# Research Papers — 2026-05 · bundle page 292 of 326

> Full-text markdown of papers #14551–14600 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/292
[← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/291.md)
[Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/293.md)

### A Robust Out-of-Distribution Detection Framework via Synergistic Smoothing

Authors: Maria Stoica, Abdelrahman Hekal, Alessio Lomuscio
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08191v1

Reliable out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is a critical requirement for the safe deployment of machine learning systems. Despite recent progress, state-of-the-art OOD detectors are highly susceptible to adversarial attacks, which undermines their trustworthiness in automated systems. To address this vulnerability, we apply median smoothing to baseline OOD detection scores, balancing clean and adversarial accuracies. Our key insight is that the noisy samples generated for median smoothing can be repurposed to quantify the local instability of the base score. We observe that OOD samples exhibit higher instability under perturbation. Based on this, we propose ROSS, a novel and robust post-hoc OOD detector that leverages the instability of baseline scores to further distinguish between in-distribution (ID) and OOD samples. ROSS achieves symmetric robustness, performing strongly against both score-minimising and score-maximising attacks, unlike prior work. This symmetric defence leads to state-of-the-art robustness, outperforming prior methods by up to 40 AUROC points. We demonstrate ROSS's effectiveness on extensive experiments across CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet. Code is available at: https://github.com/Abdu-Hekal/ROSS.

---

### Synergistic Simplex: Cooperative Runtime Assurance for Safety-Critical Autonomous Systems

Authors: Ayoosh Bansal, Mikael Yeghiazaryan, Artyom Khachatryan, Tianyi Zhu, Hunmin Kim, Naira Hovakimyan, Lui Sha
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.LG, eess.SY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08190v1

Autonomous systems increasingly rely on machine-learning (ML) components for safety-critical tasks such as perception and control in autonomous vehicles (AVs). While ML enables essential capabilities, it inevitably exhibits long-tail faults that make it unsuitable for safety-critical tasks. Runtime assurance (RTA) mitigates this issue by pairing ML components with verifiable safety monitors, e.g., Control Simplex and Perception Simplex architectures. However, the limited performance of safety monitors remains a major bottleneck. The Synergistic Simplex (SS) architecture improves system performance by enabling bidirectional integration between ML components and safety monitors while preserving formal safety guarantees. The key innovation here is allowing safety monitors to use ML outputs, which is typically prohibited in RTA systems. We formally derive conditions under which this integration preserves safety and demonstrate the performance benefits. We present the design, analysis, and evaluation of SS for AV obstacle detection.

---

### Neuroscience-Inspired Analyses of Visual Interestingness in Multimodal Transformers

Authors: Mathis Immertreu, Fitim Abdullahu, Thomas Kinfe, Helmut Grabner, Patrick Krauss, Achim Schilling
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08188v1

Human attention is the gateway to conscious perception, memory and decision-making. However, its role in modern transformer models remains largely unexplored. As these systems increasingly influence what people see, prefer and buy, the question arises as to whether they encode principles of human interest or merely exploit large-scale correlations. Addressing this issue is crucial for understanding cognition and ensuring the responsible use of AI in communication and marketing. In order to address this issue, the concept of visual interest was examined within the multimodal vision-language-model Qwen3-VL-8B, using a pre-defined Common Interestingness (CI) score derived from large-scale human engagement data on the photo-sharing platform Flickr. Here, we analyzed internal representations across vision and language components using methods from the neurosciences. Our analyses revealed that CI information is linearly decodable from final-layer embeddings, indicating that it is aligned with human-derived measures of visual interestingness. Dimensionality reduction and Generalized Discrimination Value (GDV) analyses demonstrate that CI-related hidden representations emerge in intermediate vision transformer layers and becomes progressively more distinguishable across language model layers. Concept vectors derived using geometric, probe, and Sparse Auto-Encoder based methods converge in higher layers, as confirmed by representational similarity analysis. This indicates a robust and structured encoding of visual interestingness without explicit supervision. Future work will seek to identify shared computational principles linking human brain dynamics and transformer architectures, with the ultimate goal of uncovering the organizing mechanisms that give rise to attention and interest in both biological and artificial systems.

---

### Towards Interpretable Damage Detection based on Aerodynamic Pressure Measurements

Authors: Philip Franz, Max von Danwitz, Gregory Duthé, Alexander Popp, Eleni Chatzi
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: eess.SP, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08187v2

The increasing flexibility of modern large wind turbine blades necessitates cost-efficient and reliable structural monitoring solutions. For this purpose, we propose to use aerodynamic pressure measurements obtained via Aerosense, a novel, non-intrusive and economical sensing system. In former work (Franz et al., 2025), we investigated the potential of aerodynamic pressure measurements for structural damage detection on elastic and aerodynamically loaded structures. An experimental campaign was conducted on a NACA 633418 airfoil mounted on a vertically vibrating cantilever beam within an open wind tunnel. Structural damage was introduced progressively through controlled saw cuts near the beam support. Aerodynamic pressure distributions were recorded under varying inflow conditions and structural states. Based on this data set, we developed a convolutional neural network to detect structural damage and classify its severity using only aerodynamic pressure signals. The results demonstrate that pressure measurements can effectively enable real-time detection and quantification of damage in elastic, beam-like structures subjected to mildly turbulent flow and varying operational conditions. Recognizing the limitations of pure black-box classification, in this study, we further incorporate physics-based insights and explainable machine learning methods to interpret how structural damage influences both the dynamic response and the aerodynamic pressure field. This leads to an enhanced damage detection pipeline, aiming to improve transparency, robustness, and physical consistency in data-driven monitoring of elastic, aerodynamically loaded structures.

---

### Towards Interpretable Damage Detection based on Aerodynamic Pressure Measurements

Authors: Philip Franz, Max von Danwitz, Gregory Duthé, Alexander Popp, Eleni Chatzi
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: eess.SP, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08187v1

The increasing flexibility of modern large wind turbine blades necessitates cost-efficient and reliable structural monitoring solutions. For this purpose, we propose to use aerodynamic pressure measurements obtained via Aerosense, a novel, non-intrusive and economical sensing system. In former work (Franz et al., 2025), we investigated the potential of aerodynamic pressure measurements for structural damage detection on elastic and aerodynamically loaded structures. An experimental campaign was conducted on a NACA 633418 airfoil mounted on a vertically vibrating cantilever beam within an open wind tunnel. Structural damage was introduced progressively through controlled saw cuts near the beam support. Aerodynamic pressure distributions were recorded under varying inflow conditions and structural states. Based on this data set, we developed a convolutional neural network to detect structural damage and classify its severity using only aerodynamic pressure signals. The results demonstrate that pressure measurements can effectively enable real-time detection and quantification of damage in elastic, beam-like structures subjected to mildly turbulent flow and varying operational conditions. Recognizing the limitations of pure black-box classification, in this study, we further incorporate physics-based insights and explainable machine learning methods to interpret how structural damage influences both the dynamic response and the aerodynamic pressure field. This leads to an enhanced damage detection pipeline, aiming to improve transparency, robustness, and physical consistency in data-driven monitoring of elastic, aerodynamically loaded structures.

---

### Rethinking Entropy Minimization in Test-Time Adaptation for Autoregressive Models

Authors: Wei-Ping Huang, Chee-En Yu, Guan-Ting Lin, Hung-yi Lee
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: eess.AS, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08186v1

Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) via entropy minimization (EM) has proven effective for classification tasks, yet its application to generative autoregressive models remains theoretically fragmented. Existing approaches typically rely on distinct heuristics, such as teacher forcing with pseudo labels or policy-gradient-based reinforcement learning, without a unified mathematical foundation. In this work, we resolve this discrepancy by deriving a rigorous formulation of EM tailored to autoregressive models. We show that the exact objective naturally decomposes into a token-level policy gradient loss and a token-level entropy loss, and we reinterpret prior methods as partial realizations of this unified formulation. Using Whisper ASR as a testbed, we demonstrate that our approach consistently improves performance across more than 20 diverse domains, including acoustic noise, accents, and multilingual settings.

---

### From Ontology Conformance to Admissible Reconfiguration: A RoSO/SMGI Adequacy Argument for Robotic Service Governance

Authors: Aomar Osmani
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08185v1

The Robotic Service Ontology (RoSO) gives service robotics a typed semantic vocabulary for services, functions, interactions, and deployment-sensitive constraints. Its public revision trail makes visible a harder question than ontology conformance alone can settle: once a service is rebound, recomposed, repaired, or redeployed, under what conditions does the resulting configuration remain an admissible realization of the same protected service? This article argues that the Structural Model of General Intelligence (SMGI) is relevant exactly at that level \citep{osmani2026smgi}. SMGI adds not only a structural interface $θ$, but an induced behavioral semantics $T_θ$ and a governance discipline for norm-respecting change. We show that RoSO can be embedded into SMGI as a typed semantic layer, so that service descriptions become dynamically governable rather than merely well formed. This yields a RoSO-to-SMGI adequacy theorem, identity-preserving reconfiguration criteria, and compositional conditions under which locally acceptable updates remain globally admissible. The resulting claim is not that SMGI replaces RoSO, but that it provides a formal account of what admissible runtime change requires once service semantics must survive revision.

---

### Improving TMS EEG Signal Quality for Closed-Loop Neuro Stimulation via Source-Domain Denoising

Authors: Zhen Tang, Ameer Hamoodi, Stevie Foglia, Aimee Nelson, Zhen Gao
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: eess.SP, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08184v1

This research addresses a validated TMS EEG cleaning pipeline and a corresponding benchmark dataset. It evaluates two widely used artifact removal pipelines. A reference dataset of carefully preprocessed EEG signals was established to support future algorithm development and enable systematic comparison of automated artifact removal strategies, despite the absence of a true physiological ground truth. The study evaluates the effectiveness of two widely used source based artifact removal approaches and examines their impact on signal quality improvement and preservation of TMS-evoked potentials. The results support the robustness of the proposed preprocessing workflow and demonstrate its potential for improving data reliability in both research and clinical applications. A key goal is integrating TMS EEG and embedding it within a larger BCI framework. Ultimately, these efforts aim to enhance understanding of cortical dynamics and expand the clinical and research applications of TMS EEG.

---

### Sparsity Hurts: Simple Linear Adapter Can Boost Generalized Category Discovery

Authors: Bo Ye, Kai Gan, Tong Wei, Min-Ling Zhang
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08183v1

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) seeks to identify novel categories from unlabeled data while retaining the classification ability of seen categories. Prior GCD methods commonly leverage transferable representations from pre-trained models, adapting to downstream datasets via partial fine-tuning (updating only the final ViT block) and visual prompt tuning (appending learnable vectors to inputs). However, conventional partial fine-tuning offers limited flexibility, as it fails to adapt the entire model; meanwhile, visual prompt tuning is prone to overfitting, due to its sensitivity to initialization and inherently constrained capacity. To address these limitations, we propose LAGCD, a simple yet effective GCD approach that embeds a residual linear adapter into each ViT block. From the perspective of feature sparsity, we systematically show that non-linearity in conventional adapters impairs performance, whereas our linear adapter enhances it by enabling more flexible model capacity. We further introduce an auxiliary distribution alignment loss to mitigate the negative impact of biased predictions between seen and novel categories. Extensive experiments on both generic and fine-grained datasets confirm that LAGCD consistently improves performance over many sophisticated baselines. The source code is available at https://github.com/yebo0216best/LAGCD

---

### Quantile Geometry Regularization for Distributional Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Zhaofan Zhang, Minghao Yang, Rufeng Chen, Sihong Xie, Hui Xiong
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08182v1

Quantile-based distributional reinforcement learning methods learn return distributions through sampled quantile regression, but their bootstrapped target quantiles may induce distorted or degenerate distribution estimates. We propose Robust Quantile-based Implicit Quantile Networks (RQIQN), a lightweight Wasserstein distributionally robust enhancement boosted from a quantile estimation perspective. We first reinterpret a snapshot of IQN loss as a collection of local empirical quantile estimation problems over sampled current fractions. We then robustify each local slot with a Wasserstein distributionally robust quantile estimation formulation, yielding a closed-form, fraction-dependent correction to the Bellman target. This correction directly addresses distributional degeneration: its median antisymmetry preserves the risk-neutral quantile average, while its monotonicity enlarges upper-lower quantile gaps and counteracts collapsed distributional spread. RQIQN thus regularizes quantile geometry without changing the underlying value objective or requiring additional sample set reconstruction. Finally, we empirically show that the proposed RQIQN outperforms other existing quantile-based distributional reinforcement learning algorithms in risk-sensitive navigation and Atari games.

---

### Text-Guided Multi-Scale Frequency Representation Adaptation

Authors: Weicai Yan, Xinhua Ma, Wang Lin, Tao Jin
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08181v1

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods introduce a small number of training parameters, enabling pre-trained models to adapt rapidly to new data distributions. While these methods have shown promising results, they exhibit notable limitations. First, most existing methods operate in the signal space domain, which results in substantial information redundancy. Second, most existing methods utilize fixed prompts or adaptation layers, failing to fully account for the multi-scale characteristics of signals. To address these challenges, we propose the Multi-Scale Frequency Adapter (FreqAdapter), which integrates textual information and performs multi-scale fine-tuning of signals in the frequency domain. Additionally, we introduce a multi-scale adaptation strategy to optimize receptive fields across different frequency ranges, further enhancing the model's representational capacity. Extensive experiments on multimodal models, including CLIP and LLaVA, demonstrate that FreqAdapter significantly improves both performance and efficiency. FreqAdapter improves performance with minimal cost and fast convergence within one epoch. Code is available at https://github.com/Kelvin-ywc/FreqAdapter.

---

### Information Density as a Quantitative Measure for AI-enabled Virtual Sensing: Feasibility and Limits

Authors: Hrishikesh Dutta, Roberto Minerva, Reza Farahbakhsh, Noel Crespi
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.IT, cs.AI, cs.IR, cs.LG, cs.NI, eess.SP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08180v1

Modern IoT and sensor networks generate vast amounts of data, posing significant challenges for storage, transmission, and real-time processing. Traditional approaches, such as compressive sensing and machine learning-based compression, often suffer from computational inefficiencies and irreversible data loss. This paper introduces Information Density as a quantitative metric to support sensor deployment and enable AI-driven virtual sensing. We propose a framework that leverages spatial, temporal and inter-modal correlations among sensor signals to perform sensing tasks even in the absence of physical sensors. Two complementary measures: (i) Phase in Eigen Space and (ii) Mutual Information, are developed to quantify and assess information density, enabling the selection of optimal sensor configurations across both intra-modality and cross-modality scenarios. Validated using real-world data from Madrid's smart city infrastructure, this framework demonstrates the feasibility of replacing physical sensors with virtual ones under bounded error conditions (e.g., achieving $<3.21\%$ mean error with a single sensor). The results highlight the potential for scalable and energy-efficient sensing systems in smart environments.

---

### Neural Posterior Estimation of Terrain Parameters from Radar Sounder Data

Authors: Jordy Dal Corso, Annalena Kofler, Marco Cortellazzi, Lorenzo Bruzzone, Bernhard Schölkopf
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: eess.SP, astro-ph.IM, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08179v2

Radar sounders are electromagnetic instruments that can probe deep into the subsurface of Earth and other planetary bodies by processing the echo of transmitted radar waves. Conventional approaches for analyzing such data rely on approximate assumptions and often produce point estimates that ignore parameter correlations as well as galactic and measurement noise. We propose a simulation-based inference approach to terrain parameter inversion from radar sounder data, where synthetic observations from a GPU-based simulator are used to train a neural network-based density estimator for neural posterior estimation (NPE). By explicitly conditioning on reference surface assumptions, the proposed framework allows systematic evaluation of posterior robustness to reference surface variability. We demonstrate that our NPE model is well calibrated on simulated data and transferable to real Mars radar profiles, where we analyze terrain parameters using literature-informed reference values.

---

### Generalized Category Discovery in Federated Graph Learning

Authors: Zhongzheng Yuan, Lianshuai Guo, Xunkai Li, Wenyu Wang, Meixia Qu
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08178v1

Federated Graph Learning (FGL) enables collaborative learning over distributed graph data, yet existing approaches largely rely on a closed-world assumption, limiting their applicability in dynamic environments where novel categories continuously emerge. To bridge this gap, we target the practical scenario of Federated Graph Generalized Category Discovery (FGGCD), aiming to collaboratively discover novel categories across decentralized graph clients while retaining knowledge of known categories. We observe that FGGCD introduces two fundamental challenges: (1) the Neighborhood Absorption Effect, where structural fragmentation leads to biased neighborhood aggregation, causing novel nodes to be misclassified as known categories; and (2) Global Semantic Inconsistency, where the aforementioned local biases propagate to the server and are amplified by heterogeneous subgraph distributions, hindering cross-client knowledge integration. To address these issues, we propose GCD-FGL, an FGL framework for GCD that integrates a client-side Topology-Reliable Semantic Alignment and Discovery process to mitigate the neighborhood absorption effect, and a server-side Hierarchical Prototype Alignment strategy to resolve global semantic inconsistency. Extensive experiments on five real-world graph datasets demonstrate that GCD-FGL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average absolute gain of +4.86 in HRScore.

---

### Echo-LoRA: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning via Cross-Layer Representation Injection

Authors: Yihang Peng, Peng Jin, Jie Gong, Xingyuan Chen, Lingjiao Xu, Ning Su, Yan Ran
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08177v1

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has become a practical route for adapting large language models to downstream tasks, with LoRA-style methods being particularly attractive because they are inexpensive to train and easy to deploy. Most LoRA variants, however, revise the update rule within the weight space of each layer and leave the intermediate representations formed by deeper layers largely unused. We propose Echo-LoRA, a cross-layer representation injection method for parameter-efficient fine-tuning. During training, Echo-LoRA collects boundary hidden states from deeper source layers, aggregates them into a sample-level echo representation, and uses lightweight projection and gating networks to inject the resulting signal into shallow LoRA or DoRA modules. Answer-only masking, masked distillation, and stochastic routing are used to keep this auxiliary path stable and to reduce the gap between training and inference. On eight commonsense reasoning benchmarks, Echo-LoRA exceeds the reported LoRA baselines by 5.7 percentage points on average across LLaMA-7B, LLaMA2-7B, and LLaMA3-8B. Under reproduced LoRA baselines in our unified implementation, the average gain is 3.0 points; when combined with DoRA, the gain is 2.7 points. The Echo path is discarded after training, so the deployed model keeps the original low-rank LoRA/DoRA form and adds neither inference-time parameters nor inference computation.

---

### Physics-Modeled Neural Networks

Authors: Raul Felipe-Sosa, Angel Martin del Rey, Maria Flores Ceballos
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.NE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08176v1

We introduce \emph{Dynamical Physics-Modeled Neural Networks} (DynPMNNs), a continuous-time deep learning architecture in which each hidden layer is defined as the solution of an ordinary differential equation. Unlike classical feed-forward networks, this approach replaces static activation functions with time-evolving dynamical systems, providing a biologically inspired interpretation of hidden-layer behavior and enabling the integration of physically meaningful models. The framework is rigorously grounded in Reproducing Kernel Banach Spaces (RKBSs), allowing DynPMNNs to be characterized as finite-dimensional solutions of an abstract training problem and revealing structural connections with standard neural networks. We present a concrete implementation based on the FitzHugh--Nagumo model for neuronal activation, where numerical ODE solvers are embedded into the computational graph via Euler-type schemes. Both network weights and dynamical parameters are trained jointly. Through experiments on the California Housing dataset, we compare DynPMNNs with Neural ODEs (NODEs) and Closed-form Continuous-Time Networks (CfCs). Despite using fewer trainable parameters, DynPMNNs achieve competitive performance. These results position DynPMNNs as a principled bridge between dynamical systems and deep learning, with promising directions for further research in expressivity, stability, and physics-based modeling.

---

### KARMA-MV: A Benchmark for Causal Question Answering on Music Videos

Authors: Archishman Ghosh, Abhinaba Roy, Dorien Herremans
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08175v1

While significant progress has been made in Video Question Answering and cross-modal understanding, causal reasoning about how visual dynamics drive musical structure in music videos remains under-explored. We introduce KARMA-MV, a large-scale multiple-choice QA dataset derived from 2,682 YouTube music videos, designed to test models' ability to integrate temporal audio-visual cues and reason about visual-to-musical influence across reasoning, prediction, and counterfactual questions. Unlike traditional datasets requiring manual annotation, KARMA-MV leverages LLM reasoning for scalable generation and validation, yielding 37,737 MCQs. We propose a causal knowledge graph (CKG) approach that augments vision-language models (VLMs) with structured retrieval of cross-modal dependencies. Experiments on state-of-the-art VLMs and LLMs show consistent gains from CKG grounding -- especially for smaller models -- establishing the value of explicit causal structure for music-video reasoning. KARMA-MV provides a new benchmark for advancing causal audio-visual understanding beyond correlation.

---

### CERSA: Cumulative Energy-Retaining Subspace Adaptation for Memory-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Authors: Jingze Ge, Xue Geng, Yun Liu, Wanqi Dong, Wang Zhe Mark, Min Wu, Ngai-Man Cheung, Bharadwaj Veeravalli, Xulei Yang
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08174v1

To mitigate the memory constraints associated with fine-tuning large pre-trained models, existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, such as LoRA, rely on low-rank updates. However, such updates fail to fully capture the rank characteristics of the weight modifications observed in full-parameter fine-tuning, resulting in a performance gap. Furthermore, LoRA and other existing PEFT methods still require substantial memory to store the full set of frozen weights, limiting their efficiency in resource-constrained settings. To addres these limitations, we introduce Cumulative Energy-Retaining Subspace Adaptation (CERSA), a novel fine-tuning paradigm that leverages singular value decomposition (SVD) to retain only the principal components responsible for 90% to 95% of the spectral energy. By fine-tuning low-rank representations derived from this principal subspace, CERSA significantly reduces memory consumption. We conduct extensive evaluations of CERSA across models of varying scales and domains, including image recognition, text-to-image generation, and natural language understanding. Empirical results demonstrate that CERSA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art PEFT methods while achieving substantially lower memory requirements. The code will be publicly released.

---

### CASISR: Circular Arbitrary-Scale Image Super-Resolution

Authors: Honggui Li, Zhengyang Zhang, Dingtai Li, Sinan Chen, Nahid Md Lokman Hossain, Xinfeng Xu, Yinlu Qin, Ruobing Wang, Hantao Lu, Yuting Feng, Maria Trocan, Dimitri Galayko et al.
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08173v1

The generalization performance (GP) of deep learning-based arbitrary-scale image super-resolution (ASISR) methods is subject to limited training datasets and unlimited testing datasets. It is vitally significant to enhance the GP of the pretrained ASISR models by making full use of the testing samples. The ASISR models usually employ an open-loop architecture from low-resolution (LR) images to super-resolution (SR) images. The degradation model from SR samples to LR samples is known bicubic down-sampling for the classical ASISR, is supposed down-sampling with additive random noise for the blind ASISR, and is learnable for the real-world ASISR. Combining the ASISR and degradation models, it is potentially possible to adopt a closed-loop architecture based on the automatic control theory for strengthening the GP of the ASISR methods. Therefore, this paper proposes a closed-loop architecture, circular ASISR (CASISR), to lift the capability of image reconstruction. A mathematical nonlinear loop equation is established to describe the CASISR, the reasonability of the CASISR is proven by conditional probability theory, and the stability of the CASISR is proven by Taylor series approximation. The first-order and second-order absolute difference images are defined to compare the image reconstruction performance of the ASISR and the CASISR methods. Comprehensive simulation experiments show that the proposed CASISR approach outperforms the eight state-of-the-art ASISR approaches in the quality of image reconstruction. Especially, the proposed CASISR is extraordinarily suitable for fractional SR scale factors and is extremely effective for text and stripe images with drastically changed edges.

---

### CASCADE: Case-Based Continual Adaptation for Large Language Models During Deployment

Authors: Siyuan Guo, Yali Du, Hechang Chen, Yi Chang, Jun Wang
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06702v1

Large language models (LLMs) have become a central foundation of modern artificial intelligence, yet their lifecycle remains constrained by a rigid separation between training and deployment, after which learning effectively ceases. This limitation contrasts with natural intelligence, which continually adapts through interaction with its environment. In this paper, we formalise deployment-time learning (DTL) as the third stage in the LLM lifecycle that enables LLM agents to improve from experience during deployment without modifying model parameters. We present CASCADE (CASe-based Continual Adaptation during DEployment), a general and principled framework that equips LLM agents with an explicit, evolving episodic memory. CASCADE formulates experience reuse as a contextual bandit problem, enabling principled exploration-exploitation trade-offs and establishing no-regret guarantees over long-term interactions. This design allows agents to accumulate, select, and refine task-relevant cases, transforming past experience into actionable knowledge. Across 16 diverse tasks spanning medical diagnosis, legal analysis, code generation, web search, tool use, and embodied interaction, CASCADE improves macro-averaged success rate by 20.9% over zero-shot prompting while consistently outperforming gradient-based and memory-based baselines. By reframing deployment as an adaptive learning process, this work establishes a foundation for continually improving AI systems.

---

### Multimodal synthesis of MRI and tabular data with diffusion in a joint latent space via cross-attention

Authors: Daniel Mensing, Jan Kapar, Jochen G. Hirsch, Matthias Günther, Horst Hahn, Marvin N. Wright
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: eess.IV, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06699v1

We propose a multimodal latent diffusion model that jointly synthesizes volumetric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and tabular clinical data within a shared latent space via cross-attention. This approach enables coherent joint representation learning of MRI and tabular modalities for generative modeling. Our model utilizes a variational autoencoder to fuse the two modalities before diffusion-based synthesis, allowing modality-appropriate reconstruction with separate decoders for MRI and tabular data. We evaluated the framework on data from the German National Cohort (NAKO Gesundheitsstudie), comprising over 10,000 participants with MRI scans and clinical tabular features such as age, sex, body measurements, and ethnicity. The generated MRI volumes exhibited anatomical plausibility and body composition consistent with the synthesized tabular attributes. Quantitative evaluation using Fréchet distance and precision-recall metrics confirmed high-fidelity image generation. In the tabular modality, our model outperformed CTGAN across standard evaluation metrics and achieved results comparable to TVAE, demonstrating competitive performance relative to established unimodal baselines. This work is, to our knowledge, the first to demonstrate the feasibility of jointly modeling MRI and mixed-type tabular data in a single latent diffusion framework, offering a proof-of-concept for generating coherent synthetic multimodal patient data and aligning with the broader goal of developing digital twins in healthcare.

---

### Automated Population-Level Audit Assurance via AI-Based Document Intelligence

Authors: Santosh Vasudevan, Velu Natarajan
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05252v1

Audit transaction testing validates accuracy and completeness of customer-facing statements against internal systems of record. Traditional manual, sample-based review of unstructured PDF statements is labor-intensive and does not scale to millions of transactions. This paper presents an automated framework for large-scale audit transaction testing using AI-based document intelligence. The solution leverages Snowflake Document AI to extract structured data from unstructured PDF statements using a small labeled corpus (approximately 20 documents). Extracted data are reconciled against authoritative source-of-truth datasets to identify discrepancies at scale. Results are surfaced through interactive dashboards and automated reports. The framework enables population-level testing rather than sampling-based approaches, improving audit coverage and supporting continuous assurance objectives. Recent advances in document intelligence and analytics-driven audit frameworks enable scalable, near real-time risk identification and continuous assurance.

---

### Identifier-Free Code Embedding Models for Scalable Search

Authors: Eric Wolos, Michael Doyle
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG, cs.SE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05251v1

Function association is a useful process for binary reverse engineers. Search tools exist to perform association at scale, but they do not utilize the full range of capabilities that AI-enabled search provides. Prior work has explored the development of embedding models for association between certain reverse engineering code representations, but that work does not cover bidirectional association between source code and decompiled, stripped code with standard preprocessing requirements. To bridge this gap, we formalize this function association problem and evaluate the extent to which embedding models can bidirectionally associate between these two representations. To improve model performance at this task, we fine-tune a Qwen3-Embedding model with contrastive learning. We find that our new model outperforms other models on all function association baselines by a substantial margin and generalizes to a constant-algorithm association task it is not explicitly trained on.

---

### Decision-aware User Simulation Agent for Evaluating Conversational Recommender Systems

Authors: Yuan-Chi Li, Li-Chi Chen, Sung-Yi Wu, Yu-Che Tsai, Shou-De Lin
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05250v1

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) increasingly rely on user simulators for automated evaluation of sales agents. A key requirement for such simulators is the ability to model human decision-making. However, most existing simulation frameworks do not explicitly model the internal decision process, and LLM-based simulators often exhibit unrealistically strong information-processing capabilities, rarely exhibit the hesitation or decision deferral commonly observed in real consumer behavior, resulting in overly high acceptance probabilities. To address this limitation, we propose Hesitator, a theory-grounded user simulation framework that explicitly models human decision-making under choice overload. The framework introduces a modular Decision Module that separates utility-based item selection from overload-aware commitment decisions. Experiments across multiple user simulation frameworks, domains, sales modes, and LLM backbones show that integrating our module consistently mitigates unrealistic behaviors under increasing overload conditions. Furthermore, Hesitator reproduces established behavioral patterns from psychological economics, demonstrating its ability to model human decision behavior.

---

### Governed Metaprogramming for Intelligent Systems: Reclassifying Eval as a Governed Effect

Authors: Alan L. McCann
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.PL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05248v4

AI systems increasingly synthesize executable structure at runtime: LLMs generate programs, agents construct workflows,self-improving systems modify their own behavior. In classical homoiconic and staged languages, the transition from code representation to execution is unrestricted. eval is a language primitive, not a governed operation. We argue that in governed intelligent systems, this transition is an authority amplification: it converts symbolic structure into executable authority and must be mediated like any other effect. We present governed metaprogramming, a language design where program representations (machine forms) are first-class values, form manipulation is pure computation, and materialization (the transition from form to executable machine) is a governed effect subject to structural inspection. The governance system analyzes the proposed program's capability requirements, policy compliance, and resource estimates before permitting execution. We formalize two judgments: pure form evaluation (which emits no directives) and governed materialization (which emits exactly one governed directive). We prove three properties: purity of form manipulation, the no-bypass theorem, and boundary preservation. We implement the design in mashinTalk, a DSL for AI workflows compiling to BEAM byte code, and report on integration with 454 existing machine-checked Rocq theorems. The central contribution is reclassifying eval from a language primitive into a governed effect.

---

### When Context Hurts: The Crossover Effect of Knowledge Transfer on Multi-Agent Design Exploration

Authors: Saranyan Vigraham
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.AI, cs.SE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04361v1

The prevailing assumption in agent orchestration is that more context is better. We test this on multi-agent software design across 10 tasks, 7 context-injection conditions, and over 2,700 runs, and find a crossover effect: the same artifact type improves design exploration on some tasks (up to 20$\times$ tradeoff coverage) and actively degrades it on others (up to 46% reduction). On several tasks, an irrelevant document performs as well as or better than every relevant artifact. The direction is predicted by a single measurable variable--baseline exploration without context--with Pearson $r = -0.82$ ($p < 0.001$). Probing the mechanism by manipulating convergence pressure through prompt design reveals two distinct regimes: convergence driven by training data priors (natural) responds to artifact disruption, while convergence driven by explicit instructions (induced) does not. The implication is that context injection should be conditional, not universal: one no-context trial is a cheap diagnostic that predicts whether knowledge artifacts will help or hurt a given task.

---

### Intermediate Representations are Strong AI-Generated Image Detectors

Authors: Zhenhan Huang, Pin-Yu Chen, Tejaswini Pedapati, Jianxi Gao
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04358v1

The rapid advancement in generative AI models has enabled the creation of photorealistic images. At the same time, there are growing concerns about the potential misuse and dangers of generated content, as well as a pressing need for effective AI-generated image detectors. However, current training-based detection techniques are typically computationally costly and can hardly be generalized to unseen data domains, while training-free methods fall short in detection performance. To bridge this gap, we propose a search-based method employing data embedding sensitivity in intermediate layers to detect AI-generated images. Given a set of real and AI-generated images, our method examines the similarity between original image embeddings and perturbed image embeddings, and detects AI-generated images based on the similarity. We examine the proposed method on two comprehensive benchmarks: GenImage and Forensics Small. Our method exhibits improved performance across different datasets compared to both training-free and training-based state-of-the-art methods. On average, our method achieves the largest performance gain on the Forensics Small benchmark by 39.61% compared to the best training-free method and 5.14% compared to the best training-based method in AUROC score.

---

### Coral: Cost-Efficient Multi-LLM Serving over Heterogeneous Cloud GPUs

Authors: Yixuan Mei, Zikun Li, Zixuan Chen, Shiqi Pan, Mengdi Wu, Xupeng Miao, Zhihao Jia, K. V. Rashmi
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04357v1

The usage of large language models (LLMs) has grown increasingly fragmented, with no single model dominating. Meanwhile, cloud providers offer a wide range of mid-tier and older-generation GPUs that enjoy better availability and deliver comparable performance per dollar to top-tier hardware. To efficiently harness these heterogeneous resources for serving multiple LLMs concurrently, we introduce Coral, an adaptive heterogeneity-aware multi-LLM serving system. The key idea behind Coral is to jointly optimize resource allocation and the serving strategy of each model replica across all models. To keep pace with shifting throughput demand and resource availability, Coral applies a lossless two-stage decomposition that preserves joint optimality while cutting online solve time from hours to tens of seconds. Our evaluation across 6 models and 20 GPU configurations shows that Coral reduces serving cost by up to 2.79$\times$ over the best baseline, and delivers up to 2.39$\times$ higher goodput under scarce resource availability.

---

### Efficiently Aligning Language Models with Online Natural Language Feedback

Authors: Christine Ye, Joe Benton
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04356v2

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has been used to elicit impressive performance from language models in many domains. But, broadly beneficial deployments of AI may require us to train models with strong capabilities in "fuzzy", hard-to-supervise domains. In this paper, we develop methods to align language models in fuzzy domains where human experts are still able to provide high-quality supervision signal, but only for a small number of model outputs, using online natural language feedback. Specifically, we train models by iteratively optimizing against proxy reward signals, stopping at the point of over-optimization, collecting fresh expert supervision, and updating the proxy reward. We construct proxy reward models from language models using in-context learning (ICL) and fine-tuning. We test our methods by eliciting creative writing and alignment research capabilities in Qwen3-8B and Haiku 4.5 respectively. For Qwen3-8B, ICL methods recover up to 35% of performance with 50x fewer expert samples, while fine-tuning methods recover 80% with up to 20x fewer samples and 100% with 3x fewer samples. For Haiku 4.5, ICL methods recover up to 35% of performance with 30x fewer samples, and fine-tuning methods recover 100% with 10x fewer samples. Our results suggest that online natural language feedback can substantially improve the data efficiency of expert supervision.

---

### InterFuserDVS: Event-Enhanced Sensor Fusion for Safe RL-Based Decision Making

Authors: Mustafa Sakhaia, Kaung Sithua, Min Khant Soe Okea, Maciej Wielgosza
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04355v1

Autonomous driving systems rely heavily on robust sensor fusion to perceive complex envi- ronments. Traditional setups using RGB cameras and LiDAR often struggle in high-dynamic- range scenes or high-speed scenarios due to motion blur and latency. Dynamic Vision Sensors (DVS), or event cameras, offer a paradigm shift by capturing asynchronous brightness changes with microsecond temporal resolution and high dynamic range. In this paper, we propose an extended architecture of the state-of-the-art InterFuser model, integrating DVS as an additional modality to enhance perception reliability. We introduce a novel token-based fusion strategy that incorporates accumulated event frames into the transformer-based backbone of InterFuser. Our method leverages the complementary nature of RGB, LiDAR, and DVS data. We evaluate our approach on the Car Learning to Act (CARLA) Leaderboard benchmarks, demonstrating that the inclusion of DVS improves the robustness of the driving agent, achieving a competitive Driving Score of 77.2 and a superior Route Completion of 100%. The results indicate that event-based vision is a promising direction for improving safety and performance in adverse lighting and dynamic conditions.

---

### Probing Structural Mathematical Reasoning in Language Models with Algebraic Trapdoors

Authors: Igor Rivin
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.LG, math.GR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04352v1

We introduce a benchmark suite for evaluating structural mathematical reasoning in language models, built on subgroup-construction problems in SL(3, Z) with cryptographic-style verifier-prover asymmetry. Each instance presents a finitely generated subgroup as a list of integer matrices and asks for an arithmetic invariant -- index, surjection-at-prime, or membership -- that the construction-time information (N, K) pins down in O(1) closed form, but that the solver, lacking that information, must derive by either Aschbacher-classification analysis or by a membership query in SL(3, Z) of unknown decidability. The benchmark therefore distinguishes models with internalized algebraic priors (Aschbacher classes, McLaughlin's theorem, Property (T), the congruence subgroup property) from models that rely on general-purpose computation. We report empirical results across five representative reasoning traces from two state-of-the-art models. The headline result: on the index variant, one model spent 152 minutes of reasoning, explicitly identified the kernel-side membership question as the bottleneck, attempted constructive verification, and abstained with "DON'T KNOW" rather than commit to its computed cokernel candidate -- demonstrating calibrated meta-cognition on the open-decidability boundary that the benchmark was designed to probe. We argue that the benchmark exposes a four-way classification of model behavior (commit-correct, commit-wrong, abstain-correct, abstain-wrong) that standard answer-key scoring conflates.

---

### Covariance-Aware Goodness for Scalable Forward-Forward Learning

Authors: Xiaoyi Jiang, Bashir M. Al-Hashimi, Kai Xu
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04346v1

The Forward-Forward algorithm eliminates global gradient flow and full network activations storage. However, in convolutional settings, existing BP-free FF methods significantly under-perform backpropagation on complex benchmarks such as ImageNet-100 and Tiny-ImageNet. We identify this gap as a structural bottleneck in goodness extraction: standard sum-of-squares formulation collapses feature volumes into channel-wise activation energies which omits critical second-order dependencies. To address this, we propose a framework centered on three key components. First, Bi-axis Covariance Goodness(BiCovG) explicitly augments the standard goodness function with structured second-order information along two axes: cross-channel projections that model inter-feature covariance, and nested multi-scale aggregation that encodes spatial correlation statistics. This provides a tractable approximation to covariance-aware goodness without the prohibitive O(C^2) complexity of explicit matrix estimation. Second, a lightweight Logistic Fusion module aggregates layer-wise predictions, amplifying the contribution of deeper representations. Third, the Feature Alignment Layer(FAL) introduces a zero-initialized correction at block boundaries to mitigate representation misalignment in deep locally trained networks. By introducing these three components, we effectively double the depth of viable Forward-Forward learning, extending robust layer utilization from shallow baselines to 16 layer architectures like VGG-16. The resulting BP-free model achieves 73.01% on ImageNet-100 and 50.30% on Tiny-ImageNet. As a practical extension, Hybrid Goodness Blocks control the scope of gradient propagation via configurable block sizes, further narrowing the ImageNet-100 gap to 3.6% and matching BP on Tiny-ImageNet, while still reducing peak memory by approximately 50% relative to BP.

---

### Structural Equivalence and Learning Dynamics in Delayed MARL

Authors: Jules Sintes, Ana Bušić, Jiamin Zhu
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04345v1

We formally establish the equivalence between Observation Delay (OD) and Action Delay (AD) in cooperative partially observable multi-agent systems using observation-action histories. We show that both systems generate identical admissible joint-policy sets, and their induced state-action-observation trajectories are identical in distribution, leading to identical optimal solutions in Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (Dec-POMDPs). This formally generalizes existing infinite-horizon single-agent results to any-horizon partially observable cooperative multi-agent problems with decentralized policy execution, and allows any mixed-delay configuration to be reduced to a pure OD system. We further prove that in Transition-Independent MDPs (TI-MDPs), the observation-action history reduces to a tractable minimal local augmented state. However, we show through numerical experiments that although the optimal solution spaces are structurally isomorphic, the practical learning dynamics are fundamentally different. First, using the minimal local augmented state, the equivalence no longer holds when transitions are not independent. Second, operational constraints and causal credit-assignment errors in Temporal Difference (TD) algorithms induce different learning behaviors across regimes. Finally, leveraging this structural equivalence to bypass these learning challenges, we demonstrate successful multi-agent zero-shot policy transfer from OD to AD, paving the way for unified, efficient solution methods in complex delayed systems.

---

### Perturbation is All You Need for Extrapolating Language Models

Authors: Zetai Cen, Jin Zhu, Xinwei Shen, Chengchun Shi
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.ST
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04344v2

This paper develops a statistical theory of extrapolation for large language models, by reinterpreting them through pre-post-additive noise models. In contrast to the standard autoregressive next-token prediction based on an exact prefix, we introduce a perturbation-based procedure that first transforms the prefix into a semantic neighbour and then conditions on this perturbed variant for next-token prediction. This yields a hierarchical model with a pre-post-additive noise structure. Within this framework, we develop a rigorous theory of extrapolability, namely, the capacity of a model class to make reliable predictions for token sequences that lie outside the empirical support of the training corpus, by establishing five properties of the proposed procedure: adaptivity, contractivity, robustness, extrapolability, and double robustness. We evaluate the finite sample performance of the proposed procedure using both synthetic and real world language data. Results show that the proposed method consistently improves out-of-support prediction while maintaining competitive in-support performance, demonstrating that perturbation offers a practical route to language modelling.

---

### Budgeted LoRA: Distillation as Structured Compute Allocation for Efficient Inference

Authors: Mohammed Sabry, Anya Belz
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04341v1

We study distillation for large language models under explicit compute constraints, with the goal of producing student models that are not only cheaper to train, but structurally efficient at inference time. While prior approaches to parameter-efficient distillation, such as LoRA, reduce adaptation cost, they leave the dense backbone unchanged and therefore fail to deliver meaningful inference savings. We propose Budgeted LoRA, a distillation framework that treats model compression as a structured compute allocation problem. Instead of using a fixed student architecture, we introduce a global compute budget that sets the final target fraction of dense computation retained. Under this constraint, the model redistributes capacity across dense and low-rank pathways via (i) module-level dense retention coefficients, (ii) adaptive low-rank allocation, and (iii) post-training compression that selectively removes, approximates, or preserves dense components. This formulation yields a family of students controlled by a single budget dial. Empirically, Budgeted LoRA matches standard LoRA perplexity at a moderate budget with a 1.74x compressed-module speedup; at an aggressive budget it achieves a 4.05x speedup with moderate perplexity degradation, and it preserves higher accuracy on function-style in-context learning probes. These results suggest that, under compute-constrained distillation, retaining behavior is less about matching perplexity or removing more parameters than it is about controlling how dense computation is transferred to low-rank pathways.

---

### Symbolic Regression via Neural Networks

Authors: Nibodh Boddupalli, Timothy Matchen, Jeff Moehlis
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: math.DS, eess.SP, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04337v1

Identifying governing equations for a dynamical system is a topic of critical interest across an array of disciplines, from mathematics to engineering to biology. Machine learning -- specifically deep learning -- techniques have shown their capabilities in approximating dynamics from data, but a shortcoming of traditional deep learning is that there is little insight into the underlying mapping beyond its numerical output for a given input. This limits their utility in analysis beyond simple prediction. Simultaneously, a number of strategies exist which identify models based on a fixed dictionary of basis functions, but most either require some intuition or insight about the system, or are susceptible to overfitting or a lack of parsimony. Here we present a novel approach that combines the flexibility and accuracy of deep learning approaches with the utility of symbolic solutions: a deep neural network that generates a symbolic expression for the governing equations. We first describe the architecture for our model, then show the accuracy of our algorithm across a range of classical dynamical systems.

---

### Resilient AI Supercomputer Networking using MRC and SRv6

Authors: Joao Araujo, Alex Chow, Mark Handley, Ryder Lewis, Christoph Paasch, Jitendra Padhye, Michael Papamichael, Greg Steinbrecher, Amin Tootoonchian, Lihua Yuan, S. Anantharamu, Abhishek Dosi et al.
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.NI, cs.AI, cs.DC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04333v1

Tail latency dominates the performance of synchronous pretraining jobs when running at very large scales. We describe a three-pronged approach: (1) a new RDMA-based transport protocol, MRC, sprays across many paths and actively load-balances between them, eliminating the issue of flow collisions (2) the use of multi-plane Clos topologies to get the benefits of high switch radix and redundancy, allowing training clusters well over 100K GPUs to be built as two-tier topologies while increasing physical redundancy, and (3) the use of static source-routing using SRv6 to allow MRC the freedom to bypass failures by itself. We describe our experiences running MRC and static SRv6 routing in production in OpenAI and Microsoft's largest training clusters, where it has been used to train the latest frontier models. We demonstrate how MRC allows AI training jobs to ride out many network failures that previously would have interrupted training.

---

### Learning-based Statistical Refinement for Denoising

Authors: Rihuan Ke
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV, eess.IV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04332v1

This work proposes a learning-based statistical refinement method for improving the denoising results of a given denoiser without knowing the precise noise distribution or accessing clean images or calibration data. While there are many existing successful denoising approaches for handling different kinds of noise, they typically require accurate modelling of the images and the noise (implicitly or explicitly), and hence the denoising results can be suboptimal due to different practical factors such as imperfect models, unreliable noise assumptions, or low quality data. In particular, when clean image samples are not available and there is a lack of knowledge of the underlying noise distribution, which is the case in various practical situations, the results may not well align with the noise statistics. The unawareness of the useful statistical information leads to suboptimal results. This work aims to make the best use of the statistical information to improve the consistency between the given denoising results and the noise statistics, under the assumption that the noise is conditionally pixel-wise independent given the clean signal. A method, based on a Bayesian formulation of an auxiliary signal in the noisy data, is proposed for evaluating the consistency of the denoising results, without precise information on noise distribution. By leveraging the statistical information from noisy data, the method enhances the statistical noise consistency and improves denoising quality.

---

### The Scaling Properties of Implicit Deductive Reasoning in Transformers

Authors: Enrico Vompa, Tanel Tammet
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CC, cs.LO, cs.SC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04330v3

We investigate the scaling properties of implicit deductive reasoning over Horn clauses in depth-bounded Transformers. By discouraging the reliance on statistical shortcuts via counterfactual data augmentation, and promoting the learning of shared reasoning primitives across direct and CoT modes, we find that in sufficiently deep models with a bidirectional prefix mask, implicit reasoning approaches explicit CoT performance across graph topologies and problem widths, though CoT remains necessary for depth extrapolation. These findings represent a step toward achieving better compositional reasoning in Transformers. The code and models to reproduce this work are available at: https://github.com/envomp/Implicit-Deductive-Reasoning-in-Transformers

---

### The Scaling Properties of Implicit Deductive Reasoning in Transformers

Authors: Enrico Vompa, Tanel Tammet
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CC, cs.LO, cs.SC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04330v2

We investigate the scaling properties of implicit deductive reasoning over Horn clauses in depth-bounded Transformers. By systematically decorrelating provability from spurious features and enforcing algorithmic alignment, we find that in sufficiently deep models with a bidirectional prefix mask, implicit reasoning approaches explicit CoT performance across graph topologies and problem widths, though CoT remains necessary for depth extrapolation.

---

### A foundation model of vision, audition, and language for in-silico neuroscience

Authors: Stéphane d'Ascoli, Jérémy Rapin, Yohann Benchetrit, Teon Brooks, Katelyn Begany, Joséphine Raugel, Hubert Banville, Jean-Rémi King
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: q-bio.NC, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04326v1

Cognitive neuroscience is fragmented into specialized models, each tailored to specific experimental paradigms, hence preventing a unified model of cognition in the human brain. Here, we introduce TRIBE v2, a tri-modal (video, audio and language) foundation model capable of predicting human brain activity in a variety of naturalistic and experimental conditions. Leveraging a unified dataset of over 1,000 hours of fMRI across 720 subjects, we demonstrate that our model accurately predicts high-resolution brain responses for novel stimuli, tasks and subjects, superseding traditional linear encoding models, delivering several-fold improvements in accuracy. Critically, TRIBE v2 enables in silico experimentation: tested on seminal visual and neuro-linguistic paradigms, it recovers a variety of results established by decades of empirical research. Finally, by extracting interpretable latent features, TRIBE v2 reveals the fine-grained topography of multisensory integration. These results establish artificial intelligence as a unifying framework for exploring the functional organization of the human brain.

---

### On the Architectural Complexity of Neural Networks

Authors: Nicholas J. Cooper, François G. Meyer, Michael L. Roberts, Carlos Zapata-Carratalá, Lijun Chen, Danna Gurari
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.DM, math.CO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04325v1

We introduce a unified theoretical framework for the rigorous analysis and systematic construction of deep neural networks (DNNs). This framework addresses a gap in existing theory by explicitly modeling the structure of tensor operations -- lower level information that is often abstracted. Our framework enables two novel objectives: (1) analysis of the evolution of architectural complexity over deep learning history, and (2) automatic construction of novel architectures based on new types of tensor operations. Our study of DNNs introduced over the past 40 years reveals a connection between groundbreaking architectures and increases in different types of architectural complexity. Moreover, we identify several large classes of higher complexity architectures that have not yet been explored. We then collect a dataset of 3,000+ higher complexity architectures, which we publicly release at: https://github.com/combinatoriallabs/ArchitecturalComplexity.

---

### DeFed-GMM-DaDiL: A Decentralized Federated Framework for Domain Adaptation

Authors: Rebecca Clain, Eduardo Fernandes Montesuma, Fred Ngole Mboula
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04324v1

Decentralized multi-source domain adaptation seeks to transfer knowledge from multiple heterogeneous and related source domains to an unlabeled target domain in a decentralized setting. We address this challenge through a fully decentralized federated approach, DeFed-GMM-DaDiL, an extension of the GMM-Dataset Dictionary Learning (DaDiL) framework. Each client models its dataset as a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), and the federation jointly approximates them via labeled Wasserstein barycenters of shared, learnable GMM atoms. This design enables adaptation without a central server while preserving clients' privacy. We empirically study the stability of the learned representations in scenarios where the target domain has missing classes. Empirical results demonstrate that DeFed-GMM-DaDiL maintains stable and consistent shared representations across clients, effectively reconstructs missing classes, and achieves competitive performance on multi-source domain adaptation benchmarks.

---

### LUCAS-MEGA: A Large-Scale Multimodal Dataset for Representation Learning in Soil-Environment Systems

Authors: Kuangdai Leng, Simon Jeffery, Panos Panagos, Tarje Nissen-Meyer
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.DB
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04323v2

Understanding soil is fundamental to agriculture, carbon cycling, and environmental sustainability, yet progress is limited by fragmented and heterogeneous datasets that constrain modeling to small-scale predictive settings rather than high-dimensional representation learning. We introduce LUCAS-MEGA, a large-scale multimodal dataset constructed through systematic data fusion of European soil-environment observations, with the LUCAS survey as its backbone. The fused dataset comprises over 70,000 samples and more than 1,000 features spanning physical, chemical, environmental, biological, and visual attributes, aggregated from 68 source datasets. To enable integration at scale, we develop SoilFuser, a multi-agent, human-in-the-loop data fusion pipeline that standardizes heterogeneous data formats and measurement protocols, resolves inconsistencies and invalid entries (e.g., unit inconsistencies, codebook mismatches, and erroneous values), incorporates natural language annotations, and harmonizes multimodal attributes and metadata into a unified, machine learning-ready feature space. The resulting dataset captures key characteristics of real-world soil observations, including multimodality, uneven feature coverage, and heterogeneous uncertainty. To demonstrate the usability of LUCAS-MEGA for data-driven modeling, we pretrain a multimodal tabular transformer (SoilFormer) using a self-supervised objective based on feature masking, achieving stable training, strong predictive performance, and representations that support uncertainty-aware prediction. We further show that the learned representations recover relationships consistent with established soil processes. LUCAS-MEGA is released with open access and is accompanied by composable, agent-friendly APIs that support structured querying and data-driven workflows.

---

### NoisyCausal: A Benchmark for Evaluating Causal Reasoning Under Structured Noise

Authors: Zhi Xu, Yun Fu
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04313v1

Causal reasoning in natural language requires identifying relevant variables, understanding their interactions, and reasoning about effects and interventions, often under noisy or ambiguous conditions. While large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong general reasoning abilities, they struggle to disentangle correlation from causation, particularly when observations are partially incorrect or irrelevant information is present. In this work, we introduce NoisyCausal, a new benchmark designed to evaluate causal reasoning under structured noise. Each instance is generated from a ground-truth causal graph and contextualized with a natural language scenario by injecting controllable forms of noise, such as irrelevant distractors, value perturbations, confounding, and partial observability. Moreover, we propose a modular reasoning framework that combines LLMs with explicit causal structure to address these challenges. Our method prompts the LLM to extract variables, construct a causal graph from context, and then reformulates the reasoning task as a structured prompt grounded in this graph. Rather than relying on statistical patterns alone, the LLM is guided by symbolic structure, enabling more interpretable and robust inference. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms standard prompting and reasoning baselines on NoisyCausal. Furthermore, it generalizes well to external benchmarks such as Cladder without task-specific tuning. Our findings highlight the importance of combining causal abstractions with language-driven reasoning to achieve faithful and robust causal understanding in LLMs.

---

### Agent Island: A Saturation- and Contamination-Resistant Benchmark from Multiagent Games

Authors: Connacher Murphy
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04312v1

Static capabilities benchmarks suffer from saturation and contamination, making it difficult to track capabilities progress over time. We introduce Agent Island, a multiplayer simulation environment in which language-model agents compete in a game of interagent cooperation, conflict, and persuasion. The environment yields a dynamic benchmark designed to mitigate both saturation and contamination; new models can always outperform the current leading player in this winner-take-all game, and agents compete against other adaptive agents rather than face a fixed task set. We rank players with a Bayesian Plackett-Luce model, allowing us to quantify uncertainty in player skill. In 999 games involving 49 unique models, openai/gpt-5.5 dominates its peers with a posterior mean skill of 5.64, compared with 3.10 for the second-ranked model, openai/gpt-5.2, and 2.86 for the third-ranked model, openai/gpt-5.3-codex. We release the game logs as a dataset for analyses of model behavior. As an example, we investigate same-provider preference in final-round votes and find that models are 8.3 p.p. more likely to support a same-provider finalist than finalists from other providers. This preference is not uniform across providers: among separately estimated providers, the effect is strongest for OpenAI models and weakest for Anthropic models.

---

### Interpreting V1 Population Activity via Image-Neural Latent Representation Alignment

Authors: Xin Wang, Zhuangzhi Gao, Hongyi Qin, Zhongli Wu, Feixiang Zhou, He Zhao
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.NE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04309v1

Understanding the neural mechanisms underlying visual computation has long been a central challenge in neuroscience. Recent alignment based approaches have improved the accuracy of decoding visual stimuli from brain activity, yet they provide limited insight into the neural computations that give rise to these improvements. To address this gap, we propose Dual-Tower Image-Neural Alignment (DINA), an interpretable contrastive framework for analyzing population level visual computations in primary visual cortex (V1). DINA jointly trains a biologically motivated dual-tower architecture that aligns visual stimuli and corresponding V1 population responses in a shared latent space at the level of intermediate feature maps, enabling both accurate decoding and direct access to interpretable feature maps. Evaluated on large-scale two-photon calcium imaging data from mouse V1, DINA achieves accurate neural-based decoding while revealing that decoding performance is primarily supported by coarse, low-level visual structure, rather than semantic category information or fine-grained details. Further analysis reveals that alignable feature maps emerge from multiple spatially distributed image regions, capturing both shape and texture cues, and are predominantly reconstructed by sparse subsets of strongly responsive neurons and their functional interactions. Together, these results confirm that, beyond enabling accurate decoding, DINA provides a principled framework for probing the computational mechanisms underlying visual processing in V1.

---

### Memory as a Markov Matrix: Sample Efficient Knowledge Expansion via Token-to-Dictionary Mapping

Authors: Kaustubh Pethkar, Ziyang Xiong, Zuofeng Shang, Yingcong Li
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04308v1

Continual incorporation of new knowledge is essential for the long-term evolution of large language models (LLMs). Existing approaches typically rely on parameter-update algorithms to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, yet they suffer from fundamental limitations: 1) forgetting is unavoidable as the amount of newly injected knowledge grows; and 2) model updates are often irreversible. As modern LLMs become increasingly expressive, it is natural to question whether large-scale weight updates are necessary for acquiring a small amount of new knowledge. In this work, we propose a principled framework that models autoregressive language generation as a Markov process over tokens, where model memory is represented by a Markov transition matrix. Under this formulation, incorporating new knowledge/tokens corresponds to extending the state space, and preserving existing transitions guarantees retention of previously learned knowledge. We then prove a sample complexity bound for incorporating new tokens via a token-to-dictionary mapping strategy. In particular, for learning the transition behavior of each new token, the required number of samples scales linearly with the number of existing tokens it is mapped to. To realize this mapping, we propose an embedding-tuning algorithm that requires minimal parameter updates and induces zero forgetting. Experimental results further demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and validate our theoretical findings.

---

### SWAN: Semantic Watermarking with Abstract Meaning Representation

Authors: Ziping Ye, Gourab Dey, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Charith Peris, Anil Ramakrishna, Weitong Ruan, Aram Galstyan, Kai-Wei Chang, Rahul Gupta, Ninareh Mehrabi
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CR, cs.CY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04305v1

We introduce SWAN (Semantic Watermarking with Abstract Meaning Representation), a novel framework that embeds watermark signatures into the semantic structure of a sentence using Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR). In contrast to existing watermarking methods, which typically encode signatures by adjusting token selection preferences during text generation, SWAN embeds the signature directly in the sentence's semantic representation. As the signature is encoded at the semantic structure level, any paraphrase that preserves meaning automatically preserves the signature. SWAN is training-free: watermark injection is achieved by prompting an LLM to generate sentences guided by a selected AMR template while maintaining contextual coherence, and detection uses an off-the-shelf AMR parser followed by a simple one-proportion z-test. Empirical evaluation on the RealNews benchmark shows SWAN matches state-of-the-art detection performance on unaltered watermarked text, while significantly improving robustness against paraphrasing, increasing detection AUC by up to 13.9 percentage points compared to prior methods. These results demonstrate that SWAN's approach of anchoring watermarks in AMR semantic structures provides a simple, effective, and prompt-based method for robust text provenance verification under paraphrasing, opening new avenues for semantic-level watermarking research.

---

### Hierarchical Visual Agent: Managing Contexts in Joint Image-Text Space for Advanced Chart Reasoning

Authors: Qihua Dong, Ruozhen He, Junwen Chen, Yizhou Wang, Xu Ma, Songyao Jiang, Yun Fu
Published: 2026-05-05
Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04304v1

Advanced chart question answering requires both precise perception of small visual elements and multi-step reasoning across several subplots. While existing MLLMs are strong at understanding single plots, they often struggle with multi-step reasoning across multiple subplots. We propose HierVA, a hierarchical visual agent framework for chart reasoning that iteratively constructs and updates a working context in a joint image--text space. A high-level manager generates plans and maintains a compact context containing only key information, while specialized workers perform reasoning, gather evidence, and return results. In particular, the agent maintains separate visual and textual contexts, using a zoom-in tool to restrict the visual context. Experiments on the CharXiv reasoning subset demonstrate consistent improvements over strong multimodal baselines, and ablation studies verify that hierarchical architecture, scoped visual context, and distilled context contribute complementary gains.

---