# Research Papers — 2026-05 · bundle page 315 of 326 > Full-text markdown of papers #15701–15750 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/315 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/314.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/316.md) ### ECG-biometrics-bench: A Unified Framework for Reproducible Benchmarking of ECG Biometrics Authors: Milad Parvan Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV, eess.SP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01548v1 Electrocardiogram (ECG) biometrics have emerged as a promising modality for continuous, liveness-aware authentication in wearable systems. However, many prior studies report overly optimistic results due to data leakage (e.g., random splits within the same session). To address this issue, we introduce ECG-biometrics-bench, a modular, reproducible benchmarking framework that standardizes preprocessing, segmentation, and evaluation across seven widely used public ECG datasets spanning clinical, ambulatory, and large-scale cohort settings. The framework supports both closed-set and open-set (i.e., subject-disjoint generalization in this work) evaluation, as well as progressively realistic protocols including cross-session and long-term temporal separation. To facilitate reproducible research in the community, the ECG-biometrics-bench repository will be made publicly accessible on GitHub upon the acceptance of this manuscript. Through a comprehensive multi-dataset analysis, we expose the Random Split Fallacy, demonstrating that intra-session evaluation protocols artificially inflate performance while masking severe degradation caused by temporal drift and unseen identities. Furthermore, by evaluating multiple architectures, including DeepECG, ResNet1D, and CNN-LSTM, we show that these failures are not model-specific but are likely inherent to current supervised feature-learning paradigms. Finally, we demonstrate that performance degradation due to temporal aging can be partially mitigated through a heavy enrollment, lightweight authentication strategy based on dynamic multi-session template fusion. These findings establish a more realistic baseline for ECG biometrics and highlight critical challenges that must be addressed for reliable real-world deployment. --- ### 6G Needs Agents: Toward Agentic AI-Native Networks for Autonomous Intelligence Authors: Mohamed Amine Ferrag, Abderrahmane Lakas, Merouane Debbah Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.NI, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01546v1 Sixth-generation (6G) networks are increasingly envisioned as AI-native infrastructures integrating communication, sensing, and computing into a unified fabric. However, existing approaches remain largely optimization-centric, relying on closed-loop control with limited reasoning capability. In this paper, we argue for a paradigm shift toward Agentic AI-Native 6G, in which Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents operate as bounded, policy-governed reasoning entities within a semantic control plane layered above deterministic 3GPP infrastructure. We propose a four-layer architecture that integrates deterministic network infrastructure, semantic abstraction of intent and context, hierarchical reasoning, and a distributed multi-agent fabric spanning device, edge, and core domains. To assess feasibility, we develop a proof-of-concept agentic reasoning and orchestration framework and conduct an extensive empirical study using a domain-specific 6G benchmark under realistic deployment constraints. Our results reveal a fundamental tradeoff between reasoning capability and system efficiency, showing that no single model simultaneously satisfies latency, throughput, and accuracy requirements. Instead, heterogeneous deployment of LLM agents across the device--edge--core continuum is necessary to balance these constraints. We further demonstrate that quantization introduces non-uniform effects across models, reinforcing the need for system-level optimization rather than model-level compression alone. These findings establish agentic intelligence as a viable architectural direction for 6G and highlight key challenges in achieving scalable, trustworthy, and self-reasoning networks. All experimental results and evaluation scripts are publicly available to support reproducibility. --- ### Mesh Based Simulations with Spatial and Temporal awareness Authors: Paul Garnier, Vincent Lannelongue, Elie Hachem Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, physics.comp-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01542v1 Machine Learning surrogates for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), particularly Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Transformers, have become a new important approach for accelerating physics simulations. However, we identify a critical bottleneck in the field: while architectures have advanced significantly, the common underlying training paradigms remain bound to naive assumptions, such as node-wise supervision and explicit Euler time-stepping. These legacy choices ignore the stiff dynamics and local flux continuity inherent to numerous partial differential equations resolution methods, such as Finite Element, Difference, or Volume (FEM). In this work, we propose a unified framework to bridge the gap between geometric deep learning and rigorous numerical analysis. We introduce three key innovations: (1) Multi Node Prediction, a stencil-level objective that predicts field values for a node's full local topology, enforcing spatial derivative consistency; (2) Temporal Correction, replacing unstable explicit schemes with a predictor-corrector via temporal Cross-Attention; and (3) Geometric Inductive Biases, leveraging 3D Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE) to robustly capture rotational symmetries in unstructured meshes. We evaluate this framework across three architectures (MeshGraphNet, Transolver, and a Transformer) on diverse physics datasets. Our approach yields consistent improvements in accuracy and stability, particularly in long-horizon rollouts, while producing latent representations that generalize to unseen subtasks such as Wall Shear Stress or Pressure prediction. Code is available at https://github.com/DonsetPG/graph-physics. --- ### The grip of grammar on meaning uncertainty: cross-linguistic evidence, neural correlates, and clinical relevance Authors: Rui He, Claudio Palominos, Samuele Vallisa, Ni Yang, Han Zhang, Miguel Ángel Santos Santos, Neguine Rezaii, Sergi Valero, Yonghua Huang, Huan Li, Hong Jiang, Yongjun Peng et al. Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01537v1 Isolated word meanings are inherently uncertain. This uncertainty reduces when they are combined and anchored in context. We propose that grammar compresses meaning uncertainty cross-linguistically, which is reflected in brain and selectively disrupted in disorders. Compression was operationalized as the relative difference between non-contextual surprisal estimated from lexical frequency, and contextual surprisal from grammar-sensitive models. In narratives from 20 languages, contextual surprisal reduced frequency-based surprisal. This reduction closely tracked the surprisal cost of reversing word order, and scaled with richer, non-redundant lexis as organized by more complex but optimal dependency structure. During fMRI, surprisal and its reduction explained BOLD activity for comprehension and production in overlapping but distinct regions. Uncertainty reduction was significantly attenuated in aphasia, dementia, and schizophrenia, but remained intact where primary deficit is not language. These findings position uncertainty reduction via grammar as a foundational concept that illuminates principles, brain basis, and disruptions of language. --- ### MIRL: Mutual Information-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Language Models Authors: Yin Zhang, Jiaxuan Zhao, Zonghan Wu, Zengxiang Li, Junfeng Fang, Kun Wang, Qingsong Wen, Yilei Shao Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01520v1 Vision-Language Models (VLMs) frequently suffer from visual perception errors and hallucinations that compromise answer accuracy in complex reasoning tasks. Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) offers a promising solution by optimizing policies using answer correctness signals. Despite their effectiveness, prevailing RLVR methods face two critical limitations. First, much of the sampling budget is wasted on trajectories doomed to fail due to early visual description errors. Second, sparse rewards cannot distinguish whether failures stem from visual perception or reasoning stages. We introduce MIRL, a decoupled framework that addresses both limitations by leveraging mutual information (MI) between generated descriptions and visual inputs as a cheap pre-screening signal. This enables intelligent budget allocation toward high-potential trajectories via forking, while decoupled training provides independent MI-based rewards for visual perception optimization, resolving reward blindness. Experiments on six vision-language reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that MIRL achieves 70.22% average accuracy and successfully surpasses the performance of sampling 16 complete trajectories using only 10 pre-samples with top-6 selection (25% fewer complete trajectories). Our code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/mirl-main/. --- ### Certified vs. Empirical Adversarial Robust-ness via Hybrid Convolutions with Attention Stochasticity Authors: Joy Dhar, Song Xia, Manish Kumar Pandey, Maryam Haghighat, Azadeh Alavi, Ferdous Sohel, Wenyu Zhang, Nayyar Zaidi Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01519v1 We introduce Hybrid Convolutions with Attention Stochasticity (HyCAS), an adversarial defense that narrows the long-standing gap between provable robustness under L2 certificates and empirical robustness against strong L attacks, while preserving strong generalization across diverse imaging benchmarks. HyCAS unifies deterministic and randomized principles by coupling 1-Lipschitz, spectrally normalized convolutions with two stochastic components, spectral normalized random, projection filters and a randomized attention-noise mechanism, to realize a randomized defense. Injecting smoothing randomness inside the architecture yields an overall <= 2-Lipschitz network with formal certificates. Exten-sive experiments on diverse imaging benchmarks, including CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet-1k, NIH Chest X-ray, HAM10000, show that HyCAS surpasses prior leading certified and empirical defenses, boosting certified accuracy by up to 7.3% (on NIH Chest X-ray) and empirical robustness by up to 3.1% (on HAM10000), without sacrificing clean accuracy. These results show that a randomized Lipschitz constrained architecture can simultaneously improve both certified L2 and empirical L adversarial robustness, thereby supporting safer deployment of deep models in high-stakes applications. Code: https://github.com/misti1203/HyCAS --- ### VAnim: Rendering-Aware Sparse State Modeling for Structure-Preserving Vector Animation Authors: Guotao Liang, Zhangcheng Wang, Chuang Wang, Juncheng Hu, Haitao Zhou, Junhua Liu, Jing Zhang, Dong Xu, Qian Yu Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01517v1 Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) animation generation is pivotal for professional design due to their structural editability and resolution independence. However, this task remains challenging as it requires bridging discrete code representations with continuous visual dynamics. Existing optimization-based methods often destroy topological consistency, while general-purpose LLMs rely on rigid CSS/SMIL transformations, failing to model geometry-level non-rigid deformations. To address these limitations, we present VAnim, the first LLM-based framework for open-domain text-to-SVG animation. We reconceptualize animation not as sequence generation, but as Sparse State Updates (SSU) on a persistent SVG DOM tree. This paradigm compresses sequence length by over 9.8x while preserving the SVG DOM structure and non-participating elements by construction. To enable precise control, we propose an Identification-First Motion Planning mechanism that grounds textual instructions in explicit visual entities. Furthermore, to overcome the non-differentiable nature of SVG rendering, we employ Rendering-Aware Reinforcement Learning via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). By leveraging a hybrid reward from a state-of-the-art video perception encoder, we align discrete code updates with high-fidelity visual feedback. We also introduce SVGAnim-134k, the first benchmark for vector animation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VAnim significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in semantic alignment and structural validity, with additional appendix metrics further validating motion quality and identity preservation. --- ### Protein-Conditioned Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning for Full-Length mRNA Design Authors: Zixi Shao, Tao Wang, Yibei Xiao, Tianyi Huang Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01513v1 Designing therapeutic messenger RNA (mRNA) requires creating full-length transcripts that carefully balance stability, translation efficiency, and immune safety. To address this challenge, we propose ProMORNA, a multi-objective generation framework that produces complete mRNA transcripts \textit{de novo} directly from a target protein sequence. Our approach begins by training a BART-style encoder-decoder model on over 6 million natural protein-mRNA pairs. We then introduce Multi-Objective Group Relative Policy Optimization (MO-GRPO) to simultaneously optimize for various biological objectives in a unified way. As a case study, we evaluated ProMORNA on the widely used firefly luciferase target, excluding it from both our supervised training data and the prompt pool. The results indicate that ProMORNA improves the \textit{in silico} Pareto frontier for predicted half-life and translation efficiency relative to standard supervised baselines. Additionally, it achieves higher predicted functional scores than a state-of-the-art baseline under the same evaluation pipeline. These computational findings demonstrate the feasibility of using multi-objective reinforcement learning for full-length mRNA design on unseen targets. --- ### Two-Pass Zero-Shot Temporal-Spatial Grounding of Rare Traffic Events in Surveillance Video Authors: Jiantang Huang Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01512v2 Grounding traffic accidents in real CCTV footage is a rare-event problem where training on labeled accident video is often prohibited, yet accurate joint localization in time, space, and collision type is required. We present a no-fine-tuning pipeline that elicits this joint output from frozen vision-language models through two ideas. First, a coarse-to-fine two-pass decomposition: a full-video pass at 1 fps produces a coarse (t, x, y, c) tuple, then a second pass at 5 fps within a +/- 3 s window refines time and location, with two deterministic confidence gates that revert to the coarse estimate on boundary hedges or edge-clamped coordinates. Second, a specialist role assignment: Qwen3-VL-Plus handles grounding, Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite handles typing on a centered video clip. On the ACCIDENT@CVPR 2026 benchmark (2,027 real CCTV videos) we reach ACC^S = 0.539 (95% CI (0.525, 0.553)): +0.127 over the benchmark paper's best-of-baselines oracle (0.412), +0.143 over the strongest single-VLM baseline (Molmo-7B, 0.396), and +0.250 over the naive baseline (0.289). The VLM path uses up to three API calls per video (17% fall back to physics on API failures); the full run costs ~$20. --- ### SwiftPie: Lightning-fast Subject-driven Image Personalization via One step Diffusion Authors: Huy Duong, Trong-Tung Nguyen, Cuong Pham, Anh Tran, Khoi Nguyen, Minh Hoai Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01510v1 Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in high-quality image synthesis, sparking interest in image-guided generation tasks such as subject-driven image personalization. Despite their impressive personalization results, existing methods typically rely on computationally intensive fine-tuning, iterative optimization, or multi-step denoising processes, which significantly hinder their deployment and interactive capability in real-time applications. In this work, we present SwiftPie, the first one-step diffusion image personalization tool that enables lightning-fast generation of personalized images. SwiftPie introduces a novel dual-branch identity injection mechanism that effectively integrates subject identity into a one-step diffusion model. In addition, we incorporate a mask-guided rescaling strategy to further enhance subject contextualization within a single diffusion step. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SwiftPie not only delivers superior image personalization speed but also achieves comparable performance with multi-step approaches in both identity fidelity and prompt alignment. This work opens new opportunities for real-time, high-quality personalized image generation, paving the way for interactive visual synthesis. --- ### MILD: Mediator Agent System with Bidirectional Perception and Multi-Layered Alignment for Human-Vehicle Collaboration Authors: Jiyao Wang, Yunbiao Wang, Yubo Jiao, Xiao Yang, Dengbo He, Sasan Jafarnejad, Luis Miranda-Moreno, Raphael Frank, Jiangbo Yu Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01507v2 Prior studies report that partial driving automation can increase the cognitive demands on human drivers. This effect largely arises from human drivers' lack of transparent insight into the vehicle's intentions and decision logic, as well as from automated systems' limited awareness of the driver's dynamic state and preferences. This bidirectional misalignment undermines shared situational awareness and exacerbates coordination failures in human-vehicle interaction. To address these limitations, we argue for a paradigm shift that elevates the human role from passive supervisor to active manager. We introduce the Mediator-in-the-Loop-Driving (MILD) system, based on an agentic system architecture to facilitate synergistic human-vehicle collaboration. MILD integrates a perception agent for joint in-cabin and out-of-cabin understanding with a lightweight strategy agent that generates compliant and explainable action suggestions. To ensure these strategies are strictly aligned with safety regulations and human values, we develop Evidence- and Constraint-weighted Policy Optimization (ECPO). ECPO leverages automatic validators to steer the agent toward behaviors that are not only accurate but also structurally complete, substantiated by evidence, and free from constraint violations. Furthermore, a retrieval-augmented generation module dynamically incorporates constraints from traffic regulations, speed recommendations, and driver preferences into the decision loop. Field experiments across three open datasets demonstrate that MILD consistently outperforms baselines in both perception accuracy and strategy quality under auditable offline metrics, and yields higher human-rated policy adequacy, comfort, and explanation than baselines. This work offers a practical pathway for building auditable and aligned agents for human-vehicle collaborative driving. --- ### OmniEncoder: See, Hear, and Feel Continuous Motion Like Humans With One Encoder Authors: Detao Bai, Shimin Yao, Weixuan Chen, Chengen Lai, Yuanming Li, Zhiheng Ma, Xihan Wei Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01506v1 Recent advances in omni-modal large language models have enabled remarkable progress in joint vision-audio understanding. However, prevailing architectures rely on modality-specific encoders with a \emph{video-coarse, audio-dense} design -- sampling visual frames at 1--2 fps while processing audio waveforms at 25 fps -- resulting in systems that perceive video \emph{frame by frame, modality by modality} rather than holistically as humans do. Such a discrepancy leaves models with impoverished cross-modal interaction during encoding and an inability to capture fine-grained visual motion. To bridge this gap, we present \textbf{Omni-Encoder, a unified Transformer backbone designed to co-embed visual and audio signals at a symmetrical 25 fps} within a shared latent space. This architecture leverages three core innovations -- the Omni-Encoder Token Template, Omni-RoPE, and Temporal Window Shifting -- to effectively reconcile the dual challenges of modality disentanglement and computational efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that, compared to the modality-specific baseline Qwen2.5-Omni under the same input token budget to the LLM decoder, Omni-Encoder delivers substantial gains on visual continuous understanding tasks -- such as sign language recognition and fine-grained sports action analysis -- while maintaining competitive performance on established audio-visual benchmarks such as AVQA and Speaker Identification and Localization. These results suggest that unified omnivorous encoding offers a promising direction for building omni-modal models that more closely reflect the integrated nature of human perception. --- ### RADMI: Latent Information Aggregation as a Proxy for Model Uncertainty Authors: William Stevens, Mohit Prabhushankar, Ghassan AlRegib Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01502v1 Epistemic uncertainty estimation is essential for identifying regions where deep learning system outputs may be unreliable. However, existing approaches require computationally expensive ensemble methods or multiple stochastic forward passes, limiting their scalability to dense prediction tasks like segmentation. We propose Resolution-Aggregated Decoder Mutual Information (RADMI), a single-pass method that estimates prediction uncertainty by measuring mutual information (MI) between consecutive decoder layers in segmentation networks. We observe that elevated inter-layer MI correlates with prediction uncertainty, as the network must integrate conflicting contextual information at ambiguous regions such as class boundaries. Evaluating on a seismic facies segmentation benchmark, RADMI achieves the highest correlation with deep ensemble uncertainty among all single-pass methods, outperforming the next-best baselines by 5.5% in Pearson and 10.7% in Spearman correlation coefficients. Compared to baselines that either lack spatial precision or demand significant computational overhead, RADMI yields sharp, boundary-localized uncertainty maps without architectural modifications. Our results suggest that linear aggregation of normalized information flow provides a principled and efficient proxy for prediction uncertainty in encoder-decoder architectures. --- ### Towards Visual Query Localization in the 3D World Authors: Liang Peng, Bohan Tan, Zhipeng Zhang, Haobo Li, Yifan Jiao, Xingping Dong, Libo Zhang Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01498v1 Visual query localization (VQL) aims to predict the spatio-temporal response of the most recent occurrence in a sequence given a query. Currently, most research focuses on visual query localization in 2D videos, while its counterpart in 3D space has received little attention. In this paper, we make the first attempt to address visual query localization in the 3D world by introducing a novel benchmark, dubbed 3DVQL. Specifically, 3DVQL contains 2,002 sequences with around 170,000 frames and 6.4K response track segments from 38 object categories. Each sequence in 3DVQL is provided with multiple modalities, including point clouds, RGB images, and depth images, to support flexible research. To ensure high-quality annotations, each sequence is manually annotated with multiple rounds of verification and refinement. To the best of our knowledge, 3DVQL is the first benchmark for 3D multimodal visual query localization. To facilitate comparison in subsequent research, we implement a series of representative 3D multimodal VQL baselines using point clouds and RGB images. The experimental results show that existing methods exhibit significant performance variations across different fusion modules. To encourage future research, we propose a lift-and-attention fusion algorithm named LaF, which significantly outperforms existing baseline models. Our benchmark and model will be publicly released at https://github.com/wuhengliangliang/3DVQL. --- ### SF20K Competition 2025: Summary and findings Authors: Ridouane Ghermi, Xi Wang, Vicky Kalogeiton, Ivan Laptev Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01496v1 This report presents the results and findings of the first edition of the Short-Films 20K (SF20K) Competition, held in conjunction with the SLoMO Workshop at ICCV 2025. The competition is designed to advance story-level video understanding beyond short-clip action recognition, introducing an open-ended video question-answering task built on a corpus of amateur short films. This setup ensures that models must rely on multimodal understanding rather than memorization of popular movies. Evaluation is conducted using the SF20K-Test benchmark (95 movies, 979 question-answer pairs) and scored via LLM-QA-Eval, an automated judge based on GPT-4.1-nano. The competition attracted 22 teams and 286 submissions across two tracks: a Main Track with unrestricted model size and a Special Track limited to models under 8 billion parameters. The winning team achieved 65.7% accuracy on the Main Track and 48.7% on the Special Track, against a human performance ceiling of 91.7%. Our analysis reveals several key findings: narrative-aware, shot-level processing consistently outperforms uniform frame sampling; well-designed multi-stage pipelines using smaller models can match or exceed end-to-end inference with models over 30x larger; and subtitle quality is a dominant factor in performance. These results highlight that the primary bottleneck in long-form video QA lies in information selection and reasoning structure rather than raw model capacity, and that a substantial gap remains between current methods and human-level narrative comprehension. --- ### FT-RAG: A Fine-grained Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework for Complex Table Reasoning Authors: Zebin Guo, Weidong Geng, Ruichen Mao Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01495v1 Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by grounding responses in external knowledge during inference. However, conventiona RAG systems under-perform on structured tabular data, largely due to coarse retrieval granularity and insufficient table semantic comprehension. To address these limitations, we introduce FT-RAG, a fine-grained framework that employs knowledge association by decomposing tables into entry-level semantic units to construct a structured graph. FT-RAG employs a structural neighbor expansion mechanism to find semantically connected entities during graph retrieval, followed by multi-modal fusion to consolidate the context of table retrieval results. Further, to address the scarcity of specialized datasets in this domain, we introduce Multi-Table-RAG-Lib, a benchmark comprising 9870 QA pairs with high complexity and difficulty, curated to demand multi-table integration and text-table information fusion for reasoning. FT-RAG surpasses top-performing baselines across all metrics, achieving a 23.5\% and 59.2\% improvement in table-level and cell-level Hit Rates, respectively. Generation performance also sees a remarkable 62.2\% increase in exact value accuracy recall. These metrics verify the framework's effectiveness in factual grounding across both pure tabular and heterogeneous table-text contexts. Therefore, our method establishes a new state-of-the-art performance for complex reasoning over mixed-modality documents. --- ### Stabilizing Private LASSO under Heterogeneous Covariates via Anisotropic Objective Perturbation Authors: Haruka Tanzawa, Ayaka Sakata Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: stat.ML, cs.IT, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01492v2 We study high-dimensional LASSO under differential privacy via objective perturbation with heterogeneous covariate scales. In practical scenarios, covariates often exhibit diverse scales; however, standard preprocessing is problematic under privacy constraints, as it consumes additional privacy budget. This heterogeneity induces effective anisotropy in the objective perturbation via the inverse Gram matrix of covariates, which can degrade the stability and accuracy of algorithms. To address this, we propose a Gram-based anisotropic objective perturbation, a ``pre-distortion" strategy that counteracts the distortion from the covariate structure to restore isotropy in the estimation process. Using an Approximate Message Passing (AMP) framework and state evolution analysis, we demonstrate that our proposed perturbation significantly stabilizes convergence and improves both statistical efficiency and privacy performance compared to standard uniform noise injection. Our results provide theoretical insights into designing stable and efficient private estimators without relying on data-dependent preprocessing. --- ### Stabilizing Private LASSO under Heterogeneous Covariates via Anisotropic Objective Perturbation Authors: Haruka Tanzawa, Ayaka Sakata Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: stat.ML, cs.IT, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01492v1 We study high-dimensional LASSO under differential privacy via objective perturbation with heterogeneous covariate scales. In practical scenarios, covariates often exhibit diverse scales; however, standard preprocessing is problematic under privacy constraints, as it consumes additional privacy budget. This heterogeneity induces effective anisotropy in the objective perturbation via the inverse Gram matrix of covariates, which can degrade the stability and accuracy of algorithms. To address this, we propose a Gram-based anisotropic objective perturbation, a ``pre-distortion" strategy that counteracts the distortion from the covariate structure to restore isotropy in the estimation process. Using an Approximate Message Passing (AMP) framework and state evolution analysis, we demonstrate that our proposed perturbation significantly stabilizes convergence and improves both statistical efficiency and privacy performance compared to standard uniform noise injection. Our results provide theoretical insights into designing stable and efficient private estimators without relying on data-dependent preprocessing. --- ### CGFformer: Cluster-Guidance Frequency Transformer for Pansharpening Authors: Zijian Zhou, Jianing Zhang, Kai Sun, Xiangyu Zhao, Chunxia Zhang, Xiangyong Cao Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01490v1 Pansharpening aims to generate high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) images by fusing low-resolution multispectral (LRMS) images with high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) images. However, the current mainstream frequency-based pansharpening methods employ fixed frequency filters, which cannot precisely adapt to complex and spatially diversified frequency distributions in PAN and MS images. Furthermore, existing denoising strategies insufficiently exploit frequency components for denoising and struggle to suppress various noise types accurately. To address these challenges, we propose CGFformer, a cluster-guidance frequency Transformer that focuses on varying frequency distribution and interactions between frequency and spatial components. Specifically, we design an adaptive separation module that integrates local features and non-local information through K-means clustering, enabling more precise separation of high- and low-frequency components. Subsequently, we introduce a dual-stream refinement module combined with Transformer-based cross-attention to remove various noise, allowing the network to jointly suppress frequency-relevant and irrelevant disturbances. In addition, we develop a frequency-spatial fusion module designed to enhance detail and facilitate spatial-frequency interaction, ensuring more effective reconstruction of spatial structures in the fused results. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed CGFformer achieves notable improvements over existing pansharpening approaches. --- ### SciResearcher: Scaling Deep Research Agents for Frontier Scientific Reasoning Authors: Tianshi Zheng, Rui Wang, Xiyun Li, Kelvin Kiu Wai Tam, Newt Nguyen Kim Hue Nam, Wei Fan, Yangqiu Song, Tianqing Fang Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01489v2 Frontier scientific reasoning is rapidly emerging as a key foundation for advancing AI agents in automated scientific discovery. Deep research agents offer a promising approach to this challenge. These models develop robust problem-solving capabilities through post-training on information-seeking tasks, which are typically curated via knowledge graph construction or iterative web browsing. However, these strategies face inherent limitations in frontier science, where domain-specific knowledge is scattered across sparse and heterogeneous academic sources, and problem solving requires sophisticated computation and reasoning far beyond factual recall. To bridge this gap, we introduce SciResearcher, a fully automated agentic framework for frontier-science data construction. SciResearcher synthesizes diverse conceptual and computational tasks grounded in academic evidence, while eliciting information acquisition, tool-integrated reasoning, and long-horizon capabilities. Leveraging the curated data for supervised fine-tuning and agentic reinforcement learning, we develop SciResearcher-8B, an agent foundation model that achieves 19.46% on the HLE-Bio/Chem-Gold benchmark, establishing a new state of the art at its parameter scale and surpassing several larger proprietary agents. It further achieves 13-15% absolute gains on SuperGPQA-Hard-Biology and TRQA-Literature benchmarks. Overall, SciResearcher introduces a new paradigm for automated data construction for frontier scientific reasoning and offers a scalable path toward future scientific agents. --- ### MAP-Law: Coverage-Driven Retrieval Control for Multi-Turn Legal Consultation Authors: Qinchuan Cheng, Jiaqi Liu, Ruixuan Xie, Xiaoya Yuan, Yuxin Liu Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01486v2 Legal consultation is inherently iterative: before giving advice, a system must identify relevant legal elements, gather missing facts and authorities, and determine whether the current evidence is sufficient. Existing retrieval-augmented legal agents often use fixed retrieval budgets or single-shot search, making them insensitive to the evolving coverage state of a consultation. This paper introduces a coverage-driven retrieval-control framework for multi-turn legal consultation. The framework maintains a structured map over user facts, legal elements, retrieval goals, and retrieved evidence, and uses element coverage, evidence validity coverage, and marginal retrieval gain to decide whether to retrieve, clarify, reformulate, or stop. On a 50-case synthetic Chinese labor-law consultation pilot with fixed legal-element schemas, a DeepSeek V4-Pro action-selection variant achieves full measured element coverage under the pilot metric while requiring 3.4 retrieval rounds and 7.1 evidence snippets on average. Diagnostic analyses show that model-backed action selection recovers rule-policy failure cases with a small retrieval-budget increase, while forced continuation mainly increases token and latency costs. These results suggest that legal-element coverage is a useful control signal for adaptive legal retrieval, while remaining bounded to retrieval-control behavior under synthetic fixed-schema conditions rather than deployment-level legal correctness. --- ### Evaluating LLMs on Large-Scale Graph Property Estimation via Random Walks Authors: Sunil Kumar Maurya, Xin Liu Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01484v1 With the rapidly improving reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), there is also a rising demand to use them in a wide variety of domains. This brings about the need to carefully evaluate the limits of the capabilities of these models with various tests and benchmarks. Graph structures are ubiquitous in real-world data, and are often used to represent and analyze relationship patterns within data. Many benchmarks have already been proposed in the graph literature to test the reasoning ability of LLMs to follow and execute graph algorithms. However, due to the limited context length of LLMs, these benchmarks consist of very small graphs. In real-world data, the size of graphs can be significantly larger, and in many cases, not fully accessible. In this paper, we examine a class of problems that arises with very large graphs having limited accessibility. We propose a large graph benchmark dataset, EstGraph, and introduce four distinct tasks designed to estimate large graph properties. We evaluate the reasoning abilities of LLMs on these tasks using a wide variety of graph datasets. In addition, we provide task-specific prompt constructions based on random walk sampling of large graphs (up to millions of nodes) that effectively convey sufficient information to LLMs within the limits of context length. --- ### Research on Vision-Language Question Answering Models for Industrial Robots Authors: Ping Li, Bartlomiej Brzozka Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01483v1 A hierarchical cross-modal fusion model is proposed for vision-language question answering (VLQA) in industrial robotics, targeting the challenges of semantic ambiguity, complex environmental layouts, and domain-specific terminology common in modern manufacturing. The framework integrates advanced object detection, multi-scale visual encoding, syntactic parsing, and task-aware semantic attention to unite vision and language signals into a joint reasoning space. Region-based deep networks extract visual features, weighted embeddings aggregate, and recurrent neural parsing encodes sentence structures. Through fine-grained semantic alignment driven by adaptive fusion and cross-attention mechanisms, the system can handle operational queries, instruction steps, and anomaly detection with higher reliability. Compared to the existing VLQA benchmarks, validation experiments conducted on the IVQA and RIF benchmarks indicate improvements in semantic alignment, Top-1 accuracy, and robustness to ambiguous or procedural task queries. Ablation studies further quantify the impact of each architectural module, confirming the necessity of multi-level feature integration and context-driven gating for dependable industrial deployment. The technical advancements reported here provide core methodologies to improve the interpretability and operational effectiveness of industrial robots faced with diverse human-robot interaction tasks. --- ### Grounding Multi-Hop Reasoning in Structural Causal Models via Group Relative Policy Optimization Authors: Yunhan Bu, Quan Zhang, Huaping Zhang, Guotong Geng, Chunxiao Gao, Askar Hamdulla, Juan Wang, Qiuchi Li, Baohua Zhang, Shuai Lei, Yunbo Cao, Zhunchen Luo Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01482v3 Multi-Hop Fact Verification requires complex reasoning across disparate evidence, posing significant challenges for Large Language Models , which may suffer from hallucinations and fractured logical chains. Existing methods, while improving transparency via Chain-of-Thought , often lack explicit modeling of the structural dependencies between evidence and claims. In this work, we introduce an SCM-inspired framework that grounds reasoning in explicit directed dependency graphs, treating verification as a constructive structural reasoning process rather than full causal inference with interventions or counterfactual semantics. We empirically identify an "inverted U-shaped" correlation between reasoning-chain length and accuracy, revealing that excessive structural complexity can degrade performance. To address this, we propose a rule-based reinforcement learning strategy using Group Relative Policy Optimization. This approach dynamically optimizes the trade-off between structural depth and conciseness. Extensive experiments on HoVer and EX-FEVER demonstrate that our SCM-GRPO framework outperforms strong baselines while producing more traceable reasoning structures for complex fact verification. --- ### AttnRouter: Per-Category Attention Routing for Training-Free Image Editing on MMDiT Authors: Guandong Li, Mengxia Ye Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01480v1 We study training-free image editing on Qwen-Image-Edit-2511, a 60-block multi-modal diffusion transformer (MMDiT) that concatenates noise and source-image tokens within a single attention stream. We make three contributions. (i) We introduce KVInject, a single-forward attention manipulation that alpha-blends source-half key/value projections into the noise-half within a localized layer/step band. KVInject is simpler than the classical two-pass MasaCtrl recipe and avoids the prompt-mismatch failure mode that disables MasaCtrl on MMDiT (composite score drops 31% versus baseline). (ii) We show that no single attention operation dominates across edit types, motivating AttnRouter, a per-category routing table that dispatches edits to the operation that best preserves source structure for that type. With ground-truth categories the router improves the CLIP-T+DINO-I composite by 6.4% over the editing baseline; an automatic CLIP zero-shot classifier closes 98% of this gap despite only 55% category accuracy. (iii) Through layer-, step-, and alpha-band ablations we localize the editing-effective attention sub-circuit: K/V injection in early denoising steps (S0-7) recovers nearly all of the gain of full-step injection, while injection in early (L0-15) or late (L45-60) layer bands fails to drive editing entirely; alpha in (0.3, 0.5) is a stable sweet spot. We also report negative results that highlight what does not transfer from the UNet folklore: simple K/V rescaling never beats baseline and aggressive variants collapse generation entirely (composite 0.084). We release code, pre-computed routing tables, and a 100-sample stratified subset of ImgEdit-Bench used in all ablations. --- ### CSGuard: Toward Forgery-Resistant Watermarking in Diffusion Models via Compressed Sensing Constraint Authors: Jiewei Lai, Lan Zhang, Chen Tang, Pengcheng Sun, Zhaopeng Zhang, Yunhao Wang, Hui Jin Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01479v1 Latent-based diffusion model watermarking embeds watermarks into generated images' latent space to enable content attribution, offering a training-free solution for intellectual property protection and digital forensics. However, these methods exhibit a critical vulnerability to the forgery attack, attackers can extract the watermark by inverting the watermarked image and re-generating it with an arbitrary prompt, thereby enabling false attribution on malicious content. In this paper, we propose the CSGuard, the first forgery-resistant watermarking schema that leverages compressed sensing to bind the watermarked image generation and verification to a secret matrix. This ensures that only users possessing the secret matrix can correctly embed or verify the image watermark, prevents the illegal users from forgery without compromising generation quality and watermark integrity. Experimental results demonstrate that CSGuard achieves strong forgery resistance, reduces the attack success rate from 100.0\% to 28.12\%, and achieve 100\% detection rate on benign watermarked images without compromising watermarking effectiveness. --- ### LIE: LiDAR-only HD Map Construction with Intensity Enhancement via Online Knowledge Distillation Authors: Kanak Mazumder, Fabian B. Flohr Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01478v1 Online High-Definition (HD) map construction is a key component of autonomous driving. Recent methods rely on multi-view camera images for cost-effective HD map segmentation, but cameras lack depth information for accurate scene geometry. In contrast, LiDAR provides precise 3D measurements but lacks dense semantic cues. In this work, we propose LIE, LiDAR-only semantic map construction method that employ Knowledge Distillation (KD) to handle the lack of dense semantic and texture cues. Specifically, the teacher branch fuses student LiDAR features and the corresponding 2D intensity map tile to provide dense supervision for segmenting map elements using online distillation scheme. Experimental results show that our method outperforms all single-modality approaches, achieving 8.2% higher mIoU than the state-of-the-art camera-based model on nuScenes. LIE is robust over long ranges and under challenging weather and lighting, and efficiently adapts to Argoverse2 with only 10% fine-tuning, surpassing camera-based models trained on the full dataset. Source code will be available \href{https://iv.ee.hm.edu/lie/}{here}. --- ### ReMedi: Reasoner for Medical Clinical Prediction Authors: Yushi Cao, Yiming Chen, Hongchao Jiang, Hung-yi Lee, Robby T. Tan Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01474v1 Predicting future clinical outcomes from electronic health records (EHR) remains challenging due to the complexity and heterogeneity of patient data. LLMs have shown strong potential for such predictive tasks, yet existing approaches mainly focus on enhancing medical knowledge through distillation or RAG while relying on the model's internal ability to interpret contextual information. In this work, we present ReMedi (Reasoner for Medical Clinical Prediction), a framework for improving clinical outcome prediction from EHR. ReMedi generates rationale-answer pairs using a challenging sample regeneration mechanism for complex clinical questions, which leverages ground-truth answers as hints to enhance reasoning for further fine-tuning and preference tuning. ReMedi integrates ground-truth outcome guidance into the preference data construction loop, regenerating rationale-answer variants. By tuning on these rationale-answer pairs, the model improves its predictive performance. Experiments on multiple EHR prediction tasks demonstrate substantial gains of up to 19.9 percent over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of F1 score, underscoring ReMedi's effectiveness in real-world clinical prediction. --- ### Practical Limits of Autonomous Test Repair: A Multi-Agent Case Study with LLM-Driven Discovery and Self-Correction Authors: Hyukjoo Lee Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01471v1 Maintaining reliable UI test suites in large-scale enterprise applications is a persistent and costly challenge. We present an industrial case study of a multi-agent autonomous testing system evaluated using anonymized execution data from a production-like enterprise UI testing prototype. The application features several hundred dynamic UI elements per screen. Built on a large language model with LangGraph orchestration, Playwright execution, and a RAG knowledge base, the system evolves from human-directed testing toward High-autonomy feature discovery and test execution: given no explicit test targets, it discovers over 100 testable features across 10 UI screens, dynamically expands coverage by an additional 15--30 features through runtime DOM analysis, and iteratively repairs failing tests without human intervention. We analyzed 300 consecutive autonomous execution reports encompassing 636 individual test-case executions across 10 distinct scenario families. The system achieved a 70% repair convergence rate at the scenario-family level, with a mean of 3.4 repair iterations to convergence. However, only 10% of scenario families succeeded on first attempt, 38% of reports failed to produce any executable test artifact, and we documented concrete instances of assertion weakening and test-case deletion used as workaround mechanisms to achieve superficial convergence. Our findings show that unrestricted autonomy leads to unstable and often misleading outcomes, while constrained autonomy transforms such systems into operationally viable workflows. Rather than advocating full autonomy, our findings suggest that reliable autonomous testing in enterprise-scale settings requires explicit constraints, validation boundaries, and human oversight to preserve semantic correctness and operational trustworthiness. --- ### Decision Boundary-aware Generation for Long-tailed Learning Authors: Jiacheng Yang, Ruichi Zhang, Chikai Shang, Mengke Li, Xinyi Shang, Junlong Gao, Yonggang Zhang, Yang Lu Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01468v1 Long-tailed data bias decision boundaries toward head classes and degrade tail class accuracy. Diffusion-based generative augmentation address this problem by generating additional data, while head-to-tail transfer further mitigate the generator bias inherit from long-tailed dataset. However, we show that while head-to-tail transfer helps balance the decision space of the classifier, it also induces latent non-local feature mixing that entangles inter-class features, causing decision boundary overlap and tail class distribution shift. To address this, we first identify the problem of boundary ambiguity and then propose Decision Boundary-aware Generation (DBG) framework, which promotes near-boundary representation learning by generating informative near-boundary samples. Overall, DBG rebalances the long-tailed dataset while yielding more separable decision space for long-tailed learning. Across standard long-tailed benchmarks, DBG consistently improves tail class and overall accuracy with less inter-class overlap. The code of DBG is available at https://github.com/keepdigitalabc-svg/DBG. --- ### Quaternion Nonlinear Transform-Induced Nuclear Norm for Low-Rank Tensor Completion Authors: Biswarup Karmakar, Ratikanta Behera Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: math.OC, cs.CV, math.NA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01467v1 Tensor completion has emerged as a powerful framework for recovering missing data in multidimensional signals by exploiting low-rank tensor structures. Among existing approaches, linear transform-based tensor nuclear norm (TNN) methods have achieved considerable success by enforcing low-rankness on transformed frontal slices. However, the low-rank structure revealed by linear transforms remains inherently limited. To better capture intrinsic correlations, nonlinear transform-based TNN (NTTNN) models have been proposed, significantly enhancing low-rank representation through composite transforms. Despite their effectiveness, existing NTTNN methods are restricted to real-valued tensors and fail to model quaternion-valued data, which are essential for preserving inter-channel dependencies in color images and videos. Extending nonlinear TNN models to the quaternion domain is challenging due to the non-commutativity of quaternion multiplication and the complexity of quaternion singular value decomposition. To address the limitations encountered in prior works, we propose a quaternion nonlinear transform-induced tensor nuclear norm (QNTTNN) via a real embedding of quaternions, enabling tractable nuclear norm definitions and efficient optimization. Building upon QNTTNN, we formulate a quaternion tensor completion model and develop a proximal alternating minimization algorithm with rigorous convergence guarantees. Extensive experiments on benchmark color video inpainting datasets validate the superior performance of the proposed method over existing approaches. --- ### SplAttN: Bridging 2D and 3D with Gaussian Soft Splatting and Attention for Point Cloud Completion Authors: Zhaoyang Li, Zhichao You, Tianrui Li Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01466v2 Although multi-modal learning has advanced point cloud completion, the theoretical mechanisms remain unclear. Recent works attribute success to the connection between modalities, yet we identify that standard hard projection severs this connection: projecting a sparse point cloud onto the image plane yields an extremely sparse support, which hinders visual prior propagation, a failure mode we term Cross-Modal Entropy Collapse. To address this practical limitation, we propose SplAttN, which replaces hard projection with Differentiable Gaussian Splatting to produce a dense, continuous image-plane representation. By reformulating projection as continuous density estimation, SplAttN avoids collapsed sparse support, facilitates gradient flow, and improves cross-modal connection learnability. Extensive experiments show that SplAttN achieves state-of-the-art performance on PCN and ShapeNet-55/34. Crucially, we utilize the real-world KITTI benchmark as a stress test for multi-modal reliance. Counter-factual evaluation reveals that while baselines degenerate into unimodal template retrievers insensitive to visual removal, SplAttN maintains a robust dependency on visual cues, validating that our method establishes an effective cross-modal connection. Code is available at https://github.com/zay002/SplAttN. --- ### SRGAN-CKAN: Expressive Super-Resolution with Nonlinear Functional Operators under Minimal Resources Authors: Roberto Isai Navaro-Aviña, Eduardo Said Merin-Martinez, Andres Mendez-Vazquez, Eduardo Rodriguez-Tello Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01459v2 Single-Image Super-Resolution (SISR) aims to reconstruct a High-Resolution (HR) image from a Low-Resolution (LR) observation, a fundamentally ill-posed problem where high-frequency details are severely degraded at large upscaling factors. Recent advances have been driven by transformer-based architectures and diffusion models improve global context modeling and perceptual quality at the cost of increased computational complexity. In contrast, this work focuses on enhancing the expressivity of local operators under minimal resources. We propose SRGAN--CKAN, a hybrid super-resolution framework that integrates Convolutional Kolmogorov--Arnold Networks (CKAN) into an adversarial learning setting reformulating convolution as a nonlinear patch-based transformation. The proposed operator replaces linear local mappings with spline-based functional representations, allowing expressive modeling of complex local structures and high-frequency textures using minimal hardware resources. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach improves perceptual quality while preserving reconstruction fidelity, achieving a favorable balance between distortion-based and perceptual metrics. These results are obtained under constrained computational settings, highlighting the efficiency of the proposed formulation. Overall, this work introduces a complementary direction to existing approaches by improving the representational power of local transformations, providing an efficient and scalable alternative to globally intensive architectures. --- ### CoFlow: Coordinated Few-Step Flow for Offline Multi-Agent Decision Making Authors: Guowei Zou, Haitao Wang, Beiwen Zhang, Boning Zhang, Hejun Wu Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01457v4 How can generative offline multi-agent reinforcement learning achieve both fast joint trajectory generation and effective cooperation? Multi-agent diffusion models generate joint trajectories through iterative sampling but incur high inference latency. Distillation reduces sampling steps but may lose the teacher's cross-agent dependencies, reducing the success rate of cooperative tasks. A joint few-step generator can be trained directly to avoid losing these dependencies during distillation. However, insufficient modeling of cross-agent dependencies may still impair cooperation. In addition, its consistency training process introduces heavy computational and memory costs. Therefore, we propose Coordinated Few-Step Flow (CoFlow), which directly learns a joint averaged-velocity field for distillation-free one-step and few-step multi-agent trajectory generation. To support cooperation during generation, Coordinated Velocity Attention (CVA) incorporates teammate trajectory information into each agent's prediction. To reduce the consistency-training cost of this joint model, we approximate the correction term using finite differences. Across 48 configurations on MPE and SMAC, CoFlow supports centralized and decentralized execution. Under centralized execution, CoFlow outperforms our reproduced baseline by 11.2%, averaging relative gains equally across both benchmark suites, with a 12.93-fold model-sampling speedup. CVA improves normalized scores by 165.1% on average over the same model with cross-agent attention disabled. Compared with the exact-derivative implementation, finite-difference training achieves a 1.78-fold speedup and reduces peak GPU memory by 41.1%. Project page: https://github.com/Guowei-Zou/coflow. --- ### CoFlow: Coordinated Few-Step Flow for Offline Multi-Agent Decision Making Authors: Guowei Zou, Haitao Wang, Beiwen Zhang, Boning Zhang, Hejun Wu Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01457v3 Generative models have emerged as a promising paradigm for offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), but existing approaches require many iterative sampling steps. Recent few-step acceleration methods either distill a joint teacher into independent students or apply averaged velocity fields independently to each agent. Unfortunately, these few-step approaches hurt inter-agent coordination. We show that the efficiency-coordination trade-off is not inherent: single-pass multi-agent generation can preserve coordination when the velocity field is natively joint-coupled. We propose Coordinated few-step Flow (CoFlow), an architecture that combines Coordinated Velocity Attention (CVA) with Adaptive Coordination Gating. A finite-difference consistency surrogate further replaces memory-prohibitive Jacobian-vector product backpropagation through the averaged velocity field with two stop-gradient forward passes. Across 60 configurations spanning MPE, MA-MuJoCo, and SMAC, CoFlow matches or surpasses Gaussian policies, value-based methods, transformer policies, diffusion models, and prior flow baselines on episodic return. Three independent coordination probes confirm that CoFlow's improvements arise from inter-agent coordination rather than per-agent capacity. A denoising-step sweep shows that single-pass inference suffices on every configuration. CoFlow reaches state-of-the-art coordination quality in 1-3 denoising steps under both centralized and decentralized execution. Project Page: https://guowei-zou.github.io/coflow/ --- ### Stable Localized Conformal Prediction via Transduction Authors: Yinjie Min, Liuhua Peng, Changliang Zou Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: stat.ME, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01452v1 Existing evaluations of conformal prediction, such as prediction efficiency and test-conditional coverage, are defined in expectation over the calibration data. In practice, when only one calibration set of limited size is available, prediction sets often exhibit high variability in size, especially for methods with localization. We formalize this concern as set stability, defined as the variance of the conditional expectation of the set size given the calibration data. To improve stability without requiring additional target-task labels, we propose Stable Conformal Prediction (StCP), a transfer learning approach that utilizes labeled source-task data and unlabeled target data. Theoretically, we characterize the marginal coverage and stability of StCP; empirically, it delivers more stable prediction sets than standard conformal prediction methods, especially for those with localization, when calibration data are limited. --- ### Auditing demographic bias in AI-based emergency police dispatch: a cross-lingual evaluation of eleven large language models Authors: William Guey, Wei Zhang, Pierrick Bougault, Yi Wang, Bertan Ucar, Vitor D. de Moura, José O. Gomes Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01451v1 Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly being integrated into high-stakes public safety systems, including emergency call triage and dispatch decision support, yet their demographic fairness in this context remains largely untested. Here we introduce a cross-lingual audit framework that operationalizes the Police Priority Dispatch System as a five-level ordinal classification task and applies a controlled minimal-pair design to isolate the effect of demographic cues. Across 19,800 model outputs spanning 11 frontier models, 15 scenario pairs, three demographic categories (religious appearance, gender, and race), and two languages (English and Mandarin Chinese), we find that demographic bias emerges systematically when incident severity is ambiguous but largely disappears when the operational priority is clearly determined by call content. Bias magnitude varies by demographic axis, with the largest effects observed for religious appearance, followed by gender and race. Critically, bias does not transfer consistently across languages: gender bias is substantially amplified in Mandarin Chinese, whereas race bias is more pronounced in English, revealing cross-lingual asymmetries that aggregate analyses obscure. In several scenarios, demographic cues produce counter-directional effects, challenging simple stereotype-amplification accounts of model behavior. These findings suggest that bias in LLM-based dispatch is not a fixed property of models alone, but arises from the interaction between demographic signals, contextual ambiguity, and language. Beyond these empirical results, the proposed framework provides a scalable audit infrastructure that enables deploying agencies to evaluate candidate models on jurisdiction-relevant scenarios prior to real-world adoption. --- ### Registration-Free Learnable Multi-View Capture of Faces in Dense Semantic Correspondence Authors: Panagiotis P. Filntisis, George Retsinas, Radek Daněček, Vanessa Sklyarova, Petros Maragos, Timo Bolkart Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01450v1 Recent frameworks like ToFu and TEMPEH provide an automated alternative to classical registration pipelines by predicting 3D meshes in dense semantic correspondence directly from calibrated multi-view images. However, these learning-based methods rely on the slow, manual registration pipelines they aim to replace for their training supervision. We overcome this limitation with MOCHI (Multi-view Optimizable Correspondence of Heads from Images), a multi-view 3D face prediction framework trained without requiring registered training data. MOCHI eliminates the registration data dependency by enforcing topological consistency through a pseudo-linear inverse kinematic solver. Semantic alignment is guided by dense keypoints from a 2D landmark predictor trained exclusively on synthetic data. Our analysis further reveals that standard point-to-surface distances induce training instabilities and visual artifacts in registration-free settings. We propose pointmap- and normal-based losses instead, which provide smoother gradients and superior reconstruction fidelity. Finally, we introduce a test-time optimization scheme that refines network weights over a few dozen iterations. This approach bridges the gap between feed-forward efficiency and iterative optimization precision, allowing MOCHI to outperform traditional labor-intensive pipelines in both reconstruction accuracy and visual quality. Code and model are public at: https://filby89.github.io/mochi. --- ### VisInject: Disruption != Injection -- A Dual-Dimension Evaluation of Universal Adversarial Attacks on Vision-Language Models Authors: Pang Liu, Yingjie Lao Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01449v1 Universal adversarial attacks on aligned multimodal large language models are increasingly reported with attack success rates in the 60-80% range, suggesting the visual modality is highly vulnerable to imperceptible perturbations as a prompt-injection channel. We argue that this number conflates two distinct events: (i) the model's output was perturbed (Influence), and (ii) the attacker's chosen target concept was actually emitted (Precise Injection). We compose two existing techniques -- Universal Adversarial Attack and AnyAttack -- under an $L_{inf}$ budget of 16/255, and we add a dual-axis evaluation: a deterministic Ratcliff-Obershelp drift score for Influence (programmatic baseline) plus a 4-tier ordinal categorical none/weak/partial/confirmed for Precise Injection. The judge is DeepSeek-V4-Pro in thinking mode, calibrated against Claude Opus 4.7 with Cohen's $κ$ = 0.77 on the injection axis (substantial agreement); the entire 4475-entry SHA-256 input cache ships with the dataset so reviewers can re-derive paper numbers bit-exact without an API key. Across 6615 pairs over four open VLMs, seven attack prompts, and seven test images, the two axes diverge by roughly 90$\times$: 66.4% of pairs are programmatically disturbed (LLM-judged 46.6% at the substantial-or-complete tier), but only 0.756% (50/6615) reach any non-none injection tier and only 0.030% (2/6615) verbatim. The few injections that do land cluster on screenshot- or document-style carriers whose semantics already invite text transcription. BLIP-2 shows \emph{zero detectable drift} at $L_{inf}$ = 16/255 across all 2205 pairs even when used as a Stage-1 surrogate. We release the full dataset -- 21 universal images, 147 adversarial photos, 6,615 response pairs, the v3 dual-axis judge results, and the cache at huggingface.co/datasets/jeffliulab/visinject. --- ### Decompose and Recompose: Reasoning New Skills from Existing Abilities for Cross-Task Robotic Manipulation Authors: Xitie Zhang, Aming Wu, Yahong Han Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01448v1 Cross-task generalization is a core challenge in open-world robotic manipulation, and the key lies in extracting transferable manipulation knowledge from seen tasks. Recent in-context learning approaches leverage seen task demonstrations to generate actions for unseen tasks without parameter updates. However, existing methods provide only low-level continuous action sequences as context, failing to capture composable skill knowledge and causing models to degenerate into superficial trajectory imitation. We propose Decompose and Recompose, a skill reasoning framework using atomic skill-action pairs as intermediate representations. Our approach decomposes seen demonstrations into interpretable skill--action alignments, enabling the model to recompose these skills for unseen tasks through compositional reasoning. Specifically, we construct a task-adaptive dynamic demonstration library via visual-semantic retrieval combined with skill sequences from a planning agent, complemented by a coverage-aware static library to fill missing skill patterns. Together, these yield skill-comprehensive demonstrations that explicitly elicit compositional reasoning for skill composition and execution ordering. Experiments on the AGNOSTOS benchmark and real-world environments validate our method's zero-shot cross-task generalization capability. --- ### Sequential Minimal Optimization for $\varepsilon$-SVR with MAPE Loss and Sample-Dependent Box Constraints Authors: Pablo Benavides-Herrera, Riemann Ruiz-Cruz, Juan Diego Sánchez-Torres Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: math.NA, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01446v3 Support vector regression with Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) loss is theoretically well-motivated for forecasting applications where accuracy is evaluated in relative terms, but the sample-dependent dual box constraints it induces have not been addressed in the published SMO literature. We derive a Sequential Minimal Optimization algorithm for this setting and prove a structural-invariance result: the MAPE modification affects exactly two components of the SMO iteration -- working-set selection and analytic-update clipping -- leaving gradient bookkeeping and curvature computation identical to classical epsilon-SVR. Building on this invariance, we establish four efficiency improvements (asymmetric freeze-counters, warm-starting, block working-set updates of size four, and per-pair tolerance scaling) and resolve a previously-open convergence problem for the odd-symmetry kernel variant via adaptive spectral regularization. Numerical validation against three reference solvers across eleven synthetic configurations certifies solution agreement within standard tolerance. Wall-time benchmarks show the present algorithm achieves the lowest median runtime on every tested configuration against OSQP, MOSEK, and Clarabel. At production scale, the algorithm converges on the California Housing benchmark while the patched LIBSVM reference implementation reaches its iteration ceiling without satisfying optimality -- demonstrating the practical necessity of the theoretical efficiency mechanisms. An open-source R package and an explicit solver-adaptation recipe are provided. --- ### Rethinking Explanations: Formalizing Contrast in Description Logics Authors: Yasir Mahmood, Arnab Sharma, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, Balram Tiwari Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.AI, math.LO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01442v1 There has been a growing interest in explaining entailments over description logic (DL) knowledge bases. The existing explanation formalisms focus on justifications to explain true axioms, and abductive reasoning to explain missing axioms in a knowledge base. However, these formalisms only point out the reasoning steps behind a (missing) entailment and lack a user-centered approach as they do not consider an inquirer's needs, level of understanding, or prior knowledge. We propose contrastive explanations, aiming at answering "why an axiom P (fact) is true instead of another axiom Q (foil)" over description logic knowledge bases. The motivation arises from the observation that when a user discovers that P has occurred, they are often surprised because they anticipated the occurrence of another similar event Q. Furthermore, individual explanations for "why P" and "why not Q" are unsatisfactory since a user expects to see the difference between P and Q. In this work, we first present formal foundations of contrasting questions and then define contrastive explanations within description logics. To this end, facts include ABox assertions of the form C(x) for a concept C and individual x. Possible foils for such facts are assertions C(y) (contrasting against an individual y), or D(x) (contrasting against a concept D). Additionally, we explore the properties of contrastive explanations in the DL EL and ALC. We also provide an implementation of our definition and an experimental evaluation on KBs of varying sizes. --- ### Artificial intelligence language technologies in multilingual healthcare: Grand challenges ahead Authors: Vicent Briva-Iglesias Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CY, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01441v1 AI language technologies (AILTs), increasingly enabled by large language models (LLMs), are becoming embedded in multilingual healthcare workflows for translation, rewriting, documentation, interpreting, and messaging in language-discordant settings. Yet fluent output is not the same as clinically safe or equitable communication: performance varies across languages, accents, tasks, and workflows, and efficiency gains can hide errors, reduce traceability, and shift responsibility across clinicians, translators, interpreters, and health systems. This narrative review synthesises recent peer-reviewed evidence across written communication, spoken communication, and emerging agentic workflows. Using the Human-Centered AI Language Technology (HCAILT) lens, it examines capabilities, evaluation practices, implementation patterns, and recurrent errors through reliability, safety culture, and trustworthiness. We identify key convergences and contradictions in the literature and propose seven grand challenges for the next phase of research and deployment. Progress, we argue, requires not only better models but also accountable sociotechnical design, calibrated human oversight, and stronger collaboration across MT/NLP, translation studies, HCI, clinical practice, implementation science, and policy. --- ### SCALE-LoRA: Auditing Post-Retrieval LoRA Composition with Residual Merging and View Reliability Authors: Shuaipeng Zhou, Yu Zhang Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01429v1 Libraries of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapters are becoming a practical by-product of parameter-efficient adaptation. Once such adapters accumulate, a natural question is no longer how to train one adapter for one task, but how to reuse an open pool of adapters for a new task given only a small support set. Prior work has shown that LoRA modules can be composed at the task level and dynamically selected at the instance level. However, open-pool LoRA reuse is not automatic: retrieving relevant adapters does not guarantee that their parameter updates are compatible, and composing adapters does not guarantee reliable outputs. We introduce the Sparse-Composition Agreement Layer (SCALE), a post-retrieval audit and composition framework for open-pool LoRA reuse. SCALE contains a deployable 1.0* merge path, Layer-Adaptive Sparse Residual Composition (LASRC), and a higher-cost reliability-analysis layer for multi-view disagreement. LASRC addresses merge interference by preserving a linear anchor while residualizing block-wise adapter update directions. The reliability layer treats disagreement among sparse composition views as an observable uncertainty signal and compares agreement, support-loss proxy selection, and oracle headroom under explicit path cost. In matched FLAN-T5-Large, BIG-Bench Hard (BBH), and 97-LoRA experiments, LASRC gives a directional single-view gain under fixed retrieval, while SCALE-support is reported as a query-label-free 3.0* reliability-analysis variant rather than as a calibrated or throughput-equivalent selector. Protocol-distinct BBH-8 validation shows the same qualitative trend on three decoder-only backbones. Detailed scores, paired audits, and path-cost records are reported in the experimental section. --- ### Hallucinations Undermine Trust; Metacognition is a Way Forward Authors: Gal Yona, Mor Geva, Yossi Matias Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01428v1 Despite significant strides in factual reliability, errors -- often termed hallucinations -- remain a major concern for generative AI, especially as LLMs are increasingly expected to be helpful in more complex or nuanced setups. Yet even in the simplest setting -- factoid question-answering with clear ground truth-frontier models without external tools continue to hallucinate. We argue that most factuality gains in this domain have come from expanding the model's knowledge boundary (encoding more facts) rather than improving awareness of that boundary (distinguishing known from unknown). We conjecture that the latter is inherently difficult: models may lack the discriminative power to perfectly separate truths from errors, creating an unavoidable tradeoff between eliminating hallucinations and preserving utility. This tradeoff dissolves under a different framing. If we understand hallucinations as confident errors -- incorrect information delivered without appropriate qualification -- a third path emerges beyond the answer-or-abstain dichotomy: expressing uncertainty. We propose faithful uncertainty: aligning linguistic uncertainty with intrinsic uncertainty. This is one facet of metacognition -- the ability to be aware of one's own uncertainty and to act on it. For direct interaction, acting on uncertainty means communicating it honestly; for agentic systems, it becomes the control layer governing when to search and what to trust. Metacognition is thus essential for LLMs to be both trustworthy and capable; we conclude by highlighting open problems for progress towards this objective. --- ### Barriers to Counterfactual Credit Attribution for Autoregressive Models Authors: Aloni Cohen, Chenhao Zhang Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01425v1 Generative AI disrupts the practice of giving credit to work that came before. Ideally, a generative model would give credit to any work on which its output depends in a significant way. \emph{Counterfactual credit attribution} (CCA) is a technical condition formalizing this goal--a relaxation of differential privacy--recently introduced by Livni, Moran, Nissim, and Pabbaraju (2024) who studied it in the PAC learning setting. We initiate the study of CCA generative models. Specifically, we consider autoregressive models giving credit to a deployment-time dataset (e.g., a RAG database). We uncover barriers to two natural approaches to CCA autoregressive models. First, we show that imposing CCA on the underlying next-token predictor does not guarantee that the model is CCA: CCA does not compose autoregressively (unlike DP). Second, we consider a different approach to building CCA models which we call \emph{retrofitting}. Retrofitting takes a model that does not attribute credit, and adds credit onto it. We prove a lower bound for CCA retrofitting under a weak optimality requirement. Given black-box access to the starting model, retrofitting requires query complexity exponential in the length of the model's outputs. --- ### Quantifying Multimodal Capabilities: Formal Generalization Guarantees in Pairwise Metric Learning Authors: Richeng Zhou, Xuelin Zhang, Liyuan Liu Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01424v1 Multimodal learning leverages the integration of diverse data modalities to enhance performance in complex tasks. Yet, it frequently encounters incomplete or redundant modality data in real-world scenarios. This paper presents a fine-grained theoretical analysis of the generalization properties of multimodal metric learning models, addressing critical gaps in understanding the relationship between modality selection and algorithmic performance. We establish hierarchical relationships between function classes corresponding to different modality subsets and quantify the discrepancy between learned mappings and ground truth. Through rigorous analysis of pairwise complexity within the multimodal learning framework, we derive novel generalization error bounds that reveal the joint impact of modality quantity and granularity on model performance. Our theoretical findings on both upper and lower bounds demonstrate that incorporating fine-grained modality features reduces the complexity of the hypothesis space by enhancing modality complementarity. This work offers both theoretical foundations and practical implications for improving convergence rates and accuracy in multimodal learning systems. --- ### HepScript: A Dual-Use DSL for Human-AI Collaborative Data Analysis Workflows in High-Energy Physics Authors: Junkun Jiao, Tong Liu, Ke Li, Weimin Song, Yipu Liao, Bolun Zhang, Beijiang Liu, Chang-Zheng Yuan, Yue Sun Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: hep-ex, cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01423v1 The escalating data scale in High-Energy Physics (HEP) fuels a growing aspiration for higher analytical efficiency. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a path toward automation via agentic AI, they struggle with complex scientific workflows that require deep domain knowledge and are tightly coupled to experiment-specific codebases. To address this, we introduce a methodology centered on HepScript, a dual-use Domain-Specific Language (DSL) for HEP data analysis workflows. HepScript serves as a shared formal interface, abstracting HEP analysis logic into a constrained syntax that is both intuitive for human experts and reliably generable by AI agents. First developed for the Beijing Spectrometer III (BESIII) experiment, HepScript hides the complexity of the underlying software stack, translating high-level analysis intent into low-level, production-ready code. In our case studies, this abstraction reduces the required human-written code by 93\%. Crucially, HepScript's constrained grammar defines a tractable action space, enabling AI agents to autonomously generate executable specifications for core analysis stages directly from published literature with a 95\% success rate. Our work demonstrates a scalable pathway toward human-AI collaborative systems, where a formally specified DSL acts as an unambiguous translation layer between human expertise, AI automation, and production environment, rendering previously intractable automation problems solvable. --- ### Artificial Jagged Intelligence as Uneven Optimization Energy Allocation Capability Concentration, Redistribution, and Optimization Governance Authors: Wesley Shu, Peng Wei Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01420v1 Artificial Jagged Intelligence (AJI) denotes a recurring pattern in which large learning systems exhibit strong local capabilities while remaining weak or brittle in other domains. This paper develops a formal theory of AJI as uneven allocation of optimization pressure. We model training as a finite-budget process that distributes gradient-driven update energy across capability-relevant directions in parameter space. In this model, jagged capability profiles arise from anisotropic objective structure, data geometry, and representational coupling rather than from a single scalar quantity called intelligence. The paper defines capability gain, optimization energy share, and jaggedness, then proves that persistent concentration of cumulative update energy yields lower bounds on dispersion in capability gains. A finite-budget tradeoff theorem shows why prioritizing one capability can impose opportunity costs on others unless positive coupling or shared structure offsets the cost. The analysis also studies redistribution mechanisms, including energy-variance regularization and auxiliary structural objectives, as interventions that reshape the optimization field. The resulting framework links uneven emergence, training architecture, and optimization governance. It predicts that early concentration of update energy should forecast later capability jaggedness; that scaling under a narrow objective need not eliminate anisotropy; and that explicitly funded auxiliary objectives can revive neglected capabilities. AJI is therefore not merely a descriptive label for uneven model behavior, but a testable theory of how finite optimization resources produce concentrated, delayed, and structurally uneven capability formation. --- ### TimeTok: Granularity-Controllable Time-Series Generation via Hierarchical Tokenization Authors: Seokhyun Lee, Jaeho Kim, Changjun Oh, Mihaela van der Schaar, Changhee Lee Published: 2026-05-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01418v1 Time-series generative models often lack control over temporal granularity, forcing users to accept whatever granularity the model produces. To enable truly user-driven generation, we introduce TimeTok, a unified framework for Granularity-Controllable Time-Series Generation (GC-TSG), which generates time series at any target granularity from any coarser input (e.g., rough sketches) or from scratch. At the core of TimeTok is a hierarchical tokenization strategy that maps time series into an ordered sequence of tokens, from coarse to fine temporal granularity. Our autoregressive generation process operates across these granularity levels, producing token blocks that are decoded back into continuous time series. This design naturally enables GC-TSG - including standard generation - within a single framework, where controlling the number of token blocks provides explicit control over output detail. Experiments show that TimeTok excels at GC-TSG tasks while achieving state-of-the-art performance in standard generation. Furthermore, we showcase TimeTok's potential as a foundational tokenizer by training on multiple datasets with heterogeneous temporal granularities, verifying strong transferability that consistently outperforms models trained on individual datasets. To our knowledge, this is the first unified framework that covers the full generative spectrum for time series, offering a valuable foundation for models that benefit from diverse temporal granularities. ---