# Research Papers — 2026-04 · bundle page 200 of 233 > Full-text markdown of papers #9951–10000 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/200 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-04/page/199.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-04/page/201.md) ### Don't Blink: Evidence Collapse during Multimodal Reasoning Authors: Suresh Raghu, Satwik Pandey Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04207v1 Reasoning VLMs can become more accurate while progressively losing visual grounding as they think. This creates task-conditional danger zones where low-entropy predictions are confident but ungrounded, a failure mode text-only monitoring cannot detect. Evaluating three reasoning VLMs on MathVista, HallusionBench, and MMMU_Pro, we find a pervasive evidence-collapse phenomenon: attention to annotated evidence regions drops substantially, often losing over half of evidence mass, as reasoning unfolds. Full-response entropy is the most reliable text-only uncertainty signal under cross-dataset transfer, yet adding vision features with a single global linear rule is brittle and often degrades transfer. An entropy-vision interaction model reveals a task-conditional regime: lowentropy, visually disengaged predictions are hazardous on sustained visual-reference tasks but benign on symbolic tasks. Using this structure, a targeted vision veto reduces selective risk by up to 1.9 percentage points at 90% coverage, while avoiding degradations where disengagement is expected. The results support task-aware multimodal monitoring for safe deployment under distribution shift. --- ### How Does "English (US)" Become the Default? Triangulating Structural Bias Towards American English Across the LLM Pipeline Authors: Mir Tafseer Nayeem, Davood Rafiei Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.ET, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04204v2 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in educational, professional, and public infrastructure, yet widely used platforms expose "English (US)" as a primary English setting despite the global diversity of English. We ask: How does "English (US)" become the default? We study this question as structural bias, examining how geopolitical histories of data curation, digital dominance, and linguistic standardization intersect with the LLM development pipeline. Using British English as a controlled reference, we construct a curated resource of 1,813 matched American English (AmE)--British English (BrE) variants and introduce DiAlign, a dynamic, training-free method for estimating regional alignment from distributional evidence. We triangulate the AmE preference across data exposure --> representation --> generation, jointly examining pretraining and post-training data, tokenizer behavior and provenance, model prediction cost, and generated language across developer countries, prompt conditions, domains and sources, linguistic categories, and registers. AmE is consistently favored across all six audited pretraining corpora and 21 post-training datasets, is generally represented more compactly by tokenizers, and receives lower prediction cost. It also remains the dominant generation default under neutral English prompting; British-English prompting shifts this preference toward BrE but does not consistently eliminate the AmE default. To our knowledge, this is the first rigorous pipeline-wide study of structural bias across major phases of LLM development. Our findings show that contemporary LLMs privilege AmE as the de facto norm, raising concerns about linguistic homogenization, epistemic injustice, and inequity in global AI deployment, while providing a rigorous basis for targeted component-level intervention. --- ### Which English Do LLMs Prefer? Triangulating Structural Bias Towards American English in Foundation Models Authors: Mir Tafseer Nayeem, Davood Rafiei Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.ET, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04204v1 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains, yet they expose only limited language settings, most notably "English (US)," despite the global diversity and colonial history of English. Through a postcolonial framing to explain the broader significance, we investigate how geopolitical histories of data curation, digital dominance, and linguistic standardization shape the LLM development pipeline. Focusing on two dominant standard varieties, American English (AmE) and British English (BrE), we construct a curated corpus of 1,813 AmE--BrE variants and introduce DiAlign, a dynamic, training-free method for estimating dialectal alignment using distributional evidence. We operationalize structural bias by triangulating evidence across three stages: (i) audits of six major pretraining corpora reveal systematic skew toward AmE, (ii) tokenizer analyses show that BrE forms incur higher segmentation costs, and (iii) generative evaluations show a persistent AmE preference in model outputs. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic and multi-faceted examination of dialectal asymmetries in standard English varieties across the phases of LLM development. We find that contemporary LLMs privilege AmE as the de facto norm, raising concerns about linguistic homogenization, epistemic injustice, and inequity in global AI deployment, while motivating practical steps toward more dialectally inclusive language technologies. --- ### ClawArena: Benchmarking AI Agents in Evolving Information Environments Authors: Haonian Ji, Kaiwen Xiong, Siwei Han, Peng Xia, Shi Qiu, Yiyang Zhou, Jiaqi Liu, Jinlong Li, Bingzhou Li, Zeyu Zheng, Cihang Xie, Huaxiu Yao Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04202v2 AI agents deployed as persistent assistants must maintain correct beliefs as their information environment evolves. In practice, evidence is scattered across heterogeneous sources that often contradict one another, new information can invalidate earlier conclusions, and user preferences surface through corrections rather than explicit instructions. Existing benchmarks largely assume static, single-authority settings and do not evaluate whether agents can keep up with this complexity. We introduce ClawArena, a benchmark for evaluating AI agents in evolving information environments. Each scenario maintains a complete hidden ground truth while exposing the agent only to noisy, partial, and sometimes contradictory traces across multi-channel sessions, workspace files, and staged updates. Evaluation is organized around three coupled challenges: multi-source conflict reasoning, dynamic belief revision, and implicit personalization, whose interactions yield a 14-category question taxonomy. Two question formats, multi-choice (set-selection) and shell-based executable checks, test both reasoning and workspace grounding. ClawArena comprises 12 multi-turn scenarios spanning 337 evaluation rounds with 45 dynamic updates, evaluated across five agent frameworks and 18 language models from proprietary, community-accessible, and self-hosted sources. Experiments show that model capability accounts for a 29-point score range across models while framework design accounts for up to a 24-point range, that MetaClaw's skill overlay reliably improves score without degrading accuracy, and that belief revision difficulty is determined by update design strategy rather than update volume. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/ClawArena. --- ### Which Leakage Types Matter? A Quantitative Landscape Across 2,047 Benchmark Datasets Authors: Simon Roth Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04199v2 Twenty-eight within-subject counterfactual experiments across 2,047 iid tabular datasets, plus a boundary experiment on 129 temporal datasets, measure the severity of four data leakage classes in machine learning. Class I (estimation: fitting scalers on full data) is negligible: all nine conditions produce $|ΔAUC| \leq 0.005$. Class II (selection: peeking, seed cherry-picking) is substantial: the measured effect is consistent with about 90% noise exploitation inflating reported scores. Class III (memorization) scales with model capacity: $d_z$ = 0.37 (Naive Bayes) to 1.11 (Decision Tree) at 10% duplication. Class IV (boundary) is invisible under random cross-validation. Within this iid tabular regime, the textbook emphasis is inverted: normalization leakage matters least; selection leakage at practical dataset sizes matters most. --- ### DriveVA: Video Action Models are Zero-Shot Drivers Authors: Mengmeng Liu, Diankun Zhang, Jiuming Liu, Jianfeng Cui, Hongwei Xie, Guang Chen, Hangjun Ye, Michael Ying Yang, Francesco Nex, Hao Cheng Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04198v2 Generalization is a central challenge in autonomous driving, as real-world deployment requires robust performance under unseen scenarios, sensor domains, and environmental conditions. Recent world-model-based planning methods have shown strong capabilities in scene understanding and multi-modal future prediction, yet their generalization across datasets and sensor configurations remains limited. In addition, their loosely coupled planning paradigm often leads to poor video-trajectory consistency during visual imagination. To overcome these limitations, we propose DriveVA, a novel autonomous driving world model that jointly decodes future visual forecasts and action sequences in a shared latent generative process. DriveVA inherits rich priors on motion dynamics and physical plausibility from well-pretrained large-scale video generation models to capture continuous spatiotemporal evolution and causal interaction patterns. To this end, DriveVA employs a DiT-based decoder to jointly predict future action sequences (trajectories) and videos, enabling tighter alignment between planning and scene evolution. We also introduce a video continuation strategy to strengthen long-duration rollout consistency. DriveVA achieves an impressive PDM-based planning performance of 90.9 PDM score on the NAVSIM benchmark. Extensive experiments also demonstrate the zero-shot capability and cross-domain generalization of DriveVA, which reduces average L2 error and collision rate by 78.9% and 83.3% on nuScenes and 52.5% and 52.4% on the Bench2Drive built on CARLA v2 compared with the state-of-the-art world-model-based planner. --- ### Robots Need Some Education: On the complexity of learning in evolutionary robotics Authors: Fuda van Diggelen Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04196v1 Evolutionary Robotics and Robot Learning are two fields in robotics that aim to automatically optimize robot designs. The key difference between them lies in what is being optimized and the time scale involved. Evolutionary Robotics is a field that applies evolutionary computation techniques to evolve the morphologies or controllers, or both. Robot Learning, on the other hand, involves any learning technique aimed at optimizing a robot's controller in a given morphology. In terms of time scales, evolution occurs across multiple generations, whereas learning takes place within the `lifespan' of an individual robot. Integrating Robot Learning with Evolutionary Robotics requires the careful design of suitable learning algorithms in the context of evolutionary robotics. The effects of introducing learning into the evolutionary process are not well-understood and can thus be tricky. This thesis investigates these intricacies and presents several learning algorithms developed for an Evolutionary Robotics context. --- ### Stable and Privacy-Preserving Synthetic Educational Data with Empirical Marginals: A Copula-Based Approach Authors: Gabriel Diaz Ramos, Lorenzo Luzi, Debshila Basu Mallick, Richard Baraniuk Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04195v1 To advance Educational Data Mining (EDM) within strict privacy-protecting regulatory frameworks, researchers must develop methods that enable data-driven analysis while protecting sensitive student information. Synthetic data generation is one such approach, enabling the release of statistically generated samples instead of real student records; however, existing deep learning and parametric generators often distort marginal distributions and degrade under iterative regeneration, leading to distribution drift and progressive loss of distributional support that compromise reliability. In response, we introduce the Non-Parametric Gaussian Copula (NPGC), a plug-and-play synthesis method that replaces deep learning and parametric optimization with empirical statistical anchoring to preserve the observed marginal distributions while modeling dependencies through a copula framework. NPGC integrates Differential Privacy (DP) at both the marginal and correlation levels, supports heterogeneous variable types, and treats missing data as an explicit state to retain informative absence patterns. We evaluate NPGC against deep learning and parametric baselines on five benchmark datasets and demonstrate that it remains stable across multiple regeneration cycles and achieves competitive downstream performance at substantially lower computational cost. We further validate NPGC through deployment in a real-world online learning platform, demonstrating its practicality for privacy-preserving research. --- ### PATHFINDER: Multi-objective discovery in structural and spectral spaces Authors: Kamyar Barakati, Boris N. Slautin, Utkarsh Pratiush, Hiroshi Funakubo, Sergei V. Kalinin Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cond-mat.mtrl-sci, cs.AI, cs.LG, physics.data-an arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04194v1 Automated decision-making is becoming key for automated characterization including electron and scanning probe microscopies and nano indentation. Most machine learning driven workflows optimize a single predefined objective and tend to converge prematurely on familiar responses, overlooking rare but scientifically important states. More broadly, the challenge is not only where to measure next, but how to coordinate exploration across structural, spectral, and measurement spaces under finite experimental budgets while balancing target-driven optimization with novelty discovery. Here we introduce PATHFINDER, a framework for autonomous microscopy that combines novelty driven exploration with optimization, helping the system discover more diverse and useful representations across structural, spectral, and measurement spaces. By combining latent space representations of local structure, surrogate modeling of functional response, and Pareto-based acquisition, the framework selects measurements that balance novelty discovery in feature and object space and are informative and experimentally actionable. Benchmarked on pre acquired STEM EELS data and realized experimentally in scanning probe microscopy of ferroelectric materials, this approach expands the accessible structure property landscape and avoids collapse onto a single apparent optimum. These results point to a new mode of autonomous microscopy that is not only optimization-driven, but also discovery-oriented, broad in its search, and responsive to human guidance. --- ### Graphic-Design-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating AI on Graphic Design Tasks Authors: Adrienne Deganutti, Elad Hirsch, Haonan Zhu, Jaejung Seol, Purvanshi Mehta Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04192v2 We introduce GraphicDesignBench (GDB), the first comprehensive benchmark suite designed specifically to evaluate AI models on the full breadth of professional graphic design tasks. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on natural-image understanding or generic text-to-image synthesis, GDB targets the unique challenges of professional design work: translating communicative intent into structured layouts, rendering typographically faithful text, manipulating layered compositions, producing valid vector graphics, and reasoning about animation. The suite comprises 50 tasks organized along five axes: layout, typography, infographics, template & design semantics and animation, each evaluated under both understanding and generation settings, and grounded in real-world design templates drawn from the LICA layered-composition dataset. We evaluate a set of frontier closed-source models using a standardized metric taxonomy covering spatial accuracy, perceptual quality, text fidelity, semantic alignment, and structural validity. Our results reveal that current models fall short on the core challenges of professional design: spatial reasoning over complex layouts, faithful vector code generation, fine-grained typographic perception, and temporal decomposition of animations remain largely unsolved. While high-level semantic understanding is within reach, the gap widens sharply as tasks demand precision, structure, and compositional awareness. GDB provides a rigorous, reproducible testbed for tracking progress toward AI systems that can function as capable design collaborators. The full evaluation framework is publicly available. --- ### Schema-Aware Planning and Hybrid Knowledge Toolset for Reliable Knowledge Graph Triple Verification Authors: Xinyan Ma, Xianhao Ou, Weihao Zhang, Shixin Jiang, Runxuan Liu, Dandan Tu, Lei Chen, Ming Liu, Bing Qin Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04190v1 Knowledge Graphs (KGs) serve as a critical foundation for AI systems, yet their automated construction inevitably introduces noise, compromising data trustworthiness. Existing triple verification methods, based on graph embeddings or language models, often suffer from single-source bias by relying on either internal structural constraints or external semantic evidence, and usually follow a static inference paradigm. As a result, they struggle with complex or long-tail facts and provide limited interpretability. To address these limitations, we propose SHARP (Schema-Hybrid Agent for Reliable Prediction), a training-free autonomous agent that reformulates triple verification as a dynamic process of strategic planning, active investigation, and evidential reasoning. Specifically, SHARP combines a Memory-Augmented Mechanism with Schema-Aware Strategic Planning to improve reasoning stability, and employs an enhanced ReAct loop with a Hybrid Knowledge Toolset to dynamically integrate internal KG structure and external textual evidence for cross-verification. Experiments on FB15K-237 and Wikidata5M-Ind show that SHARP significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines, achieving accuracy gains of 4.2% and 12.9%, respectively. Moreover, SHARP provides transparent, fact-based evidence chains for each judgment, demonstrating strong interpretability and robustness for complex verification tasks. --- ### AURA: Always-On Understanding and Real-Time Assistance via Video Streams Authors: Xudong Lu, Yang Bo, Jinpeng Chen, Shuhan Li, Xintong Guo, Huankang Guan, Fang Liu, Dunyuan Xu, Peiwen Sun, Heyang Sun, Rui Liu, Hongsheng Li Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04184v1 Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) have achieved strong performance on many video understanding tasks, but most existing systems remain offline and are not well-suited for live video streams that require continuous observation and timely response. Recent streaming VideoLLMs have made progress, yet current approaches often rely on decoupled trigger-response pipelines or are limited to captioning-style narration, reducing their effectiveness for open-ended question answering and long-horizon interaction. We propose AURA (Always-On Understanding and Real-Time Assistance), an end-to-end streaming visual interaction framework that enables a unified VideoLLM to continuously process video streams and support both real-time question answering and proactive responses. AURA integrates context management, data construction, training objectives, and deployment optimization for stable long-horizon streaming interaction. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on streaming benchmarks and supports a real-time demo system with ASR and TTS running at 2 FPS on two 80G accelerators. We release the AURA model together with a real-time inference framework to facilitate future research. --- ### Scale-Aware Vision-Language Adaptation for Extreme Far-Distance Video Person Re-identification Authors: Ashwat Rajbhandari, Bharatesh Chakravarthi Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04183v1 Extreme far-distance video person re-identification (ReID) is particularly challenging due to scale compression, resolution degradation, motion blur, and aerial-ground viewpoint mismatch. As camera altitude and subject distance increase, models trained on close-range imagery degrade significantly. In this work, we investigate how large-scale vision-language models can be adapted to operate reliably under these conditions. Starting from a CLIP-based baseline, we upgrade the visual backbone from ViT-B/16 to ViT-L/14 and introduce backbone-aware selective fine-tuning to stabilize adaptation of the larger transformer. To address noisy and low-resolution tracklets, we incorporate a lightweight temporal attention pooling mechanism that suppresses degraded frames and emphasizes informative observations. We retain adapter-based and prompt-conditioned cross-view learning to mitigate aerial-ground domain shifts, and further refine retrieval using improved optimization and k-reciprocal re-ranking. Experiments on the DetReIDX stress-test benchmark show that our approach achieves mAP scores of 46.69 (A2G), 41.23 (G2A), and 22.98 (A2A), corresponding to an overall mAP of 35.73. These results show that large-scale vision-language backbones, when combined with stability-focused adaptation, significantly enhance robustness in extreme far-distance video person ReID. --- ### Comparative reversal learning reveals rigid adaptation in LLMs under non-stationary uncertainty Authors: Haomiaomiao Wang, Tomás E Ward, Lili Zhang Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04182v1 Non-stationary environments require agents to revise previously learned action values when contingencies change. We treat large language models (LLMs) as sequential decision policies in a two-option probabilistic reversal-learning task with three latent states and switch events triggered by either a performance criterion or timeout. We compare a deterministic fixed transition cycle to a stochastic random schedule that increases volatility, and evaluate DeepSeek-V3.2, Gemini-3, and GPT-5.2, with human data as a behavioural reference. Across models, win-stay was near ceiling while lose-shift was markedly attenuated, revealing asymmetric use of positive versus negative evidence. DeepSeek-V3.2 showed extreme perseveration after reversals and weak acquisition, whereas Gemini-3 and GPT-5.2 adapted more rapidly but still remained less loss-sensitive than humans. Random transitions amplified reversal-specific persistence across LLMs yet did not uniformly reduce total wins, demonstrating that high aggregate payoff can coexist with rigid adaptation. Hierarchical reinforcement-learning (RL) fits indicate dissociable mechanisms: rigidity can arise from weak loss learning, inflated policy determinism, or value polarisation via counterfactual suppression. These results motivate reversal-sensitive diagnostics and volatility-aware models for evaluating LLMs under non-stationary uncertainty. --- ### Position: Logical Soundness is not a Reliable Criterion for Neurosymbolic Fact-Checking with LLMs Authors: Jason Chan, Robert Gaizauskas, Zhixue Zhao Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04177v2 As large language models (LLMs) are increasing integrated into fact-checking pipelines, formal logic is often proposed as a rigorous means by which to mitigate bias, errors and hallucinations in these models' outputs. For example, some neurosymbolic systems verify claims by using LLMs to translate natural language into logical formulae and then checking whether the proposed claims are logically sound, i.e. whether they can be validly derived from premises that are verified to be true. We argue that such approaches structurally fail to detect misleading claims due to systematic divergences between conclusions that are logically sound and inferences that humans typically make and accept. Drawing on studies in cognitive science and pragmatics, we present a typology of cases in which logically sound conclusions systematically elicit human inferences that are unsupported by the underlying premises. Consequently, we advocate for a complementary approach: leveraging human-like reasoning tendencies of LLMs as a feature rather than a bug, and using these models to validate the outputs of formal components in neurosymbolic systems against potentially misleading conclusions. --- ### Uncertainty-Aware Foundation Models for Clinical Data Authors: Qian Zhou, Yuanyun Zhang, Shi Li Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04175v1 Healthcare foundation models have largely followed paradigms from natural language processing and computer vision, emphasizing large scale pretraining and deterministic representations over heterogeneous clinical data. However, clinical observations are inherently incomplete, reflecting sparse, irregular, and modality dependent measurements of an underlying physiologic state. In this work, we propose a framework for uncertainty aware foundation modeling that represents each patient not as a point embedding, but as a distribution over plausible latent states. By learning set valued representations and enforcing consistency across partial views of the same patient, the model captures what is invariantly inferable while explicitly encoding epistemic uncertainty. We integrate this formulation with multimodal encoders and scalable self supervised objectives, combining reconstruction, contrastive alignment, and distributional regularization. Across diverse clinical tasks, our approach improves predictive performance, robustness under missing data, and uncertainty calibration relative to strong baselines. These results suggest that modeling what is not observed rather than only what is constitutes a critical inductive bias for healthcare foundation models. --- ### CoALFake: Collaborative Active Learning with Human-LLM Co-Annotation for Cross-Domain Fake News Detection Authors: Esma Aïmeur, Gilles Brassard, Dorsaf Sallami Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04174v1 The proliferation of fake news across diverse domains highlights critical limitations in current detection systems, which often exhibit narrow domain specificity and poor generalization. Existing cross-domain approaches face two key challenges: (1) reliance on labelled data, which is frequently unavailable and resource intensive to acquire and (2) information loss caused by rigid domain categorization or neglect of domain-specific features. To address these issues, we propose CoALFake, a novel approach for cross-domain fake news detection that integrates Human-Large Language Model (LLM) co-annotation with domain-aware Active Learning (AL). Our method employs LLMs for scalable, low-cost annotation while maintaining human oversight to ensure label reliability. By integrating domain embedding techniques, the CoALFake dynamically captures both domain specific nuances and cross-domain patterns, enabling the training of a domain agnostic model. Furthermore, a domain-aware sampling strategy optimizes sample acquisition by prioritizing diverse domain coverage. Experimental results across multiple datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently outperforms various baselines. Our results emphasize that human-LLM co-annotation is a highly cost-effective approach that delivers excellent performance. Evaluations across several datasets show that CoALFake consistently outperforms a range of existing baselines, even with minimal human oversight. --- ### GENFIG1: Visual Summaries of Scholarly Work as a Challenge for Vision-Language Models Authors: Yaohan Guan, Pristina Wang, Najim Dehak, Alan Yuille, Jieneng Chen, Daniel Khashabi Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04172v1 In many science papers, "Figure 1" serves as the primary visual summary of the core research idea. These figures are visually simple yet conceptually rich, often requiring significant effort and iteration by human authors to get right, highlighting the difficulty of science visual communication. With this intuition, we introduce GENFIG1, a benchmark for generative AI models (e.g., Vision-Language Models). GENFIG1 evaluates models for their ability to produce figures that clearly express and motivate the central idea of a paper (title, abstract, introduction, and figure caption) as input. Solving GENFIG1 requires more than producing visually appealing graphics: the task entails reasoning for text-to-image generation that couples scientific understanding with visual synthesis. Specifically, models must (i) comprehend and grasp the technical concepts of the paper, (ii) identify the most salient ones, and (iii) design a coherent and aesthetically effective graphic that conveys those concepts visually and is faithful to the input. We curate the benchmark from papers published at top deep-learning conferences, apply stringent quality control, and introduce an automatic evaluation metric that correlates well with expert human judgments. We evaluate a suite of representative models on GENFIG1 and demonstrate that the task presents significant challenges, even for the best-performing systems. We hope this benchmark serves as a foundation for future progress in multimodal AI. --- ### A Model of Understanding in Deep Learning Systems Authors: David Peter Wallis Freeborn Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04171v1 I propose a model of systematic understanding, suitable for machine learning systems. On this account, an agent understands a property of a target system when it contains an adequate internal model that tracks real regularities, is coupled to the target by stable bridge principles, and supports reliable prediction. I argue that contemporary deep learning systems often can and do achieve such understanding. However they generally fall short of the ideal of scientific understanding: the understanding is symbolically misaligned with the target system, not explicitly reductive, and only weakly unifying. I label this the Fractured Understanding Hypothesis. --- ### Incomplete Multi-View Multi-Label Classification via Shared Codebook and Fused-Teacher Self-Distillation Authors: Xu Yan, Jun Yin, Shiliang Sun, Minghua Wan Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04170v1 Although multi-view multi-label learning has been extensively studied, research on the dual-missing scenario, where both views and labels are incomplete, remains largely unexplored. Existing methods mainly rely on contrastive learning or information bottleneck theory to learn consistent representations under missing-view conditions, but loss-based alignment without explicit structural constraints limits the ability to capture stable and discriminative shared semantics. To address this issue, we introduce a more structured mechanism for consistent representation learning: we learn discrete consistent representations through a multi-view shared codebook and cross-view reconstruction, which naturally align different views within the limited shared codebook embeddings and reduce feature redundancy. At the decision level, we design a weight estimation method that evaluates the ability of each view to preserve label correlation structures, assigning weights accordingly to enhance the quality of the fused prediction. In addition, we introduce a fused-teacher self-distillation framework, where the fused prediction guides the training of view-specific classifiers and feeds the global knowledge back into the single-view branches, thereby enhancing the generalization ability of the model under missing-label conditions. The effectiveness of our proposed method is thoroughly demonstrated through extensive comparative experiments with advanced methods on five benchmark datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/xuy11/SCSD. --- ### A Semi-Automated Annotation Workflow for Paediatric Histopathology Reports Using Small Language Models Authors: Avish Vijayaraghavan, Jaskaran Singh Kawatra, Sebin Sabu, Jonny Sheldon, Will Poulett, Alex Eze, Daniel Key, John Booth, Shiren Patel, Jonny Pearson, Dan Schofield, Jonathan Hope et al. Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.CL, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04168v2 Electronic Patient Record (EPR) systems contain valuable clinical information, but much of it is trapped in unstructured text, limiting its use for research and decision-making. Large language models can extract such information but require substantial computational resources to run locally, and sending sensitive clinical data to cloud-based services, even when deidentified, raises significant patient privacy concerns. In this study, we develop a resource-efficient semi-automated annotation workflow using small language models (SLMs) to extract structured information from unstructured EPR data, focusing on paediatric histopathology reports. As a proof-of-concept, we apply the workflow to paediatric renal biopsy reports, a domain chosen for its constrained diagnostic scope and well-defined underlying biology. We develop the workflow iteratively with clinical oversight across three meetings, manually annotating 400 reports from a dataset of 2,111 at Great Ormond Street Hospital as a gold standard, while developing an automated information extraction approach using SLMs. We frame extraction as a Question-Answering task grounded by clinician-guided entity guidelines and few-shot examples, evaluating five instruction-tuned SLMs with a disagreement modelling framework to prioritise reports for clinical review. Gemma 2 2B achieves the highest accuracy at 84.3%, outperforming off-the-shelf models including spaCy (74.3%), BioBERT-SQuAD (62.3%), RoBERTa-SQuAD (59.7%), and GLiNER (60.2%). Entity guidelines improved performance by 7-19% over the zero-shot baseline, and few-shot examples by 6-38%, though their benefits do not compound when combined. These results demonstrate that SLMs can extract structured information from specialised clinical domains on CPU-only infrastructure with minimal clinician involvement. Our code is available at https://github.com/gosh-dre/nlp_renal_biopsy. --- ### Hierarchical Co-Embedding of Font Shapes and Impression Tags Authors: Yugo Kubota, Kaito Shiku, Seiichi Uchida Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04158v1 Font shapes can evoke a wide range of impressions, but the correspondence between fonts and impression descriptions is not one-to-one: some impressions are broadly compatible with diverse styles, whereas others strongly constrain the set of plausible fonts. We refer to this graded constraint strength as style specificity. In this paper, we propose a hyperbolic co-embedding framework that models font--impression correspondence through entailment rather than simple paired alignment. Font images and impression descriptions, represented as single tags or tag sets, are embedded in a shared hyperbolic space with two complementary entailment constraints: impression-to-font entailment and low-to-high style-specificity entailment among impressions. This formulation induces a radial structure in which low style-specificity impressions lie near the origin and high style-specificity impressions lie farther away, yielding an interpretable geometric measure of how strongly an impression constrains font style. Experiments on the MyFonts dataset demonstrate improved bidirectional retrieval over strong one-to-one baselines. In addition, traversal and tag-level analyses show that the learned space captures a coherent progression from ambiguous to more style-specific impressions and provides a meaningful, data-driven quantification of style specificity. --- ### Readable Minds: Emergent Theory-of-Mind-Like Behavior in LLM Poker Agents Authors: Hsieh-Ting Lin, Tsung-Yu Hou Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04157v1 Theory of Mind (ToM) -- the ability to model others' mental states -- is fundamental to human social cognition. Whether large language models (LLMs) can develop ToM has been tested exclusively through static vignettes, leaving open whether ToM-like reasoning can emerge through dynamic interaction. Here we report that autonomous LLM agents playing extended sessions of Texas Hold'em poker progressively develop sophisticated opponent models, but only when equipped with persistent memory. In a 2x2 factorial design crossing memory (present/absent) with domain knowledge (present/absent), each with five replications (N = 20 experiments, ~6,000 agent-hand observations), we find that memory is both necessary and sufficient for ToM-like behavior emergence (Cliff's delta = 1.0, p = 0.008). Agents with memory reach ToM Level 3-5 (predictive to recursive modeling), while agents without memory remain at Level 0 across all replications. Strategic deception grounded in opponent models occurs exclusively in memory-equipped conditions (Fisher's exact p < 0.001). Domain expertise does not gate ToM-like behavior emergence but enhances its application: agents without poker knowledge develop equivalent ToM levels but less precise deception (p = 0.004). Agents with ToM deviate from game-theoretically optimal play (67% vs. 79% TAG adherence, delta = -1.0, p = 0.008) to exploit specific opponents, mirroring expert human play. All mental models are expressed in natural language and directly readable, providing a transparent window into AI social cognition. Cross-model validation with GPT-4o yields weighted Cohen's kappa = 0.81 (almost perfect agreement). These findings demonstrate that functional ToM-like behavior can emerge from interaction dynamics alone, without explicit training or prompting, with implications for understanding artificial social intelligence and biological social cognition. --- ### The Geometric Alignment Tax: Tokenization vs. Continuous Geometry in Scientific Foundation Models Authors: Prashant C. Raju Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.IT, q-bio.QM, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04155v1 Foundation models for biology and physics optimize predictive accuracy, but their internal representations systematically fail to preserve the continuous geometry of the systems they model. We identify the root cause: the Geometric Alignment Tax, an intrinsic cost of forcing continuous manifolds through discrete categorical bottlenecks. Controlled ablations on synthetic dynamical systems demonstrate that replacing cross-entropy with a continuous head on an identical encoder reduces geometric distortion by up to 8.5x, while learned codebooks exhibit a non-monotonic double bind where finer quantization worsens geometry despite improving reconstruction. Under continuous objectives, three architectures differ by 1.3x; under discrete tokenization, they diverge by 3,000x. Evaluating 14 biological foundation models with rate-distortion theory and MINE, we identify three failure regimes: Local-Global Decoupling, Representational Compression, and Geometric Vacuity. A controlled experiment confirms that Evo 2's reverse-complement robustness on real DNA reflects conserved sequence composition, not learned symmetry. No model achieves simultaneously low distortion, high mutual information, and global coherence. --- ### Non-Equilibrium Stochastic Dynamics as a Unified Framework for Insight and Repetitive Learning: A Kramers Escape Approach to Continual Learning Authors: Gunn Kim Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cond-mat.stat-mech, cond-mat.dis-nn, cs.LG, q-bio.NC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04154v1 Continual learning in artificial neural networks is fundamentally limited by the stability--plasticity dilemma: systems that retain prior knowledge tend to resist acquiring new knowledge, and vice versa. Existing approaches, most notably elastic weight consolidation~(EWC), address this empirically without a physical account of why plasticity eventually collapses as tasks accumulate. Separately, the distinction between sudden insight and gradual skill acquisition through repetitive practice has lacked a unified theoretical description. Here, we show that both problems admit a common resolution within non-equilibrium statistical physics. We model the state of a learning system as a particle evolving under Langevin dynamics on a double-well energy landscape, with the noise amplitude governed by a time-dependent effective temperature $T(t)$. The probability density obeys a Fokker--Planck equation, and transitions between metastable states are governed by the Kramers escape rate $k = (ω_0ω_b/2π)\,e^{-ΔE/T}$. We make two contributions. First, we identify the EWC penalty term as an energy barrier whose height grows linearly with the number of accumulated tasks, yielding an exponential collapse of the transition rate predicted analytically and confirmed numerically. Second, we show that insight and repetitive learning correspond to two qualitatively distinct temperature protocols within the same Fokker--Planck equation: insight events produce transient spikes in $T(t)$ that drive rapid barrier crossing, whereas repetitive practice operates at a modestly elevated but fixed temperature, achieving transitions through sustained stochastic diffusion. These results establish a physically grounded framework for understanding plasticity and its failure in continual learning systems, and suggest principled design criteria for adaptive noise schedules in artificial intelligence. --- ### Uncertainty-Aware Test-Time Adaptation for Cross-Region Spatio-Temporal Fusion of Land Surface Temperature Authors: Sofiane Bouaziz, Adel Hafiane, Raphael Canals, Rachid Nedjai Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04153v1 Deep learning models have shown great promise in diverse remote sensing applications. However, they often struggle to generalize across geographic regions unseen during training due to domain shifts. Domain shifts occur when data distributions differ between the training region and new target regions, due to variations in land cover, climate, and environmental conditions. Test-time adaptation (TTA) has emerged as a solution to such shifts, but existing methods are primarily designed for classification and are not directly applicable to regression tasks. In this work, we address the regression task of spatio-temporal fusion (STF) for land surface temperature estimation. We propose an uncertainty-aware TTA framework that updates only the fusion module of a pre-trained STF model, guided by epistemic uncertainty, land use and land cover consistency, and bias correction, without requiring source data or labeled target samples. Experiments on four target regions with diverse climates, namely Rome in Italy, Cairo in Egypt, Madrid in Spain, and Montpellier in France, show consistent improvements in RMSE and MAE for a pre-trained model in Orléans, France. The average gains are 24.2% and 27.9%, respectively, even with limited unlabeled target data and only 10 TTA epochs. --- ### Solar-VLM: Multimodal Vision-Language Models for Augmented Solar Power Forecasting Authors: Hang Fan, Haoran Pei, Runze Liang, Weican Liu, Long Cheng, Wei Wei Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04145v1 Photovoltaic (PV) power forecasting plays a critical role in power system dispatch and market participation. Because PV generation is highly sensitive to weather conditions and cloud motion, accurate forecasting requires effective modeling of complex spatiotemporal dependencies across multiple information sources. Although recent studies have advanced AI-based forecasting methods, most fail to fuse temporal observations, satellite imagery, and textual weather information in a unified framework. This paper proposes Solar-VLM, a large-language-model-driven framework for multimodal PV power forecasting. First, modality-specific encoders are developed to extract complementary features from heterogeneous inputs. The time-series encoder adopts a patch-based design to capture temporal patterns from multivariate observations at each site. The visual encoder, built upon a Qwen-based vision backbone, extracts cloud-cover information from satellite images. The text encoder distills historical weather characteristics from textual descriptions. Second, to capture spatial dependencies across geographically distributed PV stations, a cross-site feature fusion mechanism is introduced. Specifically, a Graph Learner models inter-station correlations through a graph attention network constructed over a K-nearest-neighbor (KNN) graph, while a cross-site attention module further facilitates adaptive information exchange among sites. Finally, experiments conducted on data from eight PV stations in a northern province of China demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Our proposed model is publicly available at https://github.com/rhp413/Solar-VLM. --- ### Many Preferences, Few Policies: Towards Scalable Language Model Personalization Authors: Cheol Woo Kim, Jai Moondra, Roozbeh Nahavandi, Andrew Perrault, Milind Tambe, Swati Gupta Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04144v2 The holy grail of LLM personalization is a single LLM for each user, perfectly aligned with that user's preferences. However, maintaining a separate LLM per user is impractical due to constraints on compute, memory, and system complexity. We address this challenge by developing a principled method for selecting a small portfolio of LLMs that captures representative behaviors across heterogeneous users. We model user preferences across multiple traits (e.g., safety, humor, brevity) through a multi-dimensional weight vector. Given reward functions across these dimensions, our algorithm PALM (Portfolio of Aligned LLMs) generates a small portfolio of LLMs such that, for any weight vector, the portfolio contains a near-optimal LLM for the corresponding scalarized objective. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first result that provides theoretical guarantees on both the size and approximation quality of LLM portfolios for personalization. It characterizes the trade-off between system cost and personalization, as well as the diversity of LLMs required to cover the landscape of user preferences. We provide empirical results that validate these guarantees and demonstrate greater output diversity over common baselines. --- ### OP-GRPO: Efficient Off-Policy GRPO for Flow-Matching Models Authors: Liyu Zhang, Kehan Li, Tingrui Han, Tao Zhao, Yuxuan Sheng, Shibo He, Chao Li Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04142v1 Post training via GRPO has demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in improving the generation quality of flow-matching models. However, GRPO suffers from inherently low sample efficiency due to its on-policy training paradigm. To address this limitation, we present OP-GRPO, the first Off-Policy GRPO framework tailored for flow-matching models. First, we actively select high-quality trajectories and adaptively incorporate them into a replay buffer for reuse in subsequent training iterations. Second, to mitigate the distribution shift introduced by off-policy samples, we propose a sequence-level importance sampling correction that preserves the integrity of GRPO's clipping mechanism while ensuring stable policy updates. Third, we theoretically and empirically show that late denoising steps yield ill-conditioned off-policy ratios, and mitigate this by truncating trajectories at late steps. Across image and video generation benchmarks, OP-GRPO achieves comparable or superior performance to Flow-GRPO with only 34.2% of the training steps on average, yielding substantial gains in training efficiency while maintaining generation quality. --- ### Learning Dexterous Grasping from Sparse Taxonomy Guidance Authors: Juhan Park, Taerim Yoon, Seungmin Kim, Joong-Gil Kim, Wontae Ye, Jeongeun Park, Yoonbyung Chai, Geonwoo Cho, Geunwoo Cho, Dohyeong Kim, Kyungjae Lee, Yong-Jae Kim et al. Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04138v2 Dexterous manipulation requires planning a grasp configuration suited to the object and task, which is then executed through coordinated multi-finger control. However, specifying grasp plans with dense pose or contact targets for every object and task is impractical. Meanwhile, end-to-end reinforcement learning from task rewards alone lacks controllability, making it difficult for users to intervene when failures occur. To this end, we present GRIT, a two-stage framework that learns dexterous control from sparse taxonomy guidance. GRIT first predicts a taxonomy-based grasp specification from the scene and task context. Conditioned on this sparse command, a policy generates continuous finger motions that accomplish the task while preserving the intended grasp structure. Our result shows that certain grasp taxonomies are more effective for specific object geometries. By leveraging this relationship, GRIT improves generalization to novel objects over baselines and achieves an overall success rate of 87.9%. Moreover, real-world experiments demonstrate controllability, enabling grasp strategies to be adjusted through high-level taxonomy selection based on object geometry and task intent. --- ### Rethinking Exposure Correction for Spatially Non-uniform Degradation Authors: Ao Li, Jiawei Sun, Le Dong, Zhenyu Wang, Weisheng Dong Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04136v1 Real-world exposure correction is fundamentally challenged by spatially non-uniform degradations, where diverse exposure errors frequently coexist within a single image. However, existing exposure correction methods are still largely developed under a predominantly uniform assumption. Architecturally, they typically rely on globally aggregated modulation signals that capture only the overall exposure trend. From the optimization perspective, conventional reconstruction losses are usually derived under a shared global scale, thus overlooking the spatially varying correction demands across regions. To address these limitations, we propose a new exposure correction paradigm explicitly designed for spatial non-uniformity. Specifically, we introduce a Spatial Signal Encoder to predict spatially adaptive modulation weights, which are used to guide multiple look-up tables for image transformation, together with an HSL-based compensation module for improved color fidelity. Beyond the architectural design, we propose an uncertainty-inspired non-uniform loss that dynamically allocates the optimization focus based on local restoration uncertainties, better matching the heterogeneous nature of real-world exposure errors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior qualitative and quantitative performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/FALALAS/rethinkingEC. --- ### NTIRE 2026 3D Restoration and Reconstruction in Real-world Adverse Conditions: RealX3D Challenge Results Authors: Shuhong Liu, Chenyu Bao, Ziteng Cui, Xuangeng Chu, Bin Ren, Lin Gu, Xiang Chen, Mingrui Li, Long Ma, Marcos V. Conde, Radu Timofte, Yun Liu et al. Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04135v2 This paper presents a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2026 3D Restoration and Reconstruction (3DRR) Challenge, detailing the proposed methods and results. The challenge seeks to identify robust reconstruction pipelines that are robust under real-world adverse conditions, specifically extreme low-light and smoke-degraded environments, as captured by our RealX3D benchmark. A total of 279 participants registered for the competition, of whom 33 teams submitted valid results. We thoroughly evaluate the submitted approaches against state-of-the-art baselines, revealing significant progress in 3D reconstruction under adverse conditions. Our analysis highlights shared design principles among top-performing methods and provides insights into effective strategies for handling 3D scene degradation. --- ### Learning Robust Visual Features in Computed Tomography Enables Efficient Transfer Learning for Clinical Tasks Authors: Rubén Moreno-Aguado, Alba Magallón, Victor Moreno, Yingying Fang, Guang Yang Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04133v1 There is substantial interest in developing artificial intelligence systems to support radiologists across tasks ranging from segmentation to report generation. Existing computed tomography (CT) foundation models have largely focused on building generalist vision-language systems capable of tasks such as question answering and report generation. However, training reliable vision-language systems requires paired image-text data at a scale that remains unavailable in CT. Moreover, adapting the underlying visual representations to downstream tasks typically requires partial or full backbone fine-tuning, a computationally demanding process inaccessible to many research groups. Instead, foundation models should prioritise learning robust visual representations that enable efficient transfer to new tasks with minimal labelled data and without backbone fine-tuning. We present VoxelFM, a 3D CT foundation model trained with self-distillation using the DINO framework, which learns semantically rich features without language supervision. We evaluated VoxelFM across seven categories of clinically relevant downstream tasks using frozen backbone representations with lightweight probes: classification, regression, survival analysis, instance retrieval, localisation, segmentation, and report generation. VoxelFM matched or outperformed four existing CT foundation models across all task categories. Despite receiving no language supervision during pre-training, VoxelFM surpassed models explicitly trained with language-alignment objectives, including on report generation. Our results indicate that current CT foundation models perform significantly better as feature extractors for lightweight probes rather than as vision encoders for vision-language models. Model weights and training code are publicly available. --- ### Profile-Then-Reason: Bounded Semantic Complexity for Tool-Augmented Language Agents Authors: Paulo Akira F. Enabe Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04131v1 Large language model agents that use external tools are often implemented through reactive execution, in which reasoning is repeatedly recomputed after each observation, increasing latency and sensitivity to error propagation. This work introduces Profile--Then--Reason (PTR), a bounded execution framework for structured tool-augmented reasoning, in which a language model first synthesizes an explicit workflow, deterministic or guarded operators execute that workflow, a verifier evaluates the resulting trace, and repair is invoked only when the original workflow is no longer reliable. A mathematical formulation is developed in which the full pipeline is expressed as a composition of profile, routing, execution, verification, repair, and reasoning operators; under bounded repair, the number of language-model calls is restricted to two in the nominal case and three in the worst case. Experiments against a ReAct baseline on six benchmarks and four language models show that PTR achieves the pairwise exact-match advantage in 16 of 24 configurations. The results indicate that PTR is particularly effective on retrieval-centered and decomposition-heavy tasks, whereas reactive execution remains preferable when success depends on substantial online adaptation. --- ### Primal-Dual Methods for Nonsmooth Nonconvex Optimization with Orthogonality Constraints Authors: Linglingzhi Zhu, Wentao Ding, Shangyuan Liu, Anthony Man-Cho So Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG, math.NA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04130v1 Recent advancements in data science have significantly elevated the importance of orthogonally constrained optimization problems. The Riemannian approach has become a popular technique for addressing these problems due to the advantageous computational and analytical properties of the Stiefel manifold. Nonetheless, the interplay of nonsmoothness alongside orthogonality constraints introduces substantial challenges to current Riemannian methods, including scalability, parallelizability, complicated subproblems, and cumulative numerical errors that threaten feasibility. In this paper, we take a retraction-free primal-dual approach and propose a linearized smoothing augmented Lagrangian method specifically designed for nonsmooth and nonconvex optimization with orthogonality constraints. Our proposed method is single-loop and free of subproblem solving. We establish its iteration complexity of $O(ε^{-3})$ for finding $ε$-KKT points, matching the best-known results in the Riemannian optimization literature. Additionally, by invoking the standard Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz (KL) property, we demonstrate asymptotic sequential convergence of the proposed algorithm. Numerical experiments on both smooth and nonsmooth orthogonal constrained problems demonstrate the superior computational efficiency and scalability of the proposed method compared with state-of-the-art algorithms. --- ### Measuring Robustness of Speech Recognition from MEG Signals Under Distribution Shift Authors: Sheng-You Chien, Bo-Yi Mao, Yi-Ning Chang, Po-Chih Kuo Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.SD, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04129v1 This study investigates robust speech-related decoding from non-invasive MEG signals using the LibriBrain phoneme-classification benchmark from the 2025 PNPL competition. We compare residual convolutional neural networks (CNNs), an STFT-based CNN, and a CNN--Transformer hybrid, while also examining the effects of group averaging, label balancing, repeated grouping, normalization strategies, and data augmentation. Across our in-house implementations, preprocessing and data-configuration choices matter more than additional architectural complexity, among which instance normalization emerges as the most influential modification for generalization. The strongest of our own models, a CNN with group averaging, label balancing, repeated grouping, and instance normalization, achieves 60.95% F1-macro on the test split, compared with 39.53% for the plain CNN baseline. However, most of our models, without instance normalization, show substantial validation-to-test degradation, indicating that distribution shift induced by different normalization statistics is a major obstacle to generalization in our experiments. By contrast, MEGConformer maintains 64.09% F1-macro on both validation and test, and saliency-map analysis is qualitatively consistent with this contrast: weaker models exhibit more concentrated or repetitive phoneme-sensitive patterns across splits, whereas MEGConformer appears more distributed. Overall, the results suggest that improving the reliability of non-invasive phoneme decoding will likely require better handling of normalization-related distribution shift while also addressing the challenge of single-trial decoding. --- ### SARES-DEIM: Sparse Mixture-of-Experts Meets DETR for Robust SAR Ship Detection Authors: Fenghao Song, Shaojing Yang, Xi Zhou Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04127v1 Ship detection in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery is fundamentally challenged by inherent coherent speckle noise, complex coastal clutter, and the prevalence of small-scale targets. Conventional detectors, primarily designed for optical imagery, often exhibit limited robustness against SAR-specific degradation and suffer from the loss of fine-grained ship signatures during spatial downsampling. To address these limitations, we propose SARES-DEIM, a domain-aware detection framework grounded in the DEtection TRansformer (DETR) paradigm. Central to our approach is SARESMoE (SAR-aware Expert Selection Mixture-of-Experts), a module leveraging a sparse gating mechanism to selectively route features toward specialized frequency and wavelet experts. This sparsely-activated architecture effectively filters speckle noise and semantic clutter while maintaining high computational efficiency. Furthermore, we introduce the Space-to-Depth Enhancement Pyramid (SDEP) neck to preserve high-resolution spatial cues from shallow stages, significantly improving the localization of small targets. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of SARES-DEIM. Notably, on the challenging HRSID dataset, our model achieves a mAP50:95 of 76.4% and a mAP50 of 93.8%, outperforming state-of-the-art YOLO-series and specialized SAR detectors. --- ### NetSecBed: A Container-Native Testbed for Reproducible Cybersecurity Experimentation Authors: Leonardo Bitzki, Diego Kreutz, Tiago Heinrich, Douglas Fideles, Leandro Bertholdo, Silvio Quincozes, Angelo Diniz Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.NI, cs.PF arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04121v1 Cybersecurity research increasingly depends on reproducible evidence, such as traffic traces, logs, and labeled datasets, yet most public datasets remain static and offer limited support for controlled re-execution and traceability, especially in heterogeneous multi-protocol environments. This paper presents NetSecBed, a container-native, scenario-oriented testbed for reproducible generation of network traffic evidence and execution artifacts under controlled conditions, particularly suitable for IoT, IIoT, and pervasive multi-protocol environments. The framework integrates 60 attack scenarios, 9 target services, and benign traffic generators as single-purpose containers, enabling plug-and-play extensibility and traceability through declarative specifications. Its pipeline automates parametrized execution, packet capture, log collection, service probing, feature extraction, and dataset consolidation. The main contribution is a repeatable, auditable, and extensible framework for cybersecurity experimentation that reduces operational bias and supports continuous dataset generation. --- ### Shorter, but Still Trustworthy? An Empirical Study of Chain-of-Thought Compression Authors: Lingjie Zeng, Xiaofan Chen, Yanbo Wang, Xiuying Chen Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04120v2 Long chain-of-thought (Long-CoT) reasoning models have motivated a growing body of work on compressing reasoning traces to reduce inference cost, yet existing evaluations focus almost exclusively on task accuracy and token savings. Trustworthiness properties, whether acquired or reinforced through post-training, are encoded in the same parameter space that compression modifies. This means preserving accuracy does not, a priori, guarantee preserving trustworthiness. We conduct the first systematic empirical study of how CoT compression affects model trustworthiness, evaluating multiple models of different scales along three dimensions: safety, hallucination resistance, and multilingual robustness. Under controlled comparisons, we find that CoT compression frequently introduces trustworthiness regressions and that different methods exhibit markedly different degradation profiles across dimensions. To enable fair comparison across bases, we propose a normalized efficiency score for each dimension that reveals how naïve scalar metrics can obscure trustworthiness trade-offs. As an existence proof, we further introduce an alignment-aware DPO variant that reduces CoT length by 19.3\% on reasoning benchmarks with substantially smaller trustworthiness loss. Our findings suggest that CoT compression should be optimized not only for efficiency but also for trustworthiness, treating both as equally important design constraints. --- ### Shorter, but Still Trustworthy? An Empirical Study of Chain-of-Thought Compression Authors: Lingjie Zeng, Xiaofan Chen, Yanbo Wang, Xiuying Chen Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04120v1 Long chain-of-thought (Long-CoT) reasoning models have motivated a growing body of work on compressing reasoning traces to reduce inference cost, yet existing evaluations focus almost exclusively on task accuracy and token savings. Trustworthiness properties, whether acquired or reinforced through post-training, are encoded in the same parameter space that compression modifies. This means preserving accuracy does not, a priori, guarantee preserving trustworthiness. We conduct the first systematic empirical study of how CoT compression affects model trustworthiness, evaluating multiple models of different scales along three dimensions: safety, hallucination resistance, and multilingual robustness. Under controlled comparisons, we find that CoT compression frequently introduces trustworthiness regressions and that different methods exhibit markedly different degradation profiles across dimensions. To enable fair comparison across bases, we propose a normalized efficiency score for each dimension that reveals how naïve scalar metrics can obscure trustworthiness trade-offs. As an existence proof, we further introduce an alignment-aware DPO variant that reduces CoT length by 19.3\% on reasoning benchmarks with substantially smaller trustworthiness loss. Our findings suggest that CoT compression should be optimized not only for efficiency but also for trustworthiness, treating both as equally important design constraints. --- ### Efficient Onboard Spacecraft Pose Estimation with Event Cameras and Neuromorphic Hardware Authors: Arunkumar Rathinam, Jules Lecomte, Jost Reelsen, Gregor Lenz, Axel von Arnim, Djamila Aouada Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04117v1 Reliable relative pose estimation is a key enabler for autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations, yet space imagery is notoriously challenging due to extreme illumination, high contrast, and fast target motion. Event cameras provide asynchronous, change-driven measurements that can remain informative when frame-based imagery saturates or blurs, while neuromorphic processors can exploit sparse activations for low-latency, energy-efficient inferences. This paper presents a spacecraft 6-DoF pose-estimation pipeline that couples event-based vision with the BrainChip Akida neuromorphic processor. Using the SPADES dataset, we train compact MobileNet-style keypoint regression networks on lightweight event-frame representations, apply quantization-aware training (8/4-bit), and convert the models to Akida-compatible spiking neural networks. We benchmark three event representations and demonstrate real-time, low-power inference on Akida V1 hardware. We additionally design a heatmap-based model targeting Akida V2 and evaluate it on Akida Cloud, yielding improved pose accuracy. To our knowledge, this is the first end-to-end demonstration of spacecraft pose estimation running on Akida hardware, highlighting a practical route to low-latency, low-power perception for future autonomous space missions. --- ### Hypothesis Graph Refinement: Hypothesis-Driven Exploration with Cascade Error Correction for Embodied Navigation Authors: Peixin Chen, Guoxi Zhang, Jianwei Ma, Qing Li Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04108v1 Embodied agents must explore partially observed environments while maintaining reliable long-horizon memory. Existing graph-based navigation systems improve scalability, but they often treat unexplored regions as semantically unknown, leading to inefficient frontier search. Although vision-language models (VLMs) can predict frontier semantics, erroneous predictions may be embedded into memory and propagate through downstream inferences, causing structural error accumulation that confidence attenuation alone cannot resolve. These observations call for a framework that can leverage semantic predictions for directed exploration while systematically retracting errors once new evidence contradicts them. We propose Hypothesis Graph Refinement (HGR), a framework that represents frontier predictions as revisable hypothesis nodes in a dependency-aware graph memory. HGR introduces (1) semantic hypothesis module, which estimates context-conditioned semantic distributions over frontiers and ranks exploration targets by goal relevance, travel cost, and uncertainty, and (2) verification-driven cascade correction, which compares on-site observations against predicted semantics and, upon mismatch, retracts the refuted node together with all its downstream dependents. Unlike additive map-building, this allows the graph to contract by pruning erroneous subgraphs, keeping memory reliable throughout long episodes. We evaluate HGR on multimodal lifelong navigation (GOAT-Bench) and embodied question answering (A-EQA, EM-EQA). HGR achieves 72.41% success rate and 56.22% SPL on GOAT-Bench, and shows consistent improvements on both QA benchmarks. Diagnostic analysis reveals that cascade correction eliminates approximately 20% of structurally redundant hypothesis nodes and reduces revisits to erroneous regions by 4.5x, with specular and transparent surfaces accounting for 67% of corrected prediction errors. --- ### Physical Sensitivity Kernels Can Emerge in Data-Driven Forward Models: Evidence From Surface-Wave Dispersion Authors: Ziye Yu, Yuqi Cai, Xin Liu Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.LG, physics.geo-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04107v1 Data-driven neural networks are increasingly used as surrogate forward models in geophysics, but it remains unclear whether they recover only the data mapping or also the underlying physical sensitivity structure. Here we test this question using surface-wave dispersion. By comparing automatically differentiated gradients from a neural-network surrogate with theoretical sensitivity kernels, we show that the learned gradients can recover the main depth-dependent structure of physical kernels across a broad range of periods. This indicates that neural surrogate models can learn physically meaningful differential information, rather than acting as purely black-box predictors. At the same time, strong structural priors in the training distribution can introduce systematic artifacts into the inferred sensitivities. Our results show that neural forward surrogates can recover useful physical information for inversion and uncertainty analysis, while clarifying the conditions under which this differential structure remains physically consistent. --- ### InsTraj: Instructing Diffusion Models with Travel Intentions to Generate Real-world Trajectories Authors: Yuanshao Zhu, Yuxuan Liang, Xiangyu Zhao, Liang Han, Xinwei Fang, Xun Zhou, Xuetao Wei, James Jianqiao Yu Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04106v2 The generation of realistic and controllable GPS trajectories is a fundamental task for applications in urban planning, mobility simulation, and privacy-preserving data sharing. However, existing methods face a two-fold challenge: they lack the deep semantic understanding to interpret complex user travel intent, and struggle to handle complex constraints while maintaining the realistic diversity inherent in human behavior. To resolve this, we introduce InsTraj, a novel framework that instructs diffusion models to generate high-fidelity trajectories directly from natural language descriptions. Specifically, InsTraj first utilizes a powerful large language model to decipher unstructured travel intentions formed in natural language, thereby creating rich semantic blueprints and bridging the representation gap between intentions and trajectories. Subsequently, we proposed a multimodal trajectory diffusion transformer that can integrate semantic guidance to generate high-fidelity and instruction-faithful trajectories that adhere to fine-grained user intent. Comprehensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that InsTraj significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in generating trajectories that are realistic, diverse, and semantically faithful to the input instructions. --- ### Lexical Indicators of Mind Perception in Human-AI Companionship Authors: Jaime Banks, Jianghui Li Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.HC, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04105v1 Mind perception (MP) is a psychological phenomenon in which humans automatically infer that another entity has a mind and/or mental capacities, usually understood in two dimensions (perceived agency and experience capacities). Despite MP's centrality to many social processes, understanding how MP may function in humans' machine companionship relations is limited. This is in part due to reliance on self reports and the gap between automatic MP processes and more purposeful and norm governed expressions of MP. We here leverage MP signaling language to explore the relationship between MP and AI companionship in humans' natural language. We systematically collected discussions about companionship from AI dedicated Reddit forums and examined the cooccurrence of words (a) known to signal agentic and experiential MP and those induced from the data and (b) discussion topics related to AI companionship. Using inductive and deductive approaches, we identify a small set of linguistic indicators as reasonable markers of MP in human/AI chat, and some are linked to critical discussions of companion authenticity and philosophical and ethical imaginaries. --- ### Compliance-by-Construction Argument Graphs: Using Generative AI to Produce Evidence-Linked Formal Arguments for Certification-Grade Accountability Authors: Mahyar T. Moghaddam Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04103v1 High-stakes decision systems increasingly require structured justification, traceability, and auditability to ensure accountability and regulatory compliance. Formal arguments commonly used in the certification of safety-critical systems provide a mechanism for structuring claims, reasoning, and evidence in a verifiable manner. At the same time, generative artificial intelligence systems are increasingly integrated into decision-support workflows, assisting with drafting explanations, summarizing evidence, and generating recommendations. However, current deployments often rely on language models as loosely constrained assistants, which introduces risks such as hallucinated reasoning, unsupported claims, and weak traceability. This paper proposes a compliance-by-construction architecture that integrates Generative AI (GenAI) with structured formal argument representations. The approach treats each AI-assisted step as a claim that must be supported by verifiable evidence and validated against explicit reasoning constraints before it becomes part of an official decision record. The architecture combines four components: i) a typed Argument Graph representation inspired by assurance-case methods, ii) retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to draft argument fragments grounded in authoritative evidence, iii) a reasoning and validation kernel enforcing completeness and admissibility constraints, and iv) a provenance ledger aligned with the W3C PROV standard to support auditability. We present a system design and an evaluation strategy based on enforceable invariants and worked examples. The analysis suggests that deterministic validation rules can prevent unsupported claims from entering the decision record while allowing GenAI to accelerate argument construction. --- ### Restless Bandits with Individual Penalty Constraints: Near-Optimal Indices and Deep Reinforcement Learning Authors: Nida Zamir, I-Hong Hou Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04101v4 This paper investigates the Restless Multi-Armed Bandit (RMAB) framework under individual penalty constraints to address resource allocation challenges in dynamic wireless networked environments. Unlike conventional RMAB models, our model allows each user (arm) to have distinct and stringent performance constraints, such as energy limits, activation limits, or age of information minimums, enabling the capture of diverse objectives including fairness and efficiency. To find the optimal resource allocation policy, we propose a new Penalty-Optimal Whittle (POW) index policy. The POW index of an user only depends on the user's transition kernel and penalty constraints, and remains invariable to system-wide features such as the number of users present and the amount of resource available. This makes it computationally tractable to calculate the POW indices offline without any need for online adaptation. Moreover, we theoretically prove that the POW index policy is asymptotically optimal while satisfying all individual penalty constraints. We also introduce a deep reinforcement learning algorithm to efficiently learn the POW index on the fly. Simulation results across various applications and system configurations further demonstrate that the POW index policy not only has near-optimal performance but also significantly outperforms other existing policies. --- ### Restless Bandits with Individual Penalty Constraints: Near-Optimal Indices and Deep Reinforcement Learning Authors: Nida Zamir, I-Hong Hou Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04101v3 This paper investigates the Restless Multi-Armed Bandit (RMAB) framework under individual penalty constraints to address resource allocation challenges in dynamic wireless networked environments. Unlike conventional RMAB models, our model allows each user (arm) to have distinct and stringent performance constraints, such as energy limits, activation limits, or age of information minimums, enabling the capture of diverse objectives including fairness and efficiency. To find the optimal resource allocation policy, we propose a new Penalty-Optimal Whittle (POW) index policy. The POW index of an user only depends on the user's transition kernel and penalty constraints, and remains invariable to system-wide features such as the number of users present and the amount of resource available. This makes it computationally tractable to calculate the POW indices offline without any need for online adaptation. Moreover, we theoretically prove that the POW index policy is asymptotically optimal while satisfying all individual penalty constraints. We also introduce a deep reinforcement learning algorithm to efficiently learn the POW index on the fly. Simulation results across various applications and system configurations further demonstrate that the POW index policy not only has near-optimal performance but also significantly outperforms other existing policies. --- ### A Physics-Informed, Behavior-Aware Digital Twin for Robust Multimodal Forecasting of Core Body Temperature in Precision Livestock Farming Authors: Riasad Alvi, Mohaimenul Azam Khan Raiaan, Sadia Sultana Chowa, Arefin Ittesafun Abian, Reem E Mohamed, Md Rafiqul Islam, Yakub Sebastian, Sheikh Izzal Azid, Sami Azam Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04098v2 Precision livestock farming requires accurate and timely heat stress prediction to ensure animal welfare and optimize farm management. This study presents a physics-informed digital twin (DT) framework combined with an uncertainty-aware, expert-weighted stacked ensemble for multimodal forecasting of Core Body Temperature (CBT) in dairy cattle. Using the high-frequency, heterogeneous MmCows dataset, the DT integrates an ordinary differential equation (ODE)-based thermoregulation model that simulates metabolic heat production and dissipation, a Gaussian process for capturing cow-specific deviations, a Kalman filter for aligning predictions with real-time sensor data, and a behavioral Markov chain that models activity-state transitions under varying environmental conditions. The DT outputs key physiological indicators, such as predicted CBT, heat stress probability, and behavioral state distributions are fused with raw sensor data and enriched through multi-scale temporal analysis and cross-modal feature engineering to form a comprehensive feature set. The predictive methodology is designed in a three-stage stacked ensemble, where stage 1 trains modality-specific LightGBM 'expert' models on distinct feature groups, stage 2 collects their predictions as meta-features, and at stage 3 Optuna-tuned LightGBM meta-model yields the final CBT forecast. Predictive uncertainty is quantified via bootstrapping and validated using Prediction Interval Coverage Probability (PICP). Ablation analysis confirms that incorporating DT-derived features and multimodal fusion substantially enhances performance. The proposed framework achieves a cross-validated R2 of 0.783, F1 score of 84.25% and PICP of 92.38% for 2-hour ahead forecasting, providing a robust, uncertainty-aware, and physically principled system for early heat stress detection and precision livestock management. --- ### Toward a Sustainable Software Architecture Community: Evaluating ICSA's Environmental Impact Authors: Mahyar T. Moghaddam, Mina Alipour, Torben Worm, Mikkel Baun Kjærgaard Published: 2026-04-05 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04096v1 Generative AI (GenAI) tools are increasingly integrated into software architecture research, yet the environmental impact of their computational usage remains largely undocumented. This study presents the first systematic audit of the carbon footprint of both the digital footprint from GenAI usage in research papers, and the traditional footprint from conference activities within the context of the IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA). We report two separate carbon inventories relevant to the software architecture research community: i) an exploratory estimate of the footprint of GenAI inference usage associated with accepted papers within a research-artifact boundary, and ii) the conference attendance and operations footprint of ICSA 2025 (travel, accommodation, catering, venue energy, and materials) within the conference time boundary. These two inventories, with different system boundaries and completeness, support transparency and community reflection. We discuss implications for sustainable software architecture, including recommendations for transparency, greener conference planning, and improved energy efficiency in GenAI operations. Our work supports a more climate-conscious research culture within the ICSA community and beyond ---