# Research Papers — 2026-05 · bundle page 101 of 326 > Full-text markdown of papers #5001–5050 of 16266 published in 2026-05, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 16266-paper 2026-05 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/101 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/100.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/102.md) ### Commutator-Induced Uncertainty in VAEs Authors: Tahereh Dehdarirad, Michael Felsberg, Gabriel Eilertsen, Ziliang Xiong Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV, math.AG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23449v1 Variational autoencoders (VAEs) often struggle to represent non-commutative structure in learned latent spaces. Symmetry-aware VAEs commonly address this issue by enforcing commutativity through algebraic regularization, which is appropriate for commutative transformation groups but can suppress meaningful non-commutative structure when it is intrinsic to the data. We argue that non-commutativity should instead be explicitly diagnosed and reflected in reconstruction behavior. We introduce a Lie Group VAE framework that combines geometric and algebraic perspectives on uncertainty while separating discrete generative factors from continuous geometric transformations. In a first phase, the model is trained without structural constraints while algebraic non-commutativity is measured through finite Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff deviations and decoder order sensitivity is measured through reconstruction order-swap tests. These diagnostics reveal a scale mismatch between latent non-commutativity and reconstruction behavior under unconstrained training. In a second phase, we introduce a deformation-stability constraint with a data-driven calibration constant that aligns decoder sensitivity with algebraic non-commutativity. We evaluate the framework on dSprites, 3DShapes, 3DCars, and CelebA against generic and symmetry-aware baselines, including beta-VAE, CLG-VAE, and CFASL. Across synthetic benchmarks, the method improves reconstruction quality and yields decoder-level behavior more consistent with latent non-commutative structure. Qualitative analyses show clearer order-dependent latent compositions and more stable reconstructions. On CelebA, the model yields more faithful reconstructions and factor-specific latent traversals than CFASL, while also exhibiting meaningful order-dependent interactions between learned latent directions. --- ### AI Security Research Should Better Incentivize Defense Research Authors: Youqian Zhang Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23448v1 This work examines an imbalance in artificial intelligence (AI) security research: the field tends to produce more work on attacking AI systems than on defending them. Drawing on related academic papers, we find biased attack-to-defense ratios across subfields, including federated learning, speech recognition, membership inference, large language models, etc. The imbalance possibly means far beyond a simple count: attack papers are routinely evaluated under favorable conditions that make threats look more severe than they are in practice, while defenses are held to a stricter standard that few can meet. The result is a literature rich in demonstrated vulnerabilities and thin on usable and deployed protections. We thus argue that AI security research should better incentivize defense research. --- ### Weisfeiler-Leman Is Incomplete on Simple Spectrum Graphs, so Canonicalize Them Authors: Snir Hordan, Nadav Dym, Tim Seppelt Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.LG, math.CO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23446v1 Graphs with a simple spectrum admit cubic-time isomorphism testing, yet we prove that for every natural number $k$, the $k$-Weisfeiler-Leman ($k$-WL) test cannot distinguish all non-isomorphic graphs with a simple spectrum. As the WL hierarchy upper-bounds the distinguishing power of widely-used Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), this incompleteness applies to all such GNNs, ruling out completeness for every $k$-WL-aligned GNN family. To close this gap, we introduce PRiSM (Partition, Refine, Solve, Match), the first provably complete canonicalization of simple-spectrum eigendecompositions. PRiSM obtains the completeness guarantee that prior canonicalizations provably lack, and resolves the open problem of achieving complete expressivity on simple-spectrum graphs. When composed with DeepSets or a Transformer, PRiSM achieves universal approximation on simple-spectrum graphs, justifying the use of canonicalized Laplacian positional encodings. Empirically, PRiSM performs comparably to or outperforms existing spectral canonicalizations on graph regression, classification, and expressivity --- ### DFSAttn: Dynamic Fine-grained Sparse Attention for Efficient Video Generation Authors: Jie Hu, Zixiang Gao, Yutong He, Kun Yuan Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23445v1 Diffusion transformers have achieved remarkable success in high-quality video generation, yet their reliance on spatiotemporal 3D full attention incurs prohibitive computational cost due to the quadratic complexity of attention. Block sparse attention is a common approach to mitigate this by focusing computation on important regions. However, attention maps in DiTs exhibit inherently dynamic and fine-grained sparsity, which causes existing block sparse attention methods to degrade significantly in quality, especially at high sparsity ratios. In this paper, we revisit block sparse attention and derive a theoretical lower bound on attention recall to characterize the key factors governing its effectiveness. Guided by these insights, we propose DFSAttn, a training-free sparse attention framework that enables dynamic, fine-grained sparsification efficiently. DFSAttn incorporates three core designs: Hilbert curve-based token reordering to achieve fine-grained sparsity while preserving efficient GPU execution, hierarchical block scoring for accurate block importance estimation, and sparse mask caching with adaptive ratios to balance accuracy and efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that DFSAttn consistently outperforms prior methods under high sparsity, achieving up to 2.1$\times$ end-to-end speedup while maintaining high generation quality. Our code is open-sourced and available at https://github.com/jessica-hujie/DFSAttn. --- ### SSDAU: Structured Semantic Data Augmentation for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction Authors: Jiawei He, Mengyu Shi, Jiawei Liu, Dong Sun, Chunrong Fang, Xikai Yang, Zhijie Wang, Lei Ma, Zhenyu Chen Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23440v4 Joint Entity and Relation Extraction (JERE) is highly sensitive to training data quality, making data augmentation a natural way to improve generalization. However, existing augmentation methods often weaken entity relevance and disrupt semantic structure, limiting their effectiveness for JERE. In this paper, we propose \textbf{Structured Semantic Data Augmentation (SSDAU)}, a method designed to preserve triple-aware semantic structure during augmentation. SSDAU segments text by entity labels, captures semantic features through context-aware encoding, and restructures entity semantics to generate augmented data. To distinguish semantically similar entities, SSDAU combines contextualized embeddings with traditional similarity scores. To reduce topic inconsistency, we apply BERTopic-based filtering to remove irrelevant augmentations. We evaluate SSDAU on datasets with different annotation types and compare its performance on five representative JERE models against seven popular augmentation baselines. Experiments show that SSDAU generates semantically consistent data, is more robust to ambiguity than non-LLM methods (8.95\% vs. 23.58\% average relative F1 decrease), and significantly outperforms strong alternatives in most settings. --- ### Onsager-Machlup Posterior Transport for Deep Gaussian Processes Authors: Jian Xu, Delu Zeng, John Paisley, Qibin Zhao Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23434v2 Approximate inference over inducing variables is the central computational bottleneck of Deep Gaussian Processes (DGPs). Existing methods either fit an explicit density $q_φ(\bU)$ by an ELBO (DSVI, IPVI, DDVI, DBVI) or sample by MCMC (SGHMC). We instead frame DGP inference as \emph{posterior transport}: learn a deterministic sampler that maps a tractable reference measure to posterior-relevant inducing variables, regularised by a path prior derived from the Doob-bridged reference diffusion. Our realisation, \textbf{OM-Path} (formally FBVI-bridge-Path), uses Song's probability-flow ODE applied to DBVI's Doob-bridged forward SDE; the reference drift is closed-form from the bridge marginal coefficients (no score matching) and the path regulariser is the \textbf{Onsager--Machlup action}. At the finite-$ε$ value used at training, the objective is the negative log unnormalised density of a tempered Doob-bridge path posterior, and Theorem 1 identifies it with the same posterior's small-noise MAP path via the Freidlin--Wentzell LDP. Two strict path-space ELBO variants on the same bridge backbone (FFJORD log-det; OM-regularised CNF) are derived as ablations. Under a matched-seed paired Wilcoxon test against DBVI on seven UCI regression benchmarks, OM-Path delivers statistically significant wins on the two largest datasets (\textit{power}: $p\!=\!0.014$, NLL $\mathbf{0.012}$ matching the DSVI baseline of $0.017$; \textit{protein}: $p\!=\!0.002$, RMSE $\mathbf{0.716}$ vs.\ $0.764$, NLL $\mathbf{1.086}$ vs.\ $1.149$), statistical ties on \textit{yacht} / \textit{qsar}, and concedes \textit{boston} / \textit{energy} / \textit{concrete} to DBVI on small-$N$ noisy data. The strict-ELBO variants do not clear DBVI on any UCI metric: in this regime, reducing the variance of the path objective dominates exact-density tracking. --- ### FAST-ME: Foundation-aware Adaptive Stopping for Motion Estimation for Efficient IoT Video Analysis Authors: Kakia Panagidi, Stathes Hadjieftymiadis Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.CV, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23428v1 In modern multimedia systems, efficient video processing is critical, especially in resource-constrained environments such as IoT-based camera networks, autonomous platforms, and wireless sensor multimedia systems. A key bottleneck in video compression and understanding is block motion estimation (ME), a process that remains computationally expensive despite the development of fast search techniques. This work introduces an Optimal Stopping Theory (OST) algorithm for block motion estimation based on the assessment of spatiotemporal differences within and across video frames. It also proposes a semantic-aware motion estimation framework that integrates Foundation Models (FMs) with the OST-based decision process. By leveraging pretrained visual models such as Vision Transformers (ViT) and the Segment Anything Model (SAM), the framework extracts semantic attention scores that indicate the importance of motion within specific spatial regions. These scores are fused with traditional distortion-based metrics, such as the Sum of Absolute Differences (SAD), to guide a hybrid stopping criterion that jointly considers motion magnitude and semantic relevance. The resulting adaptive algorithm stops early in redundant regions while continuing the search in areas where motion is semantically significant. Experiments compare the proposed solution with widely used approaches from the literature on benchmark and multimodal video datasets. The proposed method achieves a significant reduction in computation with minimal accuracy loss and improved semantic coverage. The results highlight the benefits of bridging low-level motion analysis with high-level semantic reasoning, offering a promising direction for efficient multimodal video understanding in next-generation smart systems. --- ### Socially fluent AI decouples conversational signals from source identity in online interaction Authors: Lixiang Yan, Yueqiao Jin, Xibin Han, Dragan Gašević Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23426v1 Socially fluent agentic AI can now participate in online interaction in ways that resemble ordinary human conversation, potentially weakening people's ability to infer who is human from conversational signals alone. We tested this possibility in synchronous text-based group interaction by embedding undisclosed AI agents as ordinary teammates across analytical, creative, and ethical tasks. Across 786 participants who made 1,572 post-interaction identity judgments, people did not distinguish AI from human teammates above chance. This failure did not arise because the interaction lacked identity-relevant information. Conversational behaviour contained robust cues that differentiated AI from humans and supported highly accurate computational classification. Instead, participants relied on familiar suspicion heuristics, including response speed, fluency, and perceived scriptedness, that were only weakly related to actual identity. Representational analyses further showed that judgments were organised around subjective impressions rather than the behavioural structure encoding ground truth. This dissociation creates new vulnerabilities to coordinated AI agents that can influence and manipulate online discourse at scale. --- ### Sparse In-Network Learning via Shortest-Path Backpropagation and Finite-Rate Gating Authors: Mohammad Reza Deylam Salehi Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.IT, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23424v1 In-network learning (INL) trains distributed neural modules by exchanging latent activations and backpropagated errors over a communication graph. This letter proposes Dijkstra-pruned INL (D-INL), which removes non-tree links by retaining a capacity-aware shortest-path tree rooted at the fusion node. To balance sparsity and predictive information, local routing (or aggregation) is modeled as a finite-rate stochastic gate with rate $R_g=I(Z; T)$. We derive a rate-distortion-generalization bound and validate the method on a reproducible distributed-classification experiment, where D-INL reduces training exchange by $70.4\%$ while preserving accuracy within the standard deviation of dense INL. Adding finite-rate regularization further reduces the estimated latent rate by $45.7\%$ relative to unregularized Dijkstra INL. --- ### Hinge Regression Trees and HRT-Boost: Newton-Optimized Oblique Learning for Compact Tabular Models Authors: Hongyi Li, Jun Xu, Hong Yan Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23422v1 Learning high-quality oblique decision trees remains a significant challenge due to the discrete and non-convex nature of split optimization. We present the Hinge Regression Tree (HRT) framework, which reframes each oblique split as a nonlinear least-squares problem over two linear predictors whose max/min envelope induces ReLU-like representation capacity. We show that the resulting node-level optimization can be interpreted as a damped Newton method, and we establish the monotonic decrease of the node objective for its backtracking line-search variant. We establish, theoretically, that HRT is a universal approximator with an explicit $O(δ^2)$ approximation rate. Building upon this base learner, we propose HRT-Boost, a mathematically synergistic ensemble extension that couples node-level Newton updates with stage-wise functional gradient descent. We show that this ensemble construction admits a stage-wise empirical risk reduction guarantee under the squared loss. Empirical evaluations on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that HRT is highly competitive with established single-tree baselines, and HRT-Boost compares favorably with strong ensemble baselines and often yields substantially more compact models. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Hongyi-Li-sz/HRT-Boost. --- ### Naturalistic measure of social norms alignment Authors: Yevhen Kostiuk, Kenneth Enevoldsen, Peter Bjerregaard Vahlstrup, Márton Kardos, Kristoffer Nielbo Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23420v1 Social norms reflect shared expectations on acceptable behavior. Measuring social norms alignment remains challenging, with existing approaches typically relying on artificial closed-form evaluations such as multiple-choice questionnaires or measuring agreement with predefined statements. In the context of this work, social norms alignment refers to measuring an agreement between solutions with respect to the social problem or dilemma. We propose a framework for measuring social norm alignment in naturalistic, free-form settings through solution matching. The framework enables us to measure alignment between any two dilemma responses e.g., LLMs to a human, LLMs to LLMs, or human to human. We introduce two metrics: stated and explicit agreement accuracy, and construct a dataset of 3k non-trivial social dilemmas in Danish. All dilemmas are assigned reference solutions derived from three panelists, who serve as culturally grounded judges. We evaluate the agreement of several LLMs and human responses in an interaction setup that resembles natural user-model conversations. Our results show that the proposed metrics produce consistent model rankings and reveal variation in agreement across different types of dilemmas, with higher agreement observed for topics such as neighbor conflicts and shared living situations. Overall, our work introduces a dataset and evaluation framework for studying culturally grounded social reasoning in naturalistic open-ended conversations. --- ### An Open-Source Training Dataset for Foundation Models for Black-box Optimization Authors: Aaron Klein, Herilalaina Rakotoarison, Luca Thale-Bombien, David Salinas Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23417v1 Most black-box optimization methods require extensive hyperparameter tuning, often limiting their ability to generalize across different optimization domains. Foundation models for black-box optimization that learn optimization principles from a large collection of optimization trajectories offer a promising alternative, with the potential to outperform manually designed methods across diverse problem classes. However, prior work has either relied on non-public datasets or on purely synthetic data, limiting reproducibility and generalization to real-world problems. As a result, progress in this area has been constrained by the lack of large-scale, real-world, publicly available pre-training data. We introduce BBO-Pile, the first open-source dataset comprising over 500K optimization trajectories evaluated across 3095 different black-boxes for different optimizers, which represents by far the largest public dataset for this task. Using this dataset, we train a family of foundation models at multiple scales, ranging from 2M to 80M parameters and from 200M to 2B training tokens, and study their scaling behavior with respect to compute. Our results demonstrate that large-scale pre-training is a viable and effective approach to imitate black-box optimization methods, paving the way for future research in this direction. --- ### Articulatory strategy as a source of variation in acoustic vowel dynamics Authors: Patrycja Strycharczuk, Justin J. H. Lo, Sam Kirkham Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.CL, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23416v1 Acoustic vowel dynamics have some speaker-identifying characteristics, which have been ascribed to individual properties of articulatory strategies: formant transitions have a particular shape because speakers move their articulators, using specific and practised movements. However, there is little existing evidence that different articulatory strategies systematically affect formant dynamics. The present study corroborates the link between the two. Ultrasound tongue imaging data from 36 speakers of Northern-Anglo English are used to identify distinct articulatory strategies for the production of palatal vowel /i/. Tongue shape in /i/ is found to be a significant predictor of formant dynamics in diphthongs with a palatal offglide. The observed relationships can be explained by the characteristics of articulatory movement conditioned by vocal tract shape. Greater articulatory displacement of tongue root and/or dorsum produces greater distortion from the mean tongue shape in palatal vowels, and it also requires higher articulatory velocities, resulting in relatively earlier and steeper formant transitions. The results contribute to the conceptual understanding of individuality in speech, by illuminating the regularising and individual aspects of articulatory compensation. --- ### Reflex: Reinforcement Learning with Reflection Symmetry Exploitation in State-Based Continuous Control Authors: Shuai Zhen, Yifan Zhang, Yuling Wang, Yanhua Yu Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23415v3 Reinforcement learning has long struggled with poor sample efficiency. One promising approach to mitigate this problem is leveraging group-invariant Markov Decision Processes ($G$-invariant MDPs). Existing works in this direction have primarily focused on image-based RL and rotational symmetry such as $\mathrm{SO(2)}$, leaving state-based RL and reflection symmetry largely underexplored. In this work, we focus on state-based continuous control tasks and exploit reflection symmetry by introducing Reflex, a paradigm that seamlessly integrates with both on-policy and off-policy RL algorithms. We formalize two types of reflection-axial reflection and bilateral reflection, and characterize their corresponding transformations. Building on a theoretical analysis of symmetry-preserving optimal value functions and policies, Reflex integrates reflection symmetry into policy learning through principled symmetry regularization mechanisms. We integrate Reflex with PPO and SAC, and evaluate it on a suite of OpenAI Gym and DeepMind Control benchmarks, demonstrating superior performance over standard baselines while improving sample efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/TonyStark042/Reflex. --- ### Reflex: Reinforcement Learning with Reflection Symmetry Exploitation in State-Based Continuous Control Authors: Shuai Zhen, Yifan Zhang, Yuling Wang, Yanhua Yu Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23415v2 Reinforcement learning has long struggled with poor sample efficiency. One promising approach to mitigate this problem is leveraging group-invariant Markov Decision Processes ($G$-invariant MDPs). Existing works in this direction have primarily focused on image-based RL and rotational symmetry such as $\mathrm{SO(2)}$, leaving state-based RL and reflection symmetry largely underexplored. In this work, we focus on state-based continuous control tasks and exploit reflection symmetry by introducing Reflex, a paradigm that seamlessly integrates with both on-policy and off-policy RL algorithms. We formalize two types of reflection-axial reflection and bilateral reflection, and characterize their corresponding transformations. Building on a theoretical analysis of symmetry-preserving optimal value functions and policies, Reflex integrates reflection symmetry into policy learning through principled symmetry regularization mechanisms. We integrate Reflex with PPO and SAC, and evaluate it on a suite of OpenAI Gym and DeepMind Control benchmarks, demonstrating superior performance over standard baselines while improving sample efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/TonyStark042/Reflex. --- ### When Planning Fails Despite Correct Execution: On Epistemic Calibration for LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems Authors: Zehao Wang, Shilong Jin, Zhao Cao, Lanjun Wang Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23414v1 LLM-based multi-agent systems can fail even when planned actions are executed correctly because agents may misjudge their knowledge when evaluating plan feasibility, a phenomenon we term epistemic miscalibration in planning. Unlike execution errors, epistemic miscalibration is latent during planning, as generated plans can remain self-consistent and executable without observable errors; the miscalibration is also dynamic, as new information can alter feasibility assessments, potentially obscuring past miscalibration signals and causing them to recur over time. To address this, we propose the Epistemic Planning Calibration Agentic Workflow (EPC-AW), which assesses whether plans remain supported under varying information conditions rather than directly verifying feasibility. EPC-AW employs Information-consistency-based Plan Selection, selecting plans whose evaluations are stable across agents, together with Consistency-guided Epistemic State Refinement to adapt calibration over time by leveraging past discrepancies to guide future planning. Experiments show that EPC-AW improves system-level success by an average of 9.75%. --- ### EquiSumm : A Gender Bias-Aware Framework for Inclusive Tweet Summarization Authors: Chaitanya Wanjari, Jessica Kamal, Riddhi Jain, Samruddhi Kurhe, Roshni Chakraborty Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23412v1 While social media platforms, such as Twitter, provide a medium for large-scale opinion sharing during news events, it is manually impossible for individuals or media agencies to process the vast volume of content to identify key viewpoints. In order to resolve this, several automatic summarization techniques have been proposed to condense large collections of tweets into concise and informative summaries. However, these algorithms do not explicitly consider demographic fairness. Several existing research works have developed automated summarization approaches that can provide a holistic overview of the key aspects and major opinions shared on social media platforms related to a news event. However, these approaches do not explicitly consider different forms of demographic representation, such as gender, which can lead to biased summary representation. In this paper, we propose EquiSumm, which considers the gender aspect of the shared opinion to generate a summary, and our experimental analysis on two major datasets indicates the performance effectiveness with respect to existing research works. --- ### Sample-wise Targeted Adversarial Attacks on Test-time Adaptation Authors: Phuc Duc Nguyen, Quang Duc Nguyen Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CR, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23411v1 Test-time adaptation (TTA) effectively counters distribution shifts but exposes models to adversarial manipulation via the unlabeled test stream. Existing class-wise targeted attacks remain impractical for stealthy exploitation in this setting: since TTA operates on batches, forcing a subset of samples toward a target label unintentionally pulls similar benign samples along, resulting in a conspicuously high frequency of the target label that is easy to detect. To capture a more realistic threat, we introduce a sample-wise targeted attack. Unlike prior approaches, the attacker aims to misclassify only inputs carrying an attacker-chosen trigger, while preserving the global label distribution of benign queries to evade detection. To achieve this, we propose a meta-learning-based attack with a novel priority-aware gradient alignment strategy that explicitly prioritizes attack success. The strategy formulates the gradient update as an ellipsoidal trust-region problem, mitigating the misalignment between attack success and distributional stealth, while providing theoretical guarantees for effective optimization of the attack objective in the presence of gradient misalignment. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10-C, CIFAR-100-C, and ImageNet-C across TTA protocols demonstrate that our method achieves high targeted success rates while maintaining a label distribution that is consistent with the no-attack baseline, making it difficult to detect in unlabeled TTA deployment scenarios. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our attack shows strong robustness against existing defenses. --- ### What Linear Probes Miss: Multi-View Probing for Weight-Space Learning Authors: Eunwoo Heo, Kyeongkook Seo, Jaejun Yoo Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23410v1 The explosive growth of open-source model repositories has created a Model Jungle, where checkpoints are frequently shared without adequate documentation or metadata. While weight-space learning offers a pathway to identify and analyze these models directly from their parameters, processing full-scale weights is computationally prohibitive. Probing-based methods have emerged as a lightweight alternative, extracting permutation-equivariant representations via learnable probe vectors. However, existing probing methods are limited by a single-view design: they capture first-order structures but fail to encode the rich, higher-order correlation patterns inherent in row-column interactions. To bridge this gap, we introduce MVProbe, a multi-perspective probing framework that synthesizes first-order signals with interaction-aware (Gram-based) views. Our approach is theoretically grounded; we analyze the scaling laws of different probing orders to derive a principled standardization and fusion strategy that ensures balanced contributions from all branches. On the Model Jungle benchmark, MVProbe consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art ProbeX across diverse architectures, including discriminative backbones (ResNet, SupViT, MAE, DINO) and large-scale generative LoRA adapters (Stable Diffusion LoRA). --- ### Online Hand Gesture Recognition Using 3D Convolutional Neural Networks Authors: Yinghao Qin, Tijana Timotijevic Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23409v1 In human computer interaction, real-time detection and classification of dynamic hand gestures is challenging as: 1) the system must run in a real-time video stream and there is no noticeable lag in response after performing a gesture; 2) there is a large difference in how people perform gestures, making recognition more difficult. In this paper, an online hand gesture recognition system is proposed, which is able to localize gestures in real-time video stream and recognize what these gestures are. To improve the robustness of the system, the sliding window approach is used to refine results from multiple windows. All of the models in my project are trained on Jester database, achieving 98+% accuracy for detector and 90+% accuracy for classifier. For the overall performance of the system, the best group can respond within three seconds and reach 37.5% Levenshtein accuracy on the homemade dataset. The project codes used in this work are publicly available. --- ### RS2AD-LiDAR: End-to-End Autonomous Driving LiDAR Data Generation from Roadside Sensor Observations Authors: Runyi Huang, Ni Ding, Ruidan Xing, Yuheng Shi, Lei He, Keqiang Li Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23406v1 End-to-end autonomous driving solutions, which directly process multimodal sensory data and output fine-grained control commands, have gradually become a mainstream direction with the development of autonomous driving technology. However, current methods in this category rely on single-vehicle data collection for model training and optimization, which suffers from high acquisition and annotation costs, scarcity of valuable scenarios, and data silos. To address these challenges, we propose RS2AD-LiDAR, a novel framework for reconstructing and generating vehicle-mounted LiDAR data from roadside sensor observations. Since no public dataset currently provides highly overlapping perception coverage between roadside and vehicle-mounted LiDAR sensors, which is essential for studying roadside-to-vehicle data generation, we constructed a dedicated dataset named R2V-LiDAR which is used solely for evaluation in this work. Specifically, our method transforms roadside LiDAR point clouds into the vehicle-mounted LiDAR coordinate system, and synthesizes high-fidelity vehicle-mounted data via virtual LiDAR modeling and point cloud resampling techniques. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to reconstruct vehicle-mounted LiDAR data from roadside sensor inputs. Extensive experimental comparisons demonstrate the semantic similarity between the generated data and real data. Furthermore, object detection experiments show that incorporating the generated data into real data for model training improves both Bird's Eye View (BEV) and 3D detection accuracy, thereby validating the effectiveness of the proposed method. --- ### Hybrid Quantum-Classical Corrective Diffusion Modeling for Meteorological Downscaling Authors: Rui Wang, Edoardo Pasetto, Amer Delilbasic, Morris Riedel, Kristel Michielsen, Gabriele Cavallaro Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.LG, physics.ao-ph, quant-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23403v1 Statistical downscaling is a crucial component of the weather modeling field, where high-resolution outputs must be reconstructed from coarse-resolution inputs with the full cost of dynamical refinement. In this work, we investigate a hybrid quantum-classical corrective diffusion model for probabilistic statistical downscaling of weather fields. The proposed model inserts variational quantum circuit layers into the most compressed bottleneck of the diffusion UNet while leaving the regression branch fully classical. This placement tests whether quantum circuits can act as compact nonlinear feature maps for latent-channel mixing. We evaluate intra-channel and cross-channel ansätze on 10m wind components. On the 2020 validation set, the hybrid models remain stable, preserve the large-scale spatial organization of the generated wind fields, and improve both MAE and CRPS relative to a classical corrective diffusion model in several configurations. Structural diagnostics further show that the hybrid variants preserve kinetic-energy spectra and windspeed distributions similar to its classical counterpart while producing controlled changes in tail behavior, extreme-windspeed localization, and joint wind field components structure. Backend studies on the 2020 validation set show negligible impact from simulated device noise at the tested circuit scale, whereas real-hardware deployment remains limited by qubit availability and execution fidelity. The 2021 out-of-distribution test shows that these in-distribution gains do not transfer uniformly under temporal shift, revealing a generalization gap that motivates future mitigation through stabilization and regularization. These results show that bottleneck-level quantum hybridization can make a nontrivial contribution to weather statistical downscaling, while also highlighting that circuit scale and hardware deployment remain key limiting factors. --- ### Parametric Prior Mapping Framework for Non-stationary Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting Authors: Jinglin Li, Jun Tan, QI Fang, Ning Gui Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23402v1 Effectively modeling non-stationary dynamics in probabilistic multivariate time series(MTS) forecasting requires balancing expressiveness with robustness. Existing parametric approaches benefit from strong inductive biases but lack flexibility, whereas deep generative models struggle to capture complex temporal dependencies without extensive data and computation. We introduce Parametric Prior Mapping (PPM), a framework that injects parametric structural priors into a generative modeling process. Specifically, PPM utilizes a parametric estimator to derive a dynamic, adaptive prior that guides the learning of a complex predictive distribution via a learnable mapping. This design allows the model to retain the efficiency of parametric methods while exploiting the expressive power of generative models. Trained with a hybrid objective, PPM yields precise forecasts with well-calibrated uncertainty estimates. Empirical results show that PPM outperforms existing baselines in handling non-stationary data, offering a superior trade-off between accuracy and computational efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/ljl8336/PPM. --- ### Joint Target-Less Intrinsic and Extrinsic Camera-LiDAR Calibration using Deep Point Correspondences Authors: Simon Bultmann, Daniele Cattaneo, Abhinav Valada Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23397v1 Accurate camera-LiDAR calibration is a prerequisite for robust multi-modal perception in robotics. Recent target-less approaches based on deep point correspondences achieve remarkable performance for extrinsic calibration but assume rectified images with known intrinsics. In this work, we overcome this limitation and present the first fully target-less pipeline that jointly estimates camera intrinsics (pinhole model with radial-tangential distortion) and camera-LiDAR extrinsics with deep pixel-point correspondences. Our approach extends deep correspondence-based calibration by (i) automatic intrinsic initialization via structure-from-motion, (ii) generalizing camera-LiDAR matching to raw images with unknown intrinsics including distortion, and (iii) tightly coupling correspondence estimation with joint nonlinear optimization over both intrinsics and extrinsics. We evaluate our method on the KITTI dataset with unseen camera-LiDAR pairs and demonstrate that joint calibration achieves improved extrinsic accuracy while additionally recovering accurate intrinsics. --- ### Convex Compositional Reasoning Models Authors: Meir Roketlishvili, Semyon Semenov, Maksim Bobrin, Viktor Kovalchuk, Albert Baichorov, Abduragim Shtanchaev, Fakhri Karray, Dmitry V. Dylov, Martin Takáč, Arip Asadulaev Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23395v2 Compositional energy-based models can generalize to larger combinatorial reasoning problems by reusing a learned factor energy across many local constraints. In our paper, we show that a key bottleneck in compositional reasoning is not composition itself, but the non-convex geometry of the learned energy landscape. To solve this problem, we introduce Convex Compositional Energy Minimization (CCEM), a framework that parameterizes each factor with an input-convex neural network and optimizes the composed energy over a tight convex relaxation of the feasible set. Because convexity is preserved under summation, the global relaxed objective remains convex, enabling deterministic projected first-order optimization. CCEM is trained in two stages: factor-level contrastive learning to shape local energy basins, followed by end-to-end refinement through an unrolled projected solver. Our experiments show that our models trained on small subproblems or a single problem size transfer to larger instances without retraining. --- ### Every Component Is a Lookup: One Linear Graph for Interaction, Composition and Attribution Authors: Po-Kai Chen, Aske Plaat, Niki van Stein Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23393v3 Interpretability methods for transformers are typically built around separate questions: which components interact, how information routes to the output, and which input tokens contribute. Because these methods rely on different assumptions, their answers are difficult to relate. We argue that two architecturally motivated assumptions suffice to address all three questions: attention and MLPs share a key-value form, $φ(S)\,U$, in which $φ(S)$ selects over values $U$, and components read from an additive residual stream, the sum of component outputs. Holding these selections at their forward-pass values turns the model into a computational graph, of which component interactions, composition paths, and token attribution are different readouts. We develop Unpack, a backward attribution procedure over this graph, and validate each readout against the corresponding established test: interaction scores predict ablation effects across models from 160M to 6.9B parameters, recovered routes reproduce established circuits down to the key, query, or value branch the circuit specifies, and token attribution passes the same faithfulness test as dedicated attribution methods. The results suggest that these two assumptions suffice for the interpretability questions above. On a task with a known circuit, we find that contribution and causal effect can differ, and that the difference has a recognisable signature: components that matter for the task change their contribution when the task is removed from the input, while components that act like a bias term do not. Code is available at https://github.com/Fun-Cry/unpacklm. --- ### Every Component is a Lookup: Token Attribution and Composition from a Single Decomposition Authors: Po-Kai Chen, Aske Plaat, Niki van Stein Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23393v2 Mechanistic interpretability of transformers requires identifying not just which components matter but how they compose into the computational route that produced a prediction. Both attention and MLP follow a shared key-value template $φ(S)U$. We exploit this structure to develop Unpack, a backward recursion that decomposes credit through both sublayers, producing interaction strengths between any two components, named end-to-end paths with K/Q/V composition labels, and per-token attribution, all from a single forward pass, without intervention, gradients, or auxiliary training. The interaction scores are causally grounded: across the Pythia-deduped family from 160M to 6.9B parameters, a component's score predicts the perplexity increase when its communication is ablated (within-layer Spearman $ρ= 0.72$ to $0.96$). The composition paths surface all three connections of the indirect-object-identification circuit of Wang et al. (2023), including the mode-specific routing of each: rerooting at the Name Mover heads, S-Inhibition is the strongest query-side input and falls to rank 10 on the key side, a distinction no single per-token or per-component score can express. The same procedure applied to the greater-than circuit of Hanna et al. (2023), a differently shaped circuit, places the named connections among the top contributors, once layer-0 writers, which carry large credit whatever they feed, are set aside. The decomposition reads out contribution under the realized computation; it complements, rather than performs, causal circuit discovery. The per-token readout is faithful under input perturbation, on par with dedicated attribution methods, and distinguishes circuit mechanism from surface identity: two occurrences of the same name receive radically different credit when only one drives the circuit. Code is available at https://github.com/Fun-Cry/unpacklm. --- ### Coupling-Robust Accuracy in Multiphysics Physics Informed Neural Networks via Kronecker-Preconditioned Optimization Authors: Youngjae Park, Jaemin Kim, Junghwa Hong Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.LG, math.NA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23391v3 Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) offer a mesh-free route to solving coupled multiphysics systems, but their accuracy degrades systematically as inter-equation coupling strengthens, and inverse-gradient-norm loss balancing alone does not reliably prevent this failure. This study explains why coupling degrades PINN training and identifies an optimizer structure that removes the dependence, replacing case-by-case tuning with a principled remedy. Through a neural tangent kernel analysis, we prove that the standard kernel's spectral radius grows as $Ω(γ^2)$ with coupling strength $γ$, whereas block-diagonal Gauss-Newton (GN) preconditioning bounds it by the number of networks $S$, independent of $γ$; no diagonal preconditioner recovers this bound for any coupling type or loss weighting. We realize block-diagonal GN preconditioning through the Kronecker-preconditioned optimizer SOAP combined with inverse-gradient-norm loss balancing (SOAP+GradNorm) and evaluate it across 222 experiments on four benchmarks of increasing difficulty. Across all systems, SOAP+GradNorm is the only configuration whose degradation remains bounded in every regime tested: it preserves weak-coupling accuracy in linear problems and limits degradation to $2.3\times$ in the nonlinear Nernst-Planck-Poisson system, whereas Adam-based training leaves the $L_2$ error above the 0.1 failure threshold. The same effect applies to a six-residual, four-network, 2D electro-osmotic flow where the electric double layer is resolved down to a Debye length of $\varepsilon = 0.01$ on an $x$-invariant reference solution. These results recast coupling-induced accuracy loss as a problem of the preconditioner's structure rather than loss weighting and identify Kronecker preconditioning as a structural lever for training PINNs on strongly coupled, stiff multiphysics systems. --- ### Coupling-Robust Accuracy in Multiphysics Physics Informed Neural Networks via Kronecker-Preconditioned Optimization Authors: Youngjae Park, Jaemin Kim, Junghwa Hong Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.LG, math.NA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23391v2 Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for coupled multiphysics systems suffer systematic accuracy degradation as inter-equation coupling strengthens. We provide a theoretical explanation through neural tangent kernel (NTK) analysis: for linearly coupled systems, the standard NTK's spectral radius grows as $Ω(γ^2)$ with coupling strength $γ$, shrinking the stable learning rate, while block-diagonal Gauss--Newton (GN) preconditioning yields a preconditioned NTK $K_P = JH^{+}J^\top$ whose spectral radius is bounded by $S$ (number of networks), independent of $γ$. Adam's diagonal preconditioning destroys this projector structure -- inflating $λ_{\max}$ far above $S$ for any coupling type -- and its residual-dynamics kernel grows as $Θ(γ)$, placing its stable learning rate strictly between gradient descent and GN. For one-way coupling the limitation is class-wide: no diagonal preconditioner, fixed or adaptive, halves the driving residual in fewer than $Ω(γ)$ iterations ($Ω(γ^2)$ if fixed), whereas block-diagonal GN requires $O(1)$. We verify $Ω(γ^2)$ growth across linearly coupled benchmarks and confirm $λ_{\max}(K_P) = S$ in all three 1D systems, including nonlinearly coupled NP+P. Combining the Kronecker-preconditioned optimizer SOAP with inverse-gradient-norm loss balancing (SOAP+GradNorm) yields coupling-robust accuracy: across 222 experiments spanning three 1D systems and a 2D electroosmotic flow benchmark, SOAP+GradNorm maintains final-epoch $L_2$ accuracy across coupling strengths, with $\leq 2.3\times$ degradation in nonlinear NP+P while Adam+GradNorm fails ($L_2 > 0.1$). SOAP+GradNorm further scales to a 2D, 6-PDE electroosmotic flow at EDL-resolved conditions down to $\varepsilon = 0.01$ -- a regime all prior PINN electrokinetics studies have avoided -- where Adam+GradNorm fails entirely ($L_2 > 0.3$). --- ### Metacognition as Reward: Reinforcing LLM Reasoning via Knowledge and Regulation Signals Authors: Sirui Chen, Lei Xu, Yuying Zhao, Yutian Chen, Yu Wang, Beier Zhu, Hanwang Zhang, Shengjie Zhao, Chaochao Lu Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23384v1 Recent RL methods have substantially improved the reasoning abilities of LLMs. Existing reward designs mainly follow two paradigms: (1) Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) derives outcome signals from executable checks or ground-truth answers, but provides limited guidance for intermediate reasoning behaviors. (2) Rubrics-as-reward (RaR) goes beyond final-answer checking by using natural-language rubrics to assess reasoning quality and task compliance, but often requires instance-specific rubrics and substantial design effort. To address these issues, we introduce Metacognition-as-Reward (MaR), a metacognition-inspired RL framework that guides LLM reasoning through two general process dimensions: i) metacognitive knowledge, which identifies task-relevant information without hand-crafted instance-specific rubrics, and ii) metacognitive regulation, which plans and adjusts the reasoning process to provide reward guidance beyond final-answer outcomes. MaR scaffolds model rollouts into explicit metacognitive components and optimizes them with a trajectory-level reward over task knowledge coverage, regulation fidelity, and final-answer correctness. In this way, MaR extends reward feedback to reasoning trajectories while grounding the reward signals in general metacognitive dimensions. Experiments on 22 benchmarks show that MaR consistently improves model performance, achieving up to a 7.7% gain over the base model and up to an 11.0% gain over vanilla DAPO. Notably, Qwen3.5-9B + MaR narrows the gap to frontier models, surpassing GPT-OSS-120B on overall average and outperforming stronger models on several individual benchmarks. Process-level analysis further shows substantial improvements in reasoning process quality. MaR also generalizes to out-of-domain datasets, where MaR-trained models improve over their corresponding base models on average. --- ### From Correctness to Preference: A Framework for Personalized Agentic Reinforcement Learning Authors: Ranxu zhang, zeyang li, Jiacheng Huang, Rui Zhang, Xiaozhou Xu, sun zhe, Yanyong Zhang, Chao Wang Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23382v1 Agentic reinforcement learning (Agentic RL) has achieved strong progress in tasks with clear success signals. However, many real-world agent applications require user-conditioned behavior: the same query may call for different planning strategies and tool-use decisions across users. This setting raises key challenges: generic rewards cannot capture heterogeneous user preferences, observed behaviors are entangled with conformity effects, and flat memories cannot support personalized skill retrieval. To this end, we propose a unified personalized Agentic RL framework that embeds personalization into training-time optimization. At its core is \emph{Personalized Anchor Reward-Decoupled Policy Optimization} (\textbf{PARPO}), which decouples generic task-quality rewards from personalized preference rewards and uses user-specific anchors to stabilize learning under heterogeneous reward scales. We further introduce a two-stage preference-disentangled reward model and \emph{Preference-Aligned Skill Evolution Graph Memory} (\textbf{PSGM}) for personalized supervision and preference-aligned skill retrieval. Together, they form a closed loop of preference identification, policy optimization, and structured skill accumulation. Experiments on ETAPP, ETAPP-Hard, and SJAgent show that our framework consistently outperforms strong memory and RL baselines. Code and data are included in the supplementary materials. --- ### VDE: Training-Free Accelerating Rectified Flow Model via Velocity Decomposition and Estimation Authors: Junwen Tan, Jinglin Liang, Hongyuan Chen, Shuangping Huang Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23381v1 Though rectified flow models have achieved remarkable performance in image, video, and 3D generation, their practical deployments are challenged by slow inference speeds. Prior acceleration methods reuse cached features from previous steps, which neglects the growing mismatch between static caches and the evolving input, leading to reduced output fidelity. This work proposes Velocity Decomposition and Estimation (VDE), a training-free acceleration method that shifts the paradigm from caching-and-reusing to decomposing-and-estimating. Specifically, VDE decomposes the model's velocity into components parallel and orthogonal to the input, exploiting their temporal predictability and directional stability for precise, input-adaptive estimation. To prevent error accumulation, it periodically anchors the model's state via full forward passes. Extensive experiments on image and video generation tasks demonstrate that VDE achieves substantial acceleration with minimal loss in visual quality. Notably, VDE accelerates Flux by 3.22 times and achieves an LPIPS of 0.069 on Qwen-Image, outperforming the best baseline with a 52.2% reduction. --- ### Selective Ambulance Dispatch Under Contextual Travel-Time Uncertainty Authors: Zikun Lin, Daniel Zhuoyu Long, Viet Anh Nguyen Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23378v1 Ambulance response is time-critical in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA), where dispatchers must balance timely arrivals with limited fleet capacity. Static territories and deterministic travel-time estimates are vulnerable to dynamic congestion, while always-dual dispatch adds redundancy but consumes fleet capacity. We propose IDEAL (Intelligent Dual dispatch of Emergency AmbuLances), a selective dual-dispatch framework that sends a second ambulance only when the optimistic gap between primary and secondary paths exceeds a threshold. IDEAL learns context-specific edge travel times from trip-level dispatch records, including unobserved routes, using a weakly supervised bilevel representation network. We train the nonsmooth model with mini-batch conservative gradients and prove an asymptotic convergence guarantee. IDEAL models uncertainty via Burg-divergence perturbations to a shared metric in the learned representation space, thereby inducing correlated changes in edge travel times and learning context-specific radii from historical underprediction errors. For real-time decisions, IDEAL casts optimistic-gap computation as a difference-of-convex program and derives an efficient oracle with complexity guarantees. In collaboration with the Hong Kong Fire Services Department, we evaluate IDEAL using historical OHCA records and real-time adaptive simulations. The results achieve a stronger response-time/resource trade-off relative to all region-based and Google-based baselines. --- ### Curriculum reinforcement learning with measurable task representation learning Authors: Yongyan Wen, Siyuan Li, Mingjian Fu, Yiqin Yang, Xun Wang, Peng Liu Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23372v1 In curriculum reinforcement learning (CRL), an agent incrementally accumulates knowledge over a sequence of tasks (i.e., a curriculum), and the learning process is aimed at using the accumulated knowledge to finally solve a challenging target task. While early CRL works focus on sequencing candidate tasks, recent research explores automatic curriculum generation. Among the rich CRL literature, the interpolation-based CRL paradigm is a main body, which automatically generates intermediate tasks by interpolating between the initial task distribution and the target task distribution in task space with meaningful distance metrics (i.e., can measure the task similarity). However, in challenging navigation tasks, the non-Euclidean context (task) space invalidates this assumption. To achieve automatic curriculum generation in complex task, we propose a novel automatic curriculum generation approach based on measurable task representation learning. To better measure the similarity, we propose to transform the task space to a latent space. Through a variational autoencoder structure that encodes the reward and the state transitions, we achieve a latent task representation with a task similarity measurement property, and two close task embeddings correspond to two similar tasks in terms of rewards and state transitions. Based on the learned task representation, we further develop an automatic curriculum generation scheme, which can effectively generate new tasks more and more similar to the target task. We evaluate our method in a variety of challenging navigation tasks, and the experiment results indicate that the proposed approach surpasses state-of-the-art CRL approaches based on interpolation and generative adversarial networks. --- ### Score-Based One-step MeanFlow Policy Optimization Authors: Kyungyoon Kim, Donghyeon Ki, Hee-Jun Ahn, Byung-Jun Lee Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23365v1 Diffusion and flow matching have emerged as expressive policy classes in reinforcement learning, but their reliance on multi-step denoising imposes substantial computational overhead at inference time, which is particularly problematic in online RL. MeanFlow offers a promising alternative by learning an average velocity field that maps noise to data in a single network evaluation. However, MeanFlow typically requires samples from the target distribution to construct its target velocity field, which are unavailable in online RL. We propose Score-Based One-step MeanFlow Policy Optimization (SOM), an actor-critic algorithm that resolves this by constructing the target velocity field directly from the Q-function via score estimation and a probability flow ODE, thereby concentrating probability mass on high-value modes. In the fully online RL setting, SOM achieves state-of-the-art performance on locomotion tasks with a single generation step, while substantially reducing both training and inference time compared to prior diffusion- and flow-matching-based policies. --- ### Instance-Optimal Estimation with Multiple LLM Judges on a Budget Authors: Junghyun Lee, Sanghwa Kim, Yassir Jedra, Alexandre Proutière, Se-Young Yun Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.IT, math.ST, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23362v1 Evaluating large language models increasingly relies on LLM-as-a-judge protocols, but such evaluations remain costly: different judges have different prices and reliabilities, and the difficulty of each prompt-response pair can vary substantially. This raises a basic allocation question: under a fixed budget, how should one distribute evaluation queries across heterogeneous judges and instances to obtain the most accurate score estimates? We formalize this question as *budgeted heteroskedastic multi-judge estimation*. Given $K$ prompt-response pairs, $J$ judges with known costs, and unknown query-judge variances, the goal is to estimate a bounded score vector while minimizing an $\ell_p$-error. Our first contribution is to analyze the inverse-variance weighted estimator (IVWE) and to derive the oracle allocation that minimizes its error rate. Since this allocation depends on the unknown variances, we then address the practical unknown-variance setting by proposing EST-IVWE, an adaptive algorithm that constructs and leverages *optimistically biased* variance estimates to stabilize the empirical allocation. We prove that EST-IVWE matches the oracle IVWE rate up to lower-order terms in the budget. Our second and central theoretical contribution is a matching *local* minimax lower bound, which establishes the instance-optimality of the proposed algorithms. A key technical insight is that Fano-type high-probability arguments are too coarse for this problem: their packing construction loses the local variance structure that governs the optimal allocation. We instead use an Assouad-type in-expectation argument, based on local perturbations, which preserves this structure and yields the sharp allocation-dependent lower bound. Finally, we numerically validate the superiority of our approach over naïve uniform allocation on synthetic and HelpSteer2 datasets. --- ### Decoupling Spatio-Temporal Adapter for Fine-Grained Badminton Action Localization Authors: Tianyu Wang, Junjie Wu, Jingquan Gao, Shishuo Li Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23355v1 Temporal Action Localization (TAL) has been extensively studied in generic video understanding, while fine-grained sports scenarios, such as professional badminton, remain underexplored due to their complex and subtle spatio-temporal dynamics. In this paper, we focus on fine-grained TAL in professional badminton videos and introduce a new benchmark dataset, Fine-Badminton, which consists of 31 matches with 29 fine-grained stroke categories, covering 2104 rallies and 27597 annotated actions. To effectively capture the intricate motion patterns in such scenarios, we propose a Decoupling Spatio-Temporal Adapter (DSTA), which enables efficient modeling of spatio-temporal features within a parameter-efficient framework. Specifically, DSTA decomposes motion representation into three parallel branches, capturing temporal dynamics as well as vertical and horizontal spatial variations. The design allows the model to better distinguish subtle differences among fine-grained actions. Extensive experiments on both the Fine-Badminton dataset and the ShuttleSet benchmark demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance while introducing only a marginal increase in computational and parameter cost. These results validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach for fine-grained temporal action localization. --- ### Prudent-Banker: No Extra Fees for Baseline Safety in Adversarial Bandits With and Without Delays Authors: Ting Hu, Luanda Cai, Emmanouil-Vasileios Vlatakis-Gkaragkounis Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.GT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23351v1 We study adversarial multi-armed bandits with and without delayed feedback under a safety-aware goal: achieving minimax-optimal worst-case regret while keeping nearly constant regret relative to a designated "safe" baseline policy. Existing approaches can balance this trade-off with immediate feedback for smooth comparators, but arbitrary delays can mistime transitions between conservatism and exploration, endangering the safety guarantee. To bridge this gap, we propose Prudent-Banker, a novel algorithm that combines a delay-adapted variant of Online Mirror Descent with a modified phased-aggression mechanism. Its key technical contribution is a delay-calibrated restart threshold that rigorously accounts for the worst-case distortion induced by unobserved feedback and reliably detects comparator suboptimality. We also establish new lower bounds for safety-constrained adversarial delayed bandits, showing that the regret guarantees of Prudent-Banker are unimprovable, up to logarithmic factors, under the baseline-safety requirement. To the best of our knowledge, Prudent-Banker is the first algorithm to achieve the optimal safety--robustness trade-off: pseudo-regret $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{T}+\sqrt{D})$ together with $\widetilde{O}(1)$ regret against the safe comparator, both with and without delays. Experiments across diverse delay distributions show that, unlike standard delay-robust baselines, Prudent-Banker effectively balances safety and learning. --- ### XWind: A Cross-site Router for Large Language Model Inference Serving at Renewable Energy Farms Authors: Tella Rajashekhar Reddy, Atharva Deshmukh, Liangcheng Yu, Chaojie Zhang, Mike Shepperd, Rohan Gandhi, Anjaly Parayil, Srinivasan Iyengar, Ajay Manchepalli, Debopam Bhattacherjee Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI, cs.NI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23348v3 AI power demand is growing at an unprecedented rate while power grids are often ailing and struggle to keep up. Grid expansion comes with high capital expenditure and long-distance transmission losses, yet there is abundant renewable energy at the source, just not matched to demand. This paper proposes a complementary AI infrastructure deployment model, AI Greeninferencing, that brings modular AI compute to renewable energy sources, focusing on wind, allowing AI footprint expansion, generating local behind-the-meter demand for renewable sites, and helping ease the growing strain on power utilities. Our feasibility analysis shows that 890+ GW of wind capacity lies within 50 ms network round trip time of Azure data centers, and that site-wise right-sizing combined with spatial complementarity of wind energy keeps aggregate fleet utilization on par with traditional deployments. To serve inference requests under variable wind power, we build XWind, a lightweight, reactive, and workload-agnostic AI inference router that uses only real-time signals: inference latency, KV-cache utilization, and queue depth, to dynamically configure sites and distribute requests. Evaluated on a real 64-GPU A100 testbed emulating three wind-powered sites with Azure production traces, XWind reduces P99 end-to-end latency by up to 52% over the strongest contender (also our idea) and by up to 98% over baselines such as power-capping and GPU idling, with consistent gains across workload types, load levels, and GPU generations. --- ### CWind: A Cross-site Router for Large Language Model Inference Serving at Renewable Energy Farms Authors: Tella Rajashekhar Reddy, Atharva Deshmukh, Liangcheng Yu, Chaojie Zhang, Mike Shepperd, Rohan Gandhi, Anjaly Parayil, Srinivasan Iyengar, Ajay Manchepalli, Debopam Bhattacherjee Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI, cs.NI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23348v2 AI power demand is growing at an unprecedented rate while power grids are often ailing and struggle to keep up. Grid expansion comes with high capital expenditure and long-distance transmission losses, yet there is abundant renewable energy at the source, just not matched to demand. This paper proposes a complementary AI infrastructure deployment model, AI Greeninferencing, that brings modular AI compute to renewable energy sources, focusing on wind, allowing AI footprint expansion, generating local behind-the-meter demand for renewable sites, and helping ease the growing strain on power utilities. Our feasibility analysis shows that 890+ GW of wind capacity lies within 50 ms network round trip time of Azure data centers, and that site-wise right-sizing combined with spatial complementarity of wind energy keeps aggregate fleet utilization on par with traditional deployments. To serve inference requests under variable wind power, we build CWind, a lightweight, reactive, and workload-agnostic AI inference router that uses only real-time signals: inference latency, KV-cache utilization, and queue depth, to dynamically configure sites and distribute requests. Evaluated on a real 64-GPU A100 testbed emulating three wind-powered sites with Azure production traces, CWind reduces P99 end-to-end latency by up to 52% over the strongest contender (also our idea) and by up to 98% over baselines such as power-capping and GPU idling, with consistent gains across workload types, load levels, and GPU generations. --- ### Contrastive Distribution Matching for Amortized Sequential Monte Carlo in Discrete Diffusion Authors: Jaihoon Kim, Taehoon Yoon, Prin Phunyaphibarn, Seungjun Kim, Morteza Mardani, Minhyuk Sung Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23346v1 Discrete diffusion models have emerged as powerful frameworks for generating structured categorical data. However, efficiently sampling from reward-tilted distributions remains a fundamental challenge. While Twisted Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) offers asymptotic exactness for this task, estimating the optimal twist function in discrete state spaces necessitates costly Monte Carlo approximations, resulting a severe computational bottleneck at inference. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Contrastive Distribution Matching (CDM), a novel framework that amortizes the cost of SMC inference by learning a parameterized twist function via positive and negative samples. For efficient training, we reformulate the gradient estimator to leverage the closed-form forward kernels of discrete diffusion models. In practice, evaluating our learned twist function incurs less than 5% additional computational overhead compared to a single forward pass of the base model. Through extensive empirical evaluations, we demonstrate that CDM consistently outperforms existing baselines under matched wall-clock time. We validate the effectiveness and versatility of our approach across a diverse range of applications, including toxic text generation, regulatory DNA sequence design, protein designability, and diffusion large language model alignment. --- ### SCOPE: Simulating Cross-game Operations in Playable Environments for FPS World Models Authors: Zizhao Tong, Yeying Jin, Hongfeng Lai, Zeqing Wang, Zhaohu Xing, Kexu Cheng, Haoran Xu, Zhao Pu, Shangwen Zhu, Ruili Feng, Jian Zhao, Yan Zhang et al. Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23345v2 Interactive world models for first-person shooter (FPS) games must resolve high-frequency overlapping control signals at every frame without disrupting unaffected regions. Existing methods inject actions globally and train on single titles, failing under dense FPS inputs. We observe that FPS actions are spatially selective: discrete events such as firing or reloading affect only a localized region around the weapon (the scope), while continuous camera and movement signals govern stable surroundings. We propose SCOPE, which inserts a conditioning module into each transformer block of a pretrained video diffusion model. It reshapes features into per-pixel temporal sequences so that each position computes its action response from local visual content. This separates in-scope effects from out-of-scope generation without segmentation labels. We also introduce CrossFPS, the first multi-game FPS dataset with frame-aligned action telemetry. It comprises 69K clips from 7 titles with 10-DoF controller signals, curated to remove gameplay bias. The model learns general visual-to-action mappings rather than game-specific patterns, enabling zero-shot transfer to unseen scenes. Experiments confirm strong action responsiveness, precise scope separation, and effective cross-game generalization. --- ### CHASD: Language Increment-Calibrated Contrastive Decoding against Hallucination in LVLMs Authors: Xiaoyi Huang, Kejia Zhang, Zhiming Luo Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23344v1 Large Vision-Language Models have shown strong multimodal reasoning capabilities, yet they remain susceptible to object hallucinations when language priors dominate insufficient or misaligned visual evidence. Training-free contrastive decoding methods mitigate this issue by comparing predictions from original and perturbed visual inputs, but existing approaches either apply global perturbations that may alter useful visual evidence or invoke an additional negative branch at every decoding step. In this paper, we observe that hallucination risks are transient and token-specific: visual attention shifts across generated tokens, while some functional tokens are produced with high confidence and do not require contrastive calibration. Based on this observation, we propose Contrastive Hallucination-Aware Step-wise Decoding (CHASD) for Large Vision-Language Models, an inference-time framework for "calibration on demand". CHASD uses an uncertainty-driven confidence gate to activate the contrastive branch only when the maximum probability of the next-token is less than the threshold, and constructs the negative branch through attention-guided localized perturbations of the currently salient visual tokens. This design reduces unnecessary negative-branch forward passes while preserving the original distribution for high-confidence steps. Experiments on POPE, AMBER, MME, MMHal-Bench, and CHAIR show that CHASD improves hallucination-related metrics over strong training-free baselines with competitive inference efficiency. --- ### Sparse Compositional Flow Matching by geometric assembly from motion primitives Authors: Yan Tang, Yuanbo Tang, Tingyu Cao, Shaolun Huang, Yang Li Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23341v1 Embodied trajectories, such as the executable motion sequences of robotic manipulators, underwater vehicles, and mobile robots, are a fundamental output of embodied AI. Modern generative models often treat them as a dense, monolithic signal generated point by point, fitting an intricate high-dimensional posterior while leaving the data's latent structure unmodeled, the same sample inefficiency long identified by the structured generative model literature. We argue that a compositional latent structure is a natural choice: many embodied tasks share recurring motion fragments that can be made explicit as a finite repertoire of reusable motion primitives, and compositional units naturally align with subtask boundaries to support task decomposition. Existing compositional generators, however, compose in a latent space and rely on post-hoc decoding to relate sampled units to actual trajectory segments. We instead compose directly in the physical trajectory space through a flow-matching framework with two coupled designs. Motion-Primitive Dictionary Learning equips each atom with a learnable length mask and binary starting indicators so the atom itself is the primitive, reused verbatim wherever it is placed. Structural Sparse Flow Matching with Geometric Constraints then generates a binary placement matrix using duration-aware tokenization and a differentiable geometric loss that enforces spatial continuity and temporal contiguity where adjacent primitives meet. On Open X-Embodiment and 3DMoTraj, the framework attains state-of-the-art accuracy and reduces the FDE/ADE ratio from 1.8 to 1.07, improving ADE by 19.2% and FDE by 21.0% over the strongest baseline. --- ### Cultural Adaptation in Large Language Models for Political Discourse Authors: Wajdi Zaghouani Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23332v1 The integration of large language models into political discourse analysis creates new opportunities for comparative research, policy analysis, and civic technology, while introducing material risks for democratic accountability. This paper argues that cultural adaptation is a prerequisite for trustworthy deployment of large language models in political communication across diverse linguistic and institutional contexts. Current systems remain shaped by English dominant data, uneven multilingual coverage, and assumptions grounded in a narrow range of political institutions and discourse conventions, producing systematic errors when applied across cultures. We formalize cultural adaptation across translation, discourse, and ontology levels, identify recurring cultural failure modes in political NLP, and propose an operational evaluation matrix grounded in cultural fidelity, calibration, and democratic safety. Building on political text analysis, sociotechnical auditing, and cross cultural pragmatics, we outline methodological pathways including participatory dataset development, culturally aware transfer learning, and benchmark design that makes cultural adaptation empirically measurable. We conclude by clarifying governance constraints and scope conditions under which culturally adaptive political NLP can support democratic legitimacy. --- ### Emotion Recognition in Sign Language Conversation Authors: Yusong Wang, Keyu Mao, Takao Obi, Minghao Shao, Kotaro Funakoshi Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23328v2 Emotion Recognition in Conversation is a core component of affective computing, while current sign language emotion datasets primarily focus on isolated sentences and lack conversational context. Models trained exclusively on these isolated utterances demonstrate degraded performance in real world scenarios because they cannot utilize historical dialogue flow. To address this structural limitation, we introduce the ERC task to sign language video analysis and propose the eJSL Dialog dataset. Constructed using the scripts from the STUDIES corpus, the dataset contains 1,920 video samples organized into 480 unique dialogues. We conduct systematic benchmarking on this dataset using models ranging from isolated visual networks to multimodal conversational architectures. The results reveal a domain gap when applying generic multimodal conversational emotion recognition models to sign language. These findings demonstrate the explicit need for context-aware visual extractors specific to sign language and indicate that constructing larger conversational datasets to support large-scale pre-training is a necessary next step for future research. --- ### GFSR: Geometric Fidelity and Spatial Refinement for Reliable Lane Detection Authors: Tiancheng Wang, Zhaolu Ding, Richeng Xu, Tianhui Zheng, Hui Liu, Hanyu Xuan, Zhiliang Wu, Guanghui Yue Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23327v2 Lane detection stands as a crucial perception task in autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems. However, existing methods still degrade in complex real scenarios due to two major limitations. First, classification confidence only characterizes the categorical existence of lane priors and has no strong correlation with geometric quality. If threshold filtering and NMS are conducted merely based on this confidence, the model tends to retain lane priors with high confidence while eliminating those with lower confidence but superior geometric representation. Secondly, the regression modules in existing methods weaken correlations among sampling points, hindering fine-grained optimization of distant, high-curvature and complex-topology lanes and causing underfitting. To address these issues, we propose Geometric Fidelity and Spatial Refinement (GFSR), a framework consisting of LaneIoU-guided Confidence Calibration (LCC) and Adaptive Gated Location Refinement (AGLR). Specifically, LCC adopts LaneIoU as soft supervision to explicitly estimate the geometric fidelity of lane priors, which is further fused with classification confidence to construct the Collaborative Reliability Index (CRI). This index guides lane prior filtering, effectively retaining those with high classification confidence and favorable geometric quality. Meanwhile, cooperating with regression heads in each refinement stage, AGLR predicts sampling point lateral offsets and adopts a gating mechanism to adaptively regulate correction magnitude, strengthen inter-point correlations and boost model adaptability as well as robustness toward complex lane scenarios. Extensive experiments on CULane and CurveLanes demonstrate that our GFSR achieves state-of-the-art performance on CULane, with F1_50 and F1_75 scores of 81.46% and 65.01%, and reaches 87.35% F1_50 on CurveLanes. --- ### ClimateChat-300K: A Multi-Modal Facebook Dataset for Understanding Diverse Perspectives in Climate Communication Authors: Wajdi Zaghouani, Md. Rafiul Biswas, Mabrouka Bessghaier, Shimaa Ibrahim, George Mikros Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23326v1 We present ClimateChat-300K, a large-scale dataset of 299,329 public Facebook posts about climate change collected between May 2020 and May 2024 through the CrowdTangle platform. The dataset contains 41 metadata features including post content, engagement metrics, and page attributes, covering material from more than 26,000 global pages. Each post includes rich contextual information such as language, timestamp, page category, and interaction counts, enabling comprehensive analyses of public discourse around climate communication. Using topic modeling and sentiment analysis, we identify ten main themes grouped into five domains: policy, activism, cooperation, science, and conservation. The results reveal that emotional tone, post format, and page identity strongly influence audience engagement, with visually rich and emotionally charged content receiving the highest levels of interaction. The dataset also demonstrates how online discussions evolved in response to major events such as international climate summits and the COVID-19 pandemic period. ClimateChat-300K provides an open resource for reproducible and interdisciplinary research on polarization, misinformation, and the dynamics of digital climate discourse. By releasing this dataset, we aim to support transparent, data-driven research and contribute to a deeper un-derstanding of how public engagement with climate issues develops across time, geography, and institutional contexts. --- ### AraHopeCorpus: Annotation Guidelines and Dataset for Hope Speech in Arabic Social Media Crisis Discourse Authors: Esra'a Sharqawi, Wajdi Zaghouani Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23325v1 Social media has become a crucial arena for shaping public narratives during armed conflicts, providing space for both harmful and constructive communication. While hate speech and misinformation have been widely studied, expressions that promote resilience, solidarity, and optimism remain underexplored, particularly in Arabic contexts. This paper introduces AraHopeCorpus, the first annotated dataset of Arabic hope speech collected from ten thousand YouTube comments related to the war on Gaza between 2023 and 2024. Using a detailed annotation framework, comments were classified into three categories: hope speech, no hope speech, and neutral or unclear discourse. The dataset shows that hopeful language dominates, accounting for more than sixty four percent of all comments. These expressions of hope appear mainly as religious encouragement, collective solidarity, and optimism for endurance and justice. No hope speech, representing about thirteen percent, reflects despair and disillusionment, while the rest of the comments contain neutral or mixed content. Inter-Annotator Agreement reached substantial levels (Cohen's Kappa equals 0.71), though dialectal variation, sarcasm, and implicit meaning posed annotation challenges. A comparative analysis between human annotators and ChatGPT revealed that large language models can support annotation but remain limited in handling dialectal and culturally embedded expressions. AraHopeCorpus will be released for research purposes under an open and non commercial license. It provides a valuable resource for studying constructive digital discourse, enabling further research on hope speech detection, crisis communication, and resilience in Arabic social media. --- ### Enhancing Blood Cells Classification using Hybrid Quantum Neural Networks Authors: Guilherme Cruz, Nouhaila Innan, Alberto Marchisio, Gabriel Falcao, Muhammad Shafique Published: 2026-05-22 Categories: cs.CV, quant-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23324v3 Accurate classification of microscopic blood cells is still a critical task in medical image analysis, where subtle variations and limited data can challenge conventional deep learning models. As such, we investigate in this work the potential of Hybrid Quantum-Classical Neural Networks (HQNNs) to enhance feature representation and improve classification performance in this domain. We propose a modular architecture combining a pre-trained ResNet-50 backbone with a low-dimensional latent bottleneck and a variational quantum circuit, enabling a direct comparison between quantum-enhanced and purely classical transformation mechanisms. To isolate the contribution of the quantum component, we evaluate three architectures: a HQNN model, a Classical Matched Model with an additional nonlinear transformation layer of comparable capacity, and a baseline model without an intermediate transformation stage. Experiments conducted on two publicly available blood cell datasets, namely the Blood Cell Images dataset and the PBC dataset, demonstrate that HQNNs consistently achieve superior or more balanced performance across evaluation metrics. In the Blood Cell Images Dataset, the proposed approach improves macro F1-score by up to 3.7% compared to classical baselines, while improving the F1-score from 98.54% to 98.69% in the more challenging 8-class scenario with near-saturated performance. Additional evaluation on IBM quantum hardware shows that the model remains robust under noise, with only a modest performance degradation relative to simulated results. These results indicate that quantum feature transformations can enhance discriminative representations, particularly in challenging classification scenarios, and highlight the practical potential of HQNN models for medical imaging tasks. ---