# Research Papers — 2026-05 · bundle page 228 of 326 > Full-text markdown of papers #11351–11400 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/228 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/227.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/229.md) ### Teaching LLMs to See Graphs: Unifying Text and Structural Reasoning Authors: Dario Vajda Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10247v1 Using Large Language Models (LLMs) to process graph-structured data is an active research area, yet current state-of-the-art approaches typically rely on multi-step pipelines with Graph Neural Network (GNN) encoders that compress rich textual attributes into solitary tokens, creating a significant semantic bottleneck. In this paper, we introduce the Graph Transformer Language Model (GTLM), a novel architecture that enables pretrained LLMs to natively process graph topologies while entirely eliminating this compressive bottleneck. GTLM is exceptionally parameter-efficient: by injecting graph-aware attention biases directly into the LLM's attention modules, it introduces only 0.015% additional parameters relative to the base model. We theoretically prove that our bidirectional attention prefix preserves node permutation equivariance while maintaining exact backward compatibility with the pretrained base model. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that a 1B-parameter GTLM matches or exceeds the performance of 7B-parameter state-of-the-art models on standard Text-Attributed Graph benchmarks, while significantly surpassing baselines on GraphQA. Finally, we demonstrate that GTLM attention heads implicitly learn to simulate message passing, explaining its superior performance on algorithmic tasks. This paradigm shift enables true algorithmic reasoning within LLMs and provides a scalable foundation for next-generation GraphRAG and relational deep learning. --- ### SciIntegrity-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Academic Integrity in AI Scientist Systems Authors: Zonglin Yang, Xingtong Liu, Xinyan Xu Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10246v2 AI scientist systems are increasingly deployed for autonomous research, yet their academic integrity has never been systematically evaluated. We introduce SCIINTEGRITY-BENCH, the first benchmark designed around a dilemmatic evaluation paradigm: each of its 33 scenarios across 11 trap categories is constructed so that honest acknowledgment of failure is the only correct response, while task completion requires misconduct. Across 231 evaluation runs spanning 7 state-of-the-art LLMs, the overall integrity problem rate reaches 34.2%, and no model achieves zero failures. Most strikingly, across missing-data scenarios, all seven models generate synthetic data rather than acknowledging infeasibility, differing only in whether they disclose the substitution. A further prompt ablation study separates two drivers: removing explicit completion pressure sharply reduces undisclosed fabrication from 20.6% to 3.2%, while the underlying synthesis rate remains unchanged, revealing an intrinsic completion bias that persists independent of prompt-level instructions. These findings point to the absence of honest refusal as a trained disposition as the primary driver of observed failures. We release SCIINTEGRITY-BENCH at https://github.com/liuxingtong/Sci-Integrity-Bench. --- ### When Normality Shifts: Risk-Aware Test-Time Adaptation for Unsupervised Tabular Anomaly Detection Authors: Wei Huang, Hezhe Qiao, Kailai Zhang, Zaisheng Ye, Yu-Ming Shang, Xiangling Fu Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10242v1 Unsupervised tabular anomaly detection methods typically learn feature patterns from normal samples during training and subsequently identify samples that deviate from these patterns as anomalies during testing. However, in practical scenarios, the limited scale and diversity of training data often lead to an incomplete characterization of normal patterns. While test-time adaptation offers a remedy, its isolated focus on test-time optimization ignores the critical synergy with training-phase learning. Furthermore, indiscriminate adaptation to unlabeled test data inevitably triggers anomaly contamination, preventing the model from fully realizing its discriminative capability between normal and anomalous samples. To address these issues, we propose RTTAD, a Risk-aware Test-time adaptation method for unsupervised Tabular Anomaly Detection. RTTAD holistically tackles normality shifts via a synergistic two-stage mechanism. During training, collaborative dual-task learning captures multi-level representations to establish a robust normal prior. During testing, a Test-Time Contrastive Learning (TTCL) module explicitly accounts for adaptation risk by selectively updating the model using high-confidence pseudo-normal samples while constraining anomalous ones. Additionally, TTCL incorporates a k-nearest neighbor-based contrastive objective to refine embedding distributions, thereby further enhancing the model's discriminative capacity. Extensive experiments on 15 tabular datasets demonstrate that RTTAD achieves state-of-the-art overall detection performance. --- ### Building Korean linguistic resource for NLU data generation of banking app CS dialog system Authors: Jeongwoo Yoon, On-yu Park, Changhoe Hwang, Gwanghoon Yoo, Eric Laporte, Jeesun Nam Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10241v1 Natural language understanding (NLU) is integral to task-oriented dialog systems, but demands a considerable amount of annotated training data to increase the coverage of diverse utterances. In this study, we report the construction of a linguistic resource named FIAD (Financial Annotated Dataset) and its use to generate a Korean annotated training data for NLU in the banking customer service (CS) domain. By an empirical examination of a corpus of banking app reviews, we identified three linguistic patterns occurring in Korean request utterances: TOPIC (ENTITY, FEATURE), EVENT, and DISCOURSE MARKER. We represented them in LGGs (Local Grammar Graphs) to generate annotated data covering diverse intents and entities. To assess the practicality of the resource, we evaluate the performances of DIET-only (Intent: 0.91 /Topic (entity+feature): 0.83), DIET+ HANBERT (I:0.94/T:0.85), DIET+ KoBERT (I:0.94/T:0.86), and DIET+ KorBERT (I:0.95/T:0.84) models trained on FIAD-generated data to extract various types of semantic items. --- ### MARGIN: Margin-Aware Regularized Geometry for Imbalanced Vulnerability Detection Authors: Yuteng Zhang, Huifang Ma, Jiahui Wei, Qingqing Li, Yafei Yang Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.SE, cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10240v3 Software vulnerability detection is critical for ensuring software security and reliability. Despite recent advances in deep learning, real-world vulnerability datasets suffer from two severe challenges: frequency imbalance and difficulty imbalance. We reinterpret these challenges from an embedding geometry perspective, observing that such imbalances induce geometric distortions in hyperspherical representation space. To address this issue, we propose MARGIN, a metric-based framework that learns discriminative vulnerability representations through adaptive margin metric learning and hyperspherical prototype modeling. MARGIN dynamically adjusts geometric regularization according to the distribution structure estimated by the von Mises-Fisher concentration, aligning the probability mass of embedding distributions with their corresponding Voronoi cells, thereby reducing geometric distortion and yielding more stable decision boundaries. Extensive experiments on public vulnerability datasets show that MARGIN consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving notable improvements in classification and detection, especially on challenging, imbalanced datasets. Further analysis demonstrates that MARGIN produces more structured embedding geometries, improving robustness, interpretability, and generalization. --- ### AdaptSplat: Adapting Vision Foundation Models for Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting Authors: Mingwei Xing, Xinliang Wang, Yifeng Shi Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10239v3 This work explores a simple yet powerful lightweight adapter design for feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Existing methods typically apply complex, architecture-specific designs on top of the generic pipeline of image feature extraction $\rightarrow$ multi-view interaction $\rightarrow$ feature decoding. However, constrained by the scale bottleneck of 3D training data and the low-pass filtering effect of deep networks, these methods still fall short in cross-domain generalization and high-frequency geometric fidelity. To address these problems, we propose AdaptSplat, which demonstrates that without complex component engineering, introducing a single adapter of only 1.5M parameters into the generic architecture is sufficient to achieve superior performance. Specifically, we design a lightweight Frequency-Preserving Adapter (FPA) that extracts direction-aware high-frequency structural priors from the shallow features of a powerful vision foundation model backbone, and seamlessly integrates them into the generic pipeline via high-frequency positional encodings and adaptive residual modulation. This effectively compensates for the high-frequency attenuation caused by over-smoothing in deep features, improving the fitting accuracy of Gaussian primitives on complex surfaces and sharp boundaries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AdaptSplat achieves state-of-the-art feed-forward reconstruction performance on multiple standard benchmarks, with stable generalization across domains. Code available at: https://github.com/xmw666/AdaptSplat. --- ### AdaptSplat: Adapting Vision Foundation Models for Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting Authors: Mingwei Xing, Xinliang Wang, Yifeng Shi Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10239v2 This work explores a simple yet powerful lightweight adapter design for feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Existing methods typically apply complex, architecture-specific designs on top of the generic pipeline of image feature extraction $\rightarrow$ multi-view interaction $\rightarrow$ feature decoding. However, constrained by the scale bottleneck of 3D training data and the low-pass filtering effect of deep networks, these methods still fall short in cross-domain generalization and high-frequency geometric fidelity. To address these problems, we propose AdaptSplat, which demonstrates that without complex component engineering, introducing a single adapter of only 1.5M parameters into the generic architecture is sufficient to achieve superior performance. Specifically, we design a lightweight Frequency-Preserving Adapter (FPA) that extracts direction-aware high-frequency structural priors from the shallow features of a powerful vision foundation model backbone, and seamlessly integrates them into the generic pipeline via high-frequency positional encodings and adaptive residual modulation. This effectively compensates for the high-frequency attenuation caused by over-smoothing in deep features, improving the fitting accuracy of Gaussian primitives on complex surfaces and sharp boundaries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AdaptSplat achieves state-of-the-art feed-forward reconstruction performance on multiple standard benchmarks, with stable generalization across domains. Code available at: https://github.com/xmw666/AdaptSplat. --- ### The Benefits of Temporal Correlations: SGD Learns k-Juntas from Random Walks Efficiently Authors: Elisabetta Cornacchia, Dan Mikulincer, Elchanan Mossel Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10237v1 We study how temporal correlations in the data can make certain sparse learning problems efficiently learnable by gradient-based methods. Our focus is on Boolean k-juntas, a canonical sparse learning problem known to pose barriers for gradient-based methods under independent uniform samples. We show that this picture changes when the samples are generated by a lazy random walk on the hypercube. In this setting, the temporal dependencies can be exploited by a two-layer ReLU network trained using stylized-SGD with a temporal-difference loss, which compares target and predicted increments across consecutive samples. For every fixed k, the resulting sample complexity is essentially linear in the ambient dimension d. By contrast, we show that for large-batch gradient methods using standard convex pointwise losses, temporal correlations do not provide the same advantage. --- ### When Does Non-Uniform Replay Matter in Reinforcement Learning? Authors: Michal Korniak, Mikołaj Czarnecki, Yarden As, Piotr Miłoś, Pieter Abbeel, Michal Nauman Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10236v3 Modern off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms often rely on simple uniform replay sampling and it remains unclear when and why non-uniform replay improves over this strong baseline. Across diverse RL settings, we show that the effectiveness of non-uniform replay is governed by three factors: replay volume, the number of replayed transitions per environment step; expected recency, how recent sampled transitions are; and the entropy of the replay sampling distribution. Our main contribution is clarifying when non-uniform replay is beneficial and providing practical guidance for replay design in modern off-policy RL. Namely, we find that non-uniform replay is most beneficial when replay volume is low, and that high-entropy sampling is important even at comparable expected recency. Motivated by these findings, we adopt a simple Truncated Geometric replay that biases sampling toward recent experience while preserving high entropy and incurring negligible computational overhead. Across large-scale parallel simulation, single-task, and multi-task settings, including three modern algorithms evaluated on five RL benchmark suites, this replay sampling strategy improves sample efficiency in low-volume regimes while remaining competitive when replay volume is high. --- ### Route Before Retrieve: Activating Latent Routing Abilities of LLMs for RAG vs. Long-Context Selection Authors: Yiwen Chen, Kuan Li, Fuzhen Zhuang, Deqing Wang, Zhao Zhang, Liwen Zhang, Yong Jiang, Shuai Wang, Minhao Cheng Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10235v2 Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have expanded the context window to beyond 128K tokens, enabling long-document understanding and multi-source reasoning. A key challenge, however, lies in choosing between retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and long-context (LC) strategies: RAG is efficient but constrained by retrieval quality, while LC supports global reasoning at higher cost and with position sensitivity. Existing methods such as Self-Route adopt failure-driven fallback from RAG to LC, but remain passive, inefficient, and hard to interpret. We propose Pre-Route, a proactive routing framework that performs structured reasoning before answering. Using lightweight metadata (e.g., document type, length, initial snippet), Pre-Route enables task analysis, coverage estimation, and information-need prediction, producing explainable and cost-efficient routing decisions. Our study shows three key findings: (i) LLMs possess latent routing ability that can be reliably elicited with guidelines, allowing single-sample performance to approach that of multi-sample (Best-of-N) results; (ii) linear probes reveal that structured prompts sharpen the separability of the "optimal routing dimension" in representation space; and (iii) distillation transfers this reasoning structure to smaller models for lightweight deployment. Experiments on LaRA (in-domain) and LongBench-v2 (OOD) confirm that Pre-Route outperforms Always-RAG, Always-LC, and Self-Route baselines, achieving superior overall cost-effectiveness. --- ### FORGE: Fragment-Oriented Ranking and Generation for Context-Aware Molecular Optimization Authors: Qingchuan Zhang, He Cao, Hao Li, Yanjun Shao, Zhiyuan Liu, Shihang Wang, Shufang Xie, Shenghua Gao, Xinwu Ye Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10230v1 Molecular optimization seeks to improve a molecule through small structural edits while preserving similarity to the starting compound. Recent language-model approaches typically treat this task as prompt-conditioned sequence generation. However, relying on natural language introduces an inherent data-scaling bottleneck, often leads to chemical hallucinations, and ignores the strong context dependence of fragment effects. We present FORGE, a two-stage framework that reformulates molecular optimization as context-aware local editing. By utilizing automatically mined, verified low-to-high edit pairs instead of expensive human text annotations, Stage 1 ranks candidate fragments by their property contribution under the full molecular context to inject chemical prior, and Stage 2 generates explicit fragment replacements. Built on a compact 0.6B language model, FORGE further adapts to unseen black-box objectives through in-context demonstrations. Across Prompt-MolOpt, PMO-1k and ChemCoTBench, FORGE consistently outperforms prior methods, including substantially larger language models and graph methods. These results highlight the value of explicit fragment-level supervision as a more easily obtainable, scalable, and hallucination-less alternative to natural language training. --- ### VPD-100K: Towards Generalizable and Fine-grained Visual Privacy Protection Authors: Xiaobin Hu, Enpu Zuo, Lanping Hu, Kaiwen Yang, Dianshu Liao, Tianyi Zhang, Bo Yin, Yinsi Zhou, Shidong Pan, Xiaoyu Sun Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10229v1 Privacy protection has become a critical requirement in the era of ubiquitous visual data sharing, imposing higher demands on efficient and robust privacy detection algorithms. However, current robust detection models are severely hindered by the lack of comprehensive datasets. Existing privacy-oriented datasets often suffer from limited scale, coarse-grained annotations, and narrow domain coverage, failing to capture the intricate details of sensitive information in realworld environments. To bridge this gap, we present a large-scale, fine-grained Visual Privacy Dataset (VPD-100K), designed to facilitate generalized privacy detection. We establish a holistic taxonomy comprising four primary domains: Human Presence, On-Screen Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Physical Identifiers, and Location Indicators, containing 100,000 images annotated with 33 fine-grained classes and over 190,000 object instances. Statistical analysis reveals that our dataset features long-tailed distributions, small object scales, and high visual complexity. These characteristics make the dataset particularly valuable for demanding, unconstrained applications such as live streaming, where actors frequently face unintentional, realtime information leakage. Furthermore, we design an effective frequency-enhanced lightweight module consisting of frequency-domain attention fusion and adaptive spectral gating mechanism that breaks the limitations of spatial pixel intensity to better capture the subtle details of sensitive information. Extensive experiments conducted on both diverse image and streaming videos benchmarks consistently demonstrate the effectiveness of our VPD-100K dataset and the wellcurated frequency mechanism. The code and dataset are available at https://vpd-100k.github.io/. --- ### Hypothesis-Driven Deep Research with Large Language Models: A Structured Methodology for Automated Knowledge Discovery Authors: Michael Chin Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10224v1 Current AI-powered research systems adopt a direct search-then-summarize paradigm that treats hypotheses as end products of scientific discovery. We argue this leaves a critical gap: hypotheses can serve a far more powerful role as organizational instruments that structure the research process itself. We propose the Hypothesis-Driven Deep Research (HDRI) methodology - the first framework using hypotheses to organize general-purpose deep research across arbitrary domains, rather than merely validating claims within specific domains. This transforms research from reactive information retrieval into proactive, verifiable, and iterative knowledge discovery. HDRI is formalized with six core principles and an eight-stage pipeline. A central innovation is the gap-driven iterative research mechanism - a closed-loop quality assurance system that automatically identifies informational and logical gaps, triggering targeted supplementary investigation. We further introduce a fact reasoning framework with traceable reasoning chains and quantified confidence propagation, a subject locking mechanism to prevent entity confusion, and a multi-dimensional quality assessment scheme. The methodology is realized in the INFOMINER system. Experiments demonstrate improvements of 22.4% in fact density, 90% subject matching accuracy, 0.92 multi-source verification confidence, and 14% completeness gain from gap-driven supplementation. Five case studies validate its practical applicability, achieving an average quality rating of 4.46/5.0. --- ### Beyond Autonomy: A Dynamic Tiered AgentRunner Framework for Governable and Resilient Enterprise AI Execution Authors: Kai Pan, Rong Hou Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10223v1 Current large language model agent frameworks prioritize autonomy but lack the governability mechanisms required for enterprise deployment. High-risk write operations proceed without independent review, complex tasks lack acceptance verification, and computational resources are allocated uniformly regardless of risk level. We propose the Dynamic Tiered AgentRunner, a controlled execution protocol distilled from a production-grade multi-tenant SaaS platform. The framework introduces three core mechanisms: (1) Risk-Adaptive Tiering that dynamically allocates computational resources and review intensity based on task risk profiles, achieving Pareto-optimal trade-offs between safety and efficiency; (2) Separation of Powers architecture where proposal, review, execution, and verification are performed by independent agents with physically isolated boundaries; and (3) Resilience-by-Design through a Verifier-Recovery closed loop that treats failure as a first-class system state. We formalize the tier selectio --- ### Stellar Age Compression Reshapes Interpretations of the Milky Way Thick-Disk Formation History Authors: Zhipeng Zhang Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: astro-ph.GA, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10220v2 The formation timescale of the Milky Way thick disk is one of the central debates in Galactic archaeology. The age-metallicity relation (AMR), formation timescale, and chemical evolution gradients are frequently used to infer a rapid assembly, short-timescale enrichment, and bursty formation history of the thick disk. However, stellar ages are not directly observable, introducing the potential risk that inferred ages may harbor a systematic compression tied to observational quality. In this paper, we use the same stellar sample and identical physical covariate matching conditions, but two independent age scales--spectroscopic inferred ages (astroNN) and asteroseismic ages (APOKASC-3)--to compare the observable signatures of the thick-disk formation history. We find that several key observables previously supporting a rapid thick-disk formation are systematically weakened under seismic anchoring: the AMR slope flattens from -3.29 to -1.86 Gyr dex-1 (Delta a = +1.43), the formation timescale widens from 3.04 to 3.55 Gyr, and the peak formation age shifts from 9.1 to 6.0 Gyr. Through transport inversion experiments, we further show that additive noise can only broaden the age distribution and cannot reproduce the above pattern, whereas a compressive transport map (lambda < 1) simultaneously reproduces a narrower age distribution, a steeper AMR, and rapid-formation-like observables. This result indicates that the compression transformation itself is sufficient to generate rapid-formation-friendly observables without requiring an intrinsically bursty formation history. Our findings reveal that statistical interpretations of the Milky Way formation history may depend sensitively on the stellar age definition itself. --- ### Parameterized Complexity of Stationarity Testing for Piecewise-Affine Functions and Shallow CNN Losses Authors: Yuhan Ye Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: math.OC, cs.CC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10219v2 We study the parameterized complexity of testing approximate first-order stationarity at a prescribed point for continuous piecewise-affine (PA) functions, a basic task in nonsmooth optimization. PA functions form a canonical model for nonsmooth stationarity testing and capture the local polyhedral geometry that appears in ReLU-type training losses. Recent work by Tian and So (SODA 2025) shows that testing approximate stationarity notions for PA functions is computationally intractable in the worst case, and identifies fixed-dimensional tractability as an open direction. We address this direction from the viewpoint of parameterized complexity, with the ambient dimension $d$ as the parameter. In this paper, we give XP algorithms in fixed dimension for the tractable sides, and prove W(1)-hardness for the complementary sides. Moreover, lower bounds under the Exponential Time Hypothesis rule out algorithms running in time $ρ(d)\size^{o(d)}$ for any computable function $ρ$, where $\size$ denotes the total binary encoding length of the stationarity-testing instance. As a further consequence, our results yield the corresponding parameterized complexity picture for testing local minimality of continuous PA functions. We further extend our hardness results to a family of shallow ReLU CNN training losses, with stationarity tested in the trainable weight space. Thus, the same parameterized-complexity picture also appears for simple CNN training losses. --- ### Relative Score Policy Optimization for Diffusion Language Models Authors: Zichao Yu, Shengze Xu, Bingqing Jiang, Wenyi Zhang, Difan Zou Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10218v1 Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer a promising route to parallel and efficient text generation, but improving their reasoning ability requires effective post-training. Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a natural choice for this purpose, yet its application to dLLMs is hindered by the absence of tractable sequence-level log-ratios, which are central to standard policy optimization. The lack of tractable sequence-level log-ratios forces existing methods to rely on high-variance ELBO-based approximations, where high verifier rewards can amplify inaccurate score estimates and destabilize RL training. To overcome this issue, we propose \textbf{R}elative \textbf{S}core \textbf{P}olicy \textbf{O}ptimization (RSPO), a simple RLVR method that uses verifiable rewards to calibrate noisy likelihood estimates in dLLMs. The core of our algorithm relies on a key observation: a reward advantage can be interpreted not only as an update direction, but also as a target for the relative log-ratio between the current and reference policies. Accordingly, RSPO calibrates this noisy relative log-ratio estimate by comparing its reward advantage with the reward-implied target relative log-ratio, updating the policy according to the gap between the current estimate and the target rather than the raw advantage alone. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and planning benchmarks show that RSPO yields especially strong gains on planning tasks and competitive mathematical-reasoning performance. --- ### The Impact of Editorial Intervention on Detecting Native Language Traces Authors: Ahmet Yavuz Uluslu, Mark Gales, Kate Knill, Gerold Schneider Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10216v2 Native Language Identification (NLI) is the task of determining an author's native language (L1) from their non-native writing. With the advent of human-AI co-authorship, learner texts are routinely corrected and rewritten by large language models, fundamentally altering the linguistic features NLI approaches depend on. In this paper, we investigate the robustness of L1 traces across increasing degrees of editorial intervention. By processing 450 essays from the Write & Improve 2024 (W&I) corpus through varying levels of grammatical error correction and paraphrasing, we demonstrate that L1 attribution does not depend solely on surface-level errors. Instead, the detection models appear to leverage deeper L1-related features, including unidiomatic lexico-semantic choices and pragmatic transfer. We find that minimal edits preserve these structural traces and maintain high L1 attribution accuracy. In contrast, fluency edits and paraphrasing normalize these L1 features, leading to a sharp decline in performance. --- ### To Redact, or not to Redact? A Local LLM Approach to Deliberative Process Privilege Classification Authors: Maik Larooij, David Graus Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10211v1 Government transparency laws, like the Freedom of Information (FOIA) acts in the United States and United Kingdom, and the Woo (Open Government Act) in the Netherlands, grant citizens the right to directly request documents from the government. As these documents might contain sensitive information, such as personal information or threats to national security, the laws allow governments to redact sensitive parts of the documents prior to release. We build on prior research to perform automatic sensitivity classification for the FOIA Exemption 5 deliberative process privilege using Large Language Models (LLMs). However, processing documents not yet cleared for review via third-party cloud APIs is often legally or politically untenable. Therefore, in this work, we perform sensitivity classification with a small, local model, deployable on consumer-grade hardware (Qwen3.5 9B). We compare eight variants of applying LLMs for sentence classification, using well-known prompting techniques, and find that a combination of Chain-of-Thought prompting and few-shot prompting with error-based examples outperforms classification models of earlier work in terms of recall and F2 score. This method also closely approaches the performance of a widely-used, cost-efficient commercial model (Gemini 2.5 Flash). In an additional analysis, we find that sentences that are predicted as deliberative contain more verbs that indicate the expression of opinions, and are more often phrased in in first-person. Above all, deliberativeness seems characterized by the presence of a combination of multiple indicators, in particular the combination of first-person words with a verb for expressing opinion. --- ### Nano-U: Efficient Terrain Segmentation for Tiny Robot Navigation Authors: Federico Pizzolato, Francesco Pasti, Nicola Bellotto Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10210v2 Terrain segmentation is a fundamental capability for autonomous mobile robots operating in unstructured outdoor environments. However, state-of-the-art models are incompatible with the memory and compute constraints typical of microcontrollers, limiting scalable deployment in small robotics platforms. To address this gap, we develop a complete framework for robust binary terrain segmentation on a low-cost microcontroller. At the core of our approach we design Nano-U, a highly compact binary segmentation network with a few thousand parameters. To compensate for the network's minimal capacity, we train Nano-U via Quantization-Aware Distillation (QAD), combining knowledge distillation and quantization-aware training. This allows the final quantized model to achieve excellent results on the Botanic Garden dataset and to perform very well on TinyAgri, a custom agricultural field dataset with more challenging scenes. We deploy the quantized Nano-U on a commodity microcontroller by extending MicroFlow, a compiler-based inference engine for TinyML implemented in Rust. By eliminating interpreter overhead and dynamic memory allocation, the quantized model executes on an ESP32-S3 with a minimal memory footprint and low latency. This compiler-based execution demonstrates a viable and energy-efficient solution for perception on low-cost robotic platforms. --- ### Extended Wasserstein-GAN Approach to Causal Distribution Learning: Density-Free Estimation and Minimax Optimality Authors: Shu Tamano, Masaaki Imaizumi Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: math.ST, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10206v1 Distributional causal inference requires estimating not only average treatment effects but also interventional outcome distributions, including quantiles, tail risks, and policy-dependent uncertainty. As a method for distributional causal inference, generative adversarial network (GAN)-based counterfactual methods are flexible tools for this task. However, these methods have several limitations. First, the objectives of certain techniques do not coincide with the statistical risk of the identifiable causal target, and therefore provide limited theoretical guarantees regarding estimable counterfactual distributions or optimality. Second, they tend to rely on unstable density-based methods, such as density ratio estimation. In this paper, we propose GANICE (GAN for Interventional Conditional Estimation) with several advantages: it (i) clarifies the conditional interventional distribution for each treatment--covariate state as the causal estimation target; (ii) estimates the conditional distribution such that its averaged Wasserstein risk is minimized; (iii) establishes minimax optimality. GANICE achieves these advantages through the introduction of the extended Wasserstein distance, the incorporation of a cellwise critic in its dual, and an optimality proof based on Besov space theory. Our experiments demonstrate that GANICE consistently outperforms existing methods. --- ### Unveiling High-Probability Generalization in Decentralized SGD Authors: Jiahuan Wang, Ping Luo, Ziqing Wen, Dongsheng Li, Tao Sun Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10205v1 Decentralized stochastic gradient descent (D-SGD) is an efficient method for large-scale distributed learning. Existing generalization studies mainly address expected results, achieving rates limited to $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{δ\sqrt{mn}}\right)$, where $δ$ is the confidence parameter, $m$ the number of workers, and $n$ the sample size. When $m=1$, D-SGD reduces to traditional SGD, whose optimal high-probability generalization bound is $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{\sqrt{n}}\log (1/δ)\right)$. This discrepancy reveals a gap between high-probability guarantees for SGD and those for D-SGD. To close this, we develop a high-probability learning theory for D-SGD, aiming for the optimal $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{\sqrt{mn}}\log (1/δ)\right)$ rate. We refine bounds for D-SGD using pointwise uniform stability in distributed learning-a weaker notion than uniform stability-and analyze them across convex, strongly convex, and non-convex settings. We also provide high-probability results for gradient-based measures in non-convex cases where only local minima exist, and derive optimization error and excess risk bounds. Finally, accounting for communication overhead, we analyze generalization bounds for local models within time-varying frameworks. --- ### 3DReflecNet: A Large-Scale Dataset for 3D Reconstruction of Reflective, Transparent, and Low-Texture Objects Authors: Zhicheng Liang, Haoyi Yu, Boyan Li, Dayou Zhang, Zijian Cao, Tianyi Gong, Junhua Liu, Shuguang Cui, Fangxin Wang Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10204v1 Accurate 3D reconstruction of objects with reflective, transparent, or low-texture surfaces still remains notoriously challenging. Such materials often violate key assumptions in multi-view reconstruction pipelines, such as photometric consistency and the availability on distinct geometric texture cues. Existing datasets primarily focus on diffuse, textured objects, and therefore provide limited insight into performance under real-world material complexities. We introduce 3DReflecNet, a large-scale hybrid dataset exceeding 22 TB that is specifically designed to benchmark and advance 3D vision methods for these challenging materials. 3DReflecNet combines two types of data: over 120,000 synthetic instances generated via physically-based rendering of more than 12,000 shapes, and over 1,000 real-world objects captured using consumer devices. Together, these data consist of more than 7 million multi-view frames. The dataset spans diverse materials, complex lighting conditions, and a wide range of geometric forms, including shapes generated from both real and LLM-synthesized 2D images using diffusion-based pipelines. To support robust evaluation, we design benchmarks for five core tasks: image matching, structure-from-motion, novel view synthesis, reflection removal, and relighting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that state-of-the-art methods struggle to maintain accuracy across these settings, highlighting the need for more resilient 3D vision models. --- ### Task-Aware Calibration: Provably Optimal Decoding in LLMs Authors: Tim Tomov, Dominik Fuchsgruber, Rajeev Verma, Stephan Günnemann Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10202v1 LLM decoding often relies on the model's predictive distribution to generate an output. Consequently, misalignment with respect to the true generating distribution leads to suboptimal decisions in practice. While a natural solution is to calibrate the model's output distribution, for LLMs, this is ill-posed at the combinatorially vast level of free-form language. We address this by building on the insight that in many tasks, these free-form outputs can be interpreted in a semantically meaningful latent structure, for example, discrete class labels, integers, or sets. We introduce task calibration as a paradigm to calibrate the model's predictive distribution in the task-induced latent space. We apply a decision-theoretic result to show that Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding on the task-calibrated latent distribution is the optimal decoding strategy on latent model beliefs. Empirically, it consistently improves generation quality across different tasks and baselines. We also introduce Task Calibration Error (TCE), an application-aware calibration metric that quantifies the excess loss due to miscalibration. Our work demonstrates that task calibration enables more reliable model decisions across various tasks and applications. --- ### HeteroGenManip: Generalizable Manipulation For Heterogeneous Object Interactions Authors: Zhenhao Shen, Zeming Yang, Yue Chen, Yuran Wang, Shengqiang Xu, Mingleyang Li, Hao Dong, Ruihai Wu Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10201v3 Generalizable manipulation involving cross-type object interactions is a critical yet challenging capability in robotics. To reliably accomplish such tasks, robots must address two fundamental challenges: "where to manipulate" (contact point localization) and "how to manipulate" (subsequent interaction trajectory planning). Existing foundation-model-based approaches often adopt end-to-end learning that obscures the distinction between these stages, exacerbating error accumulation in long-horizon tasks. Furthermore, they typically rely on a single uniform model, which fails to capture the diverse, category-specific features required for heterogeneous objects. To overcome these limitations, we propose HeteroGenManip, a task-conditioned, two-stage framework designed to decouple initial grasp from complex interaction execution. First, Foundation-Correspondence-Guided Grasp module leverages structural priors to align the initial contact state, thereby significantly reducing the pose uncertainty of grasping. Subsequently, Multi-Foundation-Model Diffusion Policy (MFMDP) routes objects to category-specialized foundation models, integrating fine-grained geometric information with highly-variable part features via a dual-stream cross-attention mechanism. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that HeteroGenManip achieves robust intra-category shape and pose generalization. The framework achieves an average 31% performance improvement in simulation tasks with broad type setting, alongside a 36.7% gain across four real-world tasks with different interaction types. --- ### HeteroGenManip: Generalizable Manipulation For Heterogeneous Object Interactions Authors: Zhenhao Shen, Zeming Yang, Yue Chen, Yuran Wang, Shengqiang Xu, Mingleyang Li, Hao Dong, Ruihai Wu Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10201v2 Generalizable manipulation involving cross-type object interactions is a critical yet challenging capability in robotics. To reliably accomplish such tasks, robots must address two fundamental challenges: "where to manipulate" (contact point localization) and "how to manipulate" (subsequent interaction trajectory planning). Existing foundation-model-based approaches often adopt end-to-end learning that obscures the distinction between these stages, exacerbating error accumulation in long-horizon tasks. Furthermore, they typically rely on a single uniform model, which fails to capture the diverse, category-specific features required for heterogeneous objects. To overcome these limitations, we propose HeteroGenManip, a task-conditioned, two-stage framework designed to decouple initial grasp from complex interaction execution. First, Foundation-Correspondence-Guided Grasp module leverages structural priors to align the initial contact state, thereby significantly reducing the pose uncertainty of grasping. Subsequently, Multi-Foundation-Model Diffusion Policy (MFMDP) routes objects to category-specialized foundation models, integrating fine-grained geometric information with highly-variable part features via a dual-stream cross-attention mechanism. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that HeteroGenManip achieves robust intra-category shape and pose generalization. The framework achieves an average 31% performance improvement in simulation tasks with broad type setting, alongside a 36.7% gain across four real-world tasks with different interaction types. --- ### How Should LLMs Listen While Speaking? A Study of User-Stream Routing in Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Authors: Hui Lu, Xueyuan Chen, Huimeng Wang, Shuhai Peng, Shiyin Kang, Xixin Wu, Zhiyong Wu Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CL, eess.AS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10199v1 Full-duplex spoken dialogue requires a model to keep listening while generating its own spoken response. This is challenging for large language models (LLMs), which are designed to extend a single coherent sequence and do not naturally support user input arriving during generation. We argue that how the user stream is routed into the LLM is therefore a key architectural question for full-duplex modeling. To study this question, we extend a text-only LLM into a unified full-duplex spoken dialogue system and compare two routing strategies under a shared training pipeline: (i) channel fusion, which injects the user stream directly into the LLM input, and (ii) cross-attention routing, which keeps the user stream as external memory accessed through cross-attention adapters. Experiments on spoken question answering and full-duplex interaction benchmarks reveal a clear tradeoff. Channel fusion yields stronger semantic grounding and consistently better question-answering performance. However, under semantically overlapping conditions such as user interruptions, it is more vulnerable to context corruption: if the model fails to stop in time, the overlapping user stream can interfere with ongoing generation and lead to semantically incoherent continuations. Cross-attention routing underperforms on question answering, but better preserves the LLM generation context and is more robust to this failure mode. These results establish user-stream routing as a central design axis in full-duplex spoken dialogue and offer practical guidance on the tradeoff between semantic integration and context robustness. We provide a demo page for qualitative inspection. --- ### Empty SPACE: Cross-Attention Sparsity for Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models Authors: Nicola Novello, Andrea M. Tonello Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10198v1 Erasing specific concepts from text-to-image diffusion models is essential for avoiding the generation of copyrighted and explicit content. Closed-form concept erasure methods offer a fast alternative to backpropagation-based techniques, but they become less effective when scaling from smaller models such as Stable Diffusion 1.5 to larger models like Stable Diffusion XL. To maintain erasure effectiveness in these larger-scale architectures, we propose SParse cross-Attention-based Concept Erasure (SPACE). SPACE iteratively modifies the cross-attention parameters of a model with a closed-form update that jointly induces sparsity and erases target concepts. By concentrating the concept mapping to a lower-dimensional subspace, SPACE achieves superior erasure efficacy compared to dense baselines. Extensive experimental results show improvements in erasure effectiveness and robustness against adversarial prompts. Furthermore, SPACE achieves 80\%-90\% cross-attention sparsity, reducing the storage requirements for saving the modified parameters by 70\%, demonstrating its memory efficiency. --- ### Many Needles in a Haystack: Active Hit Discovery for Perturbation Experiments Authors: Andrea Rubbi, Arpit Merchant, Samuel Ogden, Amir Akbarnejad, Pietro Liò, Sattar Vakili, Mo Lotfollahi Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10196v1 High-throughput gene perturbation experiments can test several genetic interventions in parallel, yet experimental budgets remain limited. A central goal is hit discovery: identifying as many perturbations as possible whose phenotypic effect exceeds a predefined threshold. Pure exploration strategies are statistically inefficient, wasting budget on low-value regions. Bayesian optimization methods offer a principled alternative but target a single global optimum, over-exploiting dominant modes while neglecting other high-value regions. We formalize hit discovery as a sequential experimental design problem and propose Probability-of-Hit, an acquisition function that directly targets threshold exceedance by ranking candidates according to their posterior probability of being a hit. We prove asymptotic optimality of this approach and demonstrate strong empirical performance on both synthetic benchmarks and real biological immunology datasets, including up to 6.4% improvement over baselines on the Schmidt IL-2 dataset. --- ### Breaking the Reward Barrier: Accelerating Tree-of-Thought Reasoning via Speculative Exploration Authors: Shuzhang Zhong, Haochen Huang, Shengxuan Qiu, Pengfei Zuo, Runsheng Wang, Meng Li Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10195v2 Tree-of-Thought (ToT) reasoning structures Large Language Model (LLM) inference as a tree-based search, demonstrating strong potential for solving complex mathematical and programming tasks. However, its efficiency is constrained by the reward dependency barrier -- a synchronization bottleneck caused by sequential reward-guided exploration that limits search parallelism and introduces substantial latency. Prior system optimizations, mainly designed for linear Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, cannot address these challenges, leaving the efficiency of ToT underexplored. To enhance ToT reasoning efficiency, we observe that the reasoning paths can be explored speculatively to break the reward synchronization barrier. Therefore, in this paper, we propose SPEX and introduce three key techniques: (i) intra-query speculative path selection to predict and expand high-potential branches of ToT, (ii) inter-query budget allocation to balance speculative resource allocation across queries dynamically, and (iii) adaptive early termination to prune deep and redundant branches for a skewed search tree. We implement SPEX on top of the SGLang framework and evaluate it across diverse ToT algorithms and LLMs. Extensive experiments show that SPEX achieves $1.2 \sim 3 \times$ speedup for different ToT reasoning algorithms. Moreover, SPEX synergizes with token-level speculative decoding, achieving cumulative speedups of up to $4.1\times$. Ablation studies further confirm the contributions of each technique. Overall, SPEX represents a significant step toward efficient and scalable ToT reasoning, unlocking the parallelism required for high-performance inference-time scaling for LLMs. --- ### TRACE: Distilling Where It Matters via Token-Routed Self On-Policy Alignment Authors: Jiaxuan Wang, Xuan Ouyang, Zhiyu Chen, Yulan Hu, Zheng Pan, Xin Li, Lan-Zhe Guo Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10194v1 On-policy self-distillation (self-OPD) densifies reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) by letting a policy teach itself under privileged context. We find that when this guidance spans the full response, all-token KL spends gradients on mostly redundant positions and amplifies privileged-information leakage, causing entropy rise, shortened reasoning, and out-of-distribution degradation in long-horizon math training. We propose Token-Routed Alignment for Critical rEasoning (TRACE), which distills only on annotator-marked critical spans: forward KL on key spans of correct rollouts, optional reverse KL on localized error spans, and GRPO on all remaining tokens, with the KL channel annealed away after a short warm-up. Our analysis explains TRACE through two effects: forward KL provides non-vanishing lift to teacher-supported tokens that the student under-allocates, while span masking and decay keep cumulative privileged-gradient exposure finite. On four held-out math benchmarks plus GPQA-Diamond, TRACE improves over GRPO by 2.76 percentage points on average and preserves the Qwen3-8B base OOD score on GPQA-Diamond, where GRPO and all-token self-OPD baselines degrade. Gains persist under online self-annotation (+1.90 percentage points, about 69% of the strong-API gain), reducing the concern that TRACE merely imports external annotator capability. Across scales, the best routed action is base-dependent: on Qwen3-8B it is forward KL on key spans, while on Qwen3-1.7B it shifts to reverse KL on error spans. --- ### DetRefiner: Model-Agnostic Detection Refinement with Feature Fusion Transformer Authors: Soichiro Okazaki, Tatsuya Sasaki, Hiroki Ohashi Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10190v1 Open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD) aims to detect both seen and unseen categories, yet existing methods often struggle to generalize to novel objects due to limited integration of global and local contextual cues. We propose DetRefiner, a simple yet effective plug-and-play framework that learns to fuse global and local features to refine open-vocabulary detection. DetRefiner processes global image features and patch-level image features from foundational models (e.g., DINOv3) through a lightweight Transformer encoder. The encoder produces a class vector capturing image-level attributes and patch vectors representing local region attributes, from which attribute reliability is inferred to recalibrate the base model's confidence. Notably, DetRefiner is trained independently of the base OVOD model, requiring neither access to its internal features nor retraining. At inference, it operates solely on the base detector's predictions, producing auxiliary calibration scores that are merged with the base detector's scores to yield the final refined confidence. Despite this simplicity, DetRefiner consistently enhances multiple OVOD models across COCO, LVIS, ODinW13, and Pascal VOC, achieving gains of up to +10.1 AP on novel categories. These results highlight that learning to fuse global and local representations offers a powerful and general mechanism for advancing open-world object detection. Our codes and models are available at https://github.com/hitachi-rd-cv/detrefiner. --- ### ProteinOPD: Towards Effective and Efficient Preference Alignment for Protein Design Authors: Yulin Zhang, He Cao, Zihao Jiang, Chenyi Zi, Zhipeng Zhou, Zijing Liu, Yu Li, Jia Li, Ziqi Gao Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10189v1 Designing proteins with desired functions or properties represents a core goal in synthetic biology and drug discovery. Recent advances in protein language models (PLMs) have enabled the generation of highly designable protein sequences, while preference alignment provides a promising way to steer designs toward desired functions and properties. Nevertheless, they often trigger catastrophic forgetting of pretrained knowledge, degrading basic designability and failing to balance multiple competing objectives. To address these issues, we draw inspiration from On-Policy Distillation (OPD), an advanced post-training method renowned for mitigating catastrophic forgetting through its mode-seeking nature. In this work, we propose ProteinOPD, a multi-objective preference alignment framework that can effectively balance multiple preference objectives while maintaining the inherent designability of PLMs. ProteinOPD adapts a pretrained PLM into preference-specific teachers and distills their knowledge into a shared student via token-level OPD on the student's own trajectories. During this process, the student is aligned to a unique normalized geometric consensus of weighted teachers while ensuring bounded optimization under conflicts. This bridges the gap for OPD in multi-objective/teacher alignment. Extensive experiments show that ProteinOPD achieves substantial gains on target preference objectives without compromising the designability, with an 8x training speedup over RL-based alignment competitors. --- ### SciVQR: A Multidisciplinary Multimodal Benchmark for Advanced Scientific Reasoning Evaluation Authors: Longteng Guo, Xuanxu Lin, Dongze Hao, Tongtian Yue, Pengkang Huo, Jiatong Ma, Yuchen Liu, Jing Liu Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10187v2 Scientific reasoning is a key aspect of human intelligence, requiring the integration of multimodal inputs, domain expertise, and multi-step inference across various subjects. Existing benchmarks for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often fail to capture the complexity and traceability of reasoning processes necessary for rigorous evaluation. To fill this gap, we introduce SciVQR, a multimodal benchmark covering 54 subfields in mathematics, physics, chemistry, geography, astronomy, and biology. SciVQR includes domain-specific visuals, such as equations, charts, and diagrams, and challenges models to combine visual comprehension with reasoning. The tasks range from basic factual recall to complex, multi-step inferences, with 46% including expert-authored solutions. SciVQR not only evaluates final answers but also examines the reasoning process, providing insights into how models reach their conclusions. Our evaluation of leading MLLMs, including both proprietary and open-source models, reveals significant limitations in handling complex multimodal reasoning tasks, underscoring the need for improved multi-step reasoning and better integration of interdisciplinary knowledge in advancing MLLMs toward true scientific intelligence. The dataset and evaluation code are publicly available at https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/SciVQR. --- ### LegalCiteBench: Evaluating Citation Reliability in Legal Language Models Authors: Sijia Chen, Hang Yin, Shunfan Zhou Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10186v1 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into legal drafting and research workflows, where incorrect citations or fabricated precedents can cause serious professional harm. Existing legal benchmarks largely emphasize statutory reasoning, contract understanding, or general legal question answering, but they do not directly study a central common-law failure mode: when asked to provide case authorities without external grounding, models may return plausible-looking but incorrect citations or cases. We introduce LegalCiteBench, a benchmark for studying closed-book citation recovery, citation verification, and case matching in legal language models. LegalCiteBench contains approximately 24K evaluation instances constructed from 1,000 real U.S. judicial opinions from the Case Law Access Project. The benchmark covers five citation-centric tasks: citation retrieval, citation completion, citation error detection, case matching, and case verification and correction. Across 21 LLMs, exact citation recovery remains highly challenging in this closed-book setting: even the strongest models score below 7/100 on citation retrieval and completion. Within the evaluated models, scale and legal-domain pretraining provide limited gains and do not resolve this difficulty. Models also frequently provide concrete but incorrect or low-overlap authorities under our evaluation protocol, with Misleading Answer Rates (MAR) exceeding 94% for 20 of 21 evaluated models on retrieval-heavy tasks. A prompt-only abstention experiment shows that explicit uncertainty instructions reduce some confident fabrication but do not improve citation correctness. LegalCiteBench is intended as a diagnostic framework for studying authority generation failures, verification behavior, and abstention when external grounding is absent, incomplete, or bypassed. --- ### DynGhost: Temporally-Modelled Transformer for Dynamic Ghost Imaging with Quantum Detectors Authors: Vittorio Palladino, Ahmet Enis Cetin Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10185v2 Ghost imaging reconstructs spatial information from a single-pixel bucket detector by correlating structured illumination patterns with scalar intensity measurements. While deep learning approaches have achieved promising results on static scenes, two critical limitations remain unaddressed: existing architectures fail to exploit temporal coherence across frames, leaving dynamic ghost imaging largely unsolved, and they assume additive Gaussian noise models that do not reflect the true Poissonian statistics of real single-photon hardware. We present DynGhost (Dynamic Ghost Imaging Transformer), a transformer architecture that addresses both limitations through alternating spatial and temporal attention blocks. Our quantum-aware training framework, based on physically accurate detector simulations (SNSPDs, SPADs, SiPMs) and Anscombe variance-stabilizing normalization, resolves the distribution shift that causes classical models to fail under realistic hardware constraints. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that DynGhost outperforms both traditional reconstruction methods and existing deep learning architectures, with particular gains in dynamic and photon-starved settings. --- ### Developing a foundation model for high-resolution remote sensing data of the Netherlands Authors: Paul Vermeeren, Heysem Kaya Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10184v1 We develop a foundation model using 1.2m high resolution satellite images of the Netherlands. By combining a Convolutional Neural Network and a Vision Transformer, the model captures both low- and high-frequency landscape features, such as fine textures, edges, and small objects as well as large terrain structures, elevation patterns, and land-cover distributions. Leveraging temporal data as input, the model learns from broader contextual information across time, allowing the model to exploit the temporal dependencies, such as topographic features, land-cover changes, and seasonal dynamics. These additional constraints reduce feature ambiguity, improve representation learning, and enable better generalization with fewer labeled samples. The foundation model is evaluated on multiple downstream tasks, ranging from use cases within the Netherlands to global benchmarking datasets. On the vegetation monitoring dataset of the Netherlands, the model shows clear performance improvements by incorporating temporal information instead of relying on a single time point. Despite using a smaller model and less pretraining data limited to the Netherlands, it achieves competitive results on global benchmarks when compared to state-of-the-art models. These results demonstrate that the model can learn rich, generalizable representations from limited data, achieving competitive performance on global benchmarks while using a fraction of the parameters of larger state-of-the-art remote sensing models. To maximize reproducibility and reuse, we made the scripts and the model accessible on GitHub. --- ### Fix the Loss, Not the Radius: Rethinking the Adversarial Perturbation of Sharpness-Aware Minimization Authors: Jinping Wang, Qinhan Liu, Zhiwu Xie, Zhiqiang Gao Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10183v1 Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) improves generalization by minimizing the worst-case loss within a fixed parameter-space radius neighborhood. SAM and its variants mainly rely on a first-order linearized surrogate, while flat minima are inherently a second-order (curvature) notion.We revisit this mismatch and propose Loss-Equated SAM (LE-SAM), which inverts the traditional SAM mechanism that fixed perturbation radius with a fixed loss-space budget,effectively removing gradient-norm-dominated learning signals and shifting optimization toward curvature-dominated terms. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks and tasks demonstrate the strong generalization ability of LESAM that consistently outperforms SAM and even its variants, achieving the state-of-the-art performance. --- ### A Comparative Study of Machine Learning and Deep Learning for Out-of-Distribution Detection Authors: Jihyeon Baek, Seunghoon Lee, Gitaek Kwon, Doohyun Park Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10181v2 Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is essential for building reliable AI systems, as models that produce outputs for invalid inputs cannot be trusted. Although deep learning (DL) is often assumed to outperform traditional machine learning (ML), medical imaging data are typically acquired under standardized protocols, leading to relatively constrained image variability in OOD detection tasks. This motivates a direct comparison between ML and DL approaches in this setting. The two approaches are evaluated on open datasets comprising over 60,000 fundus and non-fundus images across multiple resolutions. Both approaches achieved an AUROC of 1.000 and accuracies between 0.999 and 1.000 on internal and external validation sets, showing comparable detection performance. The ML approach, however, exhibited substantially lower end-to-end latency while maintaining equivalent accuracy, indicating greater computational efficiency. These results suggest that for OOD detection tasks of limited visual complexity, lightweight ML approaches can achieve DL-level performance with significantly reduced computational cost, supporting practical real-world deployment. --- ### What Concepts Lie Within? Detecting and Suppressing Risky Content in Diffusion Transformers Authors: Chenyu Zhang Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10180v1 The rise of text-to-image (T2I) models has increasingly raised concerns regarding the generation of risky content, such as sexual, violent, and copyright-protected images, highlighting the need for effective safeguards within the models themselves. Although existing methods have been proposed to eliminate risky concepts from T2I models, they are primarily developed for earlier U-Net architectures, leaving the state-of-the-art Diffusion-Transformer-based T2I models inadequately protected. This gap stems from a fundamental architectural shift: Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) entangle semantic injection and visual synthesis via joint attention, which makes it difficult to isolate and erase risky content within the generation. To bridge this gap, we investigate how semantic concepts are represented in DiTs and discover that attention heads exhibit concept-specific sensitivity. This property enables both the detection and suppression of risky content. Building on this discovery, we propose AHV-D\&S, a training-free inference-time safeguard for image generation in DiTs. Specifically, AHV-D\&S quantifies each textual token's sensitivity across all attention heads as an Attention Head Vector (AHV), which serves as a discriminative signature for detecting risky generation tendencies. In the inference stage, we propose a momentum-based strategy to dynamically track token-wise AHVs across denoising steps, and a sensitivity-guided adaptive suppression strategy that suppresses the attention weights of identified risky tokens based on head-specific risk scores. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AHV-D\&S effectively suppresses sexual, copyrighted-style, and various harmful content while preserving visual quality, and further exhibits strong robustness against adversarial prompts and transferability across different DiT-based T2I models. --- ### One-Step Graph-Structured Neural Flows for Irregular Multivariate Time Series Classification Authors: Mengzhou Gao, Kaiwei Wang, Pengfei Jiao Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10179v1 Neural Flows efficiently model irregular multivariate time series by directly learning ODE solution trajectories with neural networks, bypassing step-by-step numerical solvers. Despite their efficiency, many existing approaches treat variables independently, leaving inter-variable interactions underexplored. Moreover, their one-step mapping makes interaction modeling inherently challenging, as it removes the iterative refinement of interactions during learning. To address this challenge, we propose one-step Graph-Structured Neural Flows (GSNF), which introduce two auxiliary-trajectory self-supervision strategies to strengthen interaction learning: (i) interaction-aware trajectory generation via re-initialization, which induces trajectory divergence to expose graph-induced interactions, with a theoretically derived lower bound on divergence; and (ii) reverse-time trajectory generation, which enforces forward-backward consistency to regularize graph learning, enabled by flow invertibility. Experiments on five real-world datasets show that GSNF achieves state-of-the-art classification performance with highly competitive training time and memory usage. --- ### Joint sparse coding and temporal dynamics support context reconfiguration Authors: Qianqian Shi, Yue Che, Faqiang Liu, Hongyi Li, Mingkun Xu, Sandra Reinert, Pieter M. Goltstein, Rong Zhao, Luping Shi Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: q-bio.NC, cs.LG, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10178v1 Adaptive behavior requires the brain to transition between distinct contexts while maintaining representations of prior experience. The ability to reconfigure neural representations without erasing previously acquired knowledge is central to learning in dynamic environments, yet the neural mechanisms that support this balance remain unclear. Understanding these mechanisms is also critical for addressing catastrophic forgetting in artificial systems designed for lifelong learning. Here, we identify joint sparse coding and temporal dynamics in both the mouse medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and computational networks as mechanisms that help preserve prior representations during context transitions. Specifically, sparsity in context-dependent representations reduces cross-context interference, whereas temporal dynamics within the network activity further enhance context separability across time. Strikingly, networks endowed with both properties, such as spiking neural networks, exhibit improved retention during lifelong learning without auxiliary heuristics. These findings establish joint sparse coding and temporal dynamics as a core mechanism supporting flexible context reconfiguration in lifelong learning and, through their activity constraining nature, as an energy-efficient architectural principle for stable adaptation. Together, they provide a mechanistic framework for understanding how the brain preserves prior knowledge while flexibly adapting to new contexts. --- ### MTA-RL: Robust Urban Driving via Multi-modal Transformer-based 3D Affordances and Reinforcement Learning Authors: Guangli Chen, Dianzhao Li, Wenjian Zhong, Bangquan Xie, Ostap Okhrin Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10177v1 Robust urban autonomous driving requires reliable 3D scene understanding and stable decision-making under dense interactions. However, existing end-to-end models lack interpretability, while modular pipelines suffer from error propagation across brittle interfaces. This paper proposes MTA-RL, the first framework that bridges perception and control through Multi-modal Transformer-based 3D Affordances and Reinforcement Learning (RL). Unlike previous fusion models that directly regress actions, RGB images and LiDAR point clouds are fused using a transformer architecture to predict explicit, geometry-aware affordance representations. These structured representations serve as a compact observation space, enabling the RL policy to operate purely on predicted driving semantics, which significantly improves sample efficiency and stability. Extensive evaluations in CARLA Town01-03 across varying densities (20-60 background vehicles) show that MTA-RL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Trained solely on Town03, our method demonstrates superior zero-shot generalization in unseen towns, achieving up to a 9.0% increase in Route Completion, an 11.0% increase in Total Distance, and an 83.7% improvement in Distance Per Violation. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm that our multi-modal fusion and reward shaping are critical, significantly outperforming image-only and unshaped variants, demonstrating the effectiveness of MTA-RL for robust urban autonomous driving. --- ### When Prompts Become Payloads: A Framework for Mitigating SQL Injection Attacks in Large Language Model-Driven Applications Authors: Farzad Nourmohammadzadeh Motlagh, Mehrdad Hajizadeh, Mehryar Majd, Pejman Najafi, Feng Cheng, Christoph Meinel Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10176v1 Natural language interfaces to structured databases are becoming increasingly common, largely due to advances in large language models (LLMs) that enable users to query data using conversational input rather than formal query languages such as SQL. While this paradigm significantly improves usability and accessibility, it introduces new security risks, particularly the amplification of SQL injection vulnerabilities through the prompt-to-SQL translation process. Malicious users can exploit these mechanisms by crafting adversarial prompts that manipulate model behavior and generate unsafe queries. In this work, we propose a multi-layered security framework designed to detect and mitigate LLM-mediated SQL injection attacks. The framework integrates a front-end security shield for prompt sanitization, an advanced threat detection model for behavioral and semantic anomaly identification, and a signature-based control layer for known attack patterns. We evaluate the proposed framework under diverse and realistic attack scenarios, including prompt injection, obfuscated SQL payloads, and context-manipulation attacks. To ensure robustness, we generate and curate a comprehensive benchmark dataset of adversarial prompts and assess performance across a fine-tuned LLM configuration. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves high detection accuracy while maintaining low false-positive rates, significantly improving the secure deployment of LLM-powered database applications. --- ### BathyFacto: Refraction-Aware Two-Media Neural Radiance Fields for Bathymetry Authors: Markus Brezovsky, Anatol Günthner, Frederik Schulte, Lukas Winiwarter, Boris Jutzi, Gottfried Mandlburger Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10174v2 Through-water photogrammetry from UAV imagery enables shallow-water bathymetry, but refraction at the air--water interface violates the straight-ray assumption of Structure-from-Motion and causes systematic depth bias. We present BathyFacto, a refraction-aware two-media extension of Nerfacto in Nerfstudio for metrically consistent underwater point clouds on simulated data. BathyFacto uses a shared hash-grid density field with a medium-conditioned color head and traces each camera ray as two segments: a straight air segment to a planar water surface and a refracted water segment computed using Snell's law and known refractive indices. A single proposal-network sampler operates on a virtual straight ray, while a kinked density wrapper corrects water-segment positions before density evaluation. Our pipeline converts photogrammetric reconstructions to Nerfstudio format, estimates the water plane from boundary markers, provides per-pixel medium masks, and supports refraction-corrected point-cloud export with reversible transforms to world and global frames. On a simulated scene with ground truth, BathyFacto achieves a Cloud-to-Mesh signed median deviation of $-0.001$,m and 85.7,% completeness at 0.2,m tolerance in the absolute global frame without rigid-body alignment. This compares with $+1.370$,m / 11.6,% for Nerfacto and $+1.409$,m / 9.9,% for BathyFacto without refraction. Even after a naive refractive-index depth correction, both baselines remain offset by approximately 0.4,m. Unlike a refraction-corrected Multi-View Stereo reference, which is reliable mainly for near-nadir views, BathyFacto recovers consistent geometry across the full range of camera incidence angles. --- ### V-ABS: Action-Observer Driven Beam Search for Dynamic Visual Reasoning Authors: Zhiwei Ning, Xuanang Gao, Jiaxi Cao, Gengming Zhang, Shengnan Ma, Wenwen Tong, Hanming Deng, Jie Yang, Wei Liu Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10172v1 Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in general perception, yet complex multi-step visual reasoning remains a persistent challenge. Although recent agentic approaches incorporate tool use, they often neglect critical execution feedback. Consequently, they suffer from the imagination-action-observer (IAO) bias, a misalignment between prior imagination and observer feedback that undermines reasoning stability and optimality. To bridge this gap, we introduce V-ABS, an action-observer driven beam search framework that enables deliberate reasoning through thinker-actor-observer iterations. We also propose an entropy-based adaptive weighting algorithm to mitigate the IAO bias by dynamically balancing the confidence scores between the policy priors and the observational feedback. Moreover, we construct a large-scale supervised fine-tuning (SFT) dataset comprising over 80k samples to guide the model to assign higher prior confidence to correct action paths. Extensive experiments across eight diverse benchmarks show that V-ABS achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering an average improvement of 19.7% on the Qwen3-VL-8B baseline and consistent gains across both open-source and proprietary models. --- ### When Reviews Disagree: Fine-Grained Contradiction Analysis in Scientific Peer Reviews Authors: Sandeep Kumar, Yash Kamdar, Abid Hossain, Bharti Kumari, Tanik Saikh, Asif Ekbal Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10171v1 Scientific peer reviews frequently contain conflicting expert judgments, and the increasing scale of conference submissions makes it challenging for Area Chairs and editors to reliably identify and interpret such disagreements. Existing approaches typically frame reviewer disagreement as binary contradiction detection over isolated sentence pairs, abstracting away the review-level context and obscuring differences in the severity of evaluative conflict. In this work, we introduce a fine-grained formulation of reviewer contradiction analysis that operates over full peer reviews by explicitly identifying contradiction evidence spans and assigning graded disagreement intensity scores. To support this task, we present RevCI, an expert-annotated benchmark of peer-review pairs with evidence-level contradiction annotations with graded intensity labels. We further propose IMPACT, a structured multi-agent framework that integrates aspect-conditioned evidence extraction, deliberative reasoning, and adjudication to model reviewer contradictions and their intensity. To support efficient deployment, we distill IMPACT into TIDE, a small language model that predicts contradiction evidence and intensity in a single forward pass. Experimental results show that IMPACT substantially outperforms strong single-agent and generic multi-agent baselines in both evidence identification and intensity agreement, while TIDE achieves competitive performance at significantly lower inference cost. --- ### Balancing Efficiency and Fairness in Traffic Light Control through Deep Reinforcement Learning Authors: Matteo Cederle, Giacomo Scatto, Gian Antonio Susto Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10170v1 Urban traffic congestion presents a significant challenge for modern cities, which impacts mobility and sustainability. Traditional traffic light control systems often fail to adapt to dynamic conditions, leading to inefficiencies. This paper proposes a novel deep reinforcement learning agent for traffic light control that addresses this limitation by explicitly integrating fairness considerations for both vehicular and pedestrian traffic. Unlike prior work, our approach dynamically balances these flows based on real-time demand, moving beyond systems focused solely on vehicles. Experimental results demonstrate that our agent effectively reduces congestion while ensuring equitable service for both the categories of road users. This research contributes to a practical and adaptable solution for intelligent traffic management within the framework of smart cities, paving the way for more efficient and inclusive urban mobility. --- ### Automated Approach for Solving Infinite-state Polynomial Reachability Games Authors: Krishnendu Chatterjee, Ehsan Kafshdar Goharshady, Mehrdad Karrabi, Maximilian Seeliger, Đorđe Žikelić Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.AI, cs.GT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10169v1 Reachability games are two-player games played on a graph, where the objective of $\texttt{REACH}$ player is to reach the target set whereas the objective of $\texttt{SAFE}$ player is to stay away from the target set. Reachability games have important applications in artificial intelligence and reactive synthesis, and many of these applications give rise to infinite-state reachability games. In this paper, we study turn-based reachability games on infinite-state graphs defined over valuations of a finite set of real variables. We consider the problem of determining the existence of and computing a winning strategy for $\texttt{REACH}$ player. Our contributions are twofold. First, we propose ranking certificates for reachability games, a sound and complete proof rule for proving that $\texttt{REACH}$ player has a winning strategy from the specified initial state. Second, we consider polynomial reachability games, where transitions and objectives are described by polynomial constraints over real variables, and propose a fully automated algorithm for computing a winning strategy for $\texttt{REACH}$ player together with a formal correctness witness in the form of a ranking certificate. The algorithm is sound, semi-complete, and runs in sub-exponential time. Our experiments demonstrate the ability of our method to solve challenging examples from the literature that were out of the reach of existing methods. Specifically, for the classical Cinderella-Stepmother game, we are able to compute an optimal winning strategy for an arbitrary precision parameter for the first time. --- ### ASTRA-QA: A Benchmark for Abstract Question Answering over Documents Authors: Shu Wang, Shansong Zhou, Xinyang Wang, Shiwei Wang, Hulong Wu, Yixiang Fang Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CL, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10168v1 Document-based question answering (QA) increasingly includes abstract questions that require synthesizing scattered information from long documents or across multiple documents into coherent answers. However, this setting is still poorly supported by existing benchmarks and evaluation methods, which often lack stable abstract references or rely on coarse similarity metrics and unstable head-to-head comparisons. To alleviate this issue, we introduce ASTRA-QA, a benchmark for AbSTRAct Question Answering over documents. ASTRA-QA contains 869 QA instances over academic papers and news documents, covering five abstract question types and three controlled retrieval scopes. Each instance is equipped with explicit evaluation annotations, including answer topic sets, curated unsupported topics, and aligned evidence. Building on these annotations, ASTRA-QA assesses whether answers cover required key points and avoid unsupported content by directly scoring topic coverage and curated unsupported content, enabling scalable evaluation without exhaustive head-to-head comparisons. Experiments with representative Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods spanning vanilla, graph-based, and hierarchical retrieval settings show that ASTRA-QA provides reference-grounded diagnostics for coverage, hallucination, and retrieval-scope robustness. Our dataset and code are available at https://xinyangsally.github.io/astra-benchmark. ---