# Research Papers — 2026-05 · bundle page 79 of 326 > Full-text markdown of papers #3901–3950 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/79 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/78.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/80.md) ### Clarify, Abstain or Answer? Strategising in Conversation with Belief-Augmented Generation Authors: Joris Baan, Wilker Aziz, Barbara Plank, Raquel Fernández Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25831v2 Large language models (LLMs) define a distribution over text, which can be viewed as a probabilistic representation of uncertainty: sampling K responses yields a belief state - responses a model deems plausible. Existing work exploits this representation for narrow tasks like either decoding or selective prediction, and often requires manual interventions, not controlling generation directly. We propose Belief-Augmented Generation (BAG): grounding LLMs in their own belief state via the prompt and letting them reason over these K samples to decide on and execute a conversational strategy: clarify, abstain, or answer. In a multi-turn ambiguous question answering (QA) setting, we find that LLMs by default rarely clarify or abstain, ignoring uncertainty about the input (aleatoric) or facts (epistemic). BAG improves QA accuracy across six models and yields strategy decisions more faithful to their belief state than prompt-only baselines. Disentangling when to clarify from when to abstain, however, remains challenging. --- ### Clarify, Abstain or Answer? Strategising in Conversation with Belief-Augmented Generation Authors: Joris Baan, Wilker Aziz, Barbara Plank, Raquel Fernández Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25831v1 Large language models (LLMs) define a distribution over text, which can be viewed as a probabilistic representation of uncertainty: sampling K responses yields a belief state - responses a model deems plausible. Existing work exploits this representation for narrow tasks like either decoding or selective prediction, and often requires manual interventions, not controlling generation directly. We propose Belief-Augmented Generation (BAG): grounding LLMs in their own belief state via the prompt and letting them reason over these K samples to decide on a conversational strategy: answer, clarify, or abstain. In a multi-turn ambiguous QA setting, we find that LLMs by default rarely clarify or abstain, ignoring uncertainty about the input or facts. BAG improves QA accuracy across six models and yields strategy decisions more faithful to the belief state than prompt-only baselines. Disentangling when to clarify from when to abstain, however, remains challenging. --- ### OASIS: Observation-Action Space Alignment via SE(3) Trajectory Prediction for Robotic Manipulation Authors: Xinzhe Chen, Sihua Ren, Liqi Huang, Haowen Sun, Mingyang Li, Xingyu Chen, Zeyang Liu, Xuguang Lan Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25829v1 Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models and world action models (WAMs) advance robotic manipulation by enriching intermediate representations with auxiliary spatial features or future visual-state prediction. However, these representations largely remain within the observation space and do not share the rigid-body geometry of the action space, forcing the action decoder to implicitly recover this geometry. We propose OASIS, a visuomotor policy that aligns the intermediate representation with the action space via $SE(3)$ end-effector trajectory prediction. OASIS couples a 3D-aware feature encoder that fuses vision-language and metric-depth features with an $SE(3)$ trajectory predictor that produces a camera-frame end-effector trajectory. Conditioned on the predictor's pose-supervised hidden states, the action decoder generates action chunks consistent with rigid-body motion. Across simulation and real-world experiments, OASIS outperforms VLA and WAM baselines in success rate and out-of-distribution generalization. Our project page is available at https://npuhandsome.github.io/OASIS_web. --- ### Branched Signature Kernel Solvers for ODEs with rough Single-Trajectory signals Authors: Munawar Ali, Qi Feng, Charlie Pyle, George Xu Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: math.NA, cs.CE, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25826v2 We develop a branched signature kernel solver for linear and nonlinear ordinary differential equations driven by a \emph{single observed trajectory} of a possibly rough forcing signal--a setting common within earthquake engineering, finance, biology, and structural health monitoring, where only one forcing realization is available, and the solver must respect the underlying physical law without an ensemble of realizations. We first introduce a count-sampling construction method to turn the single observation into a hierarchical family of $N+1$ nested training paths on which the branched signature kernel can be evaluated; this allows the signature kernel machinery, originally designed for multi-realization regression problems, to operate on a single-trajectory observation. Then we build a kernel-collocation framework, which places the ansatz either on the highest-order derivative of the solution or on the solution itself. We prove a universal approximation theorem for the branched signature kernel, leveraging the Hairer--Kelly morphism to express branched signature evaluations through geometric signatures of time-extended paths. The offline solver is extended to a streaming Test/Train/Retrain protocol with optional closed-form online updates in both linear and nonlinear cases. Numerical experiments on six benchmarks show accurate, stable predictions across all regimes. --- ### (CLS) is Not Enough: Multi-Label Recognition via Patch-Level Inference and Adaptive Aggregation Authors: Akang Wang, Xili Deng, Zhanxuan Hu, Yi Zhao, Yonghang Tai, Huafeng Li Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25821v1 Vision-Language Models such as CLIP exhibit strong zero-shot recognition capability by aligning images with textual concepts, yet they often underperform on multi-label recognition where multiple objects co-exist. A key bottleneck is that the (CLS) token, as a single global visual representation, is insufficient to faithfully encode diverse targets with varying scales, contexts, and co-occurrence patterns. To address this limitation, we present a new multi-label image recognition framework, termed PIAA, which formulates prediction as Patch-level Inference followed by Adaptive Aggregation. Specifically, we first enhance patch-wise predictions from two complementary perspectives: (i) mitigating semantic entanglement in the visual encoder to obtain more discriminative patch representations, and (ii) learning an unsupervised visual classifier to narrow the vision-language modality gap. We then introduce an adaptive aggregation module that consolidates patch-level scores into the final multi-label prediction. Notably, the entire pipeline is fully training-free, requiring no gradient updates or parameter fine-tuning. Experiments show that our method achieves strong improvements with minimal extra computation, exceeding a 6% mAP gain on the challenging NUS-WIDE benchmark over representative baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/akang-wang/PIAA. --- ### Visual-Redundancy-Controlled Parallel Decoding for Diffusion-Based Multimodal Large Language Models Authors: Yulin Yuan, Hongshuo Zhao, Xiangming Meng Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25820v2 Diffusion-based multimodal large language models (dMLLMs) decode by iteratively predicting tokens at multiple masked positions in parallel. This turns each decoding step into a position-selection problem: the model must choose not only which predictions are reliable in isolation, but also which positions should be committed together as context for later decoding steps. Existing confidence-based decoding ranks masked positions independently and commits the top-K positions, largely ignoring whether the committed tokens provide complementary visual grounding. We identify a step-level limitation of this strategy in multimodal settings: high-confidence tokens selected in the same step can rely on overlapping visual grounding, introducing visual redundancy among the committed tokens and leaving less complementary visual grounding available for later decoding. To quantify this effect, we introduce the Visual Redundancy Index (VRI), which measures visual grounding overlap among tokens committed in parallel. To control this redundancy during decoding, we propose Visual-Redundancy-Controlled Decoding (VRCD), a training-free inference-time decoding method that uses token-to-image attention to prioritize visually complementary positions. Across diverse multimodal benchmarks, VRCD reduces visual redundancy and remaining-position entropy with modest runtime overhead. In longer decoding experiments, it also achieves relative accuracy gains of up to 18.8% on M^3CoT and 6.9% on MMBench over confidence-based decoding. Code is available at https://github.com/infiniteYuanyl/VRCD. --- ### On Reliability of Efficient Membership Inference Vulnerability Evaluation Authors: Joonas Jälkö, Gauri Pradhan, Ossi Räisä, Antti Honkela Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25819v1 Membership inference attacks (MIAs) are popular methods for empirically assessing the leakage of sensitive information in the training data through models or statistics learned from the data. The MIA vulnerability is often evaluated through false positive rate (FPR) and true positive rate (TPR) of a binary classifier that tries to predict whether a particular sample was in the training data. However, in order to reliably estimate the TPR especially for low FPR values, a lot of observations are needed, which in case of MIA translates to many target models, leading to large computational cost. To avoid excessive compute requirements, the MIA scores are often averaged over multiple individuals and multiple targeted models. We demonstrate two key weaknesses in this efficient MIA evaluation pipeline. First, we show that evaluating the TPR based on MIA scores concatenated across multiple individuals, commonly used to study vulnerabilities in the very low FPR regime, is not calibrated across the per-sample FPRs. This makes it unreliable as a tool for auditing differential privacy. To solve this, we propose a post-processing method to effectively calibrate the FPR across different samples. Second, we identify a finite population bias in the commonly used efficient likelihood-ratio attack (LiRA) implementation proposed by Carlini et al. 2022, leading to a positive bias in the per-sample vulnerability. --- ### Fine-Tuning Over Architectural Complexity: Broad-Coverage PII Detection on PIIBench with DeBERTa Authors: Pritesh Jha Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25816v1 Personally identifiable information (PII) detection systems are frequently trained within narrow source or domain boundaries, limiting coverage when deployed on heterogeneous text. We study model fine-tuning on a corrected multi-source PIIBench preparation spanning 82 retained entity types across ten source datasets. We evaluate three DeBERTa-based approaches: direct token classification fine-tuning, a source-conditioned hierarchical model (SC+H), and a three-phase curriculum extension (SC+H+Curr). Against eight published comparator systems on a reproducible 5,000-record held-out subset (test_5k), direct fine-tuned DeBERTa achieves F1 0.6476, while SC+H and the curriculum variant achieve 0.5899 and 0.2772 respectively; the strongest published comparator reaches only 0.1723. Because validation initially favoured SC+H, we perform a final streamed evaluation on the complete 100,002-record held-out split. Direct fine-tuning remains superior, achieving F1 0.6455 versus 0.5894 for SC+H. Entity-level analysis shows that direct fine tuning wins 54 of 82 fine entity types and all ten coarse groups by support-weighted entity F1, while SC+H retains localised advantages on 28 types. The results indicate that diverse task-specific training data and a simple weighted cross-entropy objective contribute more to broad-coverage PII detection than the tested architectural and curriculum complexity. --- ### Behind EvoMap: Characterizing a Self-Evolving Agent-to-Agent Collaboration Network Authors: Qiming Ye, Peixian Zhang, Yupeng He, Zifan Peng, Gareth Tyson Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25815v4 Agent-to-Agent (A2A) networks enable autonomous AI agents to collaborate by sharing reusable problem-solving instructions. However, how these decentralized ecosystems operate in practice remains largely unexplored. We present the first large-scale empirical study of EvoMap, a prominent A2A collaboration network. By analyzing over 1.5M assets and 128K agents, we show how design choices that prioritize scalable growth introduce trade-offs in reusability, evolution, and auditability. First, EvoMap's credit economy rewards agents for publishing valuable assets. Although this design encourages participation at scale, rewards are tied primarily to publication rather than adoption. This leads agents to mass-produce assets to accumulate credits. As a result, 98% of assets are never reused, while rewards become highly concentrated among a small fraction of agents. Second, EvoMap employs an algorithm (referred to as GDI) to score and rank the quality of these shared assets. We demonstrate that this scoring system is flawed: rather than measuring objective performance, an asset's rank is heavily dictated by unverified, self-reported metadata (e.g., claimed lines of code modified). This allows agents to trivially manipulate their asset's scores. Finally, EvoMap relies on agents to provide local execution logs as evidence that uploaded assets function correctly. Because these validations are not independently verified, over 84% of approved assets bypass quality checks using vacuous tests (e.g., console$.$log()). Our findings show that future A2A collaboration networks cannot rely on unverified self-reporting alone. Scalable collaboration requires mechanisms that balance open participation with verifiable execution and trustworthy evaluation. --- ### Adaptive Graph Refinement and Label Propagation with LLMs for Cost-Effective Entity Resolution Authors: Hongtao Wang, Renchi Yang, Haoran Zheng, Xiangyu Ke Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25814v1 Dirty entity resolution (ER), which identifies records referring to the same real-world entity from a single, messy dataset, is a fundamental task in data management and mining. However, the dominant blocking-matching-clustering paradigm for ER suffers from critical flaws. Its cascaded, decoupled workflow essentially produces a static, sparse graph plagued by missing edges (due to blocking failures) and noisy links (due to matching errors), causing error propagation and yielding suboptimal clusters, particularly when rigid transitivity is imposed in the clustering. We contend that matching and clustering are fundamentally synergistic, both optimizing for the construction of an ideal entity graph. Building upon this insight, we propose Alper, a unified framework that integrates these steps into an iterative probabilistic label propagation process over a global, evolving graph. Unlike disjoint blocking, Alper refines the graph structure and labels dynamically by adaptively integrating "weak but cheap" signals from graph propagation with "strong but expensive" LLM-based pairwise queries. For higher cost-effectiveness, we formulate the signal selection as a constrained optimization problem maximizing cumulative marginal gain under a query budget, solved via our greedy algorithm with provable theoretical guarantees. Our extensive experiments over eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that Alper is consistently superior to state-of-the-art cascaded pipelines. --- ### Geometry Adaptive Counterfactual Distribution Learning with Diffusion-Guided Smoothing Authors: Kwangho Kim Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: stat.ME, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25811v2 We study counterfactual distribution learning for high-dimensional outcomes whose laws may concentrate near lower-dimensional structure. Standard isotropic smoothing ignores this geometry, leading to unfavorable scaling and unstable local inference. We propose semiparametrically debiased, diffusion-guided estimators for smoothed counterfactual densities and their scores. These estimators combine causal nuisance adjustment with geometry-adaptive localization driven by a learned diffusion score, yielding second-order nuisance remainders while aligning smoothing with local outcome geometry. We derive asymptotic expansions, integrated risk bounds, and simultaneous inference for smoothed densities and Stein functionals, with extensions to ambient density and score targets under additional approximation conditions. The variance term in the risk bounds is governed by the concentration of the smoothing operator: suitable geometric conditions yield intrinsic rather than ambient scaling, while an explicit drift term quantifies the cost of estimating the geometry. CelebA-based semi-synthetic experiments show faster error decay and improved stability for geometry-adaptive one-step methods, illustrating their applicability to high-dimensional embeddings. --- ### Data-driven Head Motion Generation through Natural Gaze-Head Coordination Authors: Xiaohan Liu, Yilin Wen, Yusuke Sugano Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25810v1 We present the first data-driven approach to model temporal gaze-head coordination from large-scale in-the-wild facial videos. To obtain training data for generalizable learning, we propose an automatic pipeline that extracts natural yet diverse gaze and head motions with off-the-shelf appearance-based gaze estimators. To capture the probabilistic correlation and temporal dynamics of gaze-head coordination, we build our model on a generative conditional Variational Autoencoder for plausible yet diverse gaze-conditioned head motion generations. We further apply our framework to gaze-controlled facial video generation, where we enable video generation with natural and realistic head motion correlated to the input gaze - an aspect that has not been emphasized before. Human evaluation and quantitative comparisons demonstrate our method's effectiveness and validate our design choices, with evaluators showing statistically significant preference for our approach over baseline methods. --- ### An Analysis Focused on Womens Safety: Can VAD Models Be Enhanced by a Multi-modal Dataset? Authors: Sangeeta ., Maddikuntla Sai Prajwal, Debi Prosad Dogra, Kamalakar Vijay Thakare, Hyungjoo Jung, Ig-Jae Kim, Heeseung Choi Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25806v3 Women's safety and security are paramount for a modern society. Often, crimes scenes get recorded through low-resolution CCTV cameras limiting the efficiency of video anomaly detection (VAD) models. Despite substantial progress in VAD research, women-centric anomalies are still underrepresented in datasets as well as in models. Existing datasets primarily cover well-lit, high-resolution and close-shot videos that are inadequate to tackle critical anomalies such as chain snatching, stalking, inappropriate touch, and other subtle forms of crime against women. To address this, we present a new benchmark, referred to as ExtrAnom. It contains 1001 videos (both anomalies and normal) with four textual annotations; one human-generated and three LLM-generated. The videos are arranged in 5 different categories of crimes. The dataset comprises low-light (8%), low-resolution (13%), long-shot (15%), and daytime (64%) anomaly videos. It includes stalking (3.9%), chain snatching (17.6%), kidnapping (7.3%), assassinations (2.3%), harassment (18.9%), and normal (50%) videos. It is possible to perform cross-modal and VLM-based validations using ExtrAnom. We have benchmarked it against popular unimodal and multi-modal VAD datasets (e.g., XD-Violence, UCF-Crime, and UCA) and SOTA methods. Experiments reveal that existing datasets are insufficient to deal with women-centric anomalies. We believe ExtrAnom can fill this critical gap in VAD research. --- ### Event-to-Video Reconstruction using Spatio-Temporal and Frequency-Enhanced Deep Neural Networks Authors: Ramna Maqsood, Paulo Nunes, Luís Ducla Soares, Caroline Conti Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25804v1 Event cameras offer significant advantages over conventional frame-based counterparts, including high temporal resolution, low latency, and energy efficiency. These characteristics make them suitable for high-speed and high-dynamic range scene acquisition scenarios; however, the lack of dense intensity frames limits the direct applicability of conventional computer vision methods for scene understanding. Event-to-video (E2V) reconstruction seeks to bridge this gap by converting asynchronous event streams into a sequence of synchronous video frames. Existing E2V reconstruction methods based on convolutional neural networks and transformers operate primarily in the spatial domain and often struggle to recover fine structural details while suppressing severe reconstruction artifacts. To address these issues, we propose MSFET-E2V, a novel multiscale frequency-enhanced transformer model. At its core lies a cross-domain attention module, which fuses spatio-temporal features with frequency-aware representations derived from the discrete wavelet transform. Unlike prior methods relying solely on spatial attention, our approach effectively captures both local and global structures by taking into account low- and high-frequency components, enhancing detail preservation and robustness across various motion scenarios. Furthermore, we propose a lightweight wavelet-enhanced skip block that serves as a skip connection, facilitating artifact suppression and structural detail refinement through joint spatial-frequency domain processing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MSFET-E2V achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods on multiple real-world event datasets, offering significant gains in reconstruction quality. Moreover, compared to the existing transformer-based method, our proposed model significantly reduces the number of parameters, the GPU memory usage, and inference time. --- ### ATV-Net: Adaptive Triple-View Network with Dynamic Feature Fusion Authors: Sheng-Wei Chan, Hsin-Jui Pan, Chun-Po Shen, Chia-Min Lin, Yung-Che Wang, Jen-Shiun Chiang Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25803v2 Recent advances in semantic segmentation rely heavily on attention-based and transformer-style architectures that, while accurate, introduce considerable architectural complexity and computational cost. This paper asks whether a compact CNN-based segmentation head can remain competitive by adaptively selecting useful receptive-field evidence. We propose ATV-Net, an Adaptive Triple-View Network that attaches a lightweight head to a conventional backbone. The head organizes three complementary views -- point-wise, neighborhood-level, and enlarged context -- and fuses them through an Adaptive Decision Gate that generates image-dependent weights from global feature statistics. This allows the model to emphasize different receptive-field responses according to scene content, without dense attention or multi-scale aggregation. Experiments on Cityscapes and Pascal VOC 2012 show that ATV-Net achieves 80.31% mIoU on Cityscapes with ResNet-101 and 80.90% with ConvNeXt-Tiny, and 86.7% and 88.5% mIoU on Pascal VOC 2012, respectively, while requiring fewer GFLOPs than representative context-aggregation and attention-based heads. The results indicate that adaptive receptive-field selection remains a practical and effective design choice for CNN-based semantic segmentation. --- ### Rethinking VLM Representation for VLA Initialization Authors: Weifeng Lin, Siyuan Huang, Hao Li, Tingwei Chen, Ruichuan An, Xinyu Wei, Jianbo Liu, Hongsheng Li Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25802v1 Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models widely adopt pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as policy backbones, yet it remains unclear what kind of pretrained VLM representation is useful as a VLA initialization. In this paper, we study VLA initialization as a controlled representation-design problem along three axes: capability-level embodied VQA supervision, parameter-update strategy, and robot-data pretraining. Our experiments show that the original pretrained VLM representation is a key source of action performance. However, embodied VQA adaptation does not yield uniform gains: its benefit depends on downstream bottlenecks, and gains from different capability domains are not simply additive. For update strategy, LoRA provides a more reliable initialization than Full Finetune, indicating that overly reshaping the pretrained representation can weaken VLA initialization. Robot-data pretraining further improves VLA initialization, with the strongest variant obtained by staged LoRA-based training. Together, these findings suggest that effective VLM-to-VLA adaptation should inject action-relevant embodied and robot-trajectory signals while preserving the pretrained VLM representation that remains useful for action learning. --- ### PixelWizard: Towards Efficient High-Fidelity Video Generation at Ultra-Large Spatial Resolution Authors: Wenxue Li, Jingjing Ren, Peng Zhang, Tian Ye, Daiguo Zhou, Jian Luan, Lei Zhu Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25801v1 High-resolution video generation faces a coupled bottleneck of optimization instability and prohibitive computational costs. The massive expansion of the token sequence not only biases optimization toward local textures at the expense of global coherence, leading to structural collapse, but also imposes prohibitive training costs and severe inference latency. To address this, we propose PixelWizard, a framework that hierarchically decouples global structure modeling from fine-grained detail synthesis. PixelWizard first establishes a compact spatiotemporal anchor to concentrate dense structural priors, which then guides fine-grained generation at high resolution. This mitigates the local optimization bias to ensure structural stability without compromising high-frequency details. Leveraging this structural stability, we introduce Noise-Span Aligned Shortcut Training to break the inference bottleneck. By explicitly modeling the step size, this mechanism allows the model to traverse the generation trajectory with large steps. Crucially, we incorporate Exponential Index-Biased Sampling and Adaptive Noise-Span Calibration to align optimization with the shifted noise schedules of high-resolution grids, ensuring robust few-step inference without incurring the heavy overhead of distillation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PixelWizard achieves superior visual quality while accelerating the generative sampling of native 2K/4K videos by over 10x. --- ### Addressing Exacerbated Attention Sink for Source-Free Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning Authors: Shuai Yi, Yixiong Zou, Yuhua Li, Ruixuan Li Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25799v1 Vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have shown impressive generalization capabilities, yet their potential for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CDFSL) remains underexplored, where the model needs to transfer source-domain information to target domains with scarce training data. While the attention sink phenomenon has been observed in VLMs for certain tasks, its role in CDFSL scenarios has not been studied. In this paper, we uncover a critical issue overlooked by prior works: standard target-domain few-shot fine-tuning in CDFSL significantly exacerbates the attention sink problem, leading to poor discriminability across classes. To understand this phenomenon, through extensive experiments, we interpret it as the model's shortcut learning for domain adaptation: to overcome the huge domain gap between the source and target domains, the model shows a high tendency to push tokens that are initially closer to target-domain classes (i.e., simple tokens) to be even closer to these classes, exacerbating the attention sink and wasting the capability of learning other discriminative but initially further tokens (i.e., hard tokens). To address this, we propose a novel approach to dynamically re-weight tokens according to their relevance with target-domain classes during the target-domain finetuning, which explicitly suppresses the model's reliance on these simple tokens and enhances the learning of hard tokens, reducing sink tokens and enhancing discriminability. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets validate the rationale of our method, demonstrating new state-of-the-art performance. Our codes are available at https://github.com/shuaiyi308/TIR. --- ### SAMark: A Self-Anchored Text Watermarking with Paragraph-Level Paraphrase Robustness Authors: Jiahao Huo, Wenjie Qu, Yibo Yan, Kening Zheng, Jiaheng Zhang, Xuming Hu, Philip S. Yu, Mingxun Zhou Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25796v3 Semantic-level watermarking (SWM) improves robustness against text modifications by treating sentences as the basic unit. However, robustness to paragraph-level paraphrasing remains difficult because such attacks globally disrupt watermark signals by changing sentence order. In this work, we propose SAMark, a self-anchored watermarking framework that removes the dependency on sentence order by establishing a step-independent green region in semantic space. To improve detectability, we introduce a multi-channel hyperbolic scoring mechanism that amplifies watermark signals while suppressing noise from weakly aligned candidates. We further propose a diversity-aware filtering strategy that combines hard filtering with soft regularization, extending beyond simple n-gram repetition filters to address semantic redundancy. Experimental results show that SAMark achieves up to 90.2% TP@FP1% under typical paragraph-level paraphrasing attacks, outperforming the strongest prior baseline by more than 30% on average, while maintaining generation quality competitive with unwatermarked text and breaking the robustness-quality trade-off that limits prior methods. Our code will be released at (this URL)(https://github.com/Z1zs/SAMark). --- ### When Can We Trust Early Warnings? Leakage-Excluded Early Outcome Prediction from LMS Interaction Logs Authors: Ngoc Luyen Le, Marie-Hélène Abel, Bertrand Laforge Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25794v1 Early-warning models built from Learning Management System (LMS) logs aim to predict end-of-course outcomes early enough to enable timely learner support. However, reported "early" performance is often inflated by temporal leakage. This occurs when the pipeline uses information that would not yet be available at the time of prediction. We formalize cutoff-based early outcome prediction under a temporal availability constraint and introduce LEAP (Leakage-Excluded Early-Availability Protocol), which enforces cutoff-first truncation prior to joins and aggregation and audits feature provenance to prevent post-cutoff evidence from entering the benchmark. We instantiate LEAP on the public Open University Learning Analytics Dataset (OULAD) as a multi-step protocol for leakage-controlled evaluation across weekly cutoffs. Using several standard learning methods, we evaluate performance using ROC-AUC, PR-AUC, Brier score, and F1@0.5. Results show improving performance as the observation window expands, with a marked gain around week~3; Random Forest performs best at the earliest cutoffs, while Gradient Boosting dominates thereafter. Leakage ablations further show that temporal violations, especially through assessment information, can inflate apparent "early" performance. --- ### On the Benefits of Free Exploration for Regret Minimization in Multi-Armed Bandits Authors: Yunlong Hou, Zixin Zhong, Vincent Y. F. Tan Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.IT, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25789v1 We study a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where an agent is granted a free exploration budget before regret accumulates, a setting not captured by the classic regret minimization or pure exploration paradigms. The goal is to design an adaptive policy that strategically explores the bandit instance in the initial free exploration phase and minimizes the cumulative regret in the subsequent phase. We formalize this regret minimization with free exploration problem and identify an interesting regime where the free exploration budget scales logarithmically with the time horizon. To quantify the amount of regret saved with high probability as a result of the availability of the free exploration phase, we introduce a novel set of policies known as $(α,β)$-probably saving policies. We propose a two-phase, probably saving algorithm, UFE-KLUCB-H, which consists of a principled free exploration policy, UFE, and a history-aware regret minimization policy KLUCB-H. Instance-dependent upper bounds on UFE-KLUCB-H are derived, showing that UFE-KLUCB-H accumulates strictly less regret than policies that do not have access to a free exploration phase. Complementarily, we derive instance-dependent lower bounds based on novel multi-instance perturbation arguments tailored to the free-exploration setting, demonstrating the near-optimality of UFE-KLUCB-H for two-valued bandits. Our upper and lower bounds reveal sharp phase transitions in the accumulated regret depending on the amount of available free exploration. Simulations are conducted to demonstrate that forced exploration and adaptivity in the algorithm lead to greater regret savings. --- ### NPSolver: Neural Poisson Solver with Iterative Physics Supervision Authors: Bocheng Zeng, Rui Zhang, Runze Mao, Mengtao Yan, Xuan Bai, Yang Liu, Zhi X. Chen, Hao Sun Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25786v1 Efficiently solving Poisson equations on complex, irregular domains remains a fundamental challenge in scientific computing, as classical iterative solvers often suffer from prohibitive runtime due to ill-conditioned systems. While neural operators offer a fast alternative, they typically rely on large-scale labeled datasets or struggle with unstable training dynamics when using physics-informed residual losses. We propose \textsc{NPSolver}, a neural Poisson solver trained without solution labels via iterative physics supervision. Instead of relying on fully converged numerical solutions or raw PDE residuals, \textsc{NPSolver} utilizes a small number of preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) steps to refine its own predictions, providing a more stable and well-scaled training signal. Theoretical analysis confirms that this iterative supervision serves as a well-conditioned error proxy and that a stop-gradient design is essential for optimization stability. To better capture boundary-driven features under mixed boundary conditions, we further introduce the Boundary-Aware Transolver (\textsc{BA-Transolver}) architecture that explicitly separates interior and boundary tokenization. Extensive evaluations on 2D and 3D irregular geometries demonstrate that \textsc{NPSolver} outperforms both physics-informed and data-driven baselines. Furthermore, a downstream thermal control task highlights the model's capability for conducting efficient and reliable gradient-based boundary control. We will release our codes and data at https://github.com/intell-sci-comput/NPSolver. --- ### A Scalable Benchmark Test Suite for Dynamic Multi-Objective Optimization with a Changing Number of Objectives Authors: Ke Shang, Zhiyun Xiao, Yuxuan Liu, Jianguo Li, Shaojiang Wang, Wei Sun Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25785v1 Dynamic multi-objective optimization with a changing number of objectives has recently attracted increasing attention due to its relevance to real-world problems whose evaluation criteria may evolve over time. However, existing benchmark test suites for this problem setting suffer from a fundamental limitation: when the number of objectives changes, the objective functions themselves also change implicitly. This makes it difficult to isolate and evaluate an algorithm's capability to handle dynamics in the number of objectives alone. In this paper, we analyze this issue in detail and show that several theoretical properties claimed in prior studies rely on an assumption that is violated by commonly used test suites. To address this problem, we propose a scalable benchmark test suite in which the objective functions are fixed throughout the optimization process, while the number of active objectives changes over time. Our benchmark is constructed by defining a maximum-objective problem and dynamically selecting subsets of objectives. To avoid degeneracy issues in classical DTLZ and WFG problems, we adopt Minus-DTLZ and Minus-WFG formulations, in which all objectives are mutually conflicting. Extensive benchmark studies using representative algorithms from the literature demonstrate the usefulness and flexibility of the proposed test suite. --- ### Beyond Appearance: Can Multimodal Large Language Models Exploit Vertical Structure for Remote Sensing Natural Scene Understanding? Authors: Jing Huang, Duanchu Wang, Junjie Yang, Zihang Cheng, Cheng Li, Lin Cui, Zhouyi Wu, Di Wang Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25784v2 Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced rapidly in remote-sensing analysis, yet existing evaluations remain predominantly 2D-centric. Because spectrally confused regions can appear nearly identical yet differ substantially in vertical structure, appearance alone is often insufficient for reliable semantic interpretation in natural scenes. Vertical structure therefore provides decision-critical physical evidence, yet whether current MLLMs can effectively perceive, ground, and utilize such geometric evidence remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce VertiCue-Bench, the first diagnostic benchmark that uses controlled interventions to probe whether vertical height evidence is actually perceived, grounded, and utilized, and we establish a three-stage evidence-utilization framework of Perception--Grounding--Utilization. By constructing a Representation Intervention Spectrum spanning multiple presentation and interaction modalities, including Raw Visual, Tool-assisted, and Oracle Text conditions, together with controlled counterfactual tests, we conduct an in-depth disentangled diagnosis across 10 state-of-the-art models. Our experiments reveal and formally characterize the Vertical Structure Utilization Gap. Although current models exhibit emerging geometric perception capabilities, they still struggle to accurately ground vertical evidence to relevant spatial entities and integrate it into high-level semantic decisions. This finding identifies a critical bottleneck in developing physically grounded and geometry-aware remote-sensing MLLMs. --- ### VertiCue-Bench: Diagnosing Whether MLLMs Use Height Cues to Resolve 2D Ambiguity in Remote Sensing Natural Scenes Authors: Jing Huang, Duanchu Wang, Junjie Yang, Zihang Cheng, Cheng Li, Lin Cui, Zhouyi Wu, Di Wang Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25784v1 Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently shown promising progress in geospatial reasoning. However, existing remote sensing benchmarks remain largely 2D-centric, evaluating models primarily on optical appearance. In natural environments, this paradigm breaks down due to severe spectral confusion, where ecologically distinct regions share similar textures but differ fundamentally in vertical structure. In such cases, explicit 3D structural data, such as Canopy Height Models (CHMs), become essential geometric evidence for semantic disambiguation. Yet, it remains unclear whether current MLLMs can genuinely leverage vertical cues to resolve appearance-level ambiguity. To address this gap, we introduce VertiCue-Bench, the first diagnostic benchmark for CHM-grounded geospatial reasoning. VertiCue-Bench comprises 1,534 carefully curated instances across 17 tasks, explicitly disentangling low-level height perception from ambiguity-aware semantic reasoning. Evaluations on 14 state-of-the-art general and remote-sensing-specialized MLLMs, combined with counterfactual modality testing, reveal a striking perception-reasoning dissociation. While models exhibit emerging competence in reading raw CHM height cues, they largely fail to translate geometric perception into reliable semantic reasoning, often underperforming RGB-only baselines when joint constraints are required. Overall, VertiCue-Bench exposes a critical geometry-to-semantics gap in natural scene understanding, offering actionable insights for advancing geospatial MLLMs. --- ### Double Triangle Annotation: A Scalable Human-in-the-Loop Framework for High-Precision Historical Document Annotation Authors: Yi Ren Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25781v1 Evaluating structured-information extraction from historical documents at scale requires high-precision ground-truth annotations, yet traditional manual labeling is expensive and fully automated pipelines built on large language models are prone to hallucination. We propose Double Triangle Annotation, a two-layer human-in-the-loop framework that leverages cross-model consensus to automate the majority of annotation work while ensuring high-precision outputs. In the first layer, two architecturally independent Multimodal Large Language Models annotate each document in parallel; when they agree, the label is auto-accepted, and disagreements are routed to a human jury. A second layer cross-checks two such systems against each other, escalating residual conflicts to a domain expert. The framework rests on a single assumption -- error independence between models -- requires no distributional priors or task-specific calibration, and becomes more autonomous as model capability improves. On the Guides Rosenwald, a corpus of French medical directories spanning 1887-1906, the framework achieves a final Word Error Rate of 0.003. Applied at scale, model consensus auto-accepts over 85% of 13,595 fields. We release the resulting benchmark -- the first structured-extraction ground truth for the Rosenwald Guides -- to support future work on historical document processing. --- ### OMGTex: One-stage Multi-style Facial Texture Reconstruction without Geometry Guidance Authors: Zitong Xiao, Yuda Qiu, Zisheng Ye, Xiaoguang Han Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25778v1 We propose OMGTex, an end-to-end diffusion-based framework for reconstructing high-quality and editable facial UV textures from multi-style facial images. Existing texture reconstruction methods face two major limitations: (1) Fragility due to reliance on 3D geometry priors, which are difficult to estimate accurately, especially under facial occlusions or in stylized domains; and (2) A lack of semantic disentanglement, inhibiting region-specific texture editing and style transfer. Our work addresses both challenges simultaneously. Our core innovation is a geometry-free pipeline that directly maps a 2D face image to its corresponding editable UV texture. We introduce two key techniques: First, to address the challenge of UV misalignment common in diffusion generation, we introduce a gradient-guided refinement strategy at inference time, which explicitly corrects structural consistency. Second, we leverage the inherent semantic distribution capability of diffusion models and design a novel training paradigm to enhance this tendency, enabling semantic-aware editing of facial texture. Furthermore, to address the data scarcity in multi-style texture reconstruction, we construct CANVAS, the first comprehensive paired texture reconstruction dataset covering realistic and diverse stylized domains. To the best of our knowledge, OMGTex is the first geometry-free inference framework that achieves robust, style-consistent, and editable facial texture reconstruction across diverse domains. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple facial texture benchmarks. --- ### DRFusion: Drift-Resilient Temporally Consistent Infrared-Visible Video Fusion Authors: Xingyuan Li, Haoyuan Xu, Shulin Li, Xiang Chen, Zhiying Jiang, Jinyuan Liu Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25775v1 Infrared and visible video fusion is essential for achieving comprehensive perception in dynamic scenes. However, maintaining temporal consistency remains a formidable challenge. Conventional methods relying on optical flow often suffer from geometric rigidity and ghosting artifacts. Moreover, standard diffusion-based fusion models typically operate in a frame-by-frame manner; when extended to autoregressive settings, they lack intrinsic temporal constraints and are prone to severe error accumulation and drifting, where minor artifacts amplify over time. To address these limitations, we propose a drift-resilient video fusion method that reformulates the task as history-conditioned motion generation. We introduce Stabilized History Guidance and Soft Temporal Anchoring to reframe temporal consistency as spectral filtering, implicitly aggregating motion dynamics without rigid alignment. Furthermore, our Decoupled Structure-Motion Adaptation strategy bridges pre-trained priors and structural constraints via two-stage training and latent refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both fusion quality and temporal stability. --- ### Efficient Benchmarking Is Just Feature Selection and Multiple Regression Authors: Sam Bowyer, Acyr Locatelli, Kris Cao Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: stat.ML, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25773v2 Efficient benchmarking techniques aim to lower the computational cost of evaluating LLMs by predicting full benchmark scores using only a subset of a benchmark's questions. By reframing this problem as an instance of multiple regression with feature selection, we find that existing efficient benchmarking methods can be greatly improved by simply using kernel ridge regression at the prediction stage. Additionally, using an information-theoretic feature-selection algorithm called minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR), we can further improve upon these methods by selecting question subsets that will be maximally useful for prediction. Except in very data-poor settings, these approaches consistently achieve smaller prediction errors (in both MAE and RMSE), and greater ranking correlation between predicted and true scores (in both Spearman $ρ$ and Kendall $τ$) across a range of benchmarks using both binary and continuous metrics. Furthermore, mRMR subsampling is much faster than competitor methods (which often involve fitting probabilistic models or running clustering algorithms), and is more likely to select the same questions under different random seeds or training data splits. Tutorial code can be found at https://github.com/sambowyer/mrmr_eval . --- ### MDGMIX: Boundary-Aware Subgraph Mixing for Multi-Domain Graph Pre-Training Authors: Ziyu Zheng, Yaming Yang, Ziyu Guan, Wei Zhao, Xinyan Huang Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25771v1 Multi-domain graph pre-training is a crucial step in constructing foundational graph models with cross-domain generalization capabilities. However, existing methods predominantly rely on jointly training all source domain graphs, resulting in high computational costs. Furthermore, it remains unclear whether all source domain graph data contribute equally to effective transfer. This paper empirically reveals significant data redundancy in multi-domain graph pre-training. Based on this finding, we propose the Multi-domain Graph Pre-training Framework, MDGMIX, which combines boundary-aware subgraph mixing with hierarchical discrimination. By selecting boundary nodes to construct challenging mixed-domain subgraphs, MDGMIX employs coarse-grained domain discrimination and fine-grained domain decomposition losses to decouple shared patterns from domain-specific patterns. During adaptation, MDGMIX employs a lightweight prompt weighting mechanism to transfer source domain knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MDGMIX consistently outperforms strong baselines in few-shot classification tasks while exhibiting superior time and memory efficiency. The code is available at: https://github.com/zhengziyu77/MDGMIX. --- ### SAFE-Diff: Scale-Aware Attention and Feature-Dispersive Diffusion with Uncertainty Estimation for Contrast-Enhanced Breast MRI Synthesis Authors: Tianyu Zhang, Xinglong Liang, Jarek van Dijk, Luyi Han, Chunyao Lu, Antonio Portaluri, Xinghe Xie, Yaofei Duan, Nika Rasoolzadeh, Xin Wang, Yuan Gao, Muzhen He et al. Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25767v2 Synthesizing high fidelity contrast enhanced MRI is clinically valuable for safer and more efficient breast cancer screening, yet remains challenging due to complex lesion textures and heterogeneous enhancement patterns. --- ### Concept Unlearning via Cross-Attention Activation Projection for Diffusion Models Authors: Saemi Moon, Suhyeon Jun, Seoyeon Lee, Dongwoo Kim Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25765v1 Concept unlearning aims to erase a target concept from a pretrained text-to-image diffusion model without retraining. Closed-form methods are attractive in this setting because they apply a single deterministic edit to the cross-attention weights and add no inference-time cost. Existing closed-form methods, however, represent the target concept through the text encoder's response to a few short anchor prompts that name it, and paraphrased prompts that evoke the concept without naming it consistently bypass the edit. We argue that the target should instead be represented in the cross-attention activation space. Text embeddings describe the user's prompt, while cross-attention activations describe what the model is about to render, and the latter generalize to paraphrase the anchor templates do not cover. Building on this observation, we propose PURE (Projection in U-Net Rendering for Erasure), a closed-form method that builds the forget and retain bases from per-layer cross-attention activations captured along a short denoising trajectory and applies a single linear projector to the cross-attention key and value weights. On a recent holistic concept-unlearning benchmark covering ten concepts across artistic style, intellectual property, celebrity, and NSFW categories, PURE significantly reduces target leakage under paraphrased and adversarial prompts while preserving retain concepts close to the unedited model, yielding the best overall forget-retain trade-off among evaluated methods. --- ### Benchmarking Pathology Foundation Models for Spatial Domain Understanding Authors: Bokai Zhao, Yiyang Zhang, Yuanchi Zhu, Hanqing Chao, Long Bai, Tai Ma, Minfeng Xu, Ming Song, Tianzi Jiang Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25764v1 Pathology foundation models (PFMs) have emerged as a core approach for learning transferable representations from whole slide images (WSIs), and they are typically benchmarked through downstream clinical endpoints. While such task level evaluations are indispensable, they offer limited insight into what the representations themselves encode, particularly whether PFM embeddings can distinguish meaningful tissue regions and capture their spatial relationships. We present SpaPath-Bench, a representation level benchmark designed to diagnose spatial representation capability in PFMs. SpaPath-Bench formulates spatial domain identification (SDI) on paired whole slide image and spatial transcriptomics (ST) data as a diagnostic task. It curates 42 public paired WSI and ST slides, enables large scale evaluation across 19 encoders and seven SDI methods, and measures partition quality using three complementary criteria: unsupervised spatial coherence, transcriptomics referenced agreement, and expert referenced agreement. Across 83K runs, SpaPath-Bench reveals that different pretraining paradigms capture distinct aspects of tissue spatial architecture, and it provides practical guidance for building the next generation of spatially aware computational pathology models. Code and data pipelines are publicly available at https://bokai-zhao.github.io/SpaPath-benchboard/. --- ### AI-T2I: Aggregating-and-Isolating Cross-Attention to Diffusion Models for Text-to-Image Synthesis Authors: Shipeng Cao, Biao Qian, Haipeng Liu, Yang Wang, Meng Wang Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25763v3 Text-to-image synthesis has made significant progress, benefiting from the strong generative capabilities of diffusion models. However, these models struggle to achieve precise text-to-image alignment within cross-attention maps during the denoising process. Existing works primarily focus on inter-subject-token activations (i.e., cross-attention scores) overlap for different subjects, overlooking the intra-subject-token activations scattering issue for identical subjects. In this paper, we propose an Aggregating-and-Isolating cross-attention approach to diffusion models for Text-to-Image synthesis, dubbed AI-T2I. Technically, to address the scattering issue, we devise an aggregation loss to identify and consolidate the scattered intra-token activations, which implicitly helps mitigate the potential overlap issue. Upon that, an isolation loss is further introduced to push the inter-token activations apart, thus fulfilling precise text-to-image alignment. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of AI-T2I over the state-of-the-art works for text-to-image synthesis. Furthermore, our AI-T2I exhibits excellent generalization across other tasks, e.g., controllable layout generation and personalized generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/Hatter77/AI-T2I. --- ### Towards Anatomically Plausible Human Image Generation via Synthetic Localized Preferences Authors: Bao Li, Yuliang Xiu, Zhen Liu Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25759v1 Large-scale text-to-image foundation models have achieved remarkable visual realism, yet generating human images with correct anatomical structures remains challenging. Existing approaches enforce anatomical constraints through part-specific modules or localized loss weighting during supervised fine-tuning on high-quality human photos, but such datasets are limited and often provide ambiguous optimization signals due to confounding factors such as lighting, pose, and background. Preference-based alignment offers an alternative, but standard Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) treats all pixels equally and therefore fails to exploit the localized nature of anatomical artifacts. To address this, we propose the framework of Alignment via Synthetic Anatomical Preference (ASAP), which constructs controlled preference pairs through a localized degradation mechanism applied to high-fidelity human images. This mechanism performs a controlled experiment on images by introducing explicit anatomical errors in targeted regions while preserving the remaining content. With this mechanism, we create the Human Anatomical Preference (HAP) dataset with over 10K curated pairs for effective anatomical alignment of text-to-image human image generative models. To better leverage the locality of these controlled preference pairs, we introduce a localized and margin-bounded variant of DPO that prioritizes optimization in targeted anatomical regions while enforcing a finite preference margin to prevent over-optimization and preserve global semantics. We further introduce HAF-Bench, a benchmark for systematic evaluation of anatomical fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ASAP consistently reduces anatomical errors across multiple foundation models while maintaining overall image quality. --- ### StreamProfileBench: A Benchmark for Fine-Grained User Profile Inference in Real-World Streaming Scenarios Authors: Sizhe Wang, Feiyu Duan, Juelin Wang, Liwen Zhang, Zhongyu Wei Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25758v3 Large Language Models (LLMs) have reshaped user profiling, yet current evaluations mainly focus on static data snapshots. This paradigm overlooks the reality of personalized systems, where User-Generated Content (UGC) arrives continuously and fine-grained profiles evolve rapidly. To bridge this gap, we introduce StreamProfileBench, a large-scale benchmark for fine-grained streaming user profiling. We formalize streaming user profiling as a continuous state maintenance task and curate a highly authentic dataset comprising over 120,000 UGC posts from 7,000+ real users across five diverse platforms. By leveraging the temporal correlation of user interests, we further propose a novel, annotation-free evaluation framework. Extensive experiments across 14 leading LLMs reveal that continuous profile updating remains an open challenge. Models exhibit a systemic conservative bias, over-retaining past interests while failing to recognize interest decay. Ablation experiments further validate the practical utility and necessity of the streaming paradigm. Data and code are hosted in https://github.com/WaterWang-001/StreamProfileBench. --- ### Broadband Hyperspectral 3D Imaging using Dispersed Structured Light Authors: Suhyun Shin, Yunseong Moon, Ryota Maeda, David B. Lindell, Kiriakos N. Kutulakos, Seung-Hwan Baek Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25757v2 Hyperspectral 3D imaging enables the capture of dense spectral information and scene geometry but has traditionally been confined to narrow spectral windows, typically the visible range. In this work, we introduce a broadband hyperspectral 3D imaging (BH3D) method to extend this capability across the full visible-near-infrared and short-wavelength infrared (SWIR) spectrum (450-1500 nm). This broad coverage is critical as it captures complementary physical cues: visible wavelengths reveal surface appearance, while SWIR bands provide insight into subsurface properties and material composition. However, realizing BH3D is challenging due to fundamental sensor constraints between visible-spectrum silicon and SWIR-spectrum InGaAs sensors, which necessitate complex multi-spectrograph designs. Here we propose a single-spectrograph BH3D system, using a stereo setup comprising visible and SWIR cameras, that reconstructs dense broadband hyperspectral reflectance together with accurate 3D geometry. Our key idea is to extend dispersed structured light to the broadband regime using a single spectrograph. We model the image formation of broadband dispersed structured light, and estimate hyperspectral reflectance and depth. We validate our approach on diverse real-world scenes, demonstrating accurate reconstruction with a mean spectral angle mapper of 0.13 rad, root mean square error of 0.03, and mean depth error of 4.5 mm. We further demonstrate identifying metameric materials, performing imaging through opaque layers, uncovering hidden features on banknotes, and revealing blood vessels. --- ### SplitAvatar: One-shot Head Avatar with Autoregressive Gaussian Splitting Authors: Hongzhe Liao, Chuhua Xian, Hongmin Cai, Haiyang Liu, Fa-Ting Hong Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25751v1 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) provides an efficient method for high-quality scene reconstruction using anisotropic Gaussians. Recently, 3DGS-based methods have significantly improved the rendering quality of human avatars while enabling real-time performance. However, existing methods suffer from a magnitude mismatch in the number of Gaussians generated by image-based and 3DMM-based approaches. This discrepancy results in reconstructed expressions that lack fine-grained detail. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for reconstructing an animatable head avatar from a single image. We propose a Graph splitting network to progressively generate Gaussians from coarse to fine using an autoregressive architecture. To address the graph inconsistency caused by split Gaussians, we employ a mesh topology extension method to align the GNN's connectivity with the increased Gaussian count. Furthermore, we introduce a novel density control method that includes a gating mechanism that generates soft masks for Gaussians, preventing over-densification after the splitting operation. This allows for dynamic control over Gaussian density across different facial regions. For smooth and rapid training, we employ a delayed filtering strategy to avoid re-computing the graph topology during training. Experimental results demonstrate that our autoregressive structure effectively improves expression representation ability by progressively splitting Gaussians. This process, enabled by the GNN-guided splitting, synthesizes more precise facial details and achieves higher reconstruction quality. --- ### Invariant-Based Weight Sharing for Message Passing Authors: Florian Seiffarth Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25750v1 Message-passing neural networks (MPNNs) are a powerful framework for learning representations of graph-structured domains. However, weights in MPNNs act on features only, limiting their ability to capture structural patterns. We introduce a novel structure-aware weight sharing principle that explicitly incorporates information inherent to the graph structure. Weights are indexed directly by user-chosen graph invariants, i.e., functions preserved under node permutations, enabling systematic reuse across structurally equivalent subgraphs. We present ShareGNNs, which instantiate this principle within a simple encoder-decoder architecture, resulting in an MPNN with learnable adjacency and transformer-like connectivity. We show that their expressivity is at least as strong as the discriminative power of the chosen invariants, providing explicit control over the model complexity. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data, as well as subgraph counting tasks, demonstrate consistent improvements over standard MPNNs, competitive expressivity beyond the 1-WL test, and scalability to large datasets. --- ### DeGRe: Dense-supervised Generative Reranking for Recommendation Authors: Chaotian Song, Jingyao Zhang, Chenghao Chen, Zisen Sang, Dehai Zhao, Guodong Cao, Boxi Wu, Deng Cai, Jia Jia Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25749v2 In multi-stage recommender systems, reranking optimizes overall utility by capturing intra-list contextual dependencies, yet its central challenge lies in exploring optimal sequences within an exponentially large permutation space. Recent studies have shifted towards end-to-end generative frameworks, which typically leverage list-wise rewards or preference alignment to guide generator training. However, these methods still face two critical issues. First is the heuristic label bias. Existing methods often construct training targets based on simple rules, such as promoting clicked items to the top, while ignoring causal dependencies within the list context. Second is the credit assignment problem. Sparse list-level posterior rewards fail to directly guide intermediate steps in sequence generation, leading to ambiguous optimization directions. To address these issues, we propose DeGRe (Dense-supervised Generative Reranking), a generative reranking framework that bridges the gap between offline exploration and online efficiency through dense supervision. The core of DeGRe lies in its offline-online decoupled design. During the offline phase, we introduce a Lookahead Evaluator based on cumulative regression, which leverages beam search to actively mine high-value lookahead sequences in the unexposed space. During training, we transform the step-wise value estimations from the evaluator into dense supervision signals and distill them into a lightweight Online Generator. This mechanism enables the generator to internalize lookahead planning capabilities, requiring only a single efficient greedy decoding pass during online inference to approximate the global optimum. Experiments demonstrate that DeGRe outperforms baseline models on public benchmarks and industrial datasets. We have successfully deployed DeGRe on Taobao Flash Shopping, significantly improving online recommendations. --- ### DeGRe: Dense-supervised Generative Reranking for Recommendation Authors: Chaotian Song, Jingyao Zhang, Chenghao Chen, Zisen Sang, Dehai Zhao, Guodong Cao, Boxi Wu, Deng Cai, Jia Jia Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25749v1 In multi-stage recommender systems, reranking optimizes overall utility by capturing intra-list contextual dependencies, yet its central challenge lies in exploring optimal sequences within an exponentially large permutation space. Recent studies have shifted towards end-to-end generative frameworks, which typically leverage list-wise rewards or preference alignment to guide generator training. However, these methods still face two critical issues. First is the heuristic label bias. Existing methods often construct training targets based on simple rules, such as promoting clicked items to the top, while ignoring causal dependencies within the list context. Second is the credit assignment problem. Sparse list-level posterior rewards fail to directly guide intermediate steps in sequence generation, leading to ambiguous optimization directions. To address these issues, we propose DeGRe (Dense-supervised Generative Reranking), a generative reranking framework that bridges the gap between offline exploration and online efficiency through dense supervision. The core of DeGRe lies in its offline-online decoupled design. During the offline phase, we introduce a Lookahead Evaluator based on cumulative regression, which leverages beam search to actively mine high-value lookahead sequences in the unexposed space. During training, we transform the step-wise value estimations from the evaluator into dense supervision signals and distill them into a lightweight Online Generator. This mechanism enables the generator to internalize lookahead planning capabilities, requiring only a single efficient greedy decoding pass during online inference to approximate the global optimum. Experiments demonstrate that DeGRe outperforms baseline models on public benchmarks and industrial datasets. We have successfully deployed DeGRe on Taobao Flash Shopping, significantly improving online recommendations. --- ### Agent-Centric Social Trajectory Prediction: A Free Energy Principle Perspective Authors: Yanping Wu, Ji Zhang, Hao Chen, Edmond S. L. Ho, Chongfeng Wei Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25748v1 Trajectory prediction methods have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in capturing complex motion patterns. However, existing methods rely on global state assumptions, suffer from insufficient belief inference under partial observability, and lack cognitive behavioral constraints in prediction. These limitations severely compromise both deployment feasibility and physical plausibility in real-world settings. In this work, we propose FEP-Diff, an agent-centric trajectory prediction framework grounded in the Free Energy Principle, aimed at achieving cognitively plausible predictions under realistic constraints. Specifically, a dual-branch spatiotemporal encoder extracts ego-motion dynamics and social interaction cues from local observations. Building upon this, a goal-conditioned belief learner infers multimodal latent belief distributions optimized via a free-energy objective, with a social consistency constraint on the local neighborhood graph to promote cognitive alignment among neighboring agents. Finally, a residual diffusion trajectory generator is conditioned on the learned belief representations with token-level proxy conditioning, producing precise and diverse future predictions. Extensive experiments on five public benchmarks demonstrate that FEP-Diff consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods under restricted observability. Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FEP-Diff-8876. --- ### Multi-Agent Coordination Adaptation via Structure-Guided Orchestration Authors: Haoran Li, Shulun Chen, Shaoyuan Sun, Hanchen Wang Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.MA, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25746v1 As large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems scale to handle increasingly complex tasks, balancing structural stability and dynamic adaptability becomes increasingly challenging. Existing systems typically adopt either structure-centric methods, committing to structures determined upfront that limit fine-grained control, or orchestration-centric methods, adapting decisions dynamically while leaving coordination structure implicit and unstable. To address this challenge, we revisit multi-agent coordination from a probabilistic perspective, casting it as posterior inference over the joint distribution of structure and orchestration. We introduce MACA, an automated coordination framework that learns a task- and budget-conditioned structural prior over agent participation and interactions. This prior guides a policy-based orchestration as an approximation to posterior inference, enabling efficient solutions with fine-grained control. Across benchmarks, MACA outperforms adaptive multi-agent baselines by an average of 8.42% while using 43.19% fewer tokens. Further investigation reveals that joint adaptation of structure and orchestration suppresses redundant interactions, converging coordination toward task-effective execution. --- ### Selective Latent Thinking: Adaptive Compression of LLM Reasoning Chains Authors: Hui Xie, Jie Liu, Ziyue Qiao, Joaquin Vanschore Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25745v1 Explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning substantially improves the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), but incurs high inference cost due to lengthy autoregressive traces. Existing latent reasoning methods offer a promising alternative, yet they often treat reasoning as uniformly compressible, causing precision-critical intermediate steps to be overly compressed and thereby degrading reasoning accuracy. In this work, we propose Selective Latent Thinking (SLT), a framework that selectively compresses redundant reasoning spans into latent representations while preserving precision-critical spans as explicit CoT within the same reasoning trajectory. Specifically, SLT first uses a lightweight decoder to anticipate a short upcoming reasoning span, and then applies confidence-based gating to determine the longest span that can be reliably compressed. The accepted span is encoded into a compact latent representation to improve reasoning efficiency, while uncertain or precision-critical reasoning remains in explicit CoT form to preserve accuracy. To learn this selective compression policy, SLT adopts a three-stage training strategy that combines span-level latent compression, reliability-aware future reasoning prediction, and trajectory-level reinforcement learning to optimize the trade-off between answer correctness and reasoning cost. Extensive experiments across four mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that SLT achieves 22.7\% higher accuracy than latent reasoning baselines at comparable compression ratios, while reducing reasoning chain length by 58.4\% with only 2.8\% accuracy degradation compared to explicit CoT,Our code can be found in https://github.com/hunshi34/SLT. --- ### Latent Representation Alignment for Offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning Authors: Hyungkyu Kang, Byeongchan Kim, Min-hwan Oh Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25740v1 Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) provides a practical framework for obtaining goal-reaching policies from fixed datasets. However, learning a reliable goal-conditioned value function in long-horizon tasks remains challenging. In this paper, we identify erroneous generalization in goal-conditioned value functions as a fundamental bottleneck, and demonstrate that appropriate inductive bias in the value function is crucial for addressing the bottleneck. Building on these findings, we propose Latent-Aligned Value Learning (LAVL), an offline GCRL algorithm that integrates latent-representation-based value generalization with hierarchical planning in a unified framework. Extensive experiments on OGBench demonstrate that LAVL consistently outperforms existing offline GCRL methods, achieving the highest performance on 20 out of 22 datasets. Notably, LAVL exhibits strong performance in long-horizon tasks and trajectory stitching datasets, where prior methods suffer significant performance degradation. Our code is available at https://github.com/oh-lab/LAVL.git. --- ### The Behavioral Credibility Trilemma: When Calibrated Autonomy Becomes Impossible Authors: Lauri Lovén, Nam Do, Hassan Mehmood, Dinesh Kumar Sah, Sasu Tarkoma Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG, cs.GT, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25739v2 We prove that no reinforcement learning policy with confidence-gated autonomy can simultaneously achieve maximum helpfulness, optimal calibration, and full autonomy under rational oversight, whenever some tasks exceed the agent's reliable competence: the Behavioral Credibility Trilemma. The impossibility is geometric: adding any non-affine autonomy incentive to a strictly proper scoring rule destroys strict properness, so an agent rewarded for both calibrated confidence and autonomous action systematically inflates its reported confidence on tasks below the principal's approval threshold whenever the autonomy stake exceeds the calibration cost of clearing it. The Behavioral Perturbation Lemma quantifies the inflation (scaling as $w_A/(2 w_C)$ for the Brier score) and shows detection requires $Ω(1/Δ^2)$ observations for interior reports. We prove that, in the unsaturated regime, no affine oversight rule is optimal for the principal and the optimum is attained by a sharp threshold satisfying the trilemma's own hypotheses, so the impossibility is endogenized rather than assumed; moreover, for symmetric, log-concave, full-support location policy families under the Brier score, calibration is not even a stationary point of policy-gradient training. We formalize the Confidence-Gated Decision Problem, map existing methods onto the trilemma, and identify two constructive resolution pathways (commitment, role separation). A 540-configuration Best-of-N experiment tests five hypotheses, all strongly confirmed (effect sizes $d = 1.10$ to $5.35$, the upper end from a per-completion estimator inflating magnitude over per-task aggregates) and replicated under a pre-specified protocol on two further model families, and adds a descriptive analysis of the achievable-$(H, C, A)$ surface geometry showing a plateau-truncated frontier consistent with the predicted inflation saturation. --- ### SFR-Net: Learning Scale-Frustum Representations for Ultra-Wide Area Remote Sensing Image Segmentation Authors: Chuyu Zhong, Keyan Chen, Qinzhe Yang, Bowen Chen, Zhengxia Zou, Zhenwei Shi Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25737v1 Pixel count and geographical coverage are two key characteristics of remote sensing images. Existing remote sensing image segmentation methods typically focus on images with either a small pixel count or a large pixel count but limited geographical coverage. In this paper, we introduce a novel segmentation task targeting ultra-wide area (UWA) remote sensing images, characterized by both a large pixel count and extremely wide geographical coverage. The core challenges of UWA segmentation lie in simultaneously handling ground objects with significantly varying scales and maintaining long-range contextual semantic continuity. To address these challenges, we propose the Scale-Frustum Representation Network (SFR-Net). Inspired by the viewing frustums of remote sensing images captured from different altitudes, we construct scale-frustum representations, enabling unified modeling of ground objects and contextual features at different scales. Furthermore, we design a cascaded cross-scale fusion mechanism to effectively integrate these representations, enhancing local semantic understanding while ensuring long-range contextual continuity. Experimental results on GID and FBPS demonstrate that SFR-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving mIoU by 1.72% and 4.29%, respectively, over the strongest competing methods. In addition, the proposed scale-frustum representations can be integrated into generic segmentation networks to improve both segmentation accuracy and convergence speed. The implementation code will be publicly available at https://github.com/ChuyuZhong/SFR-Net. --- ### A Deep Dive into Axiomatic Design -- Part I: Problem Formulation Authors: Aydin Homay Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25735v1 Problem formulation translating customer needs and constraints into a minimum set of independent first-level functional requirements, is arguably the most critical step in every design framework, including axiomatic design yet it is frequently misunderstood or underestimated in practice. This paper focuses exclusively on problem formulation in axiomatic design it clarifies what first-level FRs are (and are not), explains why they should not legitimately vary across designers given the same needs and constraints, and highlights intrinsic difficulties and recurring pitfalls that lead to design failure. The discussion is grounded primarily in Nam P.Suh's three books. The Principles of Design, Axiomatic Design Advances and Applications, and Complexity Theory, and it offers practical guidance to help designers formulate well-posed first-level FRs. Finally, the paper briefly revisits problem formulation in the era of large language models and discusses what such tools can (and cannot) contribute at the first level. --- ### Stein-Encoder: A White-Box Supervised Encoder via Stein Identities in Multi-Modal Studies Authors: Jiarui Zhang, Shuoxun Xu, Jiasheng Shi, Xinzhou Guo Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: stat.AP, stat.ME, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25734v1 In multi-modal biomedical research, integrating high-dimensional genomic data with clinical baselines is essential for precision medicine. However, standard deep neural network approaches often entangle these modalities, obscuring the specific predictive impact of genetic features and leading to possibly suboptimal predictive performance. Motivated by the landmark METABRIC cohort primary breast tumors study, we propose the Stein-Encoder, a white-box supervised framework designed to isolate the genetic signal driving clinical outcomes conditional on nuisance covariates. By leveraging Stein's method and residualization techniques, our approach constructs an interpretable single index that summarizes relevant biological heterogeneity while flexibly incorporating clinical factors and can be used to improve downstream prediction. We establish theoretical guarantees for identification, consistency and efficiency improvement. Applied to the METABRIC cohort, the Stein-Encoder outperforms unsupervised benchmarks in predictive accuracy. Crucially, it achieves structural disentanglement by revealing response-specific biological mechanisms: we find that tumor size is driven primarily by mitotic networks, whereas prognostic indices rely on a distinct proliferation-versus-immune axis. This work contributes a unified, computationally efficient framework that bridges statistical rigor with the representational power of neural networks, enabling interpretable, task-specific and efficient compression of multi-modal health data for a wide range of precision medicine applications, beyond biomarker discovery. --- ### Trait-Aware Policy Optimization for Autoregressive Multi-Trait Essay Scoring Authors: Zhengyang Wang, Sanwoo Lee, Jiaxin Wang, Chenxi Miao, Weikang Li, Yunfang Wu Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25731v3 Multi-trait essay scoring aims to provide fine-grained evaluation of writing quality across multiple dimensions. However, how to effectively post-train autoregressive scoring models remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose Trait-Aware Policy Optimization (TAPO), a post-training framework tailored to autoregressive multi-trait scoring. Our method decomposes rewards along both the sample and trait dimensions, combining global scoring consistency, trait-level accuracy, format validity, and inter-trait dependency preservation. In addition, we use enhanced prompts throughout training by incorporating original prompt texts and trait descriptions, providing richer semantic information for trait-specific score generation. Experiments across multiple backbone models show that our method consistently improves multi-trait scoring performance over supervised fine-tuning and scalar-reward optimization baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness and transferability of trait-aware post-training for essay scoring. ---