# Research Papers — 2026-05 · bundle page 71 of 326

> Full-text markdown of papers #3501–3550 of 16266 published in 2026-05, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 16266-paper 2026-05 archive (50 papers per file).

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### Attenuation-Resilient Alternating Optimization for Laparoscopic Liver Landmark Detection

Authors: Lanqing Liu, Ruize Cui, Jialun Pei, Diandian Guo, Tiffany Y. So, Pheng-Ann Heng, Jing Qin
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26630v1

Liver surface landmark detection is a fundamental prerequisite for anatomical guidance in laparoscopic liver surgery. However, it remains unreliable in practice due to two pervasive challenges: illumination attenuation in underexposed regions and the structural mismatch between pixel-wise localization and continuous curvilinear geometry. To address these limitations, we propose A2ONet, an attenuation-resilient alternating optimization network for robust liver landmark detection. To mitigate illumination attenuation, A2ONet embraces an illumination field compensation (IFC) block that adaptively enhances dark regions while preserving structural consistency. Meanwhile, we introduce a lightweight frequency-orientation selective filter (FOSF) to suppress repetitive texture interference and preserve salient curvilinear cues. Building upon these resilient representations, we design an alternating seg-curve optimization (ASCO) decoder that iteratively couples dense segmentation with explicit curve modeling, enabling mutual guidance to optimize both structural continuity and endpoint localization. Extensive evaluations on L3D-2K, L3D, and P2ILF demonstrate consistent improvements over competitive methods, establishing a more reliable foundation for intraoperative anatomy guidance. Our code will be available at https://github.com/hyperiondk115/A2ONet.

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### DelowlightSplat: Feed-Forward Gaussian Splatting for Lowlight 3D Scene Reconstruction

Authors: Fuzhen Jiang, Zengtian Xie, Zhuoran Li
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26629v1

Novel-view synthesis and 3D reconstruction from sparse posed images are central to robotics and AR/VR. Yet, feed-forward 3D Gaussian reconstruction fails under lowlight due to noise, color shifts, and unreliable correspondence. We propose DelowlightSplat, a lowlight-aware feed-forward Gaussian splatting framework for clean novel-view rendering. We build a controllable multi-view lowlight benchmark by degrading only context views while keeping target views clean. We introduce a lightweight Lowlight Adapter for residual enhancement to improve matchability, and couple it with cost-volume-based multi-view inference to directly predict clean 3D Gaussians. Experiments show that DelowlightSplat significantly outperforms previous feed-forward method and two-stage pipeline under lowlight conditions.

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### Tail-Aware HiFloat4: W4A4 Post-Training Quantization for Wan2.2

Authors: Zhanfeng Feng, Shuai Guo, Xin Di, Long Peng, Yang Cao, Zhengjun Zha
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26628v1

This report describes Tail-Aware HiFloat4, our submission to the low-bit text-to-video generation quantization challenge. Our method adapts the public ViDiT-Q post-training quantization pipeline to Wan2.2 under the HiFloat4 numerical format. We quantize the main linear layers in both Wan2.2 transformer modules with W4A4 HiFloat4 fake quantization, keep numerically sensitive boundary modules in high precision, and introduce an activation-tail-aware percentile calibration module for channel-mask construction. Together with compact PTQ-state restoration, this design reduces the influence of rare calibration outliers while keeping the runtime HiFloat4 arithmetic and sampling pipeline unchanged.

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### MSCGC-KAN: Multi-scale Causal Graph Convolution and KAN-inspired Analytic-basis Mapping for EEG Emotion Recognition

Authors: Haoliang Gong, Qingshan She, Jiale Xu, Yunyuan Gao, Xugang Xi
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26624v3

Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based emotion recognition is an important affective computing task, and recent EEG foundation models provide useful generic representations for downstream adaptation. However, under the fine-tuning setting, three limitations remain prominent: insufficient modeling of multi-scale emotional dynamics, inadequate exploitation of inter-channel functional connectivity, and the limited expressive power of simple linear classification heads. To address these issues, this paper proposes a new EEG emotion recognition method, termed MSCGC-KAN, which introduces a structured task head composed of multi-scale causal graph convolution and Kolmogorov--Arnold feature mapping. Built on a pre-trained CBraMod backbone, MSCGC-KAN enhances downstream adaptation by jointly strengthening multi-scale temporal modeling, learnable inter-channel connectivity modeling, and nonlinear discriminative mapping within a compact task-specific head. This design preserves the representation advantage of the foundation model while making the classifier more sensitive to emotion-related spatiotemporal patterns. Extensive experiments are conducted on the public FACED and SEED-VII datasets. The proposed method achieves a balanced accuracy of 60.66\%, a Cohen's Kappa of 0.5525, and a weighted F1-score of 60.40\% on FACED, and obtains 33.27\%, 0.2223, and 33.64\%, respectively, on SEED-VII. Compared with the CBraMod+Linear baseline, the balanced accuracy is improved by 5.91 and 2.03 percentage points on the two datasets, respectively. These results indicate that structured task-head design is an effective way to improve EEG emotion recognition when fine-tuning pre-trained EEG models.

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### MSCGC-KAN: Multi-scale Causal Graph Convolution and Kolmogorov-Arnold Feature Mapping for EEG Emotion Recognition

Authors: Haoliang Gong, Qingshan She, Jiale Xu, Yunyan Gao, Xugang Xi
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26624v2

Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based emotion recognition is an important affective computing task, and recent EEG foundation models provide useful generic representations for downstream adaptation. However, under the fine-tuning setting, three limitations remain prominent: insufficient modeling of multi-scale emotional dynamics, inadequate exploitation of inter-channel functional connectivity, and the limited expressive power of simple linear classification heads. To address these issues, this paper proposes a new EEG emotion recognition method, termed MSCGC-KAN, which introduces a structured task head composed of multi-scale causal graph convolution and Kolmogorov--Arnold feature mapping. Built on a pre-trained CBraMod backbone, MSCGC-KAN enhances downstream adaptation by jointly strengthening multi-scale temporal modeling, learnable inter-channel connectivity modeling, and nonlinear discriminative mapping within a compact task-specific head. This design preserves the representation advantage of the foundation model while making the classifier more sensitive to emotion-related spatiotemporal patterns. Extensive experiments are conducted on the public FACED and SEED-VII datasets. The proposed method achieves a balanced accuracy of 60.66\%, a Cohen's Kappa of 0.5525, and a weighted F1-score of 60.40\% on FACED, and obtains 33.27\%, 0.2223, and 33.64\%, respectively, on SEED-VII. Compared with the CBraMod+Linear baseline, the balanced accuracy is improved by 5.91 and 2.03 percentage points on the two datasets, respectively. These results indicate that structured task-head design is an effective way to improve EEG emotion recognition when fine-tuning pre-trained EEG models.

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### MedVol-R1: Reward-Driven Evidence Grounding for Volumetric Reasoning Segmentation

Authors: Zichun Wang, Hairong Shi, Bingzheng Wei, Yan Xu, Zihua Wang
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26621v1

Volumetric Reasoning Segmentation (VRS) aims to segment a target region in a 3D medical scan from a free-form clinical query, where the referent is often implicit and requires both medical knowledge and volume-grounded reasoning. Existing methods typically rely on specialized segmentation tokens to connect language with mask decoding, but this coupling collapses the decision process into opaque latent representations, limiting interpretability and generalization to diverse narrative expressions. In this paper, we present MedVol-R1, a reinforcement learning-based framework for VRS that explicitly decouples evidence grounding from volumetric delineation: the LVLM grounds clinical reasoning to a verifiable 2D evidence anchor (key axial slice and 2D bounding boxes), which is then propagated into a coherent 3D mask by a frozen MedSAM2 module. We train MedVol-R1 with cold-start supervised fine-tuning followed by GRPO, guided by a multi-component reward that encourages informative evidence selection, accurate 2D spatial grounding, and cross-slice volumetric coherence, without requiring costly chain-of-thought annotations. Experiments on CT-ORG, AbdomenCT-1K, and KiTS23 from the M3D-Seg benchmark demonstrate that MedVol-R1 consistently outperforms strong baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance, with reinforcement learning providing clear gains over pure supervised fine-tuning.

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### Granuscore: A Reference-Free Measure of Granularity for Text Analysis and Question Answering

Authors: Lukas Ellinger, Alexander Fichtl, Miriam Anschütz, Georg Groh
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CL, cs.HC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26620v2

Natural language conveys information at varying levels of granularity, from fine-grained references to broad descriptions. While granularity is fundamental to human communication, existing measures mostly capture surface detail or sentence specificity. We introduce Granuscore, a reference-free measure of granularity that leverages structural properties of a hierarchical embedding space. Granuscore reliably recovers hierarchical orderings on the Granola-EQ dataset and captures expected differences in granularity across discourse contexts. Across domains, we further show that Granuscore explains non-linear variation in sentence specificity beyond sentence length. Finally, we apply Granuscore to four question-answering benchmarks and analyze how granularity differs for questions, gold answers, and model outputs across response outcomes. The analysis reveals consistent differences in model behavior and provides a principled lens for characterizing the difficulty of QA datasets. Together, the results position Granuscore as a scalable, broadly applicable tool for analyzing granularity in text.

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### Granuscore: A Reference-Free Measure of Granularity for Text Analysis and Question Answering

Authors: Lukas Ellinger, Alexander Fichtl, Miriam Anschütz, Georg Groh
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CL, cs.HC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26620v1

Natural language conveys information at varying levels of granularity, from fine-grained references to broad descriptions. While granularity is fundamental to human communication, existing measures mostly capture surface detail or sentence specificity. We introduce Granuscore, a reference-free measure of granularity that leverages structural properties of a hierarchical embedding space. Granuscore reliably recovers hierarchical orderings on the Granola-EQ dataset and captures expected differences in granularity across discourse contexts. Across domains, we further show that Granuscore explains non-linear variation in sentence specificity beyond sentence length. Finally, we apply Granuscore to four question-answering benchmarks and analyze how granularity differs for questions, gold answers, and model outputs across response outcomes. The analysis reveals consistent differences in model behavior and provides a principled lens for characterizing the difficulty of QA datasets. Together, the results position Granuscore as a scalable, broadly applicable tool for analyzing granularity in text.

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### PIDM-DP: Physics-Informed Diffusion with Dormand-Prince Integration for Chaotic System Identification and State Reconstruction across Multiple Dynamical Regimes

Authors: Shailendra Dabral
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26619v1

Reconstructing continuous state trajectories of chaotic dynamical systems from sparse, noisy observations remains a fundamental open problem in nonlinear science. We introduce the Physics-Informed Diffusion Model with Dormand-Prince Integration (PIDM-DP), which embeds a fully differentiable 5th-order Dormand-Prince (DP-RK45) ODE integrator directly into the reverse sampling loop of a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM). At each denoising step, physics residuals are back-propagated via automatic differentiation, constraining every generated trajectory to satisfy the system's governing equations to 5th-order accuracy. A linear-scheduled guidance mechanism that ramps the physics weight from zero at high noise levels to its full value near the clean-data limit prevents the gradient explosions that cause naive physics-informed approaches to fail on stiff systems with Jacobian eigenvalues of order $O(10^3)$. Evaluated across five benchmark systems of increasing complexity 3D Lorenz, 3D Rössler, 5D Hyperchaotic, 20D Lorenz-96, and the stiff 3D Rabinovich-Fabrikant at 10% observation density with additive Gaussian noise ($σ=0.05$), PIDM-DP achieves reconstruction RMSE improvements of up to $15.4\times$ over an unconstrained diffusion baseline and decisively outperforms the Ensemble Kalman Filter on stiff systems where ensemble covariance collapses. On the Rabinovich-Fabrikant out-of-distribution benchmark, PIDM-DP attains RMSE $0.1097 \pm 0.0269$ versus $0.9443 \pm 0.5288$ (unconstrained diffusion, $8.6\times$ worse) and $0.3561 \pm 0.3040$ (EnKF, $3.2\times$ worse), with $p<0.001$ in paired Wilcoxon tests ($N = 30$). Topological validation via the Rosenstein Lyapunov estimator confirms that PIDM-DP preserves the chaotic invariant measure.

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### Gaussian-Voxel Duet: A Dual-Scaffolding Hybrid Representation for Fast and Accurate Monocular Surface Reconstruction

Authors: Zhenhua Du, Zhen Tan, Haoyu Zhang, Dewen Hu, Shuaifeng Zhi, Peidong Liu
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26616v2

While 3D Gaussian Splatting has achieved remarkable success in photorealistic novel view synthesis, its pursuit of fast and high-fidelity 3D reconstruction has long been constrained by a trade-off between geometric accuracy and optimization efficiency. Methods specialized in image rendering converge quickly at the cost of imperfect geometry caused by superfluous primitives overfitting training views, while methods integrating neural signed-distance field (SDF) for better geometry incur prohibitive training costs. In this paper, we attempt to strike a better trade-off by tethering scaffold-anchored Gaussians to a jointly optimized sparse voxel scaffold. This hybrid Gaussian-Voxel representation explicitly confines anchored Gaussians to a narrow band around surfaces defined by voxelized SDFs, which effectively improves representation efficiency and condenses floating Gaussians without sacrificing geometry quality. An implicit surface tethering loss further pulls individual Gaussian primitives closer to SDF-induced surfaces in a mutually regularized manner for improved reconstruction accuracy. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world indoor scenes from ScanNet++, ScanNetv2, and DeepBlending datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art surface reconstruction quality as well as superior novel view synthesis against leading baselines, while maintaining fast training convergence and real-time rendering. Code will be available at https://github.com/duzh11/VoxelGS.

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### Gaussian-Voxel Duet: A Dual-Scaffolding Hybrid Representation for Fast and Accurate Monocular Surface Reconstruction

Authors: Zhenhua Du, Zhen Tan, Haoyu Zhang, Dewen Hu, Shuaifeng Zhi, Peidong Liu
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26616v1

While 3D Gaussian Splatting has achieved remarkable success in photorealistic novel view synthesis, its pursuit of fast and high-fidelity 3D reconstruction has long been constrained by a trade-off between geometric accuracy and optimization efficiency. Methods specialized in image rendering converge quickly at the cost of imperfect geometry caused by superfluous primitives overfitting training views, while methods integrating neural signed-distance field (SDF) for better geometry incur prohibitive training costs. In this paper, we attempt to strike a better trade-off by tethering scaffold-anchored Gaussians to a jointly optimized sparse voxel scaffold. This hybrid Gaussian-Voxel representation explicitly confines anchored Gaussians to a narrow band around surfaces defined by voxelized SDFs, which effectively improves representation efficiency and condenses floating Gaussians without sacrificing geometry quality. An implicit surface tethering loss further pulls individual Gaussian primitives closer to SDF-induced surfaces in a mutually regularized manner for improved reconstruction accuracy. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world indoor scenes from ScanNet++, ScanNetv2, and DeepBlending datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art surface reconstruction quality as well as superior novel view synthesis against leading baselines, while maintaining fast training convergence and real-time rendering. Code will be available at https://github.com/duzh11/VoxelGS.

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### FAST-GOAL: Fast and Efficient Global-local Object Alignment Learning

Authors: Hyungyu Choi, Young Kyun Jang, Chanho Eom
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26615v1

Vision-language models such as CLIP have shown impressive capabilities in aligning images and text, but they often struggle with lengthy and detailed text descriptions due to pre-training on short and concise captions. We present FAST-GOAL (Fast and Efficient Global-local Object Alignment Learning), an efficient fine-tuning method that enhances ability of CLIP to handle lengthy text through global-local semantic alignment. Our method consists of two key components. First, Fast Local Image-Sentence Matching (FLISM) efficiently extracts local image regions through object detection and spatial division, then matches them with corresponding sentences. Second, Token Similarity-based Learning (TSL) maximizes the similarity between patch tokens from specific regions in the image and their corresponding region embeddings, applying the same principle to text, which enhances the ability of the model to capture detailed correspondences. Additionally, we introduce GLIT100k, a dataset that provides both global image-lengthy caption pairs and context-derived local pairs, where local descriptions are extracted from global captions to maintain semantic coherence. Through extensive experiments on long caption datasets (DOCCI, DCI) and short caption datasets (MSCOCO, Flickr30k), we demonstrate that FAST-GOAL achieves significant improvements over baselines, enabling effective adaptation of CLIP to detailed textual descriptions while maintaining computational efficiency.

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### LATTE: Forecasting Peer Anchored Preference Trajectories for Personalized LLM Generation

Authors: Jinze Li, Xiaoyan Yang, Shuo Yang, Jinfeng Xu, Yue Shen, Jian Wang, Jinjie Gu, Edith Cheuk-Han Ngai
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26612v1

Personalized generation with frozen large language models requires a conditioning signal that is both compact and current. Existing personalization methods typically retrieve or summarize user histories in text, or compress them into static latent profiles and soft prompts. These approaches are efficient, but they treat a user's past behavior as an aggregate profile and therefore mix stable identity, recent drift, and item content in the same representation. We propose LAtent Trajectory Tracking and Extrapolation (LATTE), a framework that represents personalization as forecasting a peer anchored relative preference state. For each historical session, LATTE subtracts a time masked baseline formed from comparable users who responded to the same item, producing a state that measures how the target user differs from peers under a shared item context. A lightweight sequence predictor then forecasts the next state in this trajectory, and a State to Token Bridge injects the forecast into a frozen instruction tuned LLM through a single anchored soft token. We provide a latent factor analysis showing when peer anchoring cancels shared item variation and why temporal forecasting trades off stale averages against noisy recent states. Experiments on Amazon Reviews 2023 and MemoryCD show that LATTE consistently outperforms retrieval, summary memory, static latent profiles, difference aware latent profiles, and soft prompt compression baselines. On Amazon Reviews 2023, LATTE improves average ROUGE-L from 0.219 for a static latent profile and 0.245 for the strongest added latent compression baseline to 0.259. Additional pairwise comparisons and diagnostic analyses suggest that the improvement is mainly due to forecasting user-specific trajectory information, rather than merely adding a soft prompt interface.

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### Spend Your Rollouts Where It Counts: Rollout Allocation for Group-Based RL Post-Training

Authors: Woojeong Kim, Ziyi Yang, Jing Nathan Yan, Jialu Liu
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26606v1

Reinforcement learning (RL) is the dominant paradigm for post-training large language models. However, in the online, on-policy setting, rollout generation dominates the computational cost of training. Group-based policy optimization methods compute advantages from multiple rollouts per prompt, yet they indiscriminately allocate budget to prompts with collapsed reward distributions, wasting expensive rollouts on negligible learning signals. We demonstrate that group-based updates are most effective in regimes of high reward variance. Since the policy evolves throughout training, prompt informativeness must be estimated online rather than precomputed, but exhaustively evaluating every prompt is computationally prohibitive. We introduce Pilot-Commit, a budget-aware rollout allocation framework for group-based RL post-training. Pilot-Commit decouples prompt evaluation from exploitation: a pilot stage estimates per-prompt informativeness using a fraction of the budget, and the remaining rollouts are allocated to high-leverage prompts while low-signal prompts are skipped. Across multiple math reasoning benchmarks and model scales from 1.5B to 14B parameters, Pilot-Commit matches baseline accuracy with significantly lower sampling costs, reaching target accuracy up to $1.9\times$ faster than GRPO and $4.0\times$ faster than DAPO in cumulative rollouts.

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### FTibSuite: A Comprehensive Resource Suite for Tibetan Vision-Language Modeling

Authors: Guixian Xu, Yide Liang, Zeli Su, Xuexian Song, Ziyin Zhang, Yushuang Dong, Ting Zhang, Xu Han
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26601v1

Vision-language models have progressed rapidly, but Tibetan remains a severely underserved low-resource language due to the lack of reproducible training and evaluation infrastructure. To fill this gap, we introduce FTibSuite, a comprehensive resource suite for Tibetan vision-language research, consisting of FTibData (human-verified multimodal training corpora spanning continual pretraining, image-text alignment, and instruction tuning data), FTibBench (Tibetan adaptations of five mainstream multimodal benchmarks with a hierarchical quality-control workflow to reduce translation noise), and FTibVLM, a reproducible baseline built on Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct via a three-stage adaptation pipeline. Experiments on FTibBench show FTibVLM delivers consistent performance gains across all tasks, such as improving MMBench accuracy from 42.97 to 67.78 and POPE-random accuracy from 47.53 to 80.56, while retaining the backbone's original Chinese capabilities with minimal degradation, providing the first standardized foundation for Tibetan multimodal research.

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### Geometry-Aware Contrastive Learning for Few-Shot Automatic Modulation Recognition

Authors: Guanqun Zhao, Yitong Liu, Jiaxuan Fang, Yufei Mao, Hongwen Yang
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26600v1

Standard Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) for Automatic Modulation Recognition (AMR) struggles with ineffective isotropic augmentations, spectral instability, and semantic drift. To address these challenges, we propose Dynamic-Consistency Contrastive Learning (DyCo-CL), a geometry-aware framework that couples Virtual Adversarial Augmentation (VAA) with a semantic consistency loss. We provide a theoretical analysis indicating that this strategy acts as an implicit spectral regularizer for the encoder, enabling stable manifold exploration. Complementing this, our Signal-Adaptive Swin Backbone with fixed-window attention improves structural stability by constraining attention locality, while a Hybrid Knowledge Fusion module anchors representations with physical priors. Experiments on RML benchmarks show that DyCo-CL achieves a 6.27% accuracy gain in 1-shot settings over prior methods.

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### AGORA: Adapter-Grounded Observation-Action Retention for Inference-Free Prompt Compression in LLM Agents

Authors: Haoran Zhang, Zhaohua Sun
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26596v1

The token-level extractive compressors widely used for general LM context are structurally inappropriate for LLM agents: across 17 (env, backbone, method) cells spanning two independent token-level method families, every cell collapses to mean reward <= 0.05 despite 1.3-13.3x realized compression. We name and characterize this failure mode as action-grammar destruction -- the tokens carrying action semantics (identifiers, brackets, action verbs) are exactly those self-information ranks lowest, so a general-purpose compressor reliably removes them and the environment rejects the residual. The diagnosis points to step-granularity compression. We introduce AGORA, an inference-free step-level compressor combining a structural prompt parser, an always-keep floor for format- and recency-critical content, and a 125M-parameter relevance scorer trained on counterfactual next-action-change labels (~2ms/step, zero per-step LLM toll). Across the compared inference-free and LLM-based methods, AGORA is the only one retaining >= 75% uncompressed performance in 8 of 9 cells (with the lone exception at 73%); a four-way component ablation isolates the structural floor as the dominant quality lever and the learned scorer as the source of 1.0-11.5x adaptive end-to-end compression from a single fixed keep ratio.

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### Cordyceps: Covert Control Attacks on LLMs via Data Poisoning

Authors: Zedian Shao, Charles Fleming, Teodora Baluta
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26595v2

Large language models (LLMs) are often fine-tuned on uncurated text datasets that adversaries can poison. Existing poisoning attacks primarily rely on fixed trigger phrases that defenses such as outlier detection, clean-data regularization, or online monitoring can neutralize. In this paper, we propose a data poisoning method that teaches an LLM an information hiding scheme reliably and stealthily through semantic associations between shared knowledge such as facts or concepts and attacker-chosen phrases. The induced hiding scheme can encode and decode arbitrary malicious instructions, thus revealing a new and subtle poisoning-induced vulnerability: covert control attacks. We precisely characterize covert control attacks and evaluate them across $5$ LLMs, $3$ backdoor defenses, and $4$ prompt injection defenses. With a small poisoned fraction, covert control attacks outperform heuristic-based prompt injection attacks in average attack success rate by about $40\%$ relative to clean fine-tuned models. They also circumvent defenses based on detection and fine-tuning, maintaining up to $93\%$ attack success rate after backdoor defenses and up to $98\%$ after prompt injection defenses.

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### Examining the Challenges of Intellectual Property in AI-Generated Productions

Authors: Ali Mazhar, Mohammad Zare, Marjan Veysi
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26590v1

With the advancement of artificial intelligence systems capable of autonomously generating artistic, literary, musical works, and even inventions without direct human intervention, the intellectual property (IP) regime faces unprecedented questions and challenges. The most critical issue concerns the ownership of moral and economic rights in the absence of a human creator, and how such outputs can be granted legal protection. This paper first reviews the theoretical foundations and existing literature in this domain, then comparatively examines Iranian legal frameworks such as the 1969 Law for the Protection of Authors, Composers, and Artists Rights and the Patent and Trademark Registration Law-alongside other legal systems, including the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Furthermore, existing legal perspectives on the intellectual property of AI-generated works and the related enforcement challenges are analyzed. The findings reveal significant regulatory gaps within the current Iranian legal framework. To balance the promotion of innovation with the preservation of human creativity, revising existing laws and introducing novel approaches such as defining a specific intellectual property right for AI-generated works or designating ownership among associated human agents appears to be essential.

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### Few-shot Cross-country Generalization of Tabular Machine Learning and Foundation Models for Childhood Anemia Prediction under Distribution Shift

Authors: Yusuf Brima, Marcellin Atemkeng, Lansana Hassim Kallon, David Niyukuri, Antoine Vacavant, Samuel Saidu, Ding-Geng Chen
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26589v1

Childhood anemia affects around 40% of children aged 6-59 months globally and arises from heterogeneous factors, limiting model generalizability. We evaluate a transformer-based tabular foundation model against classical supervised methods under cross-country and data-scarce settings. We used DHS data from 16 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caucasus, and the Middle East (n=68,856). We compared Logistic Regression, XGBoost, LightGBM, and TabPFN v2.6. Performance was assessed using AUC-ROC, Brier score, and ECE. Generalization was evaluated using leave-one-country-out (LOCO), reverse-LOCO, and few-shot settings. Subgroup analyses included sex, age, residence, maternal education, and wealth. Feature importance was estimated using SHAP. TabPFN outperformed classical models in low-data regimes (<200 samples), showing higher discrimination and better calibration. Across countries, it achieved the lowest Brier score (0.042) and ECE (0.203). Under full-data settings, AUC-ROC ranged from 0.59-0.76 with small between-model differences ($\leq 0.05$). LOCO performance was stable (0.58-0.69), driven by country context. Reverse-LOCO showed asymmetric transferability. Subgroup performance was consistent with no systematic demographic bias. SHAP identified child age, altitude, and height-for-age z-score as dominant predictors, followed by wealth and maternal education. Performance in childhood anemia prediction is driven more by population variation than model choice. TabPFN provides advantages in low-resource settings through improved discrimination and calibration, highlighting foundation models as promising tools for data-scarce global health prediction.

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### Near-Optimal Regret in Adversarial Kernel Bandits

Authors: Yu-Jie Zhang, Hao Qiu, Jonathan Scarlett, Kevin Jamieson
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26585v1

We study the adversarial kernel bandit problem, in which the loss at each round is induced by an arbitrary bounded element of a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). We propose an exponential-weights algorithm built on a regularized importance-weighted loss estimator, together with an explicit correction term that cancels the bias introduced by the regularization. Our main result bounds the regret by $\widetilde{O}\big(\sqrt{T\, d_*(λ)\,\log|{X}|}\big)$, where $d_*(λ)$ is a widely-adopted notion of effective dimension that captures the complexity of the kernel. Up to logarithmic factors, this matches the known rate achieved in the related stochastic kernel bandit problem. A notable application is the Matérn$(ν,d)$ kernel with smoothness parameter $ν$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$, for which our bound specializes to $\widetilde{O}\big(T^{(ν+d)/(2ν+d)}\big)$, improving over the best-known prior rate of Chatterji et al. (2019) while simultaneously removing the rank-one adversary assumption required by their analysis. Moreover, this rate is the same as the known optimal rate for stochastic kernel bandits, and also matches a lower bound from concurrent work up to a $\log T$ factor.

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### O-MARC: Omni Memory-Augmented Compression Distillation for Efficient Video Understanding

Authors: Peiran Wu, Yunze Liu, Chi-Hao Wu, Chen Chen, Junxiao Shen
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26584v1

Omnimodal large language models enable unified audio video understanding, but long joint token sequences make inference costly, and existing benchmarks do not fully isolate audio visual association in noisy user generated videos. We introduce UGC-AVQA, a public UGC benchmark with 1,000 videos and 4,816 QA pairs, where an audio removal test ensures that benchmark questions require both acoustic and visual evidence. To reduce inference cost, we propose OMAC, a training free plug in compression method that preserves salient visual memory and temporally grounded audio anchors. To further make compact models robust to compressed inputs, we introduce O-MARC, a compression distillation framework for learning with memory compressed multimodal contexts. On Qwen2.5-Omni-3B, O-MARC improves the average score across four benchmarks to 45.8, outperforming full token inference at 44.1 and OmniZip at 41.0. OMAC also keeps inference efficient, reducing latency by 34.6\% (1.53$\times$ speedup) and memory by 34.7\% compared with full token inference.

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### On the Error-Correcting Effects of Stochasticity in Discrete Diffusion

Authors: William Yuan, Sungwon Jeong, Amirali Aghazadeh
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26582v1

Discrete diffusion models achieve strong performance in text and image generation, but their inference remains slow and must inherently balance sampling efficiency and sample quality. In this work, we present a systematic study of how the \emph{degree of stochasticity} in Markov transitions governs the sampling tradeoff. We show that highly deterministic transitions converge rapidly but suffer from error accumulation, while more stochastic transitions converge more slowly yet can achieve higher final sample quality. Using an information-theoretic analysis, we identify the underlying mechanism as an error-correcting effect induced by \emph{redundant transitions} that symmetrically exchange mass between states, and show that these transitions can provably contract sampling errors. Motivated by this analysis, we propose \emph{Discrete Churn and Restart Sampling} (DCRS), a novel inference algorithm that injects controlled stochasticity by alternating between forward and reverse diffusion processes. Experiments on synthetic datasets and large-scale benchmarks show that DCRS improves the speed-quality tradeoff in the low number of function evaluations regime. On image datasets, DCRS achieves up to a $10\times$ reduction in sampling steps compared to standard samplers while maintaining competitive sample quality, whereas on language benchmarks, we observe more nuanced behavior depending on the corruption process and sampling procedure.

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### Focal Reward: Balanced Reinforcement Learning under Rubric-Based Rewards

Authors: Yu Huang, Zihua Zhao, Zhaoxin Huan, Wanli Gu, Feng Hong, Xinmu Ge, Lin Yuan, Weichang Wu, Qiang Hu, Xiaolu Zhang, Jun Zhou, Jiangchao Yao
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26579v1

The open-ended generation in LLMs usually requires multi-dimensional rubrics to adequately assess quality and guide the improvement of reinforcement learning. However, a critical dilemma inherent in this training paradigm is the imbalanced reward polarization along different rubric dimensions. Under this bottleneck, even if LLMs achieve relatively high rewards after training, they may still exhibit severe deficiencies in certain dimensions, leading to a direct deterioration in user experience. To address this problem, we propose Focal Reward, a novel objective to automatically balance the training of reinforcement learning under rubric-based rewards. Specifically, we first leverage an inverse reward projection mechanism to estimate the saturation degree of each criterion in the rubric, which forms the basis to calibrate the reward direction. Then, the final objective is designed with an automatically reweighting coefficient for each criterion to achieve the fine-grained balancing. Extensive experiments across three model scales and six benchmarks demonstrate that our Focal Reward method outperforms the strongest static aggregation baseline in all 18 model-benchmark comparisons. Rollout, mechanism, and ablation analyses further show that these gains arise from online, saturation-aware reallocation toward rubrics that still have room for improvement.

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### Bridging Control with Neural Network Verifier alpha-beta-CROWN: A Tutorial

Authors: Haoyu Li, Xiangru Zhong, Hao Cheng, Bin Hu, Huan Zhang
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: eess.SY, cs.AI, cs.LG, math.OC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26577v1

Learning-based methods for synthesizing controllers have gained popularity due to their high expressiveness and strong empirical performance. However, in safety-critical scenarios such as autonomous driving, robotics, and power systems, empirical performance alone is insufficient, and formal verification of controller properties such as stability and safety is highly desirable. Unfortunately, many prior verification approaches are either tied to specific structural assumptions on the system or the certificate, making them difficult to transfer across settings, or suffer from poor scalability on higher-dimensional neural network systems. In this tutorial, we present a unified framework that aims to mitigate this gap via bridging control with the state-of-the-art neural network verifier $α,\!β$-CROWN (alpha-beta-CROWN). At its core, $α,\!β$-CROWN is a general-purpose bounding engine for nonlinear functions represented as computation graphs: given an input domain, it can produce certified bounds and explicit linear relaxation of the nonlinear function. These certified bounds are useful on their own for tasks such as reachability analysis, and they also provide the foundation for more complex routines that perform satisfiability checking and optimization. More specifically, many control problems reduce to verifying real-valued inequalities over a state domain (e.g., Lyapunov theory). Consequently, $α,\!β$-CROWN enables scalable verification of such conditions by computing tight bounds and recursively partitioning and pruning subdomains based on the bounds. Thanks to GPU parallelization, this pipeline demonstrates superior scalability on verification and optimization problems that are challenging for traditional approaches. In this tutorial, we discuss the basics of $α,\!β$-CROWN and introduce its application to various control-related tasks.

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### TrackRef3D: Multi-View Consistent Track-then-Label for Open-World Referring Segmentation in 3D Gaussian Splatting

Authors: Yuyang Tan, Renhe Zhang, Hang Zhang, Ao Li, Xin Tan
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26576v1

Referring 3D Gaussian Splatting (R3DGS), which utilizes natural language for 3D object segmentation, has emerged as a crucial capability for embodied AI. However, existing methods typically rely on expensive per-scene manual annotation and per-view pseudo mask generation, which suffer from multi-view inconsistency and poor generalization to varying query specificities. To address this, we present TrackRef3D, a fully automatic pipeline that achieves open-world referring segmentation in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) without manual annotation by introducing a multi-view consistent track-then-label paradigm that fundamentally decouples object discovery from semantic grounding. Specifically, we propose a Trajectory-Aware Semantic Consensus Module (TSCM) which aggregates cross-view predictions via synonymous clustering and trajectory-aware voting to establish a canonical semantic identity, thereby ensuring multi-view consistency. Furthermore, we employ a visibility-aware description generation strategy to mitigate ambiguity and propose a Hybrid Training Strategy (HTS) that jointly optimizes coarse category semantics and fine-grained referential cues to ensure robustness under varying query specificities using a multi-positive contrastive objective. Extensive experiments on benchmarks demonstrate that TrackRef3D achieves state-of-the-art performance.

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### Hubness, Not Anisotropy, Drives Cross-Lingual Retrieval Asymmetry in Multilingual Embedding Models

Authors: Adib Sakhawat, Fardeen Sadab, Atik Shahriar
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26575v1

Multilingual embedding models are deployed under the assumption that cross-lingual retrieval is symmetric: if a query in language A retrieves its translation in language B, the reverse should also hold. In practice it does not. Using a parallel corpus of 6,518 idiomatic and proverbial expressions in English, Bangla, Hindi, and Arabic, embedded by five production-grade encoders (Gemini, Mistral, OpenAI-L, OpenAI-S, Qwen), we formalise this failure as a deficit in mutual nearest-neighbour reciprocity and test a single mechanistic claim: among the geometric pathologies of multilingual spaces, hubness, not anisotropy, centroid drift, or magnitude, is the dominant causal driver. Across five pre-registered experiments with falsification conditions specified in advance, hub mass dominates a joint regression on reciprocity (49.5% dominance share, 1.68x the next predictor; partial R^2 = 0.302 versus 0.003 for anisotropy), while a hub-aware score correction (CSLS) closes 63.5% of the worst-to-best reciprocity gap and yields a mean within-model effect size 130x larger than surgical hub-vector ablation. The latter contrast pinpoints the mechanism: hubness is a pathology of the similarity metric, not of individual hub vectors. We resolve the well-known anisotropy-hubness paradox by showing the two are statistically dissociable, and we recommend replacing cosine similarity with CSLS as the default retrieval metric for multilingual embedding pipelines.

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### Separate Aggregation of Split Network for Personalized Federated Learning

Authors: Yunseok Kang, Jaeyoung Song
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26571v1

Federated learning enables collaborative model training without sharing raw data, but its performance can degrade substantially under heterogeneous client data distributions. A single global model often cannot satisfy diverse client requirements, so personalized federated learning has therefore been explored to improve client specific performance while preserving global generalization. Existing PFL methods often face a fundamental tradeoff in which stronger global sharing can undermine local specialization, whereas stronger local adaptation can lead to overfitting under limited data, label imbalance, and missing class scenarios. In this work, we propose PGFedSplit, a personalized federated learning framework that improves both personalization and global generalization under severe client heterogeneity. PGFedSplit adopts a split architecture and performs adaptive aggregation scheduling tailored to the roles of different model components, enabling stable knowledge sharing while maintaining client specific adaptation. Each client further leverages a mixture of locally extracted representations and synthetic representations generated from server side Gaussian statistics, improving robustness under label imbalance and missing class conditions. Extensive experiments on Fashion MNIST, CIFAR 10, CIFAR 100, and Tiny ImageNet demonstrate consistent improvements over state of the art PFL methods, with stable convergence and superior personalization in highly heterogeneous settings.

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### Distribution-Aware Conformal Prediction: A Framework for generating efficient prediction intervals for time series

Authors: Daniel Schweizer, Peter Kuhn, Jayant Sharma, Shivali Dubey, Malte von Ramin, Christoph Brockt-Haßauer
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26569v1

We present Distribution-aware Conformal Prediction (DCP), a unified framework integrating probabilistic predictors like Monte Carlo dropout, deep ensembles, and quantile regression with score-agnostic conformal calibration to produce valid and efficient prediction intervals. Leveraging a numerical inversion approach to construct interval bounds, DCP accommodates arbitrary combinations of distribution generating predictors and nonconformity scores. Benchmark analysis on synthetic and real-world time series data demonstrate DCP's ability to adaptively calibrate prediction intervals under varying uncertainty regimes. Crucially, DCP's modular design facilitates plug-and-play experimentation with different predictor-score pairings, quantitatively supported by a newly introduced modified Winkler score that balances validity and efficiency by explicitly penalizing undercoverage. While DCP generalizes and extends existing approaches like Conformalized Quantile Regression and Conformalized Monte Carlo, its modular design allows further extensions, setting a foundation for advancing uncertainty quantification in dynamic environments and high-risk applications.

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### MedGuideX: Internalizing Decision Logic from Executable Guidelines into Large Language Models for Clinical Reasoning

Authors: Yuhao Shen, Lang Cao, Simo Du, Yuqing Wang, Juexiao Zhou, Hao Peng, Yue Guo
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26567v1

Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) encode evidence-based decision logic that clinicians apply by evaluating patient variables, conditional criteria, and recommendation rules. However, existing methods often use CPGs as free-text training data or retrieval sources, underutilizing their procedural decision structure. To better exploit this structure, we introduce a guideline-derived training pipeline that transforms CPG recommendations into executable clinical decision logic and uses it to generate factual and counterfactual question-answering data. Theses data teach models both guideline-supported decisions and how decisions change under different patient conditions. Post-training a medical LLM on the generated data yields MedGuideX. Across four clinical reasoning benchmarks, MedGuideX achieves a 10.28% relative improvement in average accuracy. Physician evaluation further shows that MedGuideX better recovers clinician authored reasoning steps and produces physician-preferred rationales in faithfulness, validity, completeness, and clarity. Overall, our results show that executable decision logic from CPGs can be transformed into scalable supervision for building reliable medical LLMs.

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### Beyond Holistic Models: Systematic Component-level Benchmarking of Deep Multivariate Time-Series Forecasting

Authors: Shuang Liang, Chaochuan Hou, Xu Yao, Shiping Wang, Hailiang Huang, Songqiao Han, Minqi Jiang
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26562v1

While previous research in multivariate time series forecasting has focused on developing complex holistic models, this work advocates for a shift toward a granular, component-level understanding of their impacts. We propose TSCOMP, the first large-scale benchmark that systematically deconstructs deep forecasting methods into their core, fine-grained components--spanning series preprocessing, encoding strategies, network architectures including specific and large time-series models, and optimization methods. Using constrained orthogonal experimental design and extensive evaluations, we conduct multi-view analyses that reveal component effectiveness across different backbones, data characteristics, and their interactions. Beyond providing insights, this benchmark establishes a fine-grained performance corpus comprising over 20,000 model-dataset evaluations, which supports the learning of automated component selection, enabling zero-shot model construction on new datasets. Our experiments demonstrate that the corpus-driven approach, despite its simplicity, consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating the soundness of our evaluation design and confirming that systematic component selection surpasses manually designed complex architectures. All code and the performance corpus are publicly available at https://github.com/SUFE-AILAB/TSCOMP.

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### Reliable Extraction of Clinical Follow-Up Instructions: A Hybrid Neural-Symbolic Pipeline

Authors: Michal Laufer, Yehudit Aperstein, Alexander Apartsin
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26560v1

Objective. Outpatient notes carry follow-up instructions pairing actions with future times ("MRI brain in two weeks"). Extracting (action, date) pairs supports scheduling and audit, but generative extractors miss the date because linking and arithmetic are implicit in decoding. We test a hybrid neural-symbolic pipeline against direct generation. Methods. We define TestSpecification and TimeSpecification entities and a ScheduledFor relation. BioBERT feeds BIO tagging and a biaffine linker; entities are canonicalized via a 28-action ontology and times normalized to day offsets deterministically. We evaluate on a 2,000-note synthetic outpatient corpus with action-disjoint splits (18 train, 6 OOV-test) against zero-shot GPT-4o-mini and LoRA-fine-tuned LLaMA-3 8B with note-level bootstrap 95% CIs. Results. On 259-note seen and OOV splits the hybrid pipeline achieves Test-Time Pair F1 of 0.997 and 0.986 with 0.00-day MAE. Baselines reach high action F1 (LLaMA-3 0.992; GPT-4o-mini 0.963 seen) but Pair F1 stays at 0.51-0.57 (LLaMA-3) and 0.53 (GPT-4o-mini), CIs non-overlapping with the hybrid. Conclusion. Separating learned entity extraction from deterministic date arithmetic outperforms generation on this benchmark, generalizes to held-out actions, and exposes failure modes. Transfer to real EHR notes is the next validation; a first-pass realism check is in Limitations.

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### Auditing and Fixing Economic Validity in Tabular Foundation Models for Discrete Choice

Authors: Yingshuo Wang, Xian Sun, Yanhang Li, Zhichao Fan, Zexin Zhuang
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, econ.EM
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26559v1

Tabular foundation models achieve strong accuracy on choice prediction tasks, but their predictions often violate the economic logic those tasks require: raising a price sometimes increases predicted demand, and implied willingness-to-pay estimates are frequently negative or implausible. We propose a two-stage adapter that embeds foundation model predictions within a utility-maximization framework. In the first stage, we estimate a standard choice model whose parameters are constrained to obey economic theory. In the second stage, we freeze those parameters and train a correction term that incorporates the foundation model's predictions as additional information. The result is a model that inherits the foundation model's accuracy gains while guaranteeing monotonic price-demand relationships under policy perturbation and producing analytically computable trade-off measures. On two transportation datasets, the adapter recovers up to 13 percentage points of accuracy over a standard logit model while maintaining perfect economic consistency, something neither the raw foundation models nor conventional distillation achieve.

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### Linear and Neural Dueling Bandits with Delayed Feedback

Authors: Xiangyi Wang, Pingchen Lu, Jie Mao, Mingze Kong, Zhi Hong, Zhiyong Wang, Zhongxiang Dai
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26554v1

Contextual dueling bandits form a cornerstone of preference-based decision-making, with critical applications in recommender systems and large language model alignment. However, standard algorithms rely on the idealized assumption of immediate feedback, a condition frequently violated in real-world scenarios such as prompt optimization. This setting introduces a unique theoretical challenge: unlike linear bandits, dueling bandit estimators lack closed-form solutions, rendering naive adaptations of standard weighting techniques biased. To address this, we formalize the problem of Contextual Dueling Bandits with Stochastic Delayed Feedback and propose two novel algorithms: Linear (LDB-DF) and Neural (NDB-DF) Dueling Bandits with Delayed Feedback. Central to our approach is a novel estimator that integrates an Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) mechanism directly into the loss function, ensuring unbiased correction for delayed or missing feedback. We provide comprehensive theoretical analysis, establishing an O(d*sqrt(T)) regret bound for the linear setting and sub-linear guarantees for the neural setting. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our propose.

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### Aligning Few-Step Generative Models by Amortizing Sample-based Variational Inference

Authors: Jaewoo Lee, Hyeongyu Kang, Dohyun Kim, Kyuil Sim, Woocheol Shin, Minsu Kim, Taeyoung Yun, Jeongjae Lee, Sanghyeok Choi, Tabitha Edith Lee, Jong Chul Ye, Jinkyoo Park
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26552v2

Aligning a few-step generative model is challenging, since existing alignment frameworks typically rely on restrictive assumptions: a tractable likelihood, a specific ODE/SDE solver, or a particular model family. We introduce FAV, Few-step Generative Models Alignment via Sample-based Variational Inference, a general alignment framework that requires only sample access to the generator and the reference distribution. We cast alignment as sampling from a reward-tilted distribution anchored to a reference distribution. We leverage Stein Variational Gradient Descent as a sample-based variational inference scheme and amortize its particle updates into the generator parameters via fixed-point regression. We evaluate FAV on two domains: robotics manipulation and image generator alignment. On generative policy alignment for robotic manipulation, FAV outperforms prevailing policy extraction baselines across 56 offline and 30 offline-to-online RL tasks. For image generator alignment, FAV fine-tunes diverse few-step backbones, including GAN, drifting model, consistency models, and flow maps, scaling from ImageNet-$256$ to 1024$^2$ text-to-image synthesis. Code is available at https://github.com/Jaewoopudding/FAV.

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### SEC-bench Pro: Can Language Models Solve Long-Horizon Software Security Tasks?

Authors: Hwiwon Lee, Jiawei Liu, Dongjun Kim, Wubing Xia, Ziqi Zhang, Chunqiu Steven Xia, Lingming Zhang
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26548v2

Finding a real vulnerability in complicated systems is a challenging, long-horizon task that demands reasoning across an entire codebase to produce a working proof-of-concept (PoC). However, such critical security problems remain understudied. We present SEC-bench Pro, a benchmark that measures how well frontier models hunt real vulnerabilities by reproducing working PoC inputs from disclosed reports, where each task pairs a concrete bug with the instructions for triggering it. We also demonstrate the limitations of existing rule-based judges for grading generated PoCs, and propose a novel LLM-based judge for more precise grading. We instantiate SEC-bench Pro with 344 validated vulnerabilities across three targets, the V8 and SpiderMonkey browser engines and the Linux kernel, covering critical vulnerability families including memory-safety, sandbox, JIT, race-condition, and kernel-subsystem bugs. Across six frontier commercial and open-weight models and three coding agents, the strongest, Codex with GPT-5.5, solves 58% of instances overall. We also observe that Claude Code with Opus 4.6 tends to time out but solves most instances it completes. In contrast, open-weight models struggle; for example, GLM-5 solves only 13 of the 344 instances. During construction and evaluation, SEC-bench Pro also surfaced three vulnerabilities in V8 and SpiderMonkey, including a sandbox escape that was fixed and earned a $20,000 Google Vulnerability Reward Program bounty. More recently, SEC-bench Pro has been adopted by OpenAI to evaluate the long-horizon security capabilities of its newest models. Overall, SEC-bench Pro exposes where long-horizon vulnerability discovery succeeds, where it fails, and how different grading choices change the evaluation landscape, offering insights for security-centric model evaluation and training. Our artifact is available at https://github.com/SEC-bench/SEC-bench-Pro.

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### MobileExplorer: Accelerating On-Device Inference for Mobile GUI Agents via Online Exploration

Authors: Runxi Huang, Liyu Zhang, Shengzhong Liu, Xiaomin Ouyang
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26546v1

Mobile graphical user interface (GUI) agents enable AI models to autonomously operate smartphones on behalf of users. However, most existing systems focus primarily on optimizing task accuracy and rely on cloud-hosted models for inference, which introduces privacy concerns and network-dependent latency. As a result, fully on-device deployment of mobile GUI agents remains underexplored. We propose MobileExplorer, a new framework that accelerates on-device inference for vision-based mobile GUI agents via online exploration. The key idea is to exploit the long per-step reasoning time of vision-language models (VLMs) by performing lightweight, parallel exploration of UI elements. During model inference, the agent proactively probes semantically relevant UI elements and records these exploration traces as structured memory. To ensure reliable execution in live mobile environments, we design a two-level rollback mechanism that robustly restores the initial UI state when a fast but naive backtracking strategy fails. The collected exploration traces are then summarized into concise contextual hints and injected into the prompt to enhance the subsequent reasoning step. We evaluate MobileExplorer on multiple off-the-shelf devices using the AndroidWorld benchmark, as well as newly designed, more complex tasks and dynamic on-device environments. MobileExplorer reduces the average number of reasoning steps and end-to-end latency by 23\%, while maintaining or improving task success rates by up to 5\%. A video demonstration of MobileExplorer performance in the real world is available at https://youtu.be/thK7MJmdlvM .

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### PolyFusionAgent: A Multimodal Foundation Model and Autonomous AI Assistant for Polymer Property Prediction and Inverse Design

Authors: Manpreet Kaur, Xingying Zhang, Qian Liu
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26543v1

Polymer discovery is central to fields ranging from energy storage to biomedicine, but it is hindered by an astronomically large chemical design space and fragmented representations of structure, properties, and prior knowledge. This fragmentation leaves many AI models disconnected from physical and experimental reality, restricting their ability to support directly actionable design decisions. Here we introduce PolyFusionAgent, an interactive framework coupling a multimodal polymer foundation model (PolyFusion) with a tool-augmented, literature-grounded design agent (PolyAgent). PolyFusion aligns complementary polymer views including sequence, topology, 3D geometry, and fingerprints across millions of polymers to learn a shared latent space transferable across chemistries and data regimes, improving thermophysical property prediction and enabling property-conditioned generation of chemically valid, structurally novel polymers beyond the reference design space. PolyAgent closes the design loop by linking prediction and inverse design with evidence retrieval from the polymer literature, proposing, evaluating, and contextualizing hypotheses with explicit precedent in one workflow. Together, PolyFusionAgent enables interactive, evidence-linked polymer discovery combining large-scale representation learning, multimodal chemical knowledge, and verifiable scientific reasoning.

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### ChainCaps: Composition-Safe Tool-Using Agents via Monotonic Capability Attenuation

Authors: Xiaochong Jiang, Shiqi Yang, Ziwei Li, Lifei Liu, Haoran Yu, Yichen Liu
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26542v4

Tool-using agents increasingly operate in open-ended deployment environments, where they compose file systems, web APIs, code interpreters, and enterprise services at runtime. This creates a safety gap in tool composition: an agent can satisfy every per-tool permission check and still produce an unsafe end-to-end effect, such as reading a confidential document, summarizing it, and sending the summary to an external endpoint. We call this failure mode permission laundering. ChainCaps addresses it with a runtime rule: every value carries a sink-specific capability budget, and tool composition propagates budgets by intersection. A value can preserve or lose authority as it moves through a tool chain, but it cannot gain new authority through composition. We implement ChainCaps as a transparent MCP proxy that requires no changes to the agent or tool servers. On 82 tasks across five frontier models from three providers, ChainCaps reduces attack success rate from 25-68% to 0-4.8% while preserving 96-100% benign completion. In replay experiments, it also outperforms scalar-IFC and per-function-isolation baselines. Manifest quality is the dominant deployment bottleneck: expert manifests reach 100% attack blocking, while naive manifests fall to 27.3%. Our claims are limited to explicit-flow composition safety under trusted manifests and proxy-visible data movement, a practical gap in deployed tool-using agents today.

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### Domain-Gated Latent Diffusion: Generative Inverse Design of HMX-Class Energetic Materials with First-Principles Validation

Authors: Yehudit Aperstein, Alexander Apartsin
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: physics.chem-ph, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26540v2

Energetic materials power mining, demolition, propulsion and airbags, yet today's compounds were designed decades ago. A successor must combine high energy release, low sensitivity to accidental initiation and a practical synthesis route, found within an astronomically large molecular space. Generative models are the natural search tool, but their training data are mostly untrustworthy: of approximately 66,000 molecules with recorded properties, only approximately 3,000 were measured or computed from first principles. Models trained on all of them imitate the rough estimates and propose molecules that collapse under real physics. We introduce Domain-Gated Latent Diffusion (DGLD), a diffusion model that treats data reliability as an explicit design parameter: labels are sorted into four trust tiers, and only trustworthy ones steer generation, while the unreliable majority still teaches the model what a plausible molecule looks like. Learned controls tune performance, safety and viability independently, and every proposal passes a four-stage screen ending in a quantum-chemical DFT audit. DGLD proposes 10 molecules unknown to PubChem that survive this screen. The best, 3,4,5-trinitro-1,2-isoxazole, matches the benchmark explosives HMX and PETN in calculated detonation performance, is unlike molecules in its training set, and has a four-step synthesis route. Trust gating is chemistry-independent and can be applied wherever abundant weak data surround a reliable core.

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### Scheduled Style Injection: Expanding the Style-Content Pareto Frontier in Training-Free Diffusion-based Style Transfer

Authors: Amey Sunil Kulkarni
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26538v1

Style transfer with pre-trained diffusion models has advanced rapidly, but a core question remains underexplored: where in the model should style injection be strongest? StyleID, the leading training-free method, uses a single global parameter (gamma) uniformly across all layers and timesteps, which forces a fixed tradeoff between style quality and content preservation. We show this tradeoff is unnecessarily rigid. We systematically explore four dimensions of control: varying style injection strength across decoder layers, across denoising timesteps, and scheduling ControlNet geometric conditioning along both axes. The pattern is consistent everywhere: decreasing schedules, with stronger structural signal injection in shallower layers and earlier timesteps, reliably outperform the reverse. Beyond direction, schedule shape matters: cosine and square-root timestep schedules outperform linear. Most importantly, we find that gamma scheduling and ControlNet conditioning are nearly independent. The resulting combined configurations expand the Pareto frontier, offering superior tradeoffs between style fidelity and content preservation compared to any single baseline setting. Our best balanced configuration achieves ArtFID of 27.036 versus StyleID's 28.801 - a 6.1% relative improvement, with consistent gains across the full style-content tradeoff frontier. Results are validated across 35 configurations totaling over 28,000 stylized images using four complementary metrics. These findings generalize across SD backbones with identical rank ordering. All modifications are training-free, parameter-free, and require only a few lines of scheduling code; code is available at https://github.com/ameyskulkarni/scheduled_style_injection.

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### Conceptual Steganography

Authors: Zhejian Zhou, Jonathan May
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26537v1

Language Models (LMs) emit Chains-of-Thought (CoTs) that drive much of their capability. However, the same sequence that carries useful reasoning can also covertly convey messages: a misaligned model may embed covert information in its CoT that slips through human supervision, a form of steganography known as encoded reasoning. Prior LM steganography schemes operate in the token or lexical space, and a content-preserving paraphraser is the canonical and effective defense in recent work. We introduce conceptual steganography, in which each step of a CoT carries information through patterns of high-level reasoning behavior, rather than through lexical choice. Across four model families and two reasoning domains, this backdoor communication channel is shown to be consistently more robust to a strong paraphrase defense than standard keyword approaches, and the encoding of information into CoTs does not affect their utility in the reasoning process. Having raised awareness of this new risk, we then demonstrate that a strategy-aware paraphraser can close much of the channel, highlighting new challenges and recommended defenses for ensuring faithful LLM reasoning in the wild.

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### Recursive Flow Matching

Authors: Jiahe Huang, Sihan Xu, Sharvaree Vadgama, Rose Yu
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV, math.NA
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26535v1

Generative models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for solving physics systems and modeling complex spatiotemporal dynamics. However, achieving high physical accuracy without incurring high computational cost remains a fundamental challenge, as existing approaches face a critical speed-fidelity trade-off. In this work, we introduce Recursive Flow Matching (RecFM), a generative framework for forecasting complex spatiotemporal dynamics. RecFM enforces self-consistency to align trajectories across discretization scales, reducing discretization errors and improving performance across metrics for physics-based tasks. To our knowledge, this is the first method to achieve high-fidelity one- and few-step (2-4 step) dynamic generation for scientific systems with performance comparable to state-of-the-art multi-step solvers. Across challenging scientific benchmarks, RecFM achieves up to a 20$\times$ speedup over leading diffusion-based emulators while improving predictive accuracy. Furthermore, RecFM reduces mean squared error by over 15% compared to vanilla flow matching, offering a scalable and efficient solution for real-time scientific emulation.

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### A Hybrid Vision-Language Architecture for Automated Defect Reasoning and Report Generation in Industrial Inspection

Authors: Malikussaid, Imad Gohar
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26533v1

Automated industrial inspection requires both precise defect localization and structured maintenance report generation; in current practice these tasks are handled separately, with linguistic interpretation left to human experts. This paper describes a decoupled, edge-deployable pipeline for wind turbine blade inspection built from three components that each handle a distinct sub-task. The Eyes a YOLO26-x-obb oriented bounding-box detector localizes defects at dataset-native resolution. The Bridge a deterministic, parameter-free encoding module maps each detected bounding box to grid-referenced spatial tokens embedded in a structured prompt. The Brain a 4-bit quantized Qwen-2.5-1.5B model adapted with Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA) on 947 synthetically generated maintenance reports generates a structured JSON report from that prompt. Retrieval-Augmented Fine-Tuning (RAFT) further grounds each recommendation in indexed maintenance procedures. Five ablation experiments, scored by BLEU-4, ROUGE-L, Hallucination Rate (HR), and an LLM-as-a-Judge rubric, compare the pipeline against a monolithic vision-language model (VLM) baseline and against partial configurations in which one component is removed. The complete system achieves BLEU-4 0.41, HR=4%, and Expert Score = 8.6/10 compared with 0.07, 65%, and 3.3/10 for the zero-shot VLM baseline. The QLoRA-adapted 1.5B model generates higher-quality reports than a 671B-parameter generalist API model given identical detection evidence, at 47 tokens per second on a single T4-class GPU. The results show that purpose-built decoupled architecture with a small domain-specific training corpus outperforms a generalist end-to-end model on this structured generation task.

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### Which Changes Matter? Towards Trustworthy Legal AI via Relevance-Sensitive Evaluation and Solver-Grounded Reasoning

Authors: Chen Linze, Cai Yufan, Hou Zhe, Dong Jin Song
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26530v1

Legal reasoning requires distinguishing changes that matter from those that do not. Legal AI should remain stable under legally irrelevant perturbations, but should change when perturbations alter legally material points. We formulate this requirement as a legal-relevance-sensitive evaluation problem: LLMs should only be sensitive to the legally relevant change. We introduce a unified evaluation suite covering should-change and should-not-change evaluation across judicial fairness, robustness, and statute-confusion scenarios. Our evaluation shows that existing legal LLMs are systematically sensitive to legally irrelevant variations and often fail to distinguish related legal elements and statutory rules. To mitigate these failures, we present LexGuard, an adversarial multi-agent framework grounded in formal reasoning. LexGuard formalizes statutes into executable constraints, uses adversarial agents to extract competing fact-statute arguments, and invokes SMT solvers to verify legal satisfaction and logical consistency. Experiments show that LexGuard improves legal reasoning reliability by reducing vulnerability to manipulative framing, improving disambiguation among similar statutes, limiting the influence of legally irrelevant attributes, and increasing consistency under benign reformulations. We show that legal trustworthiness requires not only accuracy, but calibrated sensitivity to legally material changes.

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### Open-Weight LLM Fine-Tuning Defenses are Susceptible to Simple Attacks

Authors: Kevin Kuo, Chhavi Yadav, Virginia Smith
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26526v1

Recent defenses for safeguarding open-weight large language models (LLMs) are intended to prevent adversarial usage. Underlying these defenses is an assumption that new harmful behavior is learned through fine-tuning rather than elicited by jailbreaking the model. Yet, pretrained LLMs already encode substantial harmful knowledge across many domains, which raises an important question: can an adversary jailbreak safeguarded models, to achieve harmful usage without fine-tuning at all? In this paper, we show that open-weight safeguards are susceptible to simpler strategies that, despite being well known, have not been systematically evaluated against these safeguards. Specifically, we evaluate two low-cost attacks--abliteration and prefilling--that do not rely on gradient-based optimization. Across three harmfulness evaluation benchmarks (BeaverTails, HarmBench, and AdvBench), these attacks increase attack success rates against safeguarded open-weight models from below 10\% to a range of 16%-96%. To mitigate this vulnerability, we introduce abliteration-resistant tuning (ART), which incorporates an abliteration-based objective into training. ART can be layered onto existing defenses and reduces the success rates of abliteration, prefilling, and their combination by 10%-20%. These findings indicate that the attack surface for open-weight models is broader than previously characterized, and that evaluations of safeguarding defenses should incorporate a more diverse set of attack strategies beyond adversarial fine-tuning.

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### ReCA: Multi-Shot Long Video Extrapolation via Recursive Context Allocation

Authors: Akide Liu, Jinbo Xing, Chaojie Mao, Ye Li, Zeyu Zhang, Yefei He, Weijie Wang, Zihan Wang, Yu Liu, Gholamreza Haffari, Bohan Zhuang
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26525v1

Minute-scale cinematic video generation is a central challenge for generative video models. Existing paradigms address only fragments of this challenge: single-shot extrapolation preserves an anchor but lacks cinematic structure, while multi-shot storytelling imposes structure yet remains free to invent its visual states rather than continue an observed one. We define Multi-Shot Video Extrapolation (MSVE), a task that extends an observed frame or clip into a sequence of cinematically structured shots while preserving anchor state and advancing narrative intent. This setting operates under the finite per-call generation budget of short-video models. We identify three coupled bottlenecks: (1) global planners over-specify unsupported details from full screenplays; (2) shot-level prompts dilute task-relevant state when carrying the complete story; and (3) temporal chaining turns generated frames into a lossy memory in which identity, scene, object, and action state decay. MSVE reveals that long-video failure is not merely a limitation of context length, but a failure of context allocation. We propose Recursive Context Allocation (ReCA), an inference-time framework that allocates context hierarchically across planning and generation. ReCA recursively decomposes MSVE into context-bounded subproblems, invokes frozen generators at leaf nodes, and propagates structured state updates across time. To evaluate this setting, we further propose MSVE-Bench and NB-Q, a source-grounded protocol with prompts purpose-built for 3 to 5 minute long-video generation, a regime not addressed by existing short-clip benchmarks. Compared to previous methods, ReCA improves average normalized score by 8 to 16 percent over the strongest competing controller and improves multi-shot consistency metrics by 28 to 43 percent. View the project page at https://reca.vmv.re.

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### CmIVTP: Cross-modal Interaction-based Vessel Trajectory Prediction for Maritime Intelligence

Authors: Yuxu Lu, Dong Yang, Xiaoyu Li, Mengwei Bao, Congcong Zhao
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26524v1

Maritime intelligent transportation systems (MITS) are essential for ensuring navigation safety and efficiency in busy waterways. However, accurate vessel trajectory prediction remains challenging due to the limitations of single-source data. Automatic identification system (AIS) data is often sparse or unavailable for small vessels, while closed-circuit television (CCTV) data alone cannot fully capture dynamic vessel behavior. To mitigate these challenges, we propose a cross-modal interaction-based vessel trajectory prediction (named CmIVTP) framework to model the intricate interactions between vessel dynamics and environmental constraints. Specifically, we introduce a target-aware scene encoder to extract scene semantic features, effectively capturing vessel-environment interactions and enhancing trajectory prediction accuracy. In addition, we propose a cross-modal interaction transformer, which integrates AIS-derived motion features, CCTV-based environmental features, and scene representations. It leverages cross-modal attention mechanisms to simultaneously capture intra-modal semantics and inter-modal interactions, ensuring dynamically consistent and environmentally feasible predictions. Furthermore, we construct a vessel group trajectory bank by clustering historical AIS trajectories into representative motion patterns, providing an efficient and scalable approach for candidate trajectory generation. Additionally, we introduce the maritime multimodal dataset plus (named Maritime-MmD$^+$), a large-scale dataset that synchronizes AIS data and CCTV video data, providing robust support for multimodal trajectory prediction research. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CmIVTP achieves better performance on multimodal-driven vessel trajectory prediction benchmarks. The code resources for this work can be available at https://github.com/LouisYxLu/CmIVTP.

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### StreamSplit: Continuous Audio Representation Learning via Uncertainty-Guided Adaptive Splitting

Authors: Minh K. Quan, Pubudu N. Pathirana
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26523v1

Large-batch Contrastive Learning (CL), the foundation of modern representation learning, is fundamentally incompatible with the volatile resource constraints of edge devices. This conflict creates a dilemma: small on-device batches degrade model fidelity, while offloading to the cloud incurs unacceptable latency and bandwidth costs. Existing solutions often resort to static model compression, which fails to adapt to the runtime volatility of edge environments. To bridge this gap, we present StreamSplit, a novel framework that makes streaming CL practical across heterogeneous ARM client platforms. StreamSplit resolves the conflict between the continuous nature of ambient audio and the discrete batch requirements of models like CLAP and COLA. We introduce: (1) A distribution-based streaming framework that decouples representation quality from local batch size, using a tractable Hybrid Loss to maintain fidelity despite sparse updates; and (2) An Uncertainty-Guided Adaptive Splitter that uses a lightweight Reinforcement Learning (RL) policy to dynamically partition computation. Uniquely, this policy integrates real-time resource monitoring with embedding ambiguity to optimize the accuracy-latency trade-off on the fly. We evaluate StreamSplit on diverse hardware, from the resource-constrained Raspberry Pi 4 to the high-performance Apple M2. Results demonstrate that StreamSplit reduces per-sample latency by up to 4.7x and cuts bandwidth by 77.1% and energy by 52.3% compared to server-centric baselines. Crucially, it maintains accuracy within 2.2% of server-centric models, proving that adaptive, distributed learning is a viable path for the modern edge ecosystem.

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### InterSketch: An Interleaved Reasoning Model with Self-correcting Visual Sketch and Stepwise Reward

Authors: Zhiwei Ning, Wenwen Tong, Xiangli Kong, Shengnan Ma, Ziyi Shang, Jingcheng Ni, Tao Hu, Yong Xien Chng, Jixuan Ying, Zehuan Wu, Hanming Deng, Jie Yang et al.
Published: 2026-05-26
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26520v1

While vision-language models (VLMs) have exhibited multi-turn visual reasoning capabilities, their reasoning trajectories remain relatively shallow and are dominated by a text-centric paradigm, limiting their applicability to complex visual challenges. In contrast, human-like thought typically involves long-horizon reasoning with an interleaved visual-textual chain-of-thought (VT-CoT). To bridge this gap, we introduce InterSketch, an interleaved reasoning model to enhance the VT-CoT capability via self-correcting and stepwise reward mechanisms. InterSketch dynamically generates intermediate visual sketches using external tools and interleaves them with textual reasoning, enabling effective perception and logical reasoning over long-horizon visual understanding tasks. Specifically, in the first cold-start stage, we propose a synthesized high-quality interleaved VT-CoT dataset and include a reflection mechanism to enable the model's capability in multi-turn interleaved reasoning and self-correction. In the subsequent reinforcement learning (RL) stage, we design a stepwise reward mechanism to mitigate the sparsity of reward signals inherent in end-only supervision over long-horizon reasoning. Extensive experiments on visual reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of InterSketch, even outperforming proprietary models such as Gemini-3-Pro.

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