# Research Papers — 2026-04 · bundle page 165 of 233 > Full-text markdown of papers #8201–8250 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/165 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-04/page/164.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-04/page/166.md) ### Face-D(^2)CL: Multi-Domain Synergistic Representation with Dual Continual Learning for Facial DeepFake Detection Authors: Yushuo Zhang, Yu Cheng, Yongkang Hu, Jiuan Zhou, Jiawei Chen, Zhaoxia Yin Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08159v2 Facial forgery techniques are advancing rapidly, posing severe threats to public trust and information security while imposing higher demands on the continual adaptation of DeepFake detection models. Although continual learning enables models to adapt to emerging forgery methods, existing approaches still face two key bottlenecks. On the one hand, they lack sufficient feature representation capacity to handle increasingly diverse and complex forgery traces. On the other hand, continual adaptation to new forgery distributions leads to severe catastrophic forgetting of prior knowledge, which substantially degrades detection performance. To address these issues, we propose Face-D(^2)CL, a framework for facial DeepFake detection. It leverages multi-domain synergistic representation to fuse spatial and frequency-domain features, enabling comprehensive capture of diverse forgery traces. Additionally, it employs a dual continual learning mechanism that combines Real/Fake-aware Elastic Weight Consolidation (RF-EWC) and Domain-wise Orthogonal Gradient Constraint (D-OGC). RF-EWC distinguishes the parameter importance for real versus fake samples, while D-OGC ensures that updates to task-specific expert modules do not interfere with previously learned knowledge. This synergy allows the model to achieve a dynamic balance between robust anti-forgetting capabilities and agile adaptability to emerging facial forgery paradigms, all without relying on historical data replay. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses current state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches in both stability and plasticity, achieving a 60.7% relative reduction in the average detection error rate. On unseen forgery domains, it further improves the average detection AUC by 7.9% compared to the current SOTA method. --- ### Training Data Size Sensitivity in Unsupervised Rhyme Recognition Authors: Petr Plecháč, Artjoms Šeļa, Silvie Cinková, Mirella De Sisto, Lara Nugues, Neža Kočnik, Antonina Martynenko, Ben Nagy, Luca Giovannini, Robert Kolár Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08156v1 Rhyme is deceptively intuitive: what is or is not a rhyme is constructed historically, scholars struggle with rhyme classification, and people disagree on whether two words are rhymed or not. This complicates automated rhymed recognition and evaluation, especially in multilingual context. This article investigates how much training data is needed for reliable unsupervised rhyme recognition using RhymeTagger, a language-independent tool that identifies rhymes based on repeating patterns in poetry corpora. We evaluate its performance across seven languages (Czech, German, English, French, Italian, Russian, and Slovene), examining how training size and language differences affect accuracy. To set a realistic performance benchmark, we assess inter-annotator agreement on a manually annotated subset of poems and analyze factors contributing to disagreement in expert annotations: phonetic similarity between rhyming words and their distance from each other in a poem. We also compare RhymeTagger to three large language models using a one-shot learning strategy. Our findings show that, once provided with sufficient training data, RhymeTagger consistently outperforms human agreement, while LLMs lacking phonetic representation significantly struggle with the task. --- ### A Direct Approach for Handling Contextual Bandits with Latent State Dynamics Authors: Zhen Li, Gilles Stoltz Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08149v2 We consider a linear contextual bandit model where contexts and rewards are governed by a finite hidden Markov chain. We first revisit the simplified model by Nelson et al. (2022), in which rewards are linear functions of the posterior probabilities over the hidden states given the observed contexts (called beliefs), rather than functions of the hidden states themselves. This simplified model may be handled through a direct reduction to standard linear contextual bandits. We extend the theoretical analysis of this reduction to take into account the estimation of the parameters of the hidden Markov model (HMM) in the regret bound and to provide high-probability bounds not depending anymore on the reward functions and only depending on the model through the estimation of the HMM parameters. Second, and most importantly, we instead study the more natural and more complex model incorporating direct dependencies in the hidden states (on top of dependencies on the observed contexts, as is natural for contextual bandits). Under a classic HMM forgetting condition, the main algorithmic tool introduced to cope with the various statistical dependencies that the reward structure introduces is to only periodically update reward-model parameters. --- ### Clickbait detection: quick inference with maximum impact Authors: Soveatin Kuntur, Panggih Kusuma Ningrum, Anna Wróblewska, Maria Ganzha, Marcin Paprzycki Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08148v1 We propose a lightweight hybrid approach to clickbait detection that combines OpenAI semantic embeddings with six compact heuristic features capturing stylistic and informational cues. To improve efficiency, embeddings are reduced using PCA and evaluated with XGBoost, GraphSAGE, and GCN classifiers. While the simplified feature design yields slightly lower F1-scores, graph-based models achieve competitive performance with substantially reduced inference time. High ROC--AUC values further indicate strong discrimination capability, supporting reliable detection of clickbait headlines under varying decision thresholds. --- ### Semantic Noise Reduction via Teacher-Guided Dual-Path Audio-Visual Representation Learning Authors: Linge Wang, Yingying Chen, Bingke Zhu, Lu Zhou, Jinqiao Wang Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.SD, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08147v1 Recent advances in audio-visual representation learning have shown the value of combining contrastive alignment with masked reconstruction. However, jointly optimizing these objectives in a single forward pass forces the contrastive branch to rely on randomly visible patches designed for reconstruction rather than cross-modal alignment, introducing semantic noise and optimization interference. We propose TG-DP, a Teacher-Guided Dual-Path framework that decouples reconstruction and alignment into separate optimization paths. By disentangling the masking regimes of the two branches, TG-DP enables the contrastive pathway to use a visibility pattern better suited to cross-modal alignment. A teacher model further provides auxiliary guidance for organizing visible tokens in this branch, helping reduce interference and stabilize cross-modal representation learning. TG-DP achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot retrieval. On AudioSet, it improves R@1 from 35.2\% to 37.4\% for video-to-audio retrieval and from 27.9\% to 37.1\% for audio-to-video retrieval. The learned representations also remain semantically robust, achieving state-of-the-art linear-probe performance on AS20K and VGGSound. Taken together, our results suggest that decoupling multimodal objectives and introducing teacher-guided structure into the contrastive pathway provide an effective framework for improving large-scale audio-visual pretraining. Code is available at https://github.com/wanglg20/TG-DP. --- ### Multimodal Reasoning with LLM for Encrypted Traffic Interpretation: A Benchmark Authors: Longgang Zhang, Xiaowei Fu, Fuxiang Huang, Lei Zhang Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.MM, cs.NI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08140v1 Network traffic, as a key media format, is crucial for ensuring security and communications in modern internet infrastructure. While existing methods offer excellent performance, they face two key bottlenecks: (1) They fail to capture multidimensional semantics beyond unimodal sequence patterns. (2) Their black box property, i.e., providing only category labels, lacks an auditable reasoning process. We identify a key factor that existing network traffic datasets are primarily designed for classification and inherently lack rich semantic annotations, failing to generate human-readable evidence report. To address data scarcity, this paper proposes a Byte-Grounded Traffic Description (BGTD) benchmark for the first time, combining raw bytes with structured expert annotations. BGTD provides necessary behavioral features and verifiable chains of evidence for multimodal reasoning towards explainable encrypted traffic interpretation. Built upon BGTD, this paper proposes an end-to-end traffic-language representation framework (mmTraffic), a multimodal reasoning architecture bridging physical traffic encoding and semantic interpretation. In order to alleviate modality interference and generative hallucinations, mmTraffic adopts a jointly-optimized perception-cognition architecture. By incorporating a perception-centered traffic encoder and a cognition-centered LLM generator, mmTraffic achieves refined traffic interpretation with guaranteed category prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that mmTraffic autonomously generates high-fidelity, human-readable, and evidence-grounded traffic interpretation reports, while maintaining highly competitive classification accuracy comparing to specialized unimodal model (e.g., NetMamba). The source code is available at https://github.com/lgzhangzlg/Multimodal-Reasoning-with-LLM-for-Encrypted-Traffic-Interpretation-A-Benchmark --- ### Bag of Bags: Adaptive Visual Vocabularies for Genizah Join Image Retrieval Authors: Sharva Gogawale, Gal Grudka, Daria Vasyutinsky-Shapira, Omer Ventura, Berat Kurar-Barakat, Nachum Dershowitz Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08138v2 A join is a set of manuscript fragments identified as originally emanating from the same manuscript. We study manuscript join retrieval: Given a query image of a fragment, retrieve other fragments originating from the same physical manuscript. We propose Bag of Bags (BoB), an image-level representation that replaces the global-level visual codebook of classical Bag of Words (BoW) with a fragment-specific vocabulary of local visual words. Our pipeline trains a sparse convolutional autoencoder on binarized fragment patches, encodes connected components from each page, clusters the resulting embeddings with per-image k-means, and compares images using set-to-set distances between their local vocabularies. Evaluated on fragments from the Cairo Genizah, the best BoB variant (viz. Chamfer) achieves Hit@1 of 0.78 and MRR of 0.84, compared to 0.74 and 0.80, respectively, for the strongest BoW baseline (BoW-RawPatches-$χ^2$), a 6.1% relative improvement in top-1 accuracy. We furthermore study a mass-weighted BoB-OT variant that incorporates cluster population into prototype matching and present a formal approximation guarantee bounding its deviation from full component-level optimal transport. A two-stage pipeline using a BoW shortlist followed by BoB-OT reranking provides a practical compromise between retrieval strength and computational cost, supporting applicability to larger manuscript collections. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/TAU-CH/midrash_bob. --- ### Alloc-MoE: Budget-Aware Expert Activation Allocation for Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Inference Authors: Baihui Liu, Kaiyuan Tian, Wei Wang, Zhaoning Zhang, Linbo Qiao, Dongsheng Li Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08133v1 Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has become a dominant architecture for scaling large language models due to their sparse activation mechanism. However, the substantial number of expert activations creates a critical latency bottleneck during inference, especially in resource-constrained deployment scenarios. Existing approaches that reduce expert activations potentially lead to severe model performance degradation. In this work, we introduce the concept of \emph{activation budget} as a constraint on the number of expert activations and propose Alloc-MoE, a unified framework that optimizes budget allocation coordinately at both the layer and token levels to minimize performance degradation. At the layer level, we introduce Alloc-L, which leverages sensitivity profiling and dynamic programming to determine the optimal allocation of expert activations across layers. At the token level, we propose Alloc-T, which dynamically redistributes activations based on routing scores, optimizing budget allocation without increasing latency. Extensive experiments across multiple MoE models demonstrate that Alloc-MoE maintains model performance under a constrained activation budget. Especially, Alloc-MoE achieves $1.15\times$ prefill and $1.34\times$ decode speedups on DeepSeek-V2-Lite at half of the original budget. --- ### Graph Neural Networks for Misinformation Detection: Performance-Efficiency Trade-offs Authors: Soveatin Kuntur, Maciej Krzywda, Anna Wróblewska, Marcin Paprzycki, Maria Ganzha, Szymon Łukasik, Amir H. Gandomi Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08131v1 The rapid spread of online misinformation has led to increasingly complex detection models, including large language models and hybrid architectures. However, their computational cost and deployment limitations raise concerns about practical applicability. In this work, we benchmark graph neural networks (GNNs) against non-graph-based machine learning methods under controlled and comparable conditions. We evaluate lightweight GNN architectures (GCN, GraphSAGE, GAT, ChebNet) against Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machines, and Multilayer Perceptrons across seven public datasets in English, Indonesian, and Polish. All models use identical TF-IDF features to isolate the impact of relational structure. Performance is measured using F1 score, with inference time reported to assess efficiency. GNNs consistently outperform non-graph baselines across all datasets. For example, GraphSAGE achieves 96.8% F1 on Kaggle and 91.9% on WELFake, compared to 73.2% and 66.8% for MLP, respectively. On COVID-19, GraphSAGE reaches 90.5% F1 vs. 74.9%, while ChebNet attains 79.1% vs. 66.4% on FakeNewsNet. These gains are achieved with comparable or lower inference times. Overall, the results show that classic GNNs remain effective and efficient, challenging the need for increasingly complex architectures in misinformation detection. --- ### LLM-Based Data Generation and Clinical Skills Evaluation for Low-Resource French OSCEs Authors: Tian Huang, Tom Bourgeade, Irina Illina Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08126v1 Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) are the standard method for assessing medical students' clinical and communication skills through structured patient interviews. In France, however, the organization of training sessions is limited by human and logistical constraints, restricting students' access to repeated practice and structured feedback. Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLMs) now offer the opportunity to automatically evaluate such medical interviews, thereby alleviating the need for human examiners during training. Yet, real French OSCE annotated transcripts remain extremely scarce, limiting reproducible research and reliable benchmarking. To address these challenges, we investigate the use of LLMs for both generating and evaluating French OSCE dialogues in a low-resource context. We introduce a controlled pipeline that produces synthetic doctor-patient interview transcripts guided by scenario-specific evaluation criteria, combining ideal and perturbed performances to simulate varying student skill levels. The resulting dialogues are automatically silver-labeled through an LLM-assisted framework supporting adjustable evaluation strictness. Benchmarking multiple open-source and proprietary LLMs shows that mid-size models ($\le$32B parameters) achieve accuracies comparable to GPT-4o ($\sim$90\%) on synthetic data, highlighting the feasibility of locally deployable, privacy-preserving evaluation systems for medical education. --- ### PolySLGen: Online Multimodal Speaking-Listening Reaction Generation in Polyadic Interaction Authors: Zhi-Yi Lin, Thomas Markhorst, Jouh Yeong Chew, Xucong Zhang Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08125v2 Human-like multimodal reaction generation is essential for natural group interactions between humans and embodied AI. However, existing approaches are limited to single-modality or speaking-only responses in dyadic interactions, making them unsuitable for realistic social scenarios. Many also overlook nonverbal cues and complex dynamics of polyadic interactions, both critical for engagement and conversational coherence. In this work, we present PolySLGen, an online framework for Polyadic multimodal Speaking and Listening reaction Generation. Given past conversation and motion from all participants, PolySLGen generates a future speaking or listening reaction for a target participant, including speech, body motion, and speaking state score. To model group interactions effectively, we propose a pose fusion module and a social cue encoder that jointly aggregate motion and social signals from the group. Extensive experiments, along with quantitative and qualitative evaluations, show that PolySLGen produces contextually appropriate and temporally coherent multi-modal reactions, outperforming several adapted and state-of-the-art baselines in motion quality, motion-speech alignment, speaking state prediction, and human-perceived realism. --- ### Beyond Stochastic Exploration: What Makes Training Data Valuable for Agentic Search Authors: Chuzhan Hao, Wenfeng Feng, Guochao Jiang, Guofeng Quan, Guohua Liu, Yuewei Zhang Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08124v1 Reinforcement learning (RL) has become an effective approach for advancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) through the strategic integration of external search engines. However, current RL-based search agents often rely on a process of stochastic exploration guided by carefully crafted outcome rewards, leading to inefficient reasoning trajectories and unstable training. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework, Hierarchical Experience (HiExp), to enhance the performance and training stability of search agents. Specifically, we extract empirical knowledge through contrastive analysis and a multi-level clustering mechanism, transforming raw reasoning trajectories into hierarchical experience knowledge. By leveraging experience-aligned training, we effectively regularize stochastic exploration, evolving it into a strategic and experience-driven search process. Extensive evaluations on multiple complex agentic search and mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our approach not only achieves substantial performance gains but also exhibits strong cross-task and cross-algorithm generalization. --- ### LegoDiffusion: Micro-Serving Text-to-Image Diffusion Workflows Authors: Lingyun Yang, Suyi Li, Tianyu Feng, Xiaoxiao Jiang, Zhipeng Di, Weiyi Lu, Kan Liu, Yinghao Yu, Tao Lan, Guodong Yang, Lin Qu, Liping Zhang et al. Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08123v1 Text-to-image generation executes a diffusion workflow comprising multiple models centered on a base diffusion model. Existing serving systems treat each workflow as an opaque monolith, provisioning, placing, and scaling all constituent models together, which obscures internal dataflow, prevents model sharing, and enforces coarse-grained resource management. In this paper, we make a case for micro-serving diffusion workflows with LegoDiffusion, a system that decomposes a workflow into loosely coupled model-execution nodes that can be independently managed and scheduled. By explicitly managing individual model inference, LegoDiffusion unlocks cluster-scale optimizations, including per-model scaling, model sharing, and adaptive model parallelism. Collectively, LegoDiffusion outperforms existing diffusion workflow serving systems, sustaining up to 3x higher request rates and tolerating up to 8x higher burst traffic. --- ### Uni-ViGU: Towards Unified Video Generation and Understanding via A Diffusion-Based Video Generator Authors: Luozheng Qin, Jia Gong, Qian Qiao, Tianjiao Li, Li Xu, Haoyu Pan, Chao Qu, Zhiyu Tan, Hao Li Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08121v1 Unified multimodal models integrating visual understanding and generation face a fundamental challenge: visual generation incurs substantially higher computational costs than understanding, particularly for video. This imbalance motivates us to invert the conventional paradigm: rather than extending understanding-centric MLLMs to support generation, we propose Uni-ViGU, a framework that unifies video generation and understanding by extending a video generator as the foundation. We introduce a unified flow method that performs continuous flow matching for video and discrete flow matching for text within a single process, enabling coherent multimodal generation. We further propose a modality-driven MoE-based framework that augments Transformer blocks with lightweight layers for text generation while preserving generative priors. To repurpose generation knowledge for understanding, we design a bidirectional training mechanism with two stages: Knowledge Recall reconstructs input prompts to leverage learned text-video correspondences, while Capability Refinement fine-tunes on detailed captions to establish discriminative shared representations. Experiments demonstrate that Uni-ViGU achieves competitive performance on both video generation and understanding, validating generation-centric architectures as a scalable path toward unified multimodal intelligence. Project Page and Code: https://fr0zencrane.github.io/uni-vigu-page/. --- ### Small Vision-Language Models are Smart Compressors for Long Video Understanding Authors: Junjie Fei, Jun Chen, Zechun Liu, Yunyang Xiong, Chong Zhou, Wei Wen, Junlin Han, Mingchen Zhuge, Saksham Suri, Qi Qian, Shuming Liu, Lemeng Wu et al. Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08120v1 Adapting Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for hour-long videos is bottlenecked by context limits. Dense visual streams saturate token budgets and exacerbate the lost-in-the-middle phenomenon. Existing heuristics, like sparse sampling or uniform pooling, blindly sacrifice fidelity by discarding decisive moments and wasting bandwidth on irrelevant backgrounds. We propose Tempo, an efficient query-aware framework compressing long videos for downstream understanding. Tempo leverages a Small Vision-Language Model (SVLM) as a local temporal compressor, casting token reduction as an early cross-modal distillation process to generate compact, intent-aligned representations in a single forward pass. To enforce strict budgets without breaking causality, we introduce Adaptive Token Allocation (ATA). Exploiting the SVLM's zero-shot relevance prior and semantic front-loading, ATA acts as a training-free $O(1)$ dynamic router. It allocates dense bandwidth to query-critical segments while compressing redundancies into minimal temporal anchors to maintain the global storyline. Extensive experiments show our 6B architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance with aggressive dynamic compression (0.5-16 tokens/frame). On the extreme-long LVBench (4101s), Tempo scores 52.3 under a strict 8K visual budget, outperforming GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro. Scaling to 2048 frames reaches 53.7. Crucially, Tempo compresses hour-long videos substantially below theoretical limits, proving true long-form video understanding relies on intent-driven efficiency rather than greedily padded context windows. --- ### Initialisation Determines the Basin: Efficient Codebook Optimisation for Extreme LLM Quantization Authors: Ian W. Kennedy, Nafise Sadat Moosavi Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08118v1 Additive quantization enables extreme LLM compression with O(1) lookup-table dequantization, making it attractive for edge deployment. Yet at 2-bit precision, it often fails catastrophically, even with extensive search and finetuning. We show that the dominant bottleneck is codebook initialisation. Greedy sequential initialisation frequently places the model in poor optimisation regions that subsequent beam search and PV-tuning struggle to overcome. We analyse this behaviour through the representational ratio \r{ho} = N/KM, which characterises the relationship between weight groups and codebook capacity, and propose OA-EM, an output-aware EM initialisation method using Hessian-weighted Mahalanobis distance. Across compression rates, search budgets, and three architectures (Llama 3.2 3B, Llama 3.1 8B, Qwen 2.5 3B), OA-EM consistently produces better solutions after PV-tuning and dominates the quality-compute frontier. The severity of the bottleneck scales with \r{ho}: moderate at 3 bpp but extreme at 2 bpp, where poor initialisation can degrade perplexity by orders of magnitude. More broadly, our results highlight the importance of optimisation geometry in compressed model spaces, where initialisation can dominate subsequent search and fine-tuning. --- ### Internal noise in deep neural networks: interplay of depth, neuron number, and noise injection step Authors: D. A. Maksimov, V. M. Moskvitin, N. Semenova Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08117v1 This paper examines the influence of internal Gaussian noise on the performance of deep feedforward neural networks, focusing on the role of the noise injection stage relative to the activation function. Two scenarios are analyzed: noise introduced before and after the activation function, for both additive and multiplicative noise influence. The case of noise before activation function is similar to perturbations in the input channel of neuron, while the noise introduced after activation function is analogous to noise occurring either within the neuron itself or in its output channel. The types of noise and the method of their introduction were inspired by analog neural networks. The results show that the activation function acts as an effective nonlinear filter of noise. Networks with noise introduced before the activation function consistently achieve higher accuracy than those with noise applied after it, with additive noise being more effectively suppressed in this case. For noise introduced after the activation function, multiplicative noise is less detrimental than additive noise, and earlier hidden layers contribute more significantly to performance degradation due to cumulative noise amplification governed by the statistical properties of subsequent weight matrices. The study also demonstrates that pooling-based noise reduction is effective in both cases when noise is introduced before and after the activation function, consistently improving network performance. --- ### A unifying view of contrastive learning, importance sampling, and bridge sampling for energy-based models Authors: Luca Martino Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CE, eess.SP, stat.CO, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08116v2 In the last decades, energy-based models (EBMs) have become an important class of probabilistic models in which a component of the likelihood is intractable and therefore cannot be evaluated explicitly. Consequently, parameter estimation in EBMs is challenging for conventional inference methods. In this work, we provide a unified framework that connects noise contrastive estimation (NCE), reverse logistic regression (RLR), multiple importance sampling (MIS), and bridge sampling within the context of EBMs. We further show that these methods are equivalent under specific conditions. This unified perspective clarifies relationships among existing methods and enables the development of new estimators, with the potential to improve statistical and computational efficiency. Furthermore, this study helps elucidate the success of NCE in terms of its flexibility and robustness, while also identifying scenarios in which its performance can be further improved. Hence, rather than being a purely descriptive review, this work offers a unifying perspective and additional methodological contributions. The MATLAB code used in the numerical experiments is also made freely available to support the reproducibility of the results. --- ### Revise: A Framework for Revising OCRed text in Practical Information Systems with Data Contamination Strategy Authors: Gyuho Shim, Seongtae Hong, Heuiseok Lim Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08115v1 Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly improved the field of Document AI, demonstrating remarkable performance on document understanding tasks such as question answering. However, existing approaches primarily focus on solving specific tasks, lacking the capability to structurally organize and manage document information. To address this limitation, we propose Revise, a framework that systematically corrects errors introduced by OCR at the character, word, and structural levels. Specifically, Revise employs a comprehensive hierarchical taxonomy of common OCR errors and a synthetic data generation strategy that realistically simulates such errors to train an effective correction model. Experimental results demonstrate that Revise effectively corrects OCR outputs, enabling more structured representation and systematic management of document contents. Consequently, our method significantly enhances downstream performance in document retrieval and question answering tasks, highlighting the potential to overcome the structural management limitations of existing Document AI frameworks. --- ### TADP-RME: A Trust-Adaptive Differential Privacy Framework for Enhancing Reliability of Data-Driven Systems Authors: Labani Halder, Payel Sadhukhan, Sarbani Palit Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08113v1 Ensuring reliability in adversarial settings necessitates treating privacy as a foundational component of data-driven systems. While differential privacy and cryptographic protocols offer strong guarantees, existing schemes rely on a fixed privacy budget, leading to a rigid utility-privacy trade-off that fails under heterogeneous user trust. Moreover, noise-only differential privacy preserves geometric structure, which inference attacks exploit, causing privacy leakage. We propose TADP-RME (Trust-Adaptive Differential Privacy with Reverse Manifold Embedding), a framework that enhances reliability under varying levels of user trust. It introduces an inverse trust score in the range (0,1) to adaptively modulate the privacy budget, enabling smooth transitions between utility and privacy. Additionally, Reverse Manifold Embedding applies a nonlinear transformation to disrupt local geometric relationships while preserving formal differential privacy guarantees through post-processing. Theoretical and empirical results demonstrate improved privacy-utility trade-offs, reducing attack success rates by up to 3.1 percent without significant utility degradation. The framework consistently outperforms existing methods against inference attacks, providing a unified approach for reliable learning in adversarial environments. --- ### Bias Redistribution in Visual Machine Unlearning: Does Forgetting One Group Harm Another? Authors: Yunusa Haruna, Adamu Lawan, Ibrahim Haruna Abdulhamid, Hamza Mohammed Dauda, Jiaquan Zhang, Chaoning Zhang, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08111v1 Machine unlearning enables models to selectively forget training data, driven by privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. However, its fairness implications remain underexplored: when a model forgets a demographic group, does it neutralize that concept or redistribute it to correlated groups, potentially amplifying bias? We investigate this bias redistribution phenomenon on CelebA using CLIP models (ViT/B-32, ViT-L/14, ViT-B/16) under a zero-shot classification setting across intersectional groups defined by age and gender. We evaluate three unlearning methods, Prompt Erasure, Prompt Reweighting, and Refusal Vector using per-group accuracy shifts, demographic parity gaps, and a redistribution score. Our results show that unlearning does not eliminate bias but redistributes it primarily along gender rather than age boundaries. In particular, removing the dominant Young Female group consistently transfers performance to Old Female across all model scales, revealing a gender-dominant structure in CLIP's embedding space. While the Refusal Vector method reduces redistribution, it fails to achieve complete forgetting and significantly degrades retained performance. These findings highlight a fundamental limitation of current unlearning methods: without accounting for embedding geometry, they risk amplifying bias in retained groups. --- ### OV-Stitcher: A Global Context-Aware Framework for Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation Authors: Seungjae Moon, Seunghyun Oh, Youngmin Ro Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08110v2 Training-free open-vocabulary semantic segmentation(TF-OVSS) has recently attracted attention for its ability to perform dense prediction by leveraging the pretrained knowledge of large vision and vision-language models, without requiring additional training. However, due to the limited input resolution of these pretrained encoders, existing TF-OVSS methods commonly adopt a sliding-window strategy that processes cropped sub-images independently. While effective for managing high-resolution inputs, this approach prevents global attention over the full image, leading to fragmented feature representations and limited contextual reasoning. We propose OV-Stitcher, a training-free framework that addresses this limitation by stitching fragmented sub-image features directly within the final encoder block. By reconstructing attention representations from fragmented sub-image features, OV-Stitcher enables global attention within the final encoder block, producing coherent context aggregation and spatially consistent, semantically aligned segmentation maps. Extensive evaluations across eight benchmarks demonstrate that OV-Stitcher establishes a scalable and effective solution for open-vocabulary segmentation, achieving a notable improvement in mean Intersection over Union(mIoU) from 48.7 to 50.7 compared with prior training-free baselines. --- ### Analysis of Search Heuristics in the Multi-Armed Bandit Setting Authors: Jasmin Brandt, Barbara Hammer, Timo Kötzing, Jurek Sander Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08109v1 We consider the classic Multi-Armed Bandit setting to understand the exploration/exploitation tradeoffs made by different search heuristics. Since many search heuristics work by comparing different options (in evolutionary algorithms called "individuals"; in the Bandit literature called "arms"), we work with the "Dueling Bandits" setting. In each iteration, a comparison between different arms can be made; in the binary stochastic setting, each arm has a fixed winning probability against any other arm. A Condorcet winner is any arm that beats every other arm with a probability strictly higher than $1/2$. We show that evolutionary algorithms are rather bad at identifying the Condorcet winner: Even if the Condorcet winner beats every other arm with a probability $1-p$, the (1+1) EA, in its stationary distribution, chooses the Condorcet winner only with constant probability if $p=Ω(1/n)$. By contrast, we show that a simple EDA (based on the Max-Min Ant System with iteration-best update) will choose the Condorcet winner in its maintained distribution with probability $1-Θ(p)$. As a remedy for the (1+1) EA, we show how repeated duels can significantly boost the probability of the Condorcet winner in the stationary distribution. --- ### EPIR: An Efficient Patch Tokenization, Integration and Representation Framework for Micro-expression Recognition Authors: Junbo Wang, Liangyu Fu, Yuke Li, Yining Zhu, Xuecheng Wu, Kun Hu Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08106v1 Micro-expression recognition can obtain the real emotion of the individual at the current moment. Although deep learning-based methods, especially Transformer-based methods, have achieved impressive results, these methods have high computational complexity due to the large number of tokens in the multi-head self-attention. In addition, the existing micro-expression datasets are small-scale, which makes it difficult for Transformer-based models to learn effective micro-expression representations. Therefore, we propose a novel Efficient Patch tokenization, Integration and Representation framework (EPIR), which can balance high recognition performance and low computational complexity. Specifically, we first propose a dual norm shifted tokenization (DNSPT) module to learn the spatial relationship between neighboring pixels in the face region, which is implemented by a refined spatial transformation and dual norm projection. Then, we propose a token integration module to integrate partial tokens among multiple cascaded Transformer blocks, thereby reducing the number of tokens without information loss. Furthermore, we design a discriminative token extractor, which first improves the attention in the Transformer block to reduce the unnecessary focus of the attention calculation on self-tokens, and uses the dynamic token selection module (DTSM) to select key tokens, thereby capturing more discriminative micro-expression representations. We conduct extensive experiments on four popular public datasets (i.e., CASME II, SAMM, SMIC, and CAS(ME)3. The experimental results show that our method achieves significant performance gains over the state-of-the-art methods, such as 9.6% improvement on the CAS(ME)$^3$ dataset in terms of UF1 and 4.58% improvement on the SMIC dataset in terms of UAR metric. --- ### Quantum Vision Theory Applied to Audio Classification for Deepfake Speech Detection Authors: Khalid Zaman, Melike Sah, Anuwat Chaiwongyenc, Cem Direkoglu Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08104v1 We propose Quantum Vision (QV) theory as a new perspective for deep learning-based audio classification, applied to deepfake speech detection. Inspired by particle-wave duality in quantum physics, QV theory is based on the idea that data can be represented not only in its observable, collapsed form, but also as information waves. In conventional deep learning, models are trained directly on these collapsed representations, such as images. In QV theory, inputs are first transformed into information waves using a QV block, and then fed into deep learning models for classification. QV-based models improve performance in image classification compared to their non-QV counterparts. What if QV theory is applied speech spectrograms for audio classification tasks? This is the motivation and novelty of the proposed approach. In this work, Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT), Mel-spectrograms, and Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) of speech signals are converted into information waves using the proposed QV block and used to train QV-based Convolutional Neural Networks (QV-CNN) and QV-based Vision Transformers (QV-ViT). Extensive experiments are conducted on the ASVSpoof dataset for deepfake speech classification. The results show that QV-CNN and QV-ViT consistently outperform standard CNN and ViT models, achieving higher classification accuracy and improved robustness in distinguishing genuine and spoofed speech. Moreover, the QV-CNN model using MFCC features achieves the best overall performance on the ASVspoof dataset, with an accuracy of 94.20% and an EER of 9.04%, while the QV-CNN with Mel-spectrograms attains the highest accuracy of 94.57%. These findings demonstrate that QV theory is an effective and promising approach for audio deepfake detection and opens new directions for quantum-inspired learning in audio perception tasks. --- ### Coordinate-Based Dual-Constrained Autoregressive Motion Generation Authors: Kang Ding, Hongsong Wang, Jie Gui, Liang Wang Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08088v1 Text-to-motion generation has attracted increasing attention in the research community recently, with potential applications in animation, virtual reality, robotics, and human-computer interaction. Diffusion and autoregressive models are two popular and parallel research directions for text-to-motion generation. However, diffusion models often suffer from error amplification during noise prediction, while autoregressive models exhibit mode collapse due to motion discretization. To address these limitations, we propose a flexible, high-fidelity, and semantically faithful text-to-motion framework, named Coordinate-based Dual-constrained Autoregressive Motion Generation (CDAMD). With motion coordinates as input, CDAMD follows the autoregressive paradigm and leverages diffusion-inspired multi-layer perceptrons to enhance the fidelity of predicted motions. Furthermore, a Dual-Constrained Causal Mask is introduced to guide autoregressive generation, where motion tokens act as priors and are concatenated with textual encodings. Since there is limited work on coordinate-based motion synthesis, we establish new benchmarks for both text-to-motion generation and motion editing. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both fidelity and semantic consistency on these benchmarks. --- ### DeepForestSound: a multi-species automatic detector for passive acoustic monitoring in African tropical forests, a case study in Kibale National Park Authors: Gabriel Dubus, Théau d'Audiffret, Claire Auger, Raphaël Cornette, Sylvain Haupert, Innocent Kasekendi, Raymond Katumba, Hugo Magaldi, Lise Pernel, Harold Rugonge, Jérôme Sueur, John Justice Tibesigwa et al. Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.SD, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08087v1 Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) is widely used for biodiversity assessment. Its application in African tropical forests is limited by scarce annotated data, reducing the performance of general-purpose ecoacoustic models on underrepresented taxa. In this study, we introduce DeepForestSound (DFS), a multi-species automatic detection model designed for PAM in African tropical forests. DFS relies on a semi-supervised pipeline combining clustering of unannotated recordings with manual validation, followed by supervised fine-tuning of an Audio Spectrogram Transformer (AST) using low-rank adaptation, which is compared to a frozen-backbone linear baseline (DFS-Linear). The framework supports the detection of multiple taxonomic groups, including birds, primates, and elephants, from long-term acoustic recordings. DFS was trained on acoustic data collected in the Sebitoli area, in Kibale National Park, Uganda, and evaluated on an independent dataset recorded two years later at different locations within the same forest. This evaluation therefore assesses generalization across time and recording sites within a single tropical forest ecosystem. Across 8 out of 12 taxons, DFS outperforms existing automatic detection tools, particularly for non-avian taxa, achieving average AP values of 0.964 for primates and 0.961 for elephants. Results further show that LoRA-based fine-tuning substantially outperforms linear probing across taxa. Overall, these results demonstrate that task-oriented, region-specific training substantially improves detection performance in acoustically complex tropical environments, and highlight the potential of DFS as a practical tool for biodiversity monitoring and conservation in African rainforests. --- ### DiffVC: A Non-autoregressive Framework Based on Diffusion Model for Video Captioning Authors: Junbo Wang, Liangyu Fu, Yuke Li, Yining Zhu, Ya Jing, Xuecheng Wu, Jiangbin Zheng Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08084v1 Current video captioning methods usually use an encoder-decoder structure to generate text autoregressively. However, autoregressive methods have inherent limitations such as slow generation speed and large cumulative error. Furthermore, the few non-autoregressive counterparts suffer from deficiencies in generation quality due to the lack of sufficient multimodal interaction modeling. Therefore, we propose a non-autoregressive framework based on Diffusion model for Video Captioning (DiffVC) to address these issues. Its parallel decoding can effectively solve the problems of generation speed and cumulative error. At the same time, our proposed discriminative conditional Diffusion Model can generate higher-quality textual descriptions. Specifically, we first encode the video into a visual representation. During training, Gaussian noise is added to the textual representation of the ground-truth caption. Then, a new textual representation is generated via the discriminative denoiser with the visual representation as a conditional constraint. Finally, we input the new textual representation into a non-autoregressive language model to generate captions. During inference, we directly sample noise from the Gaussian distribution for generation. Experiments on MSVD, MSR-VTT, and VATEX show that our method can outperform previous non-autoregressive methods and achieve comparable performance to autoregressive methods, e.g., it achieved a maximum improvement of 9.9 on the CIDEr and improvement of 2.6 on the B@4, while having faster generation speed. The source code will be available soon. --- ### AdaSpark: Adaptive Sparsity for Efficient Long-Video Understanding Authors: Handong Li, Zikang Liu, Longteng Guo, Tongtian Yue, Yepeng Tang, Xinxin Zhu, Chuanyang Zheng, Ziming Wang, Zhibin Wang, Jun Song, Cheng Yu, Bo Zheng et al. Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08077v1 Processing long-form videos with Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) is computationally prohibitive. Current efficiency methods often compromise fine-grained perception through irreversible information disposal or inhibit long-range temporal modeling via rigid, predefined sparse patterns. This paper introduces AdaSpark, an adaptive sparsity framework designed to address these limitations. AdaSpark first partitions video inputs into 3D spatio-temporal cubes. It then employs two co-designed, context-aware components: (1) Adaptive Cube-Selective Attention (AdaS-Attn), which adaptively selects a subset of relevant video cubes to attend for each query token, and (2) Adaptive Token-Selective FFN (AdaS-FFN), which selectively processes only the most salient tokens within each cube. An entropy-based (Top-p) selection mechanism adaptively allocates computational resources based on input complexity. Experiments demonstrate that AdaSpark significantly reduces computational load by up to 57% FLOPs while maintaining comparable performance to dense models and preserving fine-grained, long-range dependencies, as validated on challenging hour-scale video benchmarks. --- ### Dual-Pool Token-Budget Routing for Cost-Efficient and Reliable LLM Serving Authors: Xunzhuo Liu, Bowei He, Xue Liu, Andy Luo, Haichen Zhang, Huamin Chen Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08075v1 Production vLLM fleets typically provision each instance for the worst-case context length, leading to substantial KV-cache over-allocation and under-utilized concurrency. In practice, 80-95% of requests are short, yet are served under configurations optimized for long contexts, wasting 4-8$\times$ throughput capacity and triggering reliability issues such as OOM crashes, preemption, and request rejections. We identify a common root cause for these inefficiencies: configuration-traffic mismatch. We propose dual-pool token-budget routing, a lightweight dispatch mechanism that partitions a homogeneous fleet into two specialized pools: a high-throughput short-context pool and a high-capacity long-context pool. Each request is routed based on its estimated total token budget, computed using a per-category bytes-to-token ratio that is learned online via exponential moving average from usage.prompt_tokens feedback, eliminating the need for a tokenizer. We also develop a simple analytical model that predicts fleet-level cost savings from workload characteristics and measured throughput differences, enabling practitioners to estimate benefits prior to deployment. Evaluations on real-world traces from the Azure LLM Inference Dataset and LMSYS-Chat-1M, serving Llama-3-70B on A100 GPUs, show that our approach reduces GPU-hours by 31-42%, corresponding to \$2.86M annual savings at fleet scale, while lowering preemption rates by 5.4$\times$ and improving P99 TTFT by 6%. A case study with Qwen3-235B-A22B on AMD MI300X at 10,000 req/s projects \$15.4M in annual savings. The method incurs only O(1) dispatch overhead, adapts automatically to heterogeneous workloads, and composes seamlessly with existing optimizations such as PagedAttention, continuous batching, and prefill-decode disaggregation. --- ### DinoRADE: Full Spectral Radar-Camera Fusion with Vision Foundation Model Features for Multi-class Object Detection in Adverse Weather Authors: Christof Leitgeb, Thomas Puchleitner, Max Peter Ronecker, Daniel Watzenig Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08074v1 Reliable and weather-robust perception systems are essential for safe autonomous driving and typically employ multi-modal sensor configurations to achieve comprehensive environmental awareness. While recent automotive FMCW Radar-based approaches achieved remarkable performance on detection tasks in adverse weather conditions, they exhibited limitations in resolving fine-grained spatial details particularly critical for detecting smaller and vulnerable road users (VRUs). Furthermore, existing research has not adequately addressed VRU detection in adverse weather datasets such as K-Radar. We present DinoRADE, a Radar-centered detection pipeline that processes dense Radar tensors and aggregates vision features around transformed reference points in the camera perspective via deformable cross-attention. Vision features are provided by a DINOv3 Vision Foundation Model. We present a comprehensive performance evaluation on the K-Radar dataset in all weather conditions and are among the first to report detection performance individually for five object classes. Additionally, we compare our method with existing single-class detection approaches and outperform recent Radar-camera approaches by 12.1%. The code is available under https://github.com/chr-is-tof/RADE-Net. --- ### Tensor-Augmented Convolutional Neural Networks: Enhancing Expressivity with Generic Tensor Kernels Authors: Chia-Wei Hsing, Wei-Lin Tu Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CV, physics.comp-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08072v1 Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) excel at extracting local features hierarchically, but their performance in capturing complex correlations hinges heavily on deep architectures, which are usually computationally demanding and difficult to interpret. To address these issues, we propose a physically-guided shallow model: tensor-augmented CNN (TACNN), which replaces conventional convolution kernels with generic tensors to enhance representational capacity. This choice is motivated by the fact that an order-$N$ tensor naturally encodes an arbitrary quantum superposition state in the Hilbert space of dimension $d^N$, where $d$ is the local physical dimension, thus offering substantially richer expressivity. Furthermore, in our design the convolution output of each layer becomes a multilinear form capable of capturing high-order feature correlations, thereby equipping a shallow multilayer architecture with an expressive power competitive to that of deep CNNs. On the Fashion-MNIST benchmark, TACNN demonstrates clear advantages over conventional CNNs, achieving remarkable accuracies with only a few layers. In particular, a TACNN with only two convolution layers attains a test accuracy of 93.7$\%$, surpassing or matching considerably deeper models such as VGG-16 (93.5$\%$) and GoogLeNet (93.7$\%$). These findings highlight TACNN as a promising framework that strengthens model expressivity while preserving architectural simplicity, paving the way towards more interpretable and efficient deep learning models. --- ### AtlasOCR: Building the First Open-Source Darija OCR Model with Vision Language Models Authors: Imane Momayiz, Soufiane Ait Elaouad, Abdeljalil Elmajjodi, Haitame Bouanane Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08070v1 Darija, the Moroccan Arabic dialect, is rich in visual content yet lacks specialized Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools. This paper introduces AtlasOCR, the first open-source Darija OCR model built by fine-tuning a 3B parameter Vision Language Model (VLM). We detail our comprehensive approach, from curating a unique Darija-specific dataset leveraging both synthetic generation with our OCRSmith library and carefully sourced real-world data, to implementing efficient fine-tuning strategies. We utilize QLoRA and Unsloth for parameter-efficient training of Qwen2.5-VL 3B and present comprehensive ablation studies optimizing key hyperparameters. Our evaluation on the newly curated AtlasOCRBench and the established KITAB-Bench demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, challenging larger models and highlighting AtlasOCR's robustness and generalization capabilities for both Darija and standard Arabic OCR tasks. --- ### Brain3D: EEG-to-3D Decoding of Visual Representations via Multimodal Reasoning Authors: Emanuele Balloni, Emanuele Frontoni, Chiara Matti, Marina Paolanti, Roberto Pierdicca, Emiliano Santarnecchi Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08068v1 Decoding visual information from electroencephalography (EEG) has recently achieved promising results, primarily focusing on reconstructing two-dimensional (2D) images from brain activity. However, the reconstruction of three-dimensional (3D) representations remains largely unexplored. This limits the geometric understanding and reduces the applicability of neural decoding in different contexts. To address this gap, we propose Brain3D, a multimodal architecture for EEG-to-3D reconstruction based on EEG-to-image decoding. It progressively transforms neural representations into the 3D domain using geometry-aware generative reasoning. Our pipeline first produces visually grounded images from EEG signals, then employs a multimodal large language model to extract structured 3D-aware descriptions, which guide a diffusion-based generation stage whose outputs are finally converted into coherent 3D meshes via a single-image-to-3D model. By decomposing the problem into structured stages, the proposed approach avoids direct EEG-to-3D mappings and enables scalable brain-driven 3D generation. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation comparing the reconstructed 3D outputs against the original visual stimuli, assessing both semantic alignment and geometric fidelity. Experimental results demonstrate strong performance of the proposed architecture, achieving up to 85.4% 10-way Top-1 EEG decoding accuracy and 0.648 CLIPScore, supporting the feasibility of multimodal EEG-driven 3D reconstruction. --- ### Multimodal Latent Reasoning via Predictive Embeddings Authors: Ashutosh Adhikari, Mirella Lapata Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08065v1 Tool-augmented multimodal reasoning enables visual language models (VLMs) to improve perception by interacting with external tools (e.g., cropping, depth estimation). However, such approaches incur substantial inference overhead, require specialized supervision, and are prone to erroneous tool calls. We propose Pearl (Predictive Embedding Alignment for Reasoning in Latent space), a JEPA-inspired framework that learns from expert tool-use trajectories entirely in the latent space, eliminating the need for explicit tool invocation at inference time. Unlike reconstruction-based latent reasoning methods, which autoregressively generate latent tokens and suffer from training-inference mismatch and limited support for multi-step tool use, Pearl directly learns predictive embeddings from multimodal trajectories while preserving the standard vision-language generation pipeline: it is model-agnostic, simple to train, and naturally supports trajectories with multiple tool calls. Experiments across multiple perception benchmarks show that Pearl matches or outperforms standard supervised fine-tuning and reconstruction-based latent reasoning approaches. Furthermore, we provide empirical evidence that reconstruction-based methods primarily learn embeddings rather than image edits in latent space, motivating predictive embedding learning as a more principled alternative. --- ### ImplicitMemBench: Measuring Unconscious Behavioral Adaptation in Large Language Models Authors: Chonghan Qin, Xiachong Feng, Weitao Ma, Xiaocheng Feng, Lingpeng Kong Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08064v2 Existing memory benchmarks for LLM agents evaluate explicit recall of facts, yet overlook implicit memory where experience becomes automated behavior without conscious retrieval. This gap is critical: effective assistants must automatically apply learned procedures or avoid failed actions without explicit reminders. We introduce ImplicitMemBench, the first systematic benchmark evaluating implicit memory through three cognitively grounded constructs drawn from standard cognitive-science accounts of non-declarative memory: Procedural Memory (one-shot skill acquisition after interference), Priming (theme-driven bias via paired experimental/control instances), and Classical Conditioning (Conditioned Stimulus--Unconditioned Stimulus (CS--US) associations shaping first decisions). Our 300-item suite employs a unified Learning/Priming-Interfere-Test protocol with first-attempt scoring. Evaluation of 17 models reveals severe limitations: no model exceeds 66% overall, with top performers DeepSeek-R1 (65.3%), Qwen3-32B (64.1%), and GPT-5 (63.0%) far below human baselines. Analysis uncovers dramatic asymmetries (inhibition 17.6% vs. preference 75.0%) and universal bottlenecks requiring architectural innovations beyond parameter scaling. ImplicitMemBench reframes evaluation from "what agents recall" to "what they automatically enact". --- ### EEG2Vision: A Multimodal EEG-Based Framework for 2D Visual Reconstruction in Cognitive Neuroscience Authors: Emanuele Balloni, Emanuele Frontoni, Chiara Matti, Marina Paolanti, Roberto Pierdicca, Emiliano Santarnecchi Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08063v1 Reconstructing visual stimuli from non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) remains challenging due to its low spatial resolution and high noise, particularly under realistic low-density electrode configurations. To address this, we present EEG2Vision, a modular, end-to-end EEG-to-image framework that systematically evaluates reconstruction performance across different EEG resolutions (128, 64, 32, and 24 channels) and enhances visual quality through a prompt-guided post-reconstruction boosting mechanism. Starting from EEG-conditioned diffusion reconstruction, the boosting stage uses a multimodal large language model to extract semantic descriptions and leverages image-to-image diffusion to refine geometry and perceptual coherence while preserving EEG-grounded structure. Our experiments show that semantic decoding accuracy degrades significantly with channel reduction (e.g., 50-way Top-1 Acc from 89% to 38%), while reconstruction quality slight decreases (e.g., FID from 76.77 to 80.51). The proposed boosting consistently improves perceptual metrics across all configurations, achieving up to 9.71% IS gains in low-channel settings. A user study confirms the clear perceptual preference for boosted reconstructions. The proposed approach significantly boosts the feasibility of real-time brain-2-image applications using low-resolution EEG devices, potentially unlocking this type of applications outside laboratory settings. --- ### From Gaze to Guidance: Interpreting and Adapting to Users' Cognitive Needs with Multimodal Gaze-Aware AI Assistants Authors: Valdemar Danry, Javier Hernandez, Andrew Wilson, Pattie Maes, Judith Amores Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08062v1 Current LLM assistants are powerful at answering questions, but they have limited access to the behavioral context that reveals when and where a user is struggling. We present a gaze-grounded multimodal LLM assistant that uses egocentric video with gaze overlays to identify likely points of difficulty and target follow-up retrospective assistance. We instantiate this vision in a controlled study (n=36) comparing the gaze-aware AI assistant to a text-only LLM assistant. Compared to a conventional LLM assistant, the gaze-aware assistant was rated as significantly more accurate and personalized in its assessments of users' reading behavior and significantly improved people's ability to recall information. Users spoke significantly fewer words with the gaze-aware assistant, indicating more efficient interactions. Qualitative results underscored both perceived benefits in comprehension and challenges when interpretations of gaze behaviors were inaccurate. Our findings suggest that gaze-aware LLM assistants can reason about cognitive needs to improve cognitive outcomes of users. --- ### Governed Capability Evolution: Lifecycle-Time Compatibility Checking and Rollback for AI-Component-Based Systems, with a Proof-of-Concept Evaluation on Embodied Agents Authors: Xue Qin, Simin Luan, John See, Zeyd Boukhers, Cong Yang, Zhijun Li Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08059v6 Systems built from versioned AI components need lifecycle-time governance over how a new module version is admitted, monitored, and withdrawn. Established deployment patterns (canary, blue-green, feature flags, MLOps) monitor aggregate service-level signals of stateless services, not the stateful, policy-constrained runtimes that drive AI components. We formulate governed capability evolution as a software-lifecycle problem and ask whether staged upgrade governance prevents unsafe activations where practice-adapted canary and blue-green deployment do not, and at what cost. We propose four compatibility checks (interface, policy, behavioral, recovery) and a seven-stage pipeline (validation, sandbox, shadow, gated activation, monitoring, rollback, audit). A reference prototype is evaluated in a behavioral simulation of an embodied manipulation stack; a PyBullet backend replicates the strategy ordering. Upgrade candidates come from a seeded fault-operator generator, including out-of-taxonomy probes, and thresholds are fixed on a disjoint development set. Across five strategies, five upgrade rounds and 15 seeds, naive upgrade reaches 73.3% final-round success but activates unsafe versions in 74.7% of rounds. Canary and blue-green adaptations keep comparable success yet still admit faulty versions in 61.3% and 64.0% of rounds, because aggregate success hides policy and recovery regressions. Governed upgrade admits no in-taxonomy fault and one out-of-taxonomy probe in 75 rounds, at a 4.6-point success cost (Holm-adjusted p<=0.024 against all three baselines); the full pre-activation stack detects 97.3-100% of in-taxonomy faults across deployment profiles, and rollback restores verified operation in 72.4% of drift scenarios. Bounded-window aggregate-success gating proved insufficient against these fault operators; staged governance closes the gap at a modest, tunable cost. --- ### Governed Capability Evolution: Lifecycle-Time Compatibility Checking and Rollback for AI-Component-Based Systems, with Embodied Agents as Case Study Authors: Xue Qin, Simin Luan, John See, Zeyd Boukhers, Cong Yang, Zhijun Li Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08059v5 Software systems built from versioned AI components increasingly need lifecycle-time governance: when a capability module evolves into a new version, the hosting system must decide whether the new version may be activated safely, under what deployment conditions it should run, how it must be monitored, and when it should be rolled back. Existing software-deployment patterns (canary release, blue-green, feature flags, and MLOps pipelines) address parts of this loop but were designed for stateless web services rather than for stateful, policy-constrained runtimes that drive AI components in the field. We formulate governed capability evolution as a first-class software-lifecycle problem for AI-component-based systems and propose a staged upgrade framework in which every new capability version is treated as a governed deployment candidate rather than an immediately executable replacement. The framework introduces four upgrade compatibility checks (interface, policy, behavioral, recovery) and organizes them into a seven-stage pipeline (candidate validation, sandbox evaluation, shadow deployment, gated activation, online monitoring, rollback, audit). We implement a reference prototype on a PyBullet manipulation testbed with ROS 2 middleware and evaluate it over 6 rounds of capability upgrade with 15 random seeds. Naive upgrade achieves 72.9% task success but drives unsafe activation to 60% by the final round; governed upgrade retains comparable success (67.4%) while maintaining zero unsafe activations across all rounds (Wilcoxon p=0.003). Shadow deployment reveals 40% of upgrade regressions invisible to sandbox evaluation alone, and rollback succeeds in 79.8% of post-activation drift scenarios. --- ### Automating aggregation strategy selection in federated learning Authors: Dian S. Y. Pang, Endrias Y. Ergetu, Eric Topham, Ahmed E. Fetit Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08056v1 Federated Learning enables collaborative model training without centralising data, but its effectiveness varies with the selection of the aggregation strategy. This choice is non-trivial, as performance varies widely across datasets, heterogeneity levels, and compute constraints. We present an end-to-end framework that automates, streamlines, and adapts aggregation strategy selection for federated learning. The framework operates in two modes: a single-trial mode, where large language models infer suitable strategies from user-provided or automatically detected data characteristics, and a multi-trial mode, where a lightweight genetic search efficiently explores alternatives under constrained budgets. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets show that our approach enhances robustness and generalisation under non-IID conditions while reducing the need for manual intervention. Overall, this work advances towards accessible and adaptive federated learning by automating one of its most critical design decisions, the choice of an aggregation strategy. --- ### Efficient Provably Secure Linguistic Steganography via Range Coding Authors: Ruiyi Yan, Yugo Murawaki Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08052v2 Linguistic steganography involves embedding secret messages within seemingly innocuous texts to enable covert communication. Provable security, which is a long-standing goal and key motivation, has been extended to language-model-based steganography. Previous provably secure approaches have achieved perfect imperceptibility, measured by zero Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, but at the expense of embedding capacity. In this paper, we attempt to directly use a classic entropy coding method (range coding) to achieve secure steganography, and then propose an efficient and provably secure linguistic steganographic method with a rotation mechanism. Experiments across various language models show that our method achieves around 100% entropy utilization (embedding efficiency) for embedding capacity, outperforming the existing baseline methods. Moreover, it achieves high embedding speeds (up to 1554.66 bits/s on GPT-2). The code is available at github.com/ryehr/RRC_steganography. --- ### ABMAMBA: Multimodal Large Language Model with Aligned Hierarchical Bidirectional Scan for Efficient Video Captioning Authors: Daichi Yashima, Shuhei Kurita, Yusuke Oda, Shuntaro Suzuki, Seitaro Otsuki, Komei Sugiura Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08050v1 In this study, we focus on video captioning by fully open multimodal large language models (MLLMs). The comprehension of visual sequences is challenging because of their intricate temporal dependencies and substantial sequence length. The core attention mechanisms of existing Transformer-based approaches scale quadratically with the sequence length, making them computationally prohibitive. To address these limitations, we propose Aligned Hierarchical Bidirectional Scan Mamba (ABMamba), a fully open MLLM with linear computational complexity that enables the scalable processing of video sequences. ABMamba extends Deep State Space Models as its language backbone, replacing the costly quadratic attention mechanisms, and employs a novel Aligned Hierarchical Bidirectional Scan module that processes videos across multiple temporal resolutions. On standard video captioning benchmarks such as VATEX and MSR-VTT, ABMamba demonstrates competitive performance compared to typical MLLMs while achieving approximately three times higher throughput. --- ### Guiding a Diffusion Model by Swapping Its Tokens Authors: Weijia Zhang, Yuehao Liu, Shanyan Guan, Wu Ran, Yanhao Ge, Wei Li, Chao Ma Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08048v1 Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) is a widely used inference-time technique to boost the image quality of diffusion models. Yet, its reliance on text conditions prevents its use in unconditional generation. We propose a simple method to enable CFG-like guidance for both conditional and unconditional generation. The key idea is to generate a perturbed prediction via simple token swap operations, and use the direction between it and the clean prediction to steer sampling towards higher-fidelity distributions. In practice, we swap pairs of most semantically dissimilar token latents in either spatial or channel dimensions. Unlike existing methods that apply perturbation in a global or less constrained manner, our approach selectively exchanges and recomposes token latents, allowing finer control over perturbation and its influence on generated samples. Experiments on MS-COCO 2014, MS-COCO 2017, and ImageNet datasets demonstrate that the proposed Self-Swap Guidance (SSG), when applied to popular diffusion models, outperforms previous condition-free methods in image fidelity and prompt alignment under different set-ups. Its fine-grained perturbation granularity also improves robustness, reducing side-effects across a wider range of perturbation strengths. Overall, SSG extends CFG to a broader scope of applications including both conditional and unconditional generation, and can be readily inserted into any diffusion model as a plug-in to gain immediate improvements. --- ### Guaranteeing Knowledge Integration with Joint Decoding for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Authors: Zhengyi Zhao, Shubo Zhang, Zezhong Wang, Yuxi Zhang, Huimin Wang, Yutian Zhao, Yefeng Zheng, Binyang Li, Kam-Fai Wong, Xian Wu Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08046v2 Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) significantly enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by providing access to external knowledge. However, current research primarily focuses on retrieval quality, often overlooking the critical ''integration bottleneck'': even when relevant documents are retrieved, LLMs frequently fail to utilize them effectively due to conflicts with their internal parametric knowledge. In this paper, we argue that implicitly resolving this conflict in a single generation pass is suboptimal. We introduce GuarantRAG, a framework that explicitly decouples reasoning from evidence integration. First, we generate an ''Inner-Answer'' based solely on parametric knowledge to capture the model's reasoning flow. Second, to guarantee faithful evidence extraction, we generate a ''Refer-Answer'' using a novel Contrastive DPO objective. This objective treats the parametric Inner-Answer as a negative constraint and the retrieved documents as positive ground truth, forcing the model to suppress internal hallucinations in favor of external evidence during this phase. Finally, rather than naive concatenation or using the DPO trained model directly, we propose a joint decoding mechanism that dynamically fuses the logical coherence of the Inner-Answer with the factual precision of the Refer-Answer at the token level. Experiments on five QA benchmarks demonstrate that GuarantRAG improves accuracy by up to 12.1% and reduces hallucinations by 16.3% compared to standard and dynamic RAG baselines. --- ### Adapting Foundation Models for Annotation-Efficient Adnexal Mass Segmentation in Cine Images Authors: Francesca Fati, Alberto Rota, Adriana V. Gregory, Anna Catozzo, Maria C. Giuliano, Mrinal Dhar, Luigi De Vitis, Annie T. Packard, Francesco Multinu, Elena De Momi, Carrie L. Langstraat, Timothy L. Kline Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08045v1 Adnexal mass evaluation via ultrasound is a challenging clinical task, often hindered by subjective interpretation and significant inter-observer variability. While automated segmentation is a foundational step for quantitative risk assessment, traditional fully supervised convolutional architectures frequently require large amounts of pixel-level annotations and struggle with domain shifts common in medical imaging. In this work, we propose a label-efficient segmentation framework that leverages the robust semantic priors of a pretrained DINOv3 foundational vision transformer backbone. By integrating this backbone with a Dense Prediction Transformer (DPT)-style decoder, our model hierarchically reassembles multi-scale features to combine global semantic representations with fine-grained spatial details. Evaluated on a clinical dataset of 7,777 annotated frames from 112 patients, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to established fully supervised baselines, including U-Net, U-Net++, DeepLabV3, and MAnet. Specifically, we obtain a Dice score of 0.945 and improved boundary adherence, reducing the 95th-percentile Hausdorff Distance by 11.4% relative to the strongest convolutional baseline. Furthermore, we conduct an extensive efficiency analysis demonstrating that our DINOv3-based approach retains significantly higher performance under data starvation regimes, maintaining strong results even when trained on only 25% of the data. These results suggest that leveraging large-scale self-supervised foundations provides a promising and data-efficient solution for medical image segmentation in data-constrained clinical environments. Project Repository: https://github.com/FrancescaFati/MESA --- ### 3DrawAgent: Teaching LLM to Draw in 3D with Early Contrastive Experience Authors: Hongcan Xiao, Xinyue Xiao, Yilin Wang, Yue Zhang, Yonggang Qi Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08042v1 Sketching in 3D space enables expressive reasoning about shape, structure, and spatial relationships, yet generating 3D sketches through natural language remains a major challenge. In this work, we introduce 3DrawAgent, a training-free, language-driven framework for 3D sketch generation that leverages large language models (LLMs) to sequentially draw 3D Bezier curves under geometric feedback. Unlike prior 2D sketch agents, our method introduces a relative experience optimization strategy that adapts the recently proposed Group Reward Policy Optimization (GRPO) paradigm. Instead of relying on explicit ground-truth supervision, we construct pairwise comparisons among generated sketches, with each pair consisting of a relatively better and a worse result based on CLIP-based perceptual rewards and LLM-based fine-grained qualitative assessment. These experiences are then used to iteratively refine the prior knowledge of 3D drawing, enabling black-box reinforcement of the model's 3D awareness. This design allows our model to self-improve its spatial understanding and drawing quality without parameter updates. Experiments show that 3DrawAgent can generate complex and coherent 3D Bezier sketches from diverse textual prompts, exhibit emergent geometric reasoning, and generalize to novel shapes, establishing a new paradigm for advancing the field of training-free 3D sketch intelligence. --- ### LINE: LLM-based Iterative Neuron Explanations for Vision Models Authors: Vladimir Zaigrajew, Michał Piechota, Gaspar Sekula, Paweł Gelar, Przemysław Biecek Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08039v2 Interpreting individual neurons in deep neural networks is a crucial step towards understanding their complex decision-making processes and ensuring AI safety. Despite recent progress in neuron labeling, existing methods often limit the search space to predefined concept vocabularies or produce overly specific descriptions that fail to capture higher-order, global concepts. We introduce LINE, a novel, training-free iterative approach tailored for open-vocabulary concept labeling in vision models. Operating in a strictly black-box setting, LINE leverages a large language model and a text-to-image generator to iteratively propose and refine concepts in a closed loop, guided by activation history. LINE achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple model architectures, yielding AUC improvements of up to 0.11 on ImageNet and 0.05 on Places365, while discovering, on average, 27% of new concepts missed by predefined vocabularies. Beyond identifying the top concept, LINE provides a complete generation history, enabling polysemanticity evaluation and producing visual explanations that rival gradient-dependent activation maximization methods. The source code will be made available soon. --- ### Beyond Mamba: Enhancing State-space Models with Deformable Dilated Convolutions for Multi-scale Traffic Object Detection Authors: Jun Li, Yingying Shi, Zhixuan Ruan, Nan Guo, Jianhua Xu Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08038v1 In a real-world traffic scenario, varying-scale objects are usually distributed in a cluttered background, which poses great challenges to accurate detection. Although current Mamba-based methods can efficiently model long-range dependencies, they still struggle to capture small objects with abundant local details, which hinders joint modeling of local structures and global semantics. Moreover, state-space models exhibit limited hierarchical feature representation and weak cross-scale interaction due to flat sequential modeling and insufficient spatial inductive biases, leading to sub-optimal performance in complex scenes. To address these issues, we propose a Mamba with Deformable Dilated Convolutions Network (MDDCNet) for accurate traffic object detection in this study. In MDDCNet, a well-designed hybrid backbone with successive Multi-Scale Deformable Dilated Convolution (MSDDC) blocks and Mamba blocks enables hierarchical feature representation from local details to global semantics. Meanwhile, a Channel-Enhanced Feed-Forward Network (CE-FFN) is further devised to overcome the limited channel interaction capability of conventional feed-forward networks, whilst a Mamba-based Attention-Aggregating Feature Pyramid Network (A^2FPN) is constructed to achieve enhanced multi-scale feature fusion and interaction. Extensive experimental results on public benchmark and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over various advanced detectors. The code is available at https://github.com/Bettermea/MDDCNet. --- ### PrivFedTalk: Privacy-Aware Federated Diffusion with Identity-Stable Adapters for Personalized Talking-Head Generation Authors: Soumya Mazumdar, Vineet Kumar Rakesh, Tapas Samanta Published: 2026-04-09 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08037v1 Talking-head generation has advanced rapidly with diffusion-based generative models, but training usually depends on centralized face-video and speech datasets, raising major privacy concerns. The problem is more acute for personalized talking-head generation, where identity-specific data are highly sensitive and often cannot be pooled across users or devices. PrivFedTalk is presented as a privacy-aware federated framework for personalized talking-head generation that combines conditional latent diffusion with parameter-efficient identity adaptation. A shared diffusion backbone is trained across clients, while each client learns lightweight LoRA identity adapters from local private audio-visual data, avoiding raw data sharing and reducing communication cost. To address heterogeneous client distributions, Identity-Stable Federated Aggregation (ISFA) weights client updates using privacy-safe scalar reliability signals computed from on-device identity consistency and temporal stability estimates. Temporal-Denoising Consistency (TDC) regularization is introduced to reduce inter-frame drift, flicker, and identity drift during federated denoising. To limit update-side privacy risk, secure aggregation and client-level differential privacy are applied to adapter updates. The implementation supports both low-memory GPU execution and multi-GPU client-parallel training on heterogeneous shared hardware. Comparative experiments on the present setup across multiple training and aggregation conditions with PrivFedTalk, FedAvg, and FedProx show stable federated optimization and successful end-to-end training and evaluation under constrained resources. The results support the feasibility of privacy-aware personalized talking-head training in federated environments, while suggesting that stronger component-wise, privacy-utility, and qualitative claims need further standardized evaluation. ---