# Research Papers — 2026-04 · bundle page 111 of 233 > Full-text markdown of papers #5501–5550 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/page/111 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-04/page/110.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-04/page/112.md) ### Deepfake Detection Generalization with Diffusion Noise Authors: Hongyuan Qi, Wenjin Hou, Hehe Fan, Jun Xiao Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14570v1 Deepfake detectors face growing challenges in generalization as new image synthesis techniques emerge. In particular, deepfakes generated by diffusion models are highly photorealistic and often evade detectors trained on GAN-based forgeries. This paper addresses the generalization problem in deepfake detection by leveraging diffusion noise characteristics. We propose an Attention-guided Noise Learning (ANL) framework that integrates a pre-trained diffusion model into the deepfake detection pipeline to guide the learning of more robust features. Specifically, our method uses the diffusion model's denoising process to expose subtle artifacts: the detector is trained to predict the noise contained in an input image at a given diffusion step, forcing it to capture discrepancies between real and synthetic images, while an attention-guided mechanism derived from the predicted noise is introduced to encourage the model to focus on globally distributed discrepancies rather than local patterns. By harnessing the frozen diffusion model's learned distribution of natural images, the ANL method acts as a form of regularization, improving the detector's generalization to unseen forgery types. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ANL significantly outperforms existing methods on multiple benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy in detecting diffusion-generated deepfakes. Notably, the proposed framework boosts generalization performance (e.g., improving ACC/AP by a substantial margin on unseen models) without introducing additional overhead during inference. Our results highlight that diffusion noise provides a powerful signal for generalizable deepfake detection. --- ### Learning Adaptive Reasoning Paths for Efficient Visual Reasoning Authors: Yixu Huang, Tinghui Zhu, Muhao Chen Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14568v1 Visual reasoning models (VRMs) have recently shown strong cross-modal reasoning capabilities by integrating visual perception with language reasoning. However, they often suffer from overthinking, producing unnecessarily long reasoning chains for any tasks. We attribute this issue to \textbf{Reasoning Path Redundancy} in visual reasoning: many visual questions do not require the full reasoning process. To address this, we propose \textbf{AVR}, an adaptive visual reasoning framework that decomposes visual reasoning into three cognitive functions: visual perception, logical reasoning, and answer application. It further enables models to dynamically choose among three response formats: Full Format, Perception-Only Format, and Direct Answer. AVR is trained with FS-GRPO, an adaptation of Group Relative Policy Optimization that encourages the model to select the most efficient reasoning format while preserving correctness. Experiments on multiple vision-language benchmarks show that AVR reduces token usage by 50--90\% while maintaining overall accuracy, especially in perception-intensive tasks. These results demonstrate that adaptive visual reasoning can effectively mitigate overthinking in VRMs. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/RunRiotComeOn/AVR. --- ### Physics-Informed Machine Learning for Pouch Cell Temperature Estimation Authors: Zheng Liu Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.LG, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14566v1 Accurate temperature estimation of pouch cells with indirect liquid cooling is essential for optimizing battery thermal management systems for transportation electrification. However, it is challenging due to the computational expense of finite element simulations and the limitations of data-driven models. This paper presents a physics-informed machine learning (PIML) framework for the efficient and reliable estimation of steady-state temperature profiles. The PIML approach integrates the governing heat transfer equations directly into the neural network's loss function, enabling high-fidelity predictions with significantly faster convergence than purely data-driven methods. The framework is evaluated on a dataset of varying cooling channel geometries. Results demonstrate that the PIML model converges more rapidly and achieves markedly higher accuracy, with a 49.1% reduction in mean squared error over the data-driven model. Validation against independent test cases further confirms its superior performance, particularly in regions away from the cooling channels. These findings underscore the potential of PIML for surrogate modeling and design optimization in battery systems. --- ### MARS$^2$: Scaling Multi-Agent Tree Search via Reinforcement Learning for Code Generation Authors: Pengfei Li, Shijie Wang, Fangyuan Li, Yikun Fu, Kaifeng Liu, Kaiyan Zhang, Dazhi Zhang, Yuqiang Li, Biqing Qi, Bowen Zhou Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14564v1 Reinforcement learning (RL) paradigms have demonstrated strong performance on reasoning-intensive tasks such as code generation. However, limited trajectory diversity often leads to diminishing returns, which constrains the achievable performance ceiling. Search-enhanced RL alleviates this issue by introducing structured exploration, which remains constrained by the single-agent policy priors. Meanwhile, leveraging multiple interacting policies can acquire more diverse exploratory signals, but existing approaches are typically decoupled from structured search. We propose \textbf{MARS$^2$} (Multi-Agent Reinforced Tree-Search Scaling), a unified RL framework in which multiple independently-optimized agents collaborate within a shared tree-structured search environment. MARS$^2$ models the search tree as a learnable multi-agent interaction environment, enabling heterogeneous agents to collaboratively generate and refine candidate solutions within a shared search topology. To support effective learning, we introduce a path-level group advantage formulation based on tree-consistent reward shaping, which facilitates effective credit assignment across complex search trajectories. Experiments on code generation benchmarks show that MARS$^2$ consistently improves performance across diverse model combinations and training settings, demonstrating the effectiveness of coupling multi-agent collaboration with tree search for enhancing reinforcement learning. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/TsinghuaC3I/MARTI. --- ### Revisiting Token Compression for Accelerating ViT-based Sparse Multi-View 3D Object Detectors Authors: Mingqian Ji, Shanshan Zhang, Jian Yang Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14563v1 Vision Transformer (ViT)-based sparse multi-view 3D object detectors have achieved remarkable accuracy but still suffer from high inference latency due to heavy token processing. To accelerate these models, token compression has been widely explored. However, our revisit of existing strategies, such as token pruning, merging, and patch size enlargement, reveals that they often discard informative background cues, disrupt contextual consistency, and lose fine-grained semantics, negatively affecting 3D detection. To overcome these limitations, we propose SEPatch3D, a novel framework that dynamically adjusts patch sizes while preserving critical semantic information within coarse patches. Specifically, we design Spatiotemporal-aware Patch Size Selection (SPSS) that assigns small patches to scenes containing nearby objects to preserve fine details and large patches to background-dominated scenes to reduce computation cost. To further mitigate potential detail loss, Informative Patch Selection (IPS) selects the informative patches for feature refinement, and Cross-Granularity Feature Enhancement (CGFE) injects fine-grained details into selected coarse patches, enriching semantic features. Experiments on the nuScenes and Argoverse 2 validation sets show that SEPatch3D achieves up to \textbf{57\%} faster inference than the StreamPETR baseline and \textbf{20\%} higher efficiency than the state-of-the-art ToC3D-faster, while preserving comparable detection accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/Mingqj/SEPatch3D. --- ### Material-agnostic temperature field prediction for metal additive manufacturing via a parametric PINN framework Authors: Hyeonsu Lee, Jihoon Jeong Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.LG, physics.app-ph, physics.comp-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14562v2 Accurate temperature field prediction in metal additive manufacturing (AM) is essential for understanding the process-structure-performance relationship. While prior studies have explored generalization to unseen process conditions, they often require extensive datasets, costly retraining, or pre-training. Generalization across different materials also remains relatively unexplored due to the challenges posed by distinct material-dependent thermal behaviors. This paper introduces a parametric physics-informed neural network (PINN) framework for generalization across unseen materials without labeled data, retraining, or pre-training. The framework adopts a decoupled parametric PINN architecture that separately encodes material properties and spatiotemporal coordinates, fusing them through conditional modulation to better align with the multiplicative role of material parameters in the governing equation and boundary conditions. Physics-guided output scaling derived from Rosenthal's analytical solution and a hybrid optimization strategy are further incorporated to enhance physical consistency, training stability, and convergence. Experiments with numerical simulations across diverse metal alloys, including both in-distribution and out-of-distribution cases, demonstrate effective generalizability along with superior training efficiency. Specifically, the proposed framework achieved up to a 64.2% reduction in relative L2 error compared to the non-parametric baseline while surpassing its performance within only 4.4% of the baseline training epochs. Ablation studies clarify each component's contribution and scrutinize the severe training instability prevalent in conventional parametric PINNs. Overall, the proposed framework provides an efficient and scalable material-agnostic solution for temperature field modeling, contributing to more flexible and practical deployment in metal AM. --- ### DVFace: Spatio-Temporal Dual-Prior Diffusion for Video Face Restoration Authors: Zheng Chen, Bowen Chai, Rongjun Gao, Mingtao Nie, Xi Li, Bingnan Duan, Jianping Fang, Xiaohong Liu, Linghe Kong, Yulun Zhang Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14560v1 Video face restoration aims to enhance degraded face videos into high-quality results with realistic facial details, stable identity, and temporal coherence. Recent diffusion-based methods have brought strong generative priors to restoration and enabled more realistic detail synthesis. However, existing approaches for face videos still rely heavily on generic diffusion priors and multi-step sampling, which limit both facial adaptation and inference efficiency. These limitations motivate the use of one-step diffusion for video face restoration, yet achieving faithful facial recovery alongside temporally stable outputs remains challenging. In this paper, we propose, DVFace, a one-step diffusion framework for real-world video face restoration. Specifically, we introduce a spatio-temporal dual-codebook design to extract complementary spatial and temporal facial priors from degraded videos. We further propose an asymmetric spatio-temporal fusion module to inject these priors into the diffusion backbone according to their distinct roles. Evaluation on various benchmarks shows that DVFace delivers superior restoration quality, temporal consistency, and identity preservation compared to recent methods. Code: https://github.com/zhengchen1999/DVFace. --- ### The Fourth Challenge on Image Super-Resolution ($\times$4) at NTIRE 2026: Benchmark Results and Method Overview Authors: Zheng Chen, Kai Liu, Jingkai Wang, Xianglong Yan, Jianze Li, Ziqing Zhang, Jue Gong, Jiatong Li, Lei Sun, Xiaoyang Liu, Radu Timofte, Yulun Zhang et al. Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14558v1 This paper presents the NTIRE 2026 image super-resolution ($\times$4) challenge, one of the associated competitions of the NTIRE 2026 Workshop at CVPR 2026. The challenge aims to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) inputs generated through bicubic downsampling with a $\times$4 scaling factor. The objective is to develop effective super-resolution solutions and analyze recent advances in the field. To reflect the evolving objectives of image super-resolution, the challenge includes two tracks: (1) a restoration track, which emphasizes pixel-wise fidelity and ranks submissions based on PSNR; and (2) a perceptual track, which focuses on visual realism and evaluates results using a perceptual score. A total of 194 participants registered for the challenge, with 31 teams submitting valid entries. This report summarizes the challenge design, datasets, evaluation protocol, main results, and methods of participating teams. The challenge provides a unified benchmark and offers insights into current progress and future directions in image super-resolution. --- ### Controllable Video Object Insertion via Multi-View Priors Authors: Qi Xia, Peishan Cong, Yichen Yao, Ziyi Wang, Yaoqin Ye, Yuexin Ma Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14556v2 Video object insertion places a user-specified object in an existing dynamic scene. Existing methods typically condition generation on text or a single reference image. Consequently, object appearance is underconstrained under viewpoint changes, often leading to identity drift, incorrect foreground-background layering, boundary artifacts, and temporal flickering. In this paper, we propose a video object insertion framework that incorporates multi-view object priors to address these limitations. The framework lifts a 2D reference image into a multi-view representation and uses view-consistent conditioning to provide stable identity guidance and view-adaptive appearance cues. A quality-aware weighting mechanism reduces the influence of noisy or imperfect reconstructed views. We further introduce an Integration-Aware Consistency Module that promotes plausible occlusion, clean boundaries, and temporal continuity. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework improves visual quality, controllability, identity consistency, and foreground-background integration for video object insertion compared to the baseline methods. Project page: https://polarisxq.github.io/MOVI/. --- ### Controllable Video Object Insertion via Multiview Priors Authors: Xia Qi, Peishan Cong, Yichen Yao, Ziyi Wang, Yaoqin Ye, Yuexin Ma Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14556v1 Video object insertion is a critical task for dynamically inserting new objects into existing environments. Previous video generation methods focus primarily on synthesizing entire scenes while struggling with ensuring consistent object appearance, spatial alignment, and temporal coherence when inserting objects into existing videos. In this paper, we propose a novel solution for Video Object Insertion, which integrates multi-view object priors to address the common challenges of appearance inconsistency and occlusion handling in dynamic environments. By lifting 2D reference images into multi-view representations and leveraging a dual-path view-consistent conditioning mechanism, our framework ensures stable identity guidance and robust integration across diverse viewpoints. A quality-aware weighting mechanism is also employed to adaptively handle noisy or imperfect inputs. Additionally, we introduce an Integration-Aware Consistency Module that guarantees spatial realism, effectively resolving occlusion and boundary artifacts while maintaining temporal continuity across frames. Experimental results show that our solution significantly improves the quality of video object insertion, providing stable and realistic integration. --- ### DEEP-GAP: Deep-learning Evaluation of Execution Parallelism in GPU Architectural Performance Authors: Kathiravan Palaniappan Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.PF, cs.AR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14552v2 Modern datacenters increasingly rely on low-power, single-slot inference accelerators to balance performance, energy efficiency, and rack density constraints. The NVIDIA T4 GPU has become widely deployed due to strong performance per watt and mature software support. Its successor, the NVIDIA L4 GPU, introduces improvements in Tensor Core throughput, cache capacity, memory bandwidth, and parallel execution capability. However, limited empirical evidence quantifies the practical inference performance gap between these two generations under controlled and reproducible conditions. This work introduces DEEP-GAP, a systematic evaluation extending the GDEV-AI methodology to GPU inference. Using identical configurations and workloads, we evaluate ResNet18, ResNet50, and ResNet101 across FP32, FP16, and INT8 precision modes using PyTorch and TensorRT. Results show that reduced precision significantly improves performance, with INT8 achieving up to 58x throughput improvement over CPU baselines. L4 achieves up to 4.4x higher throughput than T4 while reaching peak efficiency at smaller batch sizes between 16 and 32, improving latency-throughput tradeoffs for latency-sensitive workloads. T4 remains competitive for large batch workloads where cost or power efficiency is important. DEEP-GAP provides practical guidance for selecting precision modes, batch sizes, and GPU architectures for modern inference deployments. --- ### VeriGraphi: A Multi-Agent Framework of Hierarchical RTL Generation for Large Hardware Designs Authors: Sazzadul Islam, Tasnim Tabassum, Hao Zheng Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.AR, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.MA, cs.PL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14550v2 Generating synthesizable Verilog for large, hierarchical hardware designs remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs), which struggle to replicate the structured reasoning that human experts employ when translating complex specifications into RTL. When tasked with producing hierarchical Verilog, LLMs frequently lose context across modules, hallucinate interfaces, fabricate inter-module wiring, and fail to maintain structural coherence - failures that intensify as design complexity grows and specifications involve informal prose, figures, and tables that resist direct operationalization. To address these challenges, we present VeriGraphi, a framework that introduces a spec-anchored Knowledge Graph as the architectural substrate driving the RTL generation pipeline. VeriGraphi constructs a HDA, a structured knowledge graph that explicitly encodes module hierarchy, port-level interfaces, wiring semantics, and inter-module dependencies as first-class graph entities and relations. Built through iterative multi-agent analysis of the specification, this Knowledge Graph provides a deterministic, machine-checkable structural scaffold before code generation. Guided by the KG, a progressive coding module incrementally generates pseudo-code and synthesizable RTL while enforcing interface consistency and dependency correctness at each submodule stage. We evaluate VeriGraphi on a benchmark of three representative specification documents from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and their corresponding implementations, and we present a RV32I processor as a detailed case study to illustrate the full pipeline. The results demonstrate that VeriGraphi enables reliable hierarchical RTL generation with minimal human intervention for RISC-V, marking a significant milestone for LLM-generated hardware design while maintaining strong functional correctness. --- ### VoxSafeBench: Not Just What Is Said, but Who, How, and Where Authors: Yuxiang Wang, Hongyu Liu, Yijiang Xu, Qinke Ni, Li Wang, Wan Lin, Kunyu Feng, Dekun Chen, Xu Tan, Lei Wang, Jie Shi, Zhizheng Wu Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.SD, cs.LG, eess.AS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14548v2 As speech language models (SLMs) transition from personal devices into shared, multi-user environments, their responses must account for far more than the words alone. Who is speaking, how they sound, and where the conversation takes place can each turn an otherwise benign request into one that is unsafe, unfair, or privacy-violating. Existing benchmarks, however, largely focus on basic audio comprehension, study individual risks in isolation, or conflate content that is inherently harmful with content that only becomes problematic due to its acoustic context. We introduce VoxSafeBench, among the first benchmarks to jointly evaluate social alignment in SLMs across three dimensions: safety, fairness, and privacy. VoxSafeBench adopts a Two-Tier design: Tier1 evaluates content-centric risks using matched text and audio inputs, while Tier2 targets audio-conditioned risks in which the transcript is benign but the appropriate response hinges on the speaker, paralinguistic cues, or the surrounding environment. To validate Tier2, we include intermediate perception probes and confirm that frontier SLMs can successfully detect these acoustic cues yet still fail to act on them appropriately. Across 22 tasks with bilingual coverage, we find that safeguards appearing robust on text often degrade in speech: safety awareness drops for speaker- and scene-conditioned risks, fairness erodes when demographic differences are conveyed vocally, and privacy protections falter when contextual cues arrive acoustically. Together, these results expose a pervasive speech grounding gap: current SLMs frequently recognize the relevant social norm in text but fail to apply it when the decisive cue must be grounded in speech. Code and data are publicly available at: https://amphionteam.github.io/VoxSafeBench_demopage/ --- ### Predicting Post-Traumatic Epilepsy from Clinical Records using Large Language Model Embeddings Authors: Wenhui Cui, Nicholas Swingle, Anand A. Joshi, Dileep Nair, Richard M. Leahy Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14547v1 Objective: Post-traumatic epilepsy (PTE) is a debilitating neurological disorder that develops after traumatic brain injury (TBI). Early prediction of PTE remains challenging due to heterogeneous clinical data, limited positive cases, and reliance on resource-intensive neuroimaging data. We investigate whether routinely collected acute clinical records alone can support early PTE prediction using language model-based approaches. Methods: Using a curated subset of the TRACK-TBI cohort, we developed an automated PTE prediction framework that implements pretrained large language models (LLMs) as fixed feature extractors to encode clinical records. Tabular features, LLM-generated embeddings, and hybrid feature representations were evaluated using gradient-boosted tree classifiers under stratified cross-validation. Results: LLM embeddings achieved performance improvements by capturing contextual clinical information compared to using tabular features alone. The best performance was achieved by a modality-aware feature fusion strategy combining tabular features and LLM embeddings, achieving an AUC-ROC of 0.892 and AUPRC of 0.798. Acute post-traumatic seizures, injury severity, neurosurgical intervention, and ICU stay are key contributors to the predictive performance. Significance: These findings demonstrate that routine acute clinical records contain information suitable for early PTE risk prediction using LLM embeddings in conjunction with gradient-boosted tree classifiers. This approach represents a promising complement to imaging-based prediction. --- ### Giving Faces Their Feelings Back: Explicit Emotion Control for Feedforward Single-Image 3D Head Avatars Authors: Yicheng Gong, Jiawei Zhang, Liqiang Liu, Yanwen Wang, Lei Chu, Jiahao Li, Hao Pan, Hao Zhu, Yan Lu Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14541v1 We present a framework for explicit emotion control in feed-forward, single-image 3D head avatar reconstruction. Unlike existing pipelines where emotion is implicitly entangled with geometry or appearance, we treat emotion as a first-class control signal that can be manipulated independently and consistently across identities. Our method injects emotion into existing feed-forward architectures via a dual-path modulation mechanism without modifying their core design. Geometry modulation performs emotion-conditioned normalization in the original parametric space, disentangling emotional state from speech-driven articulation, while appearance modulation captures identity-aware, emotion-dependent visual cues beyond geometry. To enable learning under this setting, we construct a time-synchronized, emotion-consistent multi-identity dataset by transferring aligned emotional dynamics across identities. Integrated into multiple state-of-the-art backbones, our framework preserves reconstruction and reenactment fidelity while enabling controllable emotion transfer, disentangled manipulation, and smooth emotion interpolation, advancing expressive and scalable 3D head avatars. --- ### WILD-SAM: Phase-Aware Expert Adaptation of SAM for Landslide Detection in Wrapped InSAR Interferograms Authors: Yucheng Pan, Heping Li, Zhangle Liu, Sajid Hussain, Bin Pan Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14540v1 Detecting slow-moving landslides directly from wrapped Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) interferograms is crucial for efficient geohazard monitoring, yet it remains fundamentally challenged by severe phase ambiguity and complex coherence noise. While the Segment Anything Model (SAM) offers a powerful foundation for segmentation, its direct transfer to wrapped phase data is hindered by a profound spectral domain shift, which suppresses the high-frequency fringes essential for boundary delineation. To bridge this gap, we propose WILD-SAM, a novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework specifically designed to adapt SAM for high-precision landslide detection on wrapped interferograms. Specifically, the architecture integrates a Phase-Aware Mixture-of-Experts (PA-MoE) Adapter into the frozen encoder to align spectral distributions and introduces a Wavelet-Guided Subband Enhancement (WGSE) strategy to generate frequency-aware dense prompts. The PA-MoE Adapter exploits a dynamic routing mechanism across heterogeneous convolutional experts to adaptively aggregate multi-scale spectral-textural priors, effectively aligning the distribution discrepancy between natural images and interferometric phase data. Meanwhile, the WGSE strategy leverages discrete wavelet transforms to explicitly disentangle high-frequency subbands and refine directional phase textures, injecting these structural cues as dense prompts to ensure topological integrity along sharp landslide boundaries. Extensive experiments on the ISSLIDE and ISSLIDE+ benchmarks demonstrate that WILD-SAM achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing methods in both target completeness and contour fidelity. --- ### An unsupervised decision-support framework for multivariate biomarker analysis in athlete monitoring Authors: Fernando Barcelos Rosito, Sebastião De Jesus Menezes, Simone Ferreira Sturza, Adriana Seixas, Muriel Figueredo Franco Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.LG, stat.AP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14534v1 Purpose. Athlete monitoring is constrained by small cohorts, heterogeneous biomarker scales, limited feasibility of repeated sampling, and the lack of reliable injury ground truth. These limitations reduce the interpretability and utility of traditional univariate and binary risk models. This study addresses these challenges by proposing an unsupervised multivariate framework to identify latent physiological states in athletes using real data. Methods. We propose a modular computational framework that operates in the joint biomarker space, integrating preprocessing, clinical safety screening, unsupervised clustering, and centroid-based physiological interpretation. Profiles are learned exclusively from amateur soccer players during a competitive microcycle. Synthetic data augmentation evaluates robustness and scalability. Ward hierarchical clustering supports monitoring and etiological differentiation, while Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) enable structural stability analysis in high-dimensional settings. Results. The framework identifies coherent profiles that distinguish mechanical damage from metabolic stress while preserving homeostatic states. Synthetic data augmentation demonstrates feasibility and detection of latent silent risk phenotypes typically missed by univariate monitoring. Structural analyses indicate robustness under augmentation and higher-dimensional settings. Conclusion. The framework enables interpretable identification of latent physiological states from multivariate biomarker data without injury labels. By distinguishing mechanisms and revealing silent risk patterns not captured by conventional monitoring, it provides actionable insights for individualized athlete monitoring and decision making. --- ### CSRA: Controlled Spectral Residual Augmentation for Robust Sepsis Prediction Authors: Honglin Guo, Rihao Chang, He Jiao, Weizhi Nie, Zhongheng Zhang, Yuehao Shen Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14532v1 Accurate prediction of future risk and disease progression in sepsis is clinically important for early warning and timely intervention in intensive care. However, short-window sepsis prediction remains challenging, because shorter observation windows provide limited historical evidence, whereas longer prediction horizons reduce the number of patient trajectories with valid future supervision. To address this problem, we propose CSRA, a Controlled Spectral Residual Augmentation framework for short-window multi-system ICU time series. CSRA first groups variables by clinical systems and extracts system-level and global representations. It then performs input-adaptive residual perturbation in the spectral domain to generate structured and clinically plausible trajectory variations. To improve augmentation stability and controllability, CSRA is trained end-to-end with the downstream predictor under a unified objective, together with anchor consistency loss and controller regularization. Experiments on a MIMIC-IV sepsis cohort across multiple downstream models show that CSRA is consistently competitive and often superior, reducing regression error by 10.2\% in MSE and 3.7\% in MAE over the non-augmentation baseline, while also yielding consistent gains on classification. CSRA further maintains more favorable performance under shorter observation windows, longer prediction horizons, and smaller training data scales, while also remaining effective on an external clinical dataset~(ZiGongICUinfection), indicating stronger robustness and generalizability in clinically constrained settings. --- ### TRACER: Trace-Based Adaptive Cost-Efficient Routing for LLM Classification Authors: Adam Rida Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14531v1 Every call to an LLM classification endpoint produces a labeled input-output pair already retained in production logs. These pairs constitute a free, growing training set: a lightweight surrogate trained on them can absorb a significant portion of future traffic at near-zero marginal inference cost. The open questions are when the surrogate is reliable enough to deploy, what it handles versus defers, and how that boundary evolves as data accumulates. We introduce TRACER (Trace-based Adaptive Cost-Efficient Routing), an open-source system that trains ML surrogates on an LLM's own production traces and governs deployment through a parity gate: the surrogate is activated only when its agreement with the LLM exceeds a user-specified threshold α. To make the routing boundary transparent, TRACER generates interpretability artifacts describing which input regions the surrogate handles, where it plateaus, and why it defers. On a 77-class intent benchmark with a Sonnet 4.6 teacher, TRACER achieves 83-100% surrogate coverage depending on the quality target α; on a 150-class benchmark, the surrogate fully replaces the teacher. On a natural language inference task, the parity gate correctly refuses deployment because the embedding representation cannot support reliable separation. The system is available as open-source software. --- ### Dissecting Failure Dynamics in Large Language Model Reasoning Authors: Wei Zhu, Jian Zhang, Lixing Yu, Kun Yue, Zhiwen Tang Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14528v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance through extended inference-time deliberation, yet how their reasoning failures arise remains poorly understood. By analyzing model-generated reasoning trajectories, we find that errors are not uniformly distributed but often originate from a small number of early transition points, after which reasoning remains locally coherent but globally incorrect. These transitions coincide with localized spikes in token-level entropy, and alternative continuations from the same intermediate state can still lead to correct solutions. Based on these observations, we introduce GUARD, a targeted inference-time framework that probes and redirects critical transitions using uncertainty signals. Empirical evaluations across multiple benchmarks confirm that interventions guided by these failure dynamics lead to more reliable reasoning outcomes. Our findings highlight the importance of understanding when and how reasoning first deviates, complementing existing approaches that focus on scaling inference-time computation. --- ### Design and Validation of a Low-Cost Smartphone Based Fluorescence Detection Platform Compared with Conventional Microplate Readers Authors: Zhendong Cao, Katrina G. Salvante, Ash Parameswaran, Pablo A. Nepomnaschy, Hongji Dai Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.CV, eess.IV, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14527v1 A low cost fluorescence-based optical system is developed for detecting the presence of certain microorganisms and molecules within a diluted sample. A specifically designed device setup compatible with conventional 96 well plates is chosen to create an ideal environment in which a smart phone camera can be used as the optical detector. In comparison with conventional microplate reading machines such as Perkin Elmer Victor Machine, the device presented in this paper is not equipped with expensive elements such as exciter filer, barrier filter and photomultiplier; instead, a phone camera is all needed to detect fluorescence within the sample. The strategy being involved is to determine the relationship between the image color of the sample in RGB color space and the molar concentration of the fluorescence specimen in that sample. This manuscript is a preprint version of work related to a publication in IEEE. The final version may differ from this manuscript. --- ### FreqTrack: Frequency Learning based Vision Transformer for RGB-Event Object Tracking Authors: Jinlin You, Muyu Li, Xudong Zhao Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14526v1 Existing single-modal RGB trackers often face performance bottlenecks in complex dynamic scenes, while the introduction of event sensors offers new potential for enhancing tracking capabilities. However, most current RGB-event fusion methods, primarily designed in the spatial domain using convolutional, Transformer, or Mamba architectures, fail to fully exploit the unique temporal response and high-frequency characteristics of event data. To address this, we1 propose FreqTrack, a frequency-aware RGBE tracking framework that establishes complementary inter-modal correlations through frequency-domain transformations for more robust feature fusion. We design a Spectral Enhancement Transformer (SET) layer that incorporates multi-head dynamic Fourier filtering to adaptively enhance and select frequency-domain features. Additionally, we develop a Wavelet Edge Refinement (WER) module, which leverages learnable wavelet transforms to explicitly extract multi-scale edge structures from event data, effectively improving modeling capability in high-speed and low-light scenarios. Extensive experiments on the COESOT and FE108 datasets demonstrate that FreqTrack achieves highly competitive performance, particularly attaining leading precision of 76.6\% on the COESOT benchmark, validating the effectiveness of frequency-domain modeling for RGBE tracking. --- ### Quantifying Cross-Query Contradictions in Multi-Query LLM Reasoning Authors: Rohit Kumar Salla, Ramya Manasa Amancherla, Manoj Saravanan Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14525v1 Large language models frequently produce mutually inconsistent answers when reasoning over multiple related queries. We study case-file logical consistency: maintaining a globally satisfiable belief state across interdependent queries. We introduce a benchmark of 390 multi-query reasoning instances with entailment/contradiction/unknown labels and propose set-level metrics including Case Satisfiability Rate, Contradiction Density and Revision Cost. Our solver-augmented approach extracts commitments, verifies global satisfiability and performs counterexample-guided repair. Across four reasoning domains, our method substantially reduces cross-query contradictions (SetCons: 0.56 to 0.94) while preserving per-query accuracy, demonstrating that global coherence is critical for robust multi-query reasoning. --- ### Chain of Modality: From Static Fusion to Dynamic Orchestration in Omni-MLLMs Authors: Ziyang Luo, Nian Liu, Junwei Han Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14520v2 Omni-modal Large Language Models (Omni-MLLMs) are designed to reason over diverse sensory streams within a unified model. However, we find that multimodal reasoning is not solely determined by sensory evidence, but also by how modality information is organized. Through systematic analysis across diverse reasoning scenarios, we show that different modality organizations exhibit distinct advantages and limitations, and no single topology is universally optimal. Rather than proposing a general-purpose improvement to Omni-MLLM accuracy, we ask a narrower question: can these topology-induced failures be systematically identified and corrected? Motivated by this, we propose Chain of Modality (CoM), a framework that dynamically reorganizes multimodal topology during inference and learns adaptive organization strategies. Experiments across five benchmarks, diverse architectures, and model scales show that CoM reliably recovers topology-sensitive failures, through both training-free planning and lightweight Planner-SFT, while preserving performance on the full benchmark. --- ### Chain of Modality: From Static Fusion to Dynamic Orchestration in Omni-MLLMs Authors: Ziyang Luo, Nian Liu, Junwei Han Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14520v1 Omni-modal Large Language Models (Omni-MLLMs) promise a unified integration of diverse sensory streams. However, recent evaluations reveal a critical performance paradox: unimodal baselines frequently outperform joint multimodal inference. We trace this perceptual fragility to the static fusion topologies universally employed by current models, identifying two structural pathologies: positional bias in sequential inputs and alignment traps in interleaved formats, which systematically distort attention regardless of task semantics. To resolve this functional rigidity, we propose Chain of Modality (CoM), an agentic framework that transitions multimodal fusion from passive concatenation to dynamic orchestration. CoM adaptively orchestrates input topologies, switching among parallel, sequential, and interleaved pathways to neutralize structural biases. Furthermore, CoM bifurcates cognitive execution into two task-aligned pathways: a streamlined ``Direct-Decide'' path for direct perception and a structured ``Reason-Decide'' path for analytical auditing. Operating in either a training-free or a data-efficient SFT setting, CoM achieves robust and consistent generalization across diverse benchmarks. --- ### CI-CBM: Class-Incremental Concept Bottleneck Model for Interpretable Continual Learning Authors: Amirhosein Javadi, Tuomas Oikarinen, Tara Javidi, Tsui-Wei Weng Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14519v1 Catastrophic forgetting remains a fundamental challenge in continual learning, in which models often forget previous knowledge when fine-tuned on a new task. This issue is especially pronounced in class incremental learning (CIL), which is the most challenging setting in continual learning. Existing methods to address catastrophic forgetting often sacrifice either model interpretability or accuracy. To address this challenge, we introduce ClassIncremental Concept Bottleneck Model (CI-CBM), which leverage effective techniques, including concept regularization and pseudo-concept generation to maintain interpretable decision processes throughout incremental learning phases. Through extensive evaluation on seven datasets, CI-CBM achieves comparable performance to black-box models and outperforms previous interpretable approaches in CIL, with an average 36% accuracy gain. CICBM provides interpretable decisions on individual inputs and understandable global decision rules, as shown in our experiments, thereby demonstrating that human understandable concepts can be maintained during incremental learning without compromising model performance. Our approach is effective in both pretrained and non-pretrained scenarios; in the latter, the backbone is trained from scratch during the first learning phase. Code is publicly available at github.com/importAmir/CI-CBM. --- ### Mind DeepResearch Technical Report Authors: MindDR Team, Li Auto Inc Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14518v2 We present Mind DeepResearch (MindDR), an efficient multi-agent deep research framework that achieves leading performance with only ~30B-parameter models through a meticulously designed data synthesis and multi-stage training pipeline. The core innovation of MindDR lies in a collaborative three-agent architecture (Planning Agent, DeepSearch Agent, and Report Agent) and a four-stage agent-specialized training pipeline comprising SFT cold-start, Search-RL, Report-RL and preference alignment. With this regime, MindDR demonstrates competitive performance even with ~30B-scale models. Specifically, MindDR achieves 45.7% on BrowseComp-ZH, 42.8% on BrowseComp, 46.5% on WideSearch, 75.0% on xbench-DS, and 52.5 on DeepResearch Bench, outperforming comparable-scale open-source agent systems and rivaling larger-scale models. MindDR has been deployed as an online product in Li Auto. Furthermore, we introduce MindDR Bench, a curated benchmark of 500 real-world Chinese queries from our internal product user interactions, evaluated through a comprehensive multi-dimensional rubric system rather than relying on a single RACE metric. On MindDR Bench, MindDR achieves a state-of-the-art score of 51.8. --- ### Perspective on Bias in Biomedical AI: Preventing Downstream Healthcare Disparities Authors: Michal Rosen-Zvi, Yoav Kan-Tor, Michael Danziger, Agata Ferretti, Javier Aula-Blasco, Julia Falcao, Ron Shamir, Mira Marcus-Kalish, Mordechai Muszkat Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14514v2 Healthcare disparities persist across socioeconomic boundaries, often attributed to unequal access to screening, diagnostics, and therapeutics. However, this perspective highlights that critical biases can emerge much earlier, during data collection and research prioritization, long before clinical implementation, particularly in studies focused on molecular and omics data. A vast number of studies focus on collecting omics data, but the demographic information associated with these datasets is often not reported, and when it is reported, it reveals substantial biases. An automated analysis of 4514 PubMed-indexed omics publications from 2015 to 2024, examining reporting across multiple demographic dimensions, reveals limited reporting overall; for example, only 2.7% of studies report ancestry or ethnicity information and geographic origin reporting is limited to 2.5%. Analysis of large-scale datasets commonly used for model training, such as CellxGene and GEO, reveals substantial population bias where European-ancestry data dominates. As biomedical foundation models become central to biomedical discovery with a paradigm in which base models are pretrained on large datasets and reusing them repeatedly for many different downstream tasks, they risk perpetuating or amplifying these early-stage biases, leading to cascading inequities that regulatory interventions cannot fully reverse. We propose a community-wide focus on three foundational principles: Provenance, Openness, and Reliability through Evaluation Transparency. Together, these principles can help make biases and limitations more visible to model developers and users, supporting more informed model development, evaluation, and deployment decisions in biomedical AI. --- ### PeerPrism: Peer Evaluation Expertise vs Review-writing AI Authors: Soroush Sadeghian, Alireza Daqiq, Radin Cheraghi, Sajad Ebrahimi, Negar Arabzadeh, Ebrahim Bagheri Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14513v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in scientific peer review, assisting with drafting, rewriting, expansion, and refinement. However, existing peer-review LLM detection methods largely treat authorship as a binary problem-human vs. AI-without accounting for the hybrid nature of modern review workflows. In practice, evaluative ideas and surface realization may originate from different sources, creating a spectrum of human-AI collaboration. In this work, we introduce PeerPrism, a large-scale benchmark of 20,690 peer reviews explicitly designed to disentangle idea provenance from text provenance. We construct controlled generation regimes spanning fully human, fully synthetic, and multiple hybrid transformations. This design enables systematic evaluation of whether detectors identify the origin of the surface text or the origin of the evaluative reasoning. We benchmark state-of-the-art LLM text detection methods on PeerPrism. While several methods achieve high accuracy on the standard binary task (human vs. fully synthetic), their predictions diverge sharply under hybrid regimes. In particular, when ideas originate from humans but the surface text is AI-generated, detectors frequently disagree and produce contradictory classifications. Accompanied by stylometric and semantic analyses, our results show that current detection methods conflate surface realization with intellectual contribution. Overall, we demonstrate that LLM detection in peer review cannot be reduced to a binary attribution problem. Instead, authorship must be modeled as a multidimensional construct spanning semantic reasoning and stylistic realization. PeerPrism is the first benchmark evaluating human-AI collaboration in these settings. We release all code, data, prompts, and evaluation scripts to facilitate reproducible research at https://github.com/Reviewerly-Inc/PeerPrism. --- ### CBCL: Safe Self-Extending Agent Communication Authors: Hugo O'Connor Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.FL, cs.LO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14512v1 Agent communication languages (ACLs) enable heterogeneous agents to share knowledge and coordinate across diverse domains. This diversity demands extensibility, but expressive extension mechanisms can push the input language beyond the complexity classes where full validation is tractable. We present CBCL (Common Business Communication Language), an agent communication language that constrains all messages, including runtime language extensions, to the deterministic context-free language (DCFL) class. CBCL allows agents to define, transmit, and adopt domain-specific "dialect" extensions as first-class messages; three safety invariants (R1--R3), machine-checked in Lean 4 and enforced in a Rust reference implementation, prevent unbounded expansion, applying declared resource limits, and preserving core vocabulary. We formalize the language and its safety properties in Lean 4, implement a reference parser and dialect engine in Rust with property-based and differential tests, and extract a verified parser binary. Our results demonstrate that homoiconic protocol design, where extension definitions share the same representation as ordinary messages, can be made provably safe. As autonomous agents increasingly extend their own communication capabilities, formally bounding what they can express to each other is a precondition for oversight. --- ### NewsTorch: A PyTorch-based Toolkit for Learner-oriented News Recommendation Authors: Rongyao Wang, Veronica Liesaputra, Zhiyi Huang Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14510v1 News recommender systems are devised to alleviate the information overload, attracting more and more researchers' attention in recent years. The lack of a dedicated learner-oriented news recommendation toolkit hinders the advancement of research in news recommendation. We propose a PyTorch-based news recommendation toolkit called NewsTorch, developed to support learners in acquiring both conceptual understanding and practical experience. This toolkit provides a modular, decoupled, and extensible framework with a learner-friendly GUI platform that supports dataset downloading and preprocessing. It also enables training, validation, and testing of state-of-the-art neural news recommendation models with standardized evaluation metrics, ensuring fair comparison and reproducible experiments. Our open-source toolkit is released on Github: https://github.com/whonor/NewsTorch. --- ### H2VLR: Heterogeneous Hypergraph Vision-Language Reasoning for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection Authors: Jianghong Huang, Luping Ji, Weiwei Duan, Mao Ye Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14507v1 As a classic vision task, anomaly detection has been widely applied in industrial inspection and medical imaging. In this task, data scarcity is often a frequently-faced issue. To solve it, the few-shot anomaly detection (FSAD) scheme is attracting increasing attention. In recent years, beyond traditional visual paradigm, Vision-Language Model (VLM) has been extensively explored to boost this field. However, in currently-existing VLM-based FSAD schemes, almost all perform anomaly inference only by pairwise feature matching, ignoring structural dependencies and global consistency. To further redound to FSAD via VLM, we propose a Heterogeneous Hypergraph Vision-Language Reasoning (H2VLR) framework. It reformulates the FSAD as a high-order inference problem of visual-semantic relations, by jointly modeling visual regions and semantic concepts in a unified hypergraph. Experimental comparisons verify the effectiveness and advantages of H2VLR. It could often achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on representative industrial and medical benchmarks. Our code will be released upon acceptance. --- ### Co-distilled attention guided masked image modeling with noisy teacher for self-supervised learning on medical images Authors: Jue Jiang, Aneesh Rangnekar, Harini Veeraraghavan Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14506v1 Masked image modeling (MIM) is a highly effective self-supervised learning (SSL) approach to extract useful feature representations from unannotated data. Predominantly used random masking methods make SSL less effective for medical images due to the contextual similarity of neighboring patches, leading to information leakage and SSL simplification. Hierarchical shifted window (Swin) transformer, a highly effective approach for medical images cannot use advanced masking methods as it lacks a global (CLS) token. Hence, we introduced an attention guided masking mechanism for Swin within a co-distillation learning framework to selectively mask semantically co-occurring and discriminative patches, to reduce information leakage and increase the difficulty of SSL pretraining. However, attention guided masking inevitably reduces the diversity of attention heads, which negatively impacts downstream task performance. To address this, we for the first time, integrate a noisy teacher into the co-distillation framework (termed DAGMaN) that performs attentive masking while preserving high attention head diversity. We demonstrate the capability of DAGMaN on multiple tasks including full- and few-shot lung nodule classification, immunotherapy outcome prediction, tumor segmentation, and unsupervised organs clustering. --- ### On the Expressive Power and Limitations of Multi-Layer SSMs Authors: Nikola Zubić, Qian Li, Yuyi Wang, Davide Scaramuzza Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14501v2 We study how depth, finite precision, state dimension, and chain-of-thought (CoT) affect the expressive power of multi-layer state-space models (SSMs). For the explicit-table $K$-function-composition problem, a canonical benchmark for sequential information propagation, we prove that any $L$-layer SSM solving $(L+3)$-function composition must satisfy $d^2p=Ω(N/L^3)$, where $d$ is the state dimension and $p$ is the per-scalar precision. Conversely, $K$-function composition is solved exactly by a $(K+1)$-layer generalized SSM with $d=1$ and $p=Θ(\log N)$. This gives a worst-case depth hierarchy for this formal problem family. We then distinguish post-input reasoning, in which all thought tokens are generated after the input, from input-interleaved reasoning, in which thought tokens may be inserted while the input stream is being read. Post-input reasoning does not circumvent our communication-based lower-bound pipeline, whereas input-interleaved reasoning admits bidirectional simulations with general deterministic one-pass streaming algorithms at the granularity of persistent memory. Finally, width and precision are not interchangeable under exact step-preserving simulation in the base affine-state model, but become interchangeable through the streaming-memory characterization once input-interleaved reasoning is allowed. --- ### On the Expressive Power and Limitations of Multi-Layer SSMs Authors: Nikola Zubić, Qian Li, Yuyi Wang, Davide Scaramuzza Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14501v1 We study the expressive power and limitations of multi-layer state-space models (SSMs). First, we show that multi-layer SSMs face fundamental limitations in compositional tasks, revealing an inherent gap between SSMs and streaming models. Then, we examine the role of chain-of-thought (CoT), showing that offline CoT does not fundamentally increase the expressiveness, while online CoT can substantially increase its power. Indeed, with online CoT, multi-layer SSMs become equivalent in power to streaming algorithms. Finally, we investigate the tradeoff between width and precision, showing that these resources are not interchangeable in the base model, but admit a clean equivalence once online CoT is allowed. Overall, our results offer a unified perspective on how depth, finite precision, and CoT shape the power and limits of SSMs. --- ### Geometric Metrics for MoE Specialization: From Fisher Information to Early Failure Detection Authors: Dongxin Guo, Jikun Wu, Siu Ming Yiu Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14500v1 Expert specialization is fundamental to Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model success, yet existing metrics (cosine similarity, routing entropy) lack theoretical grounding and yield inconsistent conclusions under reparameterization. We present an information-geometric framework providing the first rigorous characterization of MoE specialization dynamics. Our key insight is that expert routing distributions evolve on the probability simplex equipped with the Fisher information metric, enabling formal analysis via Riemannian geometry. We prove that standard heuristic metrics violate parameterization invariance (Theorem 1), establish that specialization corresponds to geodesic flow with quantified approximation bounds (Theorem 2), and derive a failure predictor with theoretical threshold justification (Theorem 3). The framework introduces two principled metrics: Fisher Specialization Index (FSI) achieving r=0.91+/-0.02 correlation with downstream performance, and Fisher Heterogeneity Score (FHS) predicting training failure at 10% completion with AUC=0.89+/-0.03 -- outperforming validation-loss-based early stopping by 23% while requiring 40x fewer compute cycles. We validate intervention protocols achieving 87% recovery rate when FHS>1 is detected. Comprehensive experiments across language modeling (WikiText-103, C4), vision MoE (ImageNet), and scaling studies (8-64 experts, 125M-2.7B parameters) validate our theoretical predictions. --- ### Improving Machine Learning Performance with Synthetic Augmentation Authors: Mel Sohm, Charles Dezons, Sami Sellami, Oscar Ninou, Axel Pincon Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14498v1 Synthetic augmentation is increasingly used to mitigate data scarcity in financial machine learning, yet its statistical role remains poorly understood. We formalize synthetic augmentation as a modification of the effective training distribution and show that it induces a structural bias--variance trade-off: while additional samples may reduce estimation error, they may also shift the population objective whenever the synthetic distribution deviates from regions relevant under evaluation. To isolate informational gains from mechanical sample-size effects, we introduce a size-matched null augmentation and a finite-sample, non-parametric block permutation test that remains valid under weak temporal dependence. We evaluate this framework in both controlled Markov-switching environments and real financial datasets, including high-frequency option trade data and a daily equity panel. Across generators spanning bootstrap, copula-based models, variational autoencoders, diffusion models, and TimeGAN, we vary augmentation ratio, model capacity, task type, regime rarity, and signal-to-noise. We show that synthetic augmentation is beneficial only in variance-dominant regimes, such as persistent volatility forecasting-while it deteriorates performance in bias-dominant settings, including near-efficient directional prediction. Rare-regime targeting can improve domain-specific metrics but may conflict with unconditional permutation inference. Our results provide a structural perspective on when synthetic data improves financial learning performance and when it induces persistent distributional distortion. --- ### Decoupling Identity from Utility: Privacy-by-Design Frameworks for Financial Ecosystems Authors: Ifayoyinsola Ibikunle, Tyler Farnan, Senthil Kumar, Mayana Pereira Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.CE, cs.AI, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14495v1 Financial institutions face tension between maximizing data utility and mitigating the re-identification risks inherent in traditional anonymization methods. This paper explores Differentially Private (DP) synthetic data as a robust "Privacy by Design" framework to resolve this conflict, ensuring output privacy while satisfying stringent regulatory obligations. We examine two distinct generative paradigms: Direct Tabular Synthesis, which reconstructs high-fidelity joint distributions from raw data, and DP-Seeded Agent-Based Modeling (ABM), which uses DP-protected aggregates to parameterize complex, stateful simulations. While tabular synthesis excels at reflecting static historical correlations for QA testing and business analytics, the DP-Seeded ABM offers a forward-looking "counterfactual laboratory" capable of modeling dynamic market behaviors and black swan events. By decoupling individual identities from data utility, these methodologies eliminate traditional data-clearing bottlenecks, enabling seamless cross-institutional research and compliant decision-making in an evolving regulatory landscape. --- ### Pushing the Limits of On-Device Streaming ASR: A Compact, High-Accuracy English Model for Low-Latency Inference Authors: Nenad Banfic, David Fan, Kunal Vaishnavi, Sam Kemp, Sunghoon Choi, Rui Ren, Sayan Shaw, Meng Tang Published: 2026-04-16 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14493v2 Deploying high-quality automatic speech recognition (ASR) on edge devices requires models that jointly optimize accuracy, latency, and memory footprint while operating entirely on CPU without GPU acceleration. We conduct a systematic empirical study of state-of-the-art ASR architectures, encompassing encoder-decoder, transducer, and LLM-based paradigms, evaluated across batch, chunked, and streaming inference modes. Through a comprehensive benchmark of over 50 configurations spanning OpenAI Whisper, NVIDIA Nemotron, Parakeet TDT, Canary, Conformer Transducer, and Qwen3-ASR, we identify NVIDIA's Nemotron Speech Streaming as the strongest candidate for real-time English streaming on resource-constrained hardware. We then re-implement the complete streaming inference pipeline in ONNX Runtime and conduct a controlled evaluation of multiple post-training quantization strategies, including importance-weighted k-quant, mixed-precision schemes, and round-to-nearest quantization, combined with graph-level operator fusion. These optimizations reduce the model from 2.47 GB to as little as 0.67 GB while maintaining word error rate (WER) within 1% absolute of the full-precision PyTorch baseline. Our recommended configuration, the int4 k-quant variant, achieves 8.20% average streaming WER across eight standard benchmarks, running comfortably faster than real-time on CPU with 0.56 s algorithmic latency, establishing a new quality-efficiency Pareto point for on-device streaming ASR. --- ### Calibrated Selective Fact-Checking via Evidence Chain Evaluation Authors: Dekun Yang Published: 2026-04-15 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18240v1 Large language models (LLMs) can achieve strong fact-checking accuracy, yet forced binary decisions conceal a critical reliability problem: systems may issue confident verdicts even when supporting evidence is weak, sparse, or internally inconsistent. We address this issue through Evidence Chain Evaluation (ECE), a selective fact-checking framework that permits abstention via an uncertain verdict instead of requiring a true/false decision for every claim. The evaluated system is a tool-using verification agent that gathers evidence through web search, scholarly search, and executable checks, and then returns a structured verdict with confidence and source-level metadata. On ECE-Bench, ECE achieves 91.6% standard accuracy, 93.7% coverage, and 97.8% selective accuracy on answered claims. Although ECE does not outperform the strongest retrieval baseline on aggregate calibration metrics such as Expected Calibration Error, Brier score, or AURC, it delivers a clear selective-prediction trade-off: the system maintains very high accuracy on answered claims while deferring 6 of 95 cases. These deferred cases are concentrated in lower-reliability evidence settings (5/6 at source level L4), supporting the view that abstention functions as a safety-oriented mechanism for handling epistemically weak evidence. Code is available at https://github.com/ cheshireyang/ECE.git --- ### ERRORQUAKE: Heavy-Tailed Error Severity Distributions in Open-Weight Large Language Models Authors: Jason Z Wang Published: 2026-04-15 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05170v1 At matched accuracy, open-weight LLMs differ substantially in the shape of their error severity distribution -- a difference invisible to the scalar error rate. Hallucination benchmarks report a single error count and treat all errors as equivalent, yet a wrong date and a fabricated court ruling differ by orders of magnitude. We introduce Errorquake-10k, a 10,000-query benchmark scoring each response on a continuous 0-4 severity scale across 8 domains and 5 difficulty tiers, and we fit per-model severity distributions for 21 open-weight models. For each model we estimate a severity distribution index (b, the Gutenberg-Richter upper-tail slope) with 95% bootstrap confidence intervals. Headline: across the 210 model pairs, 85 have disjoint 95% b confidence intervals at matched accuracy (|Delta epsilon| < 0.05) on human-consensus scoring, e.g. deepseek-v3.2 vs. ministral-14b at epsilon = 0.586 and Delta b = 0.47. A 519-item three-rater human validation study confirms measurement reliability (ICC(2,k=3) = 0.85), validates the LLM-judge ranking (rho = 0.89), and confirms the dense-model scaling correlation on human data (rho_s = -0.86). We prove a Non-Reducibility Theorem showing that severity profile and error rate are informationally non-redundant (I(b; model | epsilon) = 1.56 bits; 64.5% of cross-model b variance is unexplained by epsilon). A severity mechanism taxonomy (kappa = 0.83) reveals that error type shifts categorically with severity: low-severity errors are retrievals (71%); high-severity errors are fabrications (39%) -- and this composition differs by model size (p < 0.0001). Severity distribution should be reported alongside accuracy; it carries discriminative information that the error rate cannot. --- ### The Evaluation Blind Spot: A Stereological Theory of Benchmark Coverage for Large Language Models Authors: Jason Z Wang Published: 2026-04-15 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05169v1 We give a stereological theory of LLM benchmark coverage. For any suite with effective dimensionality d_eff, the visible Hausdorff distance between two convex capability profiles consistent with the same scores is bounded by epsilon + C R m^(-1/(d_eff-1)), with matching Lipschitz lower bound. Empirically, three independent leaderboards (Open LLM v2, an extended 12-benchmark suite, LiveBench) all have d_eff in (2.86, 4.80) on their competitive frontier; the structural blind spot exceeds the observed runner-up score gap by two orders of magnitude and dominates statistical noise by 52-127x. Under a chi-squared projection model, the isotropic prior is the optimistic case; across six hidden-capability priors and four ambient dimensions the simulated half-split swap rate of the top two models stays in (0.38, 0.49), and a 500-trial random visible/held-out split shows that 92% of trials swap the top-1 ranking with on average 2.83 of 5 top-5 models changing. A submodular greedy algorithm with the Nemhauser (1 - 1/e) guarantee finds a stable core of 4 benchmarks; 7 of 12 suffice for 90% coverage, and the trained subset transfers across temporal quarters with 93-97% retention. A counterfactual validation across 12 internal benchmarks and 27 Chatbot Arena categories confirms that the eigenstructure predicts which evaluations are irreplaceable (rho = -0.69, p = 0.013 for removal disruption) and which external evaluations bring new information (rho = +0.38). As a second, independent theoretical contribution, we resolve Gardner's Problem 1.5 (1995) for C^2 support functions, establishing the minimax rate Theta(R/(kappa m^(2/(D-1)))) in general dimension via optimal recovery theory on S^(D-1). --- ### Applying Two-Grid Preconditioner for Subsurface Flow Simulation using Attention-enhanced Hybrid Network to Accelerate Multiscale Discretization in High-contrast Media Authors: Peiqi Li, Jie Chen, Shubin Fu Published: 2026-04-15 Categories: cs.CE, cs.LG, math.NA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02582v1 In this paper, we study the efficient numerical solution of Darcy equations in strongly heterogeneous media with high-contrast permeability and propose a hybrid framework that combines learning with multiscale numerical methods. The learning component is used for the prediction of multiscale basis functions in the mixed generalized multiscale finite element method (mixed GMsFEM), with the goal of reducing the repeated local computations required in the offline stage. Once these basis functions are predicted, the global system is assembled and the pressure field is computed by a two-grid preconditioned solver. The resulting method accelerates the costly local basis-construction stage while retaining the multiscale discretization and preconditioned iterative structure of the underlying solver. Numerical experiments on two-dimensional heterogeneous Darcy problems show that the proposed framework yields more accurate final pressure reconstruction than several representative learning-based methods and remains stable under strong heterogeneity and high-contrast coefficients. In comparison with the traditional mixed GMsFEM, its main advantage lies in the efficiency of the basis-generation stage, while the quality of the global solve is still ensured by the two-grid preconditioner. These results indicate that accelerating multiscale basis construction through learning, while preserving a mature numerical solver for the global problem, provides a viable approach for high-resolution Darcy-type simulations. --- ### TCAR-Gen: Temporal Graph Retrieval with Evidence Fusion for Knowledge-Grounded Generation Authors: Sidra Nasir, Muhammad Noman Zahid, Rizwan Ahmed Khan Published: 2026-04-15 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00029v1 Retrieval-augmented generation systems struggle with temporal reasoning and evidence fusion when answering complex questions over historical criminal case narratives. Existing approaches either retrieve independently of query semantics or fail to integrate multiple evidence sources coherently. We propose Temporal Context Augmented Retrieval Generation (TCAR-Gen), a framework that combines query-conditioned graph neural networks, temporal evidence fusion, and chain-of-trees reasoning to ground answer generation in retrieved evidence. On the Victorian Crime Diaries benchmark, TCAR-Gen achieves 0.3738 Recall@5, outperforming Vanilla RAG, Temporal RAG, GraphRAG-C, and GraphRAG-T across seven query types including multi-hop reasoning and counterfactual questions. Ablation studies reveal that the context graph, temporal penalty mechanism, and query conditioning are critical components. Cross-model evaluation across five language model (GPT-OSS 20B to TinyLlama 1.1B) demonstrates that TCAR-Gen maintains robust retrieval coverage at smaller model scales, though generation quality degrades substantially with reduced model capacity. Our work shows that explicit temporal modelling and multi-branch evidence fusion are essential for faithful, reasoning-intensive question answering over knowledge-grounded corpora. --- ### A Multi-Domain Red Teaming Framework for Safety, Robustness, and Fairness Evaluation of Medical Large Language Models Authors: Andrei Marian Feier, Veysel Kocaman, Yigit Gul, Ahmet Korkmaz, Alexander Thomas, Aleksei Zakharov, Jay Gil, Mehmet Butgul, David Talby Published: 2026-04-15 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00027v1 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across healthcare, yet existing benchmarks fail to capture model behavior under adversarial or ethically complex conditions common in clinical practice. We developed a multi-domain red teaming framework evaluating eleven contemporary LLMs across 690 clinically grounded scenarios spanning nine domains and over 150 subcategories. Scenarios incorporated adversarial transformations, and responses were assessed using a seven-dimension rubric with LLM-assisted scoring and human-in-the-loop validation. Results revealed substantial performance variance, with mean scores ranging from 0.791 to 0.984. Critically, several high-performing systems produced complete failures in individual safety-critical scenarios, demonstrating that aggregate accuracy masks clinically meaningful risk. The highest-performing systems (X-BAI, GPT-5, Claude Opus 4.1) achieved scores above 0.97 with low variance, while performance varied significantly across domains. Equity-related tasks showed 10-20% error amplification with demographic modifications, and human reviewers identified clinically relevant failures missed by automated evaluation. Our findings demonstrate that performance variance and worst-case failures provide more clinically meaningful reliability indicators than mean accuracy alone, and that hybrid evaluation approaches combining automation with clinician oversight are essential for credible safety assessment. --- ### Cognitive-Linguistic Indicators of Depression in Online Communities: Analysed by DistilBERT and Holographic Reduced Representation Authors: Brian Van Steen Published: 2026-04-15 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00026v1 This paper investigates whether combining cognitively grounded linguistic features with transformer-based embeddings improves automated detection of depression in online text. Using Beck's Cognitive Theory of Depression, the study extracts cognitive distortions as measurable features, including first-person pronoun density, absolutist words, and negative emotion in Reddit posts from depression-related and control communities. Using a subset of the Kaggle Reddit Suicide and Depression Detection dataset, two classification pipelines are compared, a TF-IDF embedding with Naive Bayes as a baseline, and a hybrid model that concatenates DistilBERT sentence embeddings with Holographic Reduced Representation (HRR) vectors encoding the cognitive-linguistic features, followed by Logistic Regression. The hybrid DistilBERT HRR model achieves a macro F1 score of 0.94 versus 0.80 for the TD-IDF baseline, with 5-fold cross validation F1 improving from 0.83 to 0.92, and AUC from 0.958 to 0.981. --- ### ART: Attention Run-time Termination for Efficient Large Language Model Decoding Authors: Chen Qiu, Guozhong Li, Cristian McGee, Aritra Dutta, Panos Kalnis Published: 2026-04-15 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00024v3 Long-context decoding in Large Language Models (LLMs) is constrained by the cost of accessing and processing the Key-Value (KV) cache. Despite evidence that attention outputs depend jointly on keys and values, most existing KV management methods rely on key-only pruning, since incorporating values incurs prohibitive overhead. In this paper, we propose Attention Run-time Termination (ART), a lightweight run-time mechanism that tracks accumulated attention outputs during kernel execution and terminates subsequent KV block accesses once further contributions become negligible. Rather than replacing KV selection, ART dynamically terminates redundant KV traversal on top of existing dense or sparse attention policies. We introduce a stability-based criterion that monitors both magnitude and directional changes of intermediate attention outputs and provideds a theoretical characterization of the resulting truncation error. Experiments on the LongBench and RULER Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks show that ART increases the generation throughput of existing KV-cache methods by up to 20%, without compromising the result quality. --- ### TrustLDM: Benchmarking Trustworthiness in Language Diffusion Models Authors: Yichuan Mo, Yukun Jiang, Yanbo Shi, Mingjie Li, Michael Backes, Yang Zhang, Yisen Wang Published: 2026-04-15 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00023v1 The rapid development of Language Diffusion Models (LDMs) challenges the dominant position of auto-regressive competitors in language processing. However, their flexible, any-order decoding strategies not only enable fast decoding speed but also potentially bring new trustworthiness challenges. To better understand the risks behind their pipelines, we introduce a comprehensive trustworthiness benchmark tailored to LDMs (TrustLDM), evaluating safety, privacy, and fairness across different LDM architectures with multiple categories of static post contexts. Our empirical results show that although LDMs generally exhibit strong trustworthiness with only the user prompts, their alignment behavior degrades noticeably when the malicious post contexts are attached to the masked responses. We further observe that longer contexts do not necessarily induce stronger effects, and both decoding order and generation length affect the evaluation outcomes. Finally, we propose TrustLDM-Auto, an automatic evaluation framework that leverages LDM decoding flexibility to systematically identify vulnerable configurations, revealing substantial trustworthiness weaknesses across all evaluated models and dimensions. Our work may potentially help the community build more trustworthy LDMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ML/TrustLDM. --- ### The Model Parking Tax: Quantifying the Hidden Energy Cost of Always-On GPU Model Deployment Authors: Sai Sathvik Vadari Published: 2026-04-15 Categories: cs.DC, cs.LG, cs.PF arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23918v1 The AI inference industry keeps models loaded in GPU memory around the clock to avoid cold-start latency, implicitly treating idle power as a fixed cost of readiness. Yet the structure of this cost has never been empirically decomposed - and never across GPU architectures. We present the first cross-architecture measurement of idle GPU power as a function of VRAM allocation, combining 18 days of production telemetry (335,267 samples, 14 H100 GPUs) with controlled dose-response experiments on three GPU architectures spanning three memory technologies: NVIDIA H100 (HBM3, 80 GB), A100 (HBM2e, 80 GB), and L40S (GDDR6, 48 GB). We observe that idle power is piecewise constant on all three architectures: the CUDA context forces a discrete DVFS transition consuming +26-66 W over bare idle (26-50 W on HBM architectures, 66 W on GDDR6), while the marginal VRAM effect is bounded below measurement relevance ($|β| < 0.02$ W/GB) on every device tested. The CUDA context accounts for >98% of the parking tax regardless of memory technology. We validate this finding with a real HuggingFace model (Qwen2.5-7B) on all three architectures, confirming <0.5 W difference from empty tensors on every device, and capture cold-start power profiles during model loading. We derive a cold-start breakeven model showing energy-optimal behavior depends on request arrival rate and loading latency - not model size - with breakeven intervals of 1-5 minutes. Our results identify a constraint consistent across all tested architectures: idle-with-context power is determined by DVFS state, not memory occupancy. --- ### Double descent for least-squares interpolation on contaminated data: A simulation study Authors: Tino Werner Published: 2026-04-15 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.21494v1 Overparametrized models can exhibit an excellent generalization performance, although they should be prone to overfitting according to classical statistical theory. The discovery of the "double descent", indicating that the generalization error decreases after a certain model complexity has been reached, opened a new line of research. Robust statistics considers statistical estimation on contaminated data, which, due to assumptions that do not hold on real data, let data points appear as outliers w.r.t. the assumed "ideal" distribution, potentially severely distorting any classical estimator. We address the question whether a double descent phenomenon can be observed in a linear regression setting with contaminated training data. We compare the performance of the highly non-robust least-squares interpolation estimator with several robust alternatives. It turns out that large overparametrization indeed allows for a double descent phenomenon, resulting in a very good generalization performance of the least-squares interpolator, surpassing that of the robust alternatives. ---