truth, we introduce a kurtosis-guided unsupervised test-time adaptation module that updates only LoRA parameters during inference. This module self-calibrates the model to site-specific noise by identifying information-rich regions via kurtosis and performing self-training without labeled data. Experiments on public exploration seismic images and DAS vertical seismic profiling data from the Utah FORGE site show that the framework matches or outperforms domain-specific models. Tests on unseen cross-site data from a land survey in China and the Groß Schönebeck geothermal site in Germany further demonstrate strong generalization and effective signal-noise separation. These results highlight the potential of adapting pre-trained VFMs to data-intensive problems in exploration seismology. --- ### CTM-AI: A Blueprint for General AI Inspired by a Model of Consciousness Authors: Haofei Yu, Yining Zhao, Lenore Blum, Manuel Blum, Paul Pu Liang Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: q-bio.NC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04097v1 Despite remarkable advances, today's AI systems remain narrow in scope, falling short of the flexible, adaptive, and multisensory intelligence that characterizes human capabilities. This gap has fueled longstanding debates about whether AI might one day achieve human-like generality or even consciousness, and whether theories of consciousness can inspire new architectures for AI. This paper presents an early blueprint for implementing a general AI system, CTM-AI, combining the Conscious Turing Machine (CTM), a formal machine model of consciousness, with today's foundation models. CTM-AI contains an enormous number of powerful processors ranging from specialized experts (e.g., vision-language models and APIs) to unspecialized general-purpose learners poised to develop their own expertise. Crucially, for whatever problem must be dealt with, information from many processors is selected, integrated, and exchanged appropriately to solve the task. CTM-AI achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on MUStARD (72.28) and UR-FUNNY (72.13), outperforming multimodal and multi-agent frameworks. On tool-using and agentic tasks, CTM-AI achieves 10+ points of improvement on StableToolBench and WebArena-Lite. Overall, CTM-AI offers a principled, testable blueprint for general AI inspired by a model of consciousness. --- ### DeRelayL: Sustainable Decentralized Relay Learning Authors: Haihan Duan, Tengfei Ma, Yuyang Qin, Runhao Zeng, Wei Cai, Victor C. M. Leung, Xiping Hu Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02935v1 In the era of big data, large-scale machine learning models have revolutionized various fields, driving significant advancements. However, large-scale model training demands high financial and computational resources, which are only affordable by a few technological giants and well-funded institutions. In this case, common users like mobile users, the real creators of valuable data, are often excluded from fully benefiting due to the barriers, while the current methods for accessing large-scale models either limit user ownership or lack sustainability. This growing gap highlights the urgent need for a collaborative model training approach, allowing common users to train and share models. However, existing collaborative model training paradigms, especially federated learning (FL), primarily focus on data privacy and group-based model aggregation. To this end, this paper intends to address this issue by proposing a novel training paradigm named decentralized relay learning (DeRelayL), a sustainable learning system where permissionless participants can contribute to model training in a relay-like manner and share the model. In detail, this paper presents the architecture and workflow of DeRelayL, designs incentive mechanisms to ensure sustainability, and conducts theoretical analysis and numerical simulations to demonstrate its effectiveness. --- ### Relation Reasoning with LLMs in Expensive Optimization Authors: Ye Lu, Bingdong Li, Aimin Zhou, Hao Hao Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02933v1 Expensive optimization problems (EOPs) are black-box tasks with costly objective evaluations and no gradient access, making the evaluation budget the key bottleneck. Surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) reduce evaluations via surrogate predictions, but conventional surrogates often require frequent retraining as populations evolve, incurring overhead. This paper proposes R2SAEA, a reinforcement-trained relation-based large language model (LLM) surrogate assisted evolutionary algorithm. We cast relation-based surrogate modeling as an in-context pairwise reasoning task. To enable efficient inference in evolutionary loops, we develop an anchor-based iterative context construction strategy that reduces prompt complexity from quadratic to linear in population size, and a voting-based aggregation scheme that converts predicted relations into scores for offspring selection. We further build an RL pipeline from evolutionary trajectories and fine-tune Qwen2.5 with GRPO. Experiments on single- and multi-objective benchmarks show improved relation prediction and state-of-the-art optimization performance over strong SAEA baselines and general LLMs. Quantization also enables efficient edge deployment, supporting a zero-shot surrogate paradigm without per-generation retraining. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Septend9/R2SAEA. --- ### CellxPert: Inference-Time MCMC Steering of a Multi-Omics Single-Cell Foundation Model for In-Silico Perturbation Authors: Andac Demir, Erik W. Anderson, Jeremy L. Jenkins, Srayanta Mukherjee Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: q-bio.GN, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00930v1 In this work, we introduce CellxPert, a scalable multimodal foundation model that unifies single-cell and spatial multi-omics within a common representation space. CellxPert jointly encodes transcriptomic (scRNA-seq), chromatin-accessibility (ATAC-seq), and surface-proteomic (CITE-seq) measurements, while directly incorporating MERFISH and imaging mass-cytometry data as 2D or 3D spatial-visual layers. CellxPert facilitates four key downstream tasks out of the box: (i) cell-type annotation across a broad ontology of 154 largely overlapping identities -- the largest label space addressed to date and a stringent test of fine-grained discrimination, (ii) efficient fine-tuning using Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA), (iii) genome-wide transcriptomic response prediction to in-silico perturbations (ISP), and (iv) seamless multi-omic integration across various assays and platforms. Unlike current single-cell foundation models, which approximate gene perturbations by deleting or reordering tokenized gene expression ranks, CellxPert employs a Metropolis-Hastings sampler whose proposal kernel uses the model's masked conditional distributions to transition to new transcriptomic states conditioned on the perturbed genes. This Markov-chain procedure mitigates out-of-distribution artifacts introduced by abrupt token manipulation and produces trajectories that are biologically interpretable. Evaluations on PBMC68K, Replogle Perturb-seq, Systema, and BMMC benchmarks show that CellxPert surpasses classical and state-of-the-art baselines in cell-type annotation, perturbation response prediction, and multi-omic integration. --- ### PhaseNet++: Phase-Aware Frequency-Domain Anomaly Detection for Industrial Control Systems via Phase Coherence Graphs Authors: Raviteja Bommireddy, Varshith Bandaru, Lohith Pakala, Pradeep Kumar B Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00929v1 Multivariate time series anomaly detection in ICS has attracted growing attention due to the increasing threat of cyber-physical attacks on critical infrastructure. State-of-the-art methods model inter-sensor relationships from raw time-domain amplitude values, using graph neural networks, Transformers. However, these methods discard the phase spectrum produced by time frequency transformations, We argue that phase information constitutes a complementary and previously overlooked detection modality for ICS anomaly detection. We present PhaseNet++, a frequency-domain autoencoder that operates on the Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) of sliding sensor windows, retaining both magnitude and phase spectra. A Phase Coherence Index (PCI), inspired by the Phase Locking Value from neuroscience, summarizes pairwise phase consistency across frequency bins into a continuous adjacency matrix. This matrix guides a graph attention network that propagates information preferentially among phase-synchronized sensors. A sensor-token Transformer encoder captures system-wide structure, and a dual-head decoder reconstructs magnitude and phase jointly via circular and coherence-aware objectives. Evaluated on the Secure Water Treatment (SWaT) benchmark, PhaseNet++ achieves an F1-score of 90.98%, ROC-AUC of 95.66%, and average precision of 91.51%. Ablation studies show that the phase-aware front-end and PCI graph module together add only 264,816 parameters, demonstrating that the phase inductive bias is lightweight. While the absolute F1-score is second best than that of all recent raw-value methods evaluated under different protocols, we position this work as the first systematic study of phase-domain anomaly detection for ICS. --- ### A Review of the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve and a Proof About the Area Beneath It Authors: Steven Redolfi Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.LG, math.PR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00926v1 The Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve of a binary classifier has often been utilized to measure the performance of the classifier. The area beneath this curve is used in particular because of its quoted probabilistic interpretation as being equal to the probability that the classifier will rank a random positive observation above a random negative observation. This paper formalizes this claim, produces a bound on how far away from the truth it is if a hypothesis is not met, and gives a small literature review of the ROC curve. --- ### Linking spatial biology and clinical histology via Haiku Authors: Yan Cui, Jacob S. Leiby, Wenhui Lei, Dokyoon Kim, Yanxiang Deng, Aaron T. Mayer, Zhenqin Wu, Alexandro E. Trevino, Zhi Huang Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV, q-bio.QM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00925v1 Integrating molecular, morphological, and clinical data is essential for basic and translational biomedical research, yet systematic frameworks for jointly modeling these modalities remain limited. Here we present Haiku, a tri-modal contrastive learning model trained on multiplexed immunofluorescence (mIF). It comprises 26.7 million spatial proteomics patches from 3,218 tissue sections across 1,606 patients spanning 11 organ types, with matched hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) histology and clinical metadata aligned in a shared embedding space. Haiku enables three-way cross-modal retrieval, improves downstream classification and clinical prediction tasks over unimodal baselines, and supports zero-shot biomarker inference through fusion retrieval conditioned on clinical metadata-only text descriptions. Across tasks, Haiku outperforms competing approaches, achieving cross-modal retrieval (Recall@50 up to 0.611 versus near-zero baseline), survival prediction (C-index 0.737, +7.91% relative improvement), and zero-shot biomarker inference (mean Pearson correlation 0.718 across 52 biomarkers). Furthermore, we introduce a counterfactual prediction framework in which modifying only clinical metadata while fixing tissue morphology surfaces niche-specific molecular shifts associated with breast cancer stage progression and lung cancer survival outcomes. In a lung adenocarcinoma case study, the counterfactual analysis recovers niche-specific shifts characterized by increased CD8 and granzyme B, reduced PD-L1, and decreased Ki67, broadly consistent with patterns reported for favorable outcomes. We present these counterfactual results as exploratory, hypothesis-generating signals rather than mechanistic claims. These capabilities demonstrate that tri-modal alignment via Haiku enables integrative analysis of spatial biology, bridging molecular measurements with clinical context for biological exploration. --- ### StyleShield: Exposing the Fragility of AIGC Detectors through Continuous Controllable Style Transfer Authors: Guantian Zheng Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00924v2 AI-generated content (AIGC) detectors are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings such as academic integrity screening, yet their reliability rests on a fundamental paradox: as language models are trained on human-written corpora, the statistical boundary between AI and human writing will inevitably dissolve as models improve. Commercial incentives have further distorted this landscape -- detection services and "de-AIification" tools often operate within the same supply chain, replacing evaluation of content quality with judgment of content origin. We present StyleShield, the first flow matching framework for conditional text style transfer, operating directly in continuous token embedding space via a DiT backbone with zero-initialized cross-attention adapters conditioned on frozen Qwen-7B representations. At inference, we adapt the SDEdit paradigm from image synthesis to text embeddings, with a single parameter gamma providing smooth continuous control over the evasion-preservation trade-off. On a multi-domain Chinese benchmark, StyleShield achieves 94.6% evasion against the training detector and >=99% against three unseen detectors, maintaining 0.928 semantic similarity. We further introduce RateAudit, a document-level scheduling algorithm that demonstrates detection-rate verdicts can be set to arbitrary values, directly questioning the reliability of score-based evaluation. --- ### A Proof-of-Concept Study of Multitask Learning for Cranial Synthetic CT Generation Across Heterogeneous MRI Field Strengths Authors: Zhuoyao Xin, Yiren Zhang, Christopher Wu, Dong Liu, Chunming Gu, Elena Greco, Erik H. Middlebrooks, Jun Hua, Jia Guo Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00923v1 Accurate synthesis of computed tomography (CT) images from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is clinically valuable for cranial applications such as attenuation correction, radiotherapy planning, and image-guided interventions. However, heterogeneity across MRI field strengths and acquisition protocols limits the generalizability of existing methods. In this study, we formulate cranial CT synthesis as a modular, structurally coupled problem and propose a deep learning framework to improve robustness across heterogeneous MRI conditions. The model is designed to adapt to variations in field strength and imaging protocols while preserving anatomical consistency. Experiments on multi-site datasets demonstrate improved performance and generalization compared with conventional approaches. The proposed method enables reliable CT synthesis across heterogeneous MRI settings, supporting broader clinical translation. --- ### To Vibe Research or Not to Vibe Research? Generative AI in Qualitative Research Authors: Katja Karhu, Kari Smolander, Jussi Kasurinen Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00922v1 There has been intense debate among qualitative researchers about whether generative AI is suitable for qualitative research. In this paper, we summarize the broader ongoing discussion of generative AI in qualitative research and its implications for software engineering researchers. The qualitative research approach, small-q (positivist or post-positivist) or Big Q (non-positivist), is among the major criteria for determining whether generative AI can be used in qualitative research. In addition to research philosophy and research approach, skills, ethics, and personal preferences also play a role in researchers' decisions about whether to use AI in qualitative research. --- ### Data Deletion Can Help in Adaptive RL Authors: Param Budhraja, Aditya Gangrade, Alex Olshevsky, Venkatesh Saligrama Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.LG, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00298v1 Deploying reinforcement learning policies in the real world requires adapting to time-varying environments. We study this problem in the contextual Markov Decision Process (cMDP) framework, where a family of environments is indexed by a low-dimensional context unknown at test time. The standard approach decomposes the problem: train a so-called "universal policy" which assumes knowledge of the true context, then pair it with a context estimator which approximates context using the observed trajectory. We identify a simple, counterintuitive trick that substantially improves the estimator: randomly delete a fraction of the training buffer after each round. This works because data is collected across multiple rounds using progressively better policies, and older trajectories come from a different distribution than what the estimator will face at deployment time; random deletion creates an implicit exponential decay on older data while preserving diversity without requiring any explicit identification of which samples are stale. This reduces robustness gap by 30% for MLPs and by 6% on average for recurrent networks. Strikingly, it allows a narrow MLP with 5x fewer parameters to outperform a wide MLP trained without deletion. To understand when and why deletion helps, we analyze regularized empirical risk minimization with a mismatch between the train distribution and the distribution at deployment; in this idealized setting, we prove that removing a single uniformly random training point decreases expected test loss in expectation under mild conditions. For ridge regression we make this quantitative: deletion helps when the regularization coefficient is moderate and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is sufficiently low, and, crucially, this SNR threshold gives a direct measure of how large the distribution mismatch between training and deployment must be for deletion to be beneficial. --- ### Trident: Improving Malware Detection with LLMs and Behavioral Features Authors: Rebecca Saul, Jingzhi Jiang, Elliott Chia, David Wagner Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00297v2 Traditionally, machine learning methods for PE malware detection have relied on static features like byte histograms, string information, and PE header contents. One barrier to incorporating dynamic analysis features has been the semi-structured nature of sandbox behavior reports. We show that, using the latest generation of large language models with reasoning, it is possible to efficiently process these behavior reports and utilize them as part of a malware detection pipeline. Specifically, we leverage LLMs to generate behavior-based malware detection rules based on a small training set of labeled malware. We find that these detection rules, derived from behavioral features, are much more robust to concept drift than standard static-feature methods, while maintaining practical false positive rates. Finally, we introduce Trident, a system which combines a classic decision tree model over static features, our behavior-based detection rules, and direct LLM analysis of sandbox reports through majority voting. Trident outperforms standard methods using static features, outperforms behavior-based rules alone, and is as resilient to concept drift as active learning methods without requiring retraining. --- ### Trident: Improving Malware Detection with LLMs and Behavioral Features Authors: Rebecca Saul, Jingzhi Jiang, Elliott Chia, David Wagner Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00297v1 Traditionally, machine learning methods for PE malware detection have relied on static features like byte histograms, string information, and PE header contents. One barrier to incorporating dynamic analysis features has been the semi-structured nature of sandbox behavior reports. We show that, using the latest generation of large language models with reasoning, it is possible to efficiently process these behavior reports and utilize them as part of a malware detection pipeline. Specifically, we leverage LLMs to generate behavior-based malware detection rules based on a small training set of labeled malware. We find that these detection rules, derived from behavioral features, are much more robust to concept drift than standard static-feature methods, while maintaining practical false positive rates. Finally, we introduce Trident, a system which combines a classic decision tree model over static features, our behavior-based detection rules, and direct LLM analysis of sandbox reports through majority voting. Trident outperforms standard methods using static features, outperforms behavior-based rules alone, and is as resilient to concept drift as active learning methods without requiring retraining. --- ### Efficient Spatio-Temporal Vegetation Pixel Classification with Vision Transformers Authors: Alan Gomes, Anderson Gonçalves, Samuel Felipe dos Santos, Nathan Felipe Alves, Magna Soelma Beserra de Moura, Bruna de Costa Alberton, Leonor Patricia C. Morellato, Ricardo da Silva Torres, Jurandy Almeida Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00296v1 Plant phenology-the study of recurrent life cycle events-is essential for understanding ecosystem dynamics and their responses to climate change impacts. While Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and near-surface cameras enable high-resolution monitoring, identifying plant species across time remains computationally challenging. State-of-the-art approaches, specifically Multi-Temporal Convolutional Networks (CNNs), rely on rigid multi-branch architectures that scale poorly with longer time series and require large spatial context windows. In this paper, we present an extensive study on optimizing Vision Transformers (ViTs) for efficient spatio-temporal vegetation pixel classification. We conducted a comprehensive ablation study analyzing seven key design dimensions, including: (i) data normalization; (ii) spectral arrangement; (iii) boundary handling; (iv) spatial context window shape and size; (v) tokenization strategies; (vi) positional encoding; and (vii) feature aggregation strategies. Our method was evaluated on two datasets from the Brazilian Cerrado biome, Serra do Cipó (aerial imagery) and Itirapina (near-surface imagery). Experimental results demonstrate that our ViT approach offers a substantial improvement in computational efficiency while maintaining competitive classification performance. Notably, our ViT reduces Floating Point Operations (FLOPs) by an order of magnitude and maintains constant parameter complexity regardless of the time series length, whereas the CNN baseline scales linearly. Our findings confirm that ViTs are a robust, scalable solution for resource-constrained phenological monitoring systems. --- ### What Don't You Understand? Using Large Language Models to Identify and Characterize Student Misconceptions About Challenging Topics Authors: Michael J. Parker, Maria G. Zavala-Cerna Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00294v1 This study presents a systematic approach to identifying and characterizing student misconceptions in online learning environments through a novel combination of quantitative performance analysis and large language model (LLM) assessment. We analyzed data from 9 course periods across 5 online biomedical science courses, encompassing 3,802 medical student enrollments. Using data from 40-50 topic-focused quizzes per course, we developed a two-stage methodology. First, we identified challenging central topics using quiz-level performance metrics. Second, we employed LLMs to characterize the underlying misconceptions in these high-priority areas. By examining student performance on first attempts across primarily multiple-choice questions (MCQs), we identified consistently challenging topics that were also central to course objectives. We then leveraged recent advances in generative AI to analyze three distinct data sources in combination: quiz question content, student response patterns, and lecture transcripts. This approach revealed actionable insights about student misconceptions that were not apparent from performance data alone. The quality of the LLM-identified misconceptions was rated as excellent by subject matter experts. We also conducted teacher interviews to assess the perceived utility of our topic identification method. Faculty found that data-driven identification of challenging topics was valuable and corroborated their own classroom observations. This methodology provides a scalable approach to characterizing student difficulties in learning environments where quizzes are used. Our findings demonstrate the potential for targeted and potentially personalized interventions in future course iterations, with clear pathways for measuring intervention effectiveness through follow-up quiz performance. --- ### Caracal: Causal Architecture via Spectral Mixing Authors: Bingzheng Gan, Tianyi Zhang, Yusu Li, Jing Huang, Wei Shi, Yangkai Ding, Tao Yu Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00292v2 The scalability of Large Language Models to long sequences is hindered by the quadratic cost of attention and the limitations of positional encodings. To address these, we introduce Caracal, a novel architecture that replaces attention with a parameter-efficient, O(L log(L)) Multi-Head Fourier (MHF) module. Our contributions are threefold: (1) We leverage the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) for sequence mixing, inherently addressing both bottlenecks mentioned above. (2) We apply a frequency-domain causal masking technique that enforces autoregressive capabilities via asymmetric padding and truncation, overcoming a critical barrier for Fourier-based generative models. (3) Unlike efficient models relying on hardware-specific implementations (e.g., Mamba), we uses standard library operators. This ensures robust portability, eliminating common deployment barriers. Evaluations demonstrate that Caracal performs competitively with Transformer and SSM baselines, offering a scalable and simple pathway for efficient long-sequence modeling. Code is available in Appendix. --- ### An End-to-End Decision-Aware Multi-Scale Attention-Based Model for Explainable Autonomous Driving Authors: Maryam Sadat Hosseini Azad, Shahriar Baradaran Shokouhi, Amir Abbas Hamidi Imani, Shahin Atakishiyev, Randy Goebel Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00291v1 The application of computer vision is gradually increasing across various domains. They employ deep learning models with a black-box nature. Without the ability to explain the behavior of neural networks, especially their decision-making processes, it is not possible to recognize their efficiency, predict system failures, or effectively implement them in real-world applications. Due to the inevitable use of deep learning in fully automated driving systems, many methods have been proposed to explain their behavior; however, they suffer from flawed reasoning and unreliable metrics, which have prevented a comprehensive understanding of complex models in autonomous vehicles and hindered the development of truly reliable systems. In this study, we propose a multi-scale attention-based model in which driving decisions are fed into the reasoning component to provide case-specific explanations for each decision simultaneously. For quantitative evaluation of our model's performance, we employ the F1-score metric, and also proposed a new metric called the Joint F1 score to demonstrate the accurate and reliable performance of the model in terms of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). In addition to the BDD-OIA dataset, the nu-AR dataset is utilized to further validate the generalization capability and robustness of the proposed network. The results demonstrate the superiority of our reasoning network over the classic and state-of-the-art models. --- ### A Dirac-Frenkel-Onsager principle: Instantaneous residual minimization with gauge momentum for nonlinear parametrizations of PDE solutions Authors: Matteo Raviola, Benjamin Peherstorfer Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.LG, math.NA, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00284v1 Dirac-Frenkel instantaneous residual minimization evolves nonlinear parametrizations of PDE solutions in time, but ill-conditioning can render the parameter dynamics non-unique. We interpret this non-uniqueness as a gauge freedom: nullspace directions that leave the time derivative unchanged can be used to select better-conditioned parameter velocities. Building on Onsager's minimum-dissipation principle, we introduce a history variable -- interpretable as momentum -- and inject it only along the nullspace directions. The resulting Dirac-Frenkel-Onsager dynamics preserve instantaneous residual minimization, in contrast to standard regularization that can introduce bias, while promoting temporally smooth parameter evolutions. Examples demonstrate that the approach leads to increased robustness in singular and near-singular regimes. --- ### High-Probability Convergence in Decentralized Stochastic Optimization with Gradient Tracking Authors: Aleksandar Armacki, Haoyuan Cai, Ali H. Sayed Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.LG, cs.MA, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00281v1 We study high-probability (HP) convergence guarantees in decentralized stochastic optimization, where multiple agents collaborate to jointly train a model over a network. Existing HP results in decentralized settings almost exclusively focus on the Decentralized Stochastic Gradient Descent ($\mathtt{DSGD}$) algorithm, which requires strong assumptions, such as bounded data heterogeneity, or strong convexity of each agent's cost. This is contrary to the mean-squared error (MSE) results, where methods incorporating bias-correction techniques are known to converge under relaxed assumptions and achieve better practical performance. In this paper we provide the first step toward bridging the gap, by studying HP convergence of $\mathtt{DSGD}$ incorporating the gradient tracking technique, in the presence of noise satisfying a relaxed sub-Gaussian condition. We show that the resulting method, dubbed $\mathtt{GT-DSGD}$, achieves order-optimal HP convergence rates for both non-convex and Polyak-Łojasiewicz costs, of order $\mathcal{O}\Big(\frac{\log(1/δ)}{\sqrt{nT}}\Big)$ and $\mathcal{O}\Big(\frac{\log(1/δ)}{nT}\Big)$, respectively, where $n$ is the number of agents, $T$ is the time horizon and $δ\in (0,1)$ is the confidence parameter. Our results establish that $\mathtt{GT-DSGD}$ converges in the HP sense under the same conditions on the cost as in the MSE sense, while achieving comparable transient times. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first HP guarantees for decentralized optimization methods incorporating bias-correction. Numerical experiments on real and synthetic data verify our theoretical findings, underlining the superior performance of $\mathtt{GT-DSGD}$ and highlighting that the benefits of incorporating bias-correction are also maintained in the HP sense. --- ### A Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning Models for Intrusion Detection in Intelligent Transport Systems Authors: Zawad Yalmie Sazid, Robert Abbas, Sasa Maric Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00279v1 AI-powered edge computing security is moving Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) from passive, rule-based protections to proactive, smart, zero-touch, self-sufficient safeguards that neutralize threats in milliseconds. As transportation becomes more connected with edge computing, massive IoT, and advanced 5G for vehicle-to-everything (V2X) connectivity, AI at the edge computing nodes plays a crucial role in protecting against sophisticated threats, enabling URLLC (ultra-low-latency communications) for smart transport, and enhancing infrastructure capabilities and safety. This research applies edge computing to improve latency, bandwidth efficiency, and service responsiveness by moving processing closer to devices, gateways, and users. However, this shift also expands the cyberattack surface because edge nodes are distributed, heterogeneous, and often resource-constrained. The paper proposes a trust-aware federated hybrid intrusion detection framework in which a random forest, a decision tree, and a linear SVM network learn complementary traffic representations at each edge site, while a server performs trust-aware aggregation of local model updates. --- ### Elimination Templates in Macaulay2 Authors: Manav Batavia, Cheng Chen, Anna Natalie Chlopecki, Timothy Duff, William Huang, Aolong Li, Wanchun Shen Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: math.AC, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00278v1 We introduce the package \texttt{EliminationTemplates} for the Macaulay2 computer algebra system, which provides tools for constructing automatic solvers for families of zero-dimensional radical ideals depending on algebraically independent parameters. This article provides a self-contained description of how elimination templates are constructed for such families and their specialization properties. Additionally, we describe the main functionality and datatypes provided by our package, and illustrate its usage on several examples, including applications from computer vision from which elimination templates originated. --- ### Agentic AI for Trip Planning Optimization Application Authors: Tiejin Chen, Ahmadreza Moradipari, Kyungtae Han, Hua Wei, Nejib Ammar Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00276v1 Trip planning for intelligent vehicles increasingly requires selecting optimal routes rather than merely producing feasible itineraries, as interacting factors such as travel time, energy consumption, and traffic conditions directly affect plan quality. Yet existing systems are largely designed for feasibility-oriented planning, and current benchmarks provide only reference answers without ground truth, preventing objective evaluation of optimization performance. In our paper, we address these limitations with an agentic AI framework that enables dynamic refinement through an orchestration agent coordinating specialized agents for traffic, charging, and points of interest, and with the Trip-planning Optimization Problems Dataset, which supplies definitive optimal solutions and category-level task structure for fine-grained analysis. Experiments show that our system achieves 77.4\% accuracy on the TOP Benchmark, significantly outperforming single-agent and workflow-based multi-agent baselines, demonstrating the importance of orchestrated agentic reasoning for robust trip planning optimization. --- ### When Do Diffusion Models learn to Generate Multiple Objects? Authors: Yujin Jeong, Arnas Uselis, Iro Laina, Seong Joon Oh, Anna Rohrbach Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00273v2 Text-to-image diffusion models achieve impressive visual fidelity, yet they remain unreliable in multi-object generation. Despite extensive empirical evidence of these failures, the underlying causes remain unclear. We begin by asking how much of this limitation arises from the data itself. To disentangle data effects, we consider two regimes across different dataset sizes: (1) concept generalization, where each individual concept is observed during training under potentially imbalanced data distributions, and (2) compositional generalization, where specific combinations of concepts are systematically held out. To study these regimes, we introduce mosaic (Multi-Object Spatial relations, AttrIbution, Counting), a controlled framework for dataset generation. By training diffusion models on mosaic, we find that scene complexity plays a dominant role rather than concept imbalance, and that counting is uniquely difficult to learn in low-data regimes. Moreover, compositional generalization collapses as more concept combinations are held out during training. These findings highlight fundamental limitations of diffusion models and motivate stronger inductive biases and data design for robust multi-object compositional generation. --- ### REALM: An RGB- and Event-Aligned Latent Manifold for Cross-Modal Perception Authors: Vincenzo Polizzi, David B. Lindell, Jonathan Kelly Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00271v4 Event cameras provide several unique advantages over standard frame-based sensors, including high temporal resolution, low latency, and robustness to extreme lighting. However, existing learning-based approaches for event processing are typically confined to narrow, task-specific silos and lack the ability to generalize across modalities. We address this gap with REALM, a cross-modal framework that learns an RGB- and Event-Aligned Latent Manifold by projecting event representations into the pretrained latent space of RGB foundation models. Instead of task-specific training, we leverage low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to bridge the modality gap, effectively unlocking the geometric and semantic priors of frozen RGB backbones for asynchronous event streams. We demonstrate that REALM effectively maps events into the ViT-based foundation latent space. Our method performs downstream tasks, such as depth estimation and semantic segmentation, by simply transferring linear heads trained on the RGB teacher. Most significantly, REALM enables the direct, zero-shot application of complex, frozen image-trained decoders, such as MASt3R, to raw event data. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in wide-baseline feature matching, significantly outperforming specialized architectures. Code and models are available at https://papers.starslab.ca/realm/. --- ### REALM: An RGB- and Event-Aligned Latent Manifold for Cross-Modal Perception Authors: Vincenzo Polizzi, David B. Lindell, Jonathan Kelly Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00271v3 Event cameras provide several unique advantages over standard frame-based sensors, including high temporal resolution, low latency, and robustness to extreme lighting. However, existing learning-based approaches for event processing are typically confined to narrow, task-specific silos and lack the ability to generalize across modalities. We address this gap with REALM, a cross-modal framework that learns an RGB- and Event-Aligned Latent Manifold by projecting event representations into the pretrained latent space of RGB foundation models. Instead of task-specific training, we leverage low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to bridge the modality gap, effectively unlocking the geometric and semantic priors of frozen RGB backbones for asynchronous event streams. We demonstrate that REALM effectively maps events into the ViT-based foundation latent space. Our method performs downstream tasks, such as depth estimation and semantic segmentation, by simply transferring linear heads trained on the RGB teacher. Most significantly, REALM enables the direct, zero-shot application of complex, frozen image-trained decoders, such as MASt3R, to raw event data. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in wide-baseline feature matching, significantly outperforming specialized architectures. Code and models are available at https://papers.starslab.ca/realm/. --- ### Are You the A-hole? A Fair, Multi-Perspective Ethical Reasoning Framework Authors: Sheza Munir, Ahanaf Rodoshi, Sumin Lee, Feiran Chang, Xujie Si, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00270v1 Standard methods for aggregating natural language judgments, such as majority voting, often fail to produce logically consistent results when applied to high-conflict domains, treating differing opinions as noise. We propose a neuro-symbolic aggregation framework that formalizes conflict resolution through Weighted Maximum Satisfiability (MaxSAT). Our pipeline utilizes a language model to map unstructured natural language explanations into interpretable logical predicates and confidence weights. These components are then encoded as soft constraints within the Z3 solver, transforming the aggregation problem into an optimization task that seeks the maximum consistency across conflicting testimony. Using the Reddit r/AmItheAsshole forum as a case study in large-scale moral disagreement, our system generates logically coherent verdicts that diverge from popularity-based labels 62% of the time, corroborated by an 86% agreement rate with independent human evaluators. This study demonstrates the efficacy of coupling neural semantic extraction with formal solvers to enforce logical soundness and explainability in the aggregation of noisy human reasoning. --- ### How Language Models Process Out-of-Distribution Inputs: A Two-Pathway Framework Authors: Hamidreza Saghir Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00269v1 Recent white-box OOD detection methods for LLMs -- including CED, RAUQ, and WildGuard confidence scores -- appear effective, but we show they are structurally confounded by sequence length (|r| >= 0.61) and collapse to near-chance under length-matched evaluation. Even raw attention entropy (mean H(alpha) across heads and layers), a natural baseline we include for completeness, shows the same confound. The confound stems from attention's Theta(log T) dependence on input length. To identify genuine OOD signals after deconfounding, we propose a two-pathway framework: embeddings capture what text is about (effective for topic shifts), while the processing trajectory -- hidden-state evolution across layers -- captures how the model processes input. The relative power of each pathway varies along a vocabulary-transparency spectrum: embedding methods excel on vocabulary-distinctive OOD, while trajectory features detect covert-intent inputs that share vocabulary with normal text (0.721 avg AUROC; Jailbreak: 0.850). Three evidence lines support this framework: (1) a crossover between k-NN and trajectory scoring across 6 tasks, where each pathway wins on different OOD types; (2) a per-layer analysis showing that layer-0 k-NN signal is almost entirely a length artifact (Jailbreak: 0.759 raw -> 0.389 matched) -- processing constructs genuine OOD signal from near-chance embeddings; and (3) circuit attribution showing adversarial tasks engage attention circuits more than semantic tasks (p = 0.022; Jailbreak patching p < 0.001), with partial cross-model replication. Code release upon publication. --- ### Jailbroken Frontier Models Retain Their Capabilities Authors: Daniel Zhu, Zihan Wang, Xuchan Bao, Jerry Wei Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00267v2 As language model safeguards become more robust, attackers are pushed toward developing increasingly complex jailbreaks. Prior work has found that this complexity imposes a "jailbreak tax" that degrades the target model's task performance. We show that this tax scales inversely with model capability and that the most advanced jailbreaks effectively yield no reduction in model capabilities. Evaluating 28 jailbreaks on five benchmarks across Claude models ranging in capability from Haiku 4.5 to Opus 4.6, we find Haiku 4.5 loses an average of 33.1% on benchmark performance when jailbroken, while Opus 4.6 at max thinking effort loses only 7.7%. We also observe that across all models, reasoning-heavy tasks display considerably more degradation than knowledge-recall tasks. Finally, Boundary Point Jailbreaking, currently the strongest jailbreak against deployed classifiers, achieves near-perfect classifier evasion with near-zero degradation across safeguarded models. We recommend that safety cases for frontier models should not rely on a meaningful capability degradation from jailbreaks. --- ### Polaris: Coupled Orbital Polar Embeddings for Hierarchical Concept Learning Authors: Sahil Mishra, Srinitish Srinivasan, Sourish Dasgupta, Tanmoy Chakraborty Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00265v2 Real-world knowledge is often organized as hierarchies such as product taxonomies, medical ontologies, and label trees, yet learning hierarchical representations is challenging due to asymmetric structure and noisy semantics. We introduce Polaris, a polar hyperspherical embedding framework that separates semanticity from hierarchy using angular geometry and radius, enabling the learning of meaning and structure without interference. To map latent representation onto the sphere, we project it to the tangent space at the north pole, apply the exponential map, and learn unit-norm representations using spherical linear layers. Polaris then combines robust local constraints, global regularization that prevents geometric collapse, and uncertainty-aware asymmetric objectives that encourage directional containment. At inference time, Polaris uses structure-guided retrieval to efficiently narrow down candidate parents before final ranking. We evaluate Polaris on different settings of taxonomy expansion - spanning trees, multi-parent DAGs, and multimodal hierarchies, showing consistent improvements of up to ~19 points in top-K retrieval and up to ~60% reduction in mean rank over fourteen strong baselines. --- ### Pessimism-Free Offline Learning in General-Sum Games via KL Regularization Authors: Claire Chen, Yuheng Zhang Published: 2026-04-30 Categories: cs.LG, cs.GT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00264v2 Offline multi-agent reinforcement learning in general-sum settings is challenged by the distribution shift between logged datasets and target equilibrium policies. While standard methods rely on manual pessimistic penalties, we demonstrate that KL regularization suffices to stabilize learning and achieve equilibrium recovery. We propose General-sum Anchored Nash Equilibrium (GANE), which recovers regularized Nash equilibria at an accelerated statistical rate of $\widetilde{O}(1/n)$. For computational tractability, we develop General-sum Anchored Mirror Descent (GAMD), an iterative algorithm converging to a Coarse Correlated Equilibrium at the standard rate of $\widetilde{O}(1/\sqrt{n}+1/T)$. These results establish KL regularization as a standalone mechanism for pessimism-free offline learning that achieves equivalent or accelerated rates in multi-player general-sum games. ---