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ad5f64a854d41cbb4cd6a9c6d8649f6eda1610b0393f0bc7e42c31193ebb98e1
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Adaptive Label Error Detection: A Bayesian Approach to Mislabeled Data Detection
arXiv:2601.10084v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning classification systems are susceptible to poor performance when trained with incorrect ground truth labels, even when data is well-curated by expert annotators. As machine learning becomes more widespread, it is increasingly imperative to identify and correct mislabeling to develop more powerful models. In this work, we motivate and describe Adaptive Label Error Detection (ALED), a novel method of detecting mislabeling. ALED extracts an intermediate feature space from a deep convolutional neural network, denoises the features, models the reduced manifold of each class with a multidimensional Gaussian distribution, and performs a simple likelihood ratio test to identify mislabeled samples. We show that ALED has markedly increased sensitivity, without compromising precision, compared to established label error detection methods, on multiple medical imaging datasets. We demonstrate an example where fine-tuning a neural network on corrected data results in a 33.8% decrease in test set errors, providing strong benefits to end users. The ALED detector is deployed in the Python package statlab.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10084
Academic Papers
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ffe03630dd58b97bd35cfecaa15ecb3a9fac17482d3e5aa818f73736f5cf9377
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
CALM-IT: Generating Realistic Long-Form Motivational Interviewing Dialogues with Dual-Actor Conversational Dynamics Tracking
arXiv:2601.10085v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in mental health-related settings, yet they struggle to sustain realistic, goal-directed dialogue over extended interactions. While LLMs generate fluent responses, they optimize locally for the next turn rather than maintaining a coherent model of therapeutic progress, leading to brittleness and long-horizon drift. We introduce CALM-IT, a framework for generating and evaluating long-form Motivational Interviewing (MI) dialogues that explicitly models dual-actor conversational dynamics. CALM-IT represents therapist-client interaction as a bidirectional state-space process, in which both agents continuously update inferred alignment, mental states, and short-term goals to guide strategy selection and utterance generation. Across large-scale evaluations, CALM-IT consistently outperforms strong baselines in Effectiveness and Goal Alignment and remains substantially more stable as conversation length increases. Although CALM-IT initiates fewer therapist redirections, it achieves the highest client acceptance rate (64.3%), indicating more precise and therapeutically aligned intervention timing. Overall, CALM-IT provides evidence for modeling evolving conversational state being essential for generating high-quality long-form synthetic conversations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10085
Academic Papers
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68e909da75f23749bd80980272ec07fa21ede96d249abc8c7afb4d0f2e0800ed
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
State of AI: An Empirical 100 Trillion Token Study with OpenRouter
arXiv:2601.10088v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The past year has marked a turning point in the evolution and real-world use of large language models (LLMs). With the release of the first widely adopted reasoning model, o1, on December 5th, 2024, the field shifted from single-pass pattern generation to multi-step deliberation inference, accelerating deployment, experimentation, and new classes of applications. As this shift unfolded at a rapid pace, our empirical understanding of how these models have actually been used in practice has lagged behind. In this work, we leverage the OpenRouter platform, which is an AI inference provider across a wide variety of LLMs, to analyze over 100 trillion tokens of real-world LLM interactions across tasks, geographies, and time. In our empirical study, we observe substantial adoption of open-weight models, the outsized popularity of creative roleplay (beyond just the productivity tasks many assume dominate) and coding assistance categories, plus the rise of agentic inference. Furthermore, our retention analysis identifies foundational cohorts: early users whose engagement persists far longer than later cohorts. We term this phenomenon the Cinderella "Glass Slipper" effect. These findings underscore that the way developers and end-users engage with LLMs "in the wild" is complex and multifaceted. We discuss implications for model builders, AI developers, and infrastructure providers, and outline how a data-driven understanding of usage can inform better design and deployment of LLM systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10088
Academic Papers
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d42aa218f67c88ea5817570042be214e741c387d81a7956363fd0425214ee0f5
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Bayesian Meta-Analyses Could Be More: A Case Study in Trial of Labor After a Cesarean-section Outcomes and Complications
arXiv:2601.10089v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The meta-analysis's utility is dependent on previous studies having accurately captured the variables of interest, but in medical studies, a key decision variable that impacts a physician's decisions was not captured. This results in an unknown effect size and unreliable conclusions. A Bayesian approach may allow analysis to determine if the claim of a positive effect is still warranted, and we build a Bayesian approach to this common medical scenario. To demonstrate its utility, we assist professional OBGYNs in evaluating Trial of Labor After a Cesarean-section (TOLAC) situations where few interventions are available for patients and find the support needed for physicians to advance patient care.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10089
Academic Papers
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e0857c8d2bfb6d650b76b997f4aa7c70f3dea360551809b5fb55f9785971e01f
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Difficulty-guided Sampling: Bridging the Target Gap between Dataset Distillation and Downstream Tasks
arXiv:2601.10090v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we propose difficulty-guided sampling (DGS) to bridge the target gap between the distillation objective and the downstream task, therefore improving the performance of dataset distillation. Deep neural networks achieve remarkable performance but have time and storage-consuming training processes. Dataset distillation is proposed to generate compact, high-quality distilled datasets, enabling effective model training while maintaining downstream performance. Existing approaches typically focus on features extracted from the original dataset, overlooking task-specific information, which leads to a target gap between the distillation objective and the downstream task. We propose leveraging characteristics that benefit the downstream training into data distillation to bridge this gap. Focusing on the downstream task of image classification, we introduce the concept of difficulty and propose DGS as a plug-in post-stage sampling module. Following the specific target difficulty distribution, the final distilled dataset is sampled from image pools generated by existing methods. We also propose difficulty-aware guidance (DAG) to explore the effect of difficulty in the generation process. Extensive experiments across multiple settings demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. It also highlights the broader potential of difficulty for diverse downstream tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10090
Academic Papers
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25a4ea4fbc779211fe5abac41e471da884f10968c8b000e2bddb3805afbc9b33
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
LeMoF: Level-guided Multimodal Fusion for Heterogeneous Clinical Data
arXiv:2601.10092v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal clinical prediction is widely used to integrate heterogeneous data such as Electronic Health Records (EHR) and biosignals. However, existing methods tend to rely on static modality integration schemes and simple fusion strategies. As a result, they fail to fully exploit modality-specific representations. In this paper, we propose Level-guided Modal Fusion (LeMoF), a novel framework that selectively integrates level-guided representations within each modality. Each level refers to a representation extracted from a different layer of the encoder. LeMoF explicitly separates and learns global modality-level predictions from level-specific discriminative representations. This design enables LeMoF to achieve a balanced performance between prediction stability and discriminative capability even in heterogeneous clinical environments. Experiments on length of stay prediction using Intensive Care Unit (ICU) data demonstrate that LeMoF consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art multimodal fusion techniques across various encoder configurations. We also confirmed that level-wise integration is a key factor in achieving robust predictive performance across various clinical conditions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10092
Academic Papers
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2f7dd1255beafc2e21df8279ed61c23087c4f985975daecd9748ae0816658918
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Mark My Works Autograder for Programming Courses
arXiv:2601.10093v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large programming courses struggle to provide timely, detailed feedback on student code. We developed Mark My Works, a local autograding system that combines traditional unit testing with LLM-generated explanations. The system uses role-based prompts to analyze submissions, critique code quality, and generate pedagogical feedback while maintaining transparency in its reasoning process. We piloted the system in a 191-student engineering course, comparing AI-generated assessments with human grading on 79 submissions. While AI scores showed no linear correlation with human scores (r = -0.177, p = 0.124), both systems exhibited similar left-skewed distributions, suggesting they recognize comparable quality hierarchies despite different scoring philosophies. The AI system demonstrated more conservative scoring (mean: 59.95 vs 80.53 human) but generated significantly more detailed technical feedback.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10093
Academic Papers
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4b95e35fff8d060ad3b0f4451257a9163e2f16bda99d2b1ce08474b00c4dc0ae
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
V-Zero: Self-Improving Multimodal Reasoning with Zero Annotation
arXiv:2601.10094v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in multimodal learning have significantly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs). However, state-of-the-art approaches rely heavily on large-scale human-annotated datasets, which are costly and time-consuming to acquire. To overcome this limitation, we introduce V-Zero, a general post-training framework that facilitates self-improvement using exclusively unlabeled images. V-Zero establishes a co-evolutionary loop by instantiating two distinct roles: a Questioner and a Solver. The Questioner learns to synthesize high-quality, challenging questions by leveraging a dual-track reasoning reward that contrasts intuitive guesses with reasoned results. The Solver is optimized using pseudo-labels derived from majority voting over its own sampled responses. Both roles are trained iteratively via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), driving a cycle of mutual enhancement. Remarkably, without a single human annotation, V-Zero achieves consistent performance gains on Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct, improving visual mathematical reasoning by +1.7 and general vision-centric by +2.6, demonstrating the potential of self-improvement in multimodal systems. Code is available at https://github.com/SatonoDia/V-Zero
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10094
Academic Papers
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2f3e477a08738c16604b4ed587d5035452aaae028f1a746e82e61edc4735de6a
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
On the Computation and Approximation of Backward Reachable Sets for Max-Plus Linear Systems using Polyhedras
arXiv:2601.10095v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper investigates reachability analysis for max-plus linear systems (MPLS), an important class of dynamical systems that model synchronization and delay phenomena in timed discrete-event systems. We specifically focus on backward reachability analysis, i.e., determining the set of states that can reach a given target set within a certain number of steps. Computing backward reachable sets presents significant challenges due to the non-convexity of max-plus dynamics and the complexity of set complement operations. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approximation framework that efficiently computes backward reachable sets by exploiting the structure of tropical polyhedra. Our approach reformulates the problem as a sequence of symbolic operations and approximates non-convex target sets through closure operations on unions of tropical polyhedra. We develop a systematic algorithm that constructs both outer (M-form) and inner (V-form) representations of the resulting sets, incorporating extremal filtering to reduce computational complexity. The proposed method offers a scalable alternative to traditional DBM-based approaches, enabling reliable approximate backward reachability analysis for general target regions in MPLS.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10095
Academic Papers
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c07949b4652f3a177f8b2731e0372669ba0c84bb493c256d0f4ae1ffaeb500ac
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Multilingual-To-Multimodal (M2M): Unlocking New Languages with Monolingual Text
arXiv:2601.10096v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal models excel in English, supported by abundant image-text and audio-text data, but performance drops sharply for other languages due to limited multilingual multimodal resources. Existing solutions rely heavily on machine translation, while advances in multilingual text modeling remain underutilized. We introduce METAL, a lightweight alignment method that learns only a few linear layers using English text alone to map multilingual text embeddings into a multimodal space. Despite its simplicity, METAL matches baseline performance in English (94.9 percent Recall at 10) and achieves strong zero-shot transfer (89.5 percent Recall at 10 averaged across 11 languages, 10 unseen) on XTD text-to-image retrieval. Qualitative t-SNE visualizations show that multilingual embeddings align tightly with multimodal representations, while weight analysis reveals that the transformation reshapes embedding geometry rather than performing trivial rotations. Beyond image-text retrieval, METAL generalizes to audio-text retrieval and cross-lingual text-to-image generation. We release code and checkpoints at https://github.com/m2m-codebase/M2M , as well as multilingual evaluation datasets including MSCOCO Multilingual 30K (https://huggingface.co/datasets/piyushsinghpasi/mscoco-multilingual-30k ), AudioCaps Multilingual (https://huggingface.co/datasets/piyushsinghpasi/audiocaps-multilingual ), and Clotho Multilingual (https://huggingface.co/datasets/piyushsinghpasi/clotho-multilingual ), to facilitate further research.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10096
Academic Papers
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134d5d19a036c8281325ecb6b07066651149d639d9af93c65db393b153e48a9a
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
InfoSculpt: Sculpting the Latent Space for Generalized Category Discovery
arXiv:2601.10098v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to classify instances from both known and novel categories within a large-scale unlabeled dataset, a critical yet challenging task for real-world, open-world applications. However, existing methods often rely on pseudo-labeling, or two-stage clustering, which lack a principled mechanism to explicitly disentangle essential, category-defining signals from instance-specific noise. In this paper, we address this fundamental limitation by re-framing GCD from an information-theoretic perspective, grounded in the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle. We introduce InfoSculpt, a novel framework that systematically sculpts the representation space by minimizing a dual Conditional Mutual Information (CMI) objective. InfoSculpt uniquely combines a Category-Level CMI on labeled data to learn compact and discriminative representations for known classes, and a complementary Instance-Level CMI on all data to distill invariant features by compressing augmentation-induced noise. These two objectives work synergistically at different scales to produce a disentangled and robust latent space where categorical information is preserved while noisy, instance-specific details are discarded. Extensive experiments on 8 benchmarks demonstrate that InfoSculpt validating the effectiveness of our information-theoretic approach.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10098
Academic Papers
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41e8cc8a1e9d21cb14c3a1e8a1339026e5e5952863bddeb5f03ffd68953a3121
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
MATRIX AS PLAN: Structured Logical Reasoning with Feedback-Driven Replanning
arXiv:2601.10101v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As knowledge and semantics on the web grow increasingly complex, enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) comprehension and reasoning capabilities has become particularly important. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. However, it still falls short on logical reasoning tasks that rely on symbolic expressions and strict deductive rules. Neuro-symbolic methods address this gap by enforcing formal correctness through external solvers. Yet these solvers are highly format-sensitive, and small instabilities in model outputs can lead to frequent processing failures. LLM-driven approaches avoid parsing brittleness, but they lack structured representations and process-level error-correction mechanisms. To further enhance the logical reasoning capabilities of LLMs, we propose MatrixCoT, a structured CoT framework with a matrix-based plan. Specifically, we normalize and type natural language expressions, attach explicit citation fields, and introduce a matrix-based planning method to preserve global relations among steps. The plan becomes a verifiable artifact, making execution more stable. For verification, we also add a feedback-driven replanning mechanism. Under semantic-equivalence constraints, it identifies omissions and defects, rewrites and compresses the dependency matrix, and produces a more trustworthy final answer. Experiments on five logical-reasoning benchmarks and five LLMs show that, without relying on external solvers, MatrixCoT enhances both robustness and interpretability when tackling complex symbolic reasoning tasks, while maintaining competitive performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10101
Academic Papers
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0cd94553ac16098e8518cfe9296dd97f4e13cfb30a085f53a06aa010fd67f373
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
When Personas Override Payoffs: Role Identity Bias in Multi-Agent LLM Decision-Making
arXiv:2601.10102v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed in multi-agent systems for strategic tasks, yet how design choices such as role-based personas and payoff visibility affect reasoning remains poorly understood. We investigate whether multi-agent systems function as strategic reasoners capable of payoff optimization or as identity-driven actors that prioritize role alignment over explicit incentives. Using Nash equilibrium achievement as a diagnostic for strategic reasoning, we conduct systematic experiments across four LLM architectures (Qwen-7B, Qwen-32B, Llama-8B, Mistral-7B) in complex environmental decision-making games involving four agents. We show that role identity bias fundamentally alters strategic reasoning even when payoff-optimal equilibria exist and complete payoff information is available. Removing personas and providing explicit payoffs enables Qwen models to achieve high Nash equilibrium rates, indicating that both conditions are necessary for strategic reasoning. In contrast, personas systematically bias equilibrium selection toward socially preferred outcomes: with personas present, all of the achieved equilibria correspond to Green Transition, while models entirely fail to reach equilibrium when Tragedy of the Commons is payoff-optimal. The effect of explicit payoffs depends entirely on persona presence, revealing strong interactions between representational design choices. We also observe clear model-dependent patterns. Qwen architectures are highly sensitive to both personas and payoff visibility, whereas Llama and Mistral exhibit rigid reasoning behavior across conditions. These findings demonstrate that representational choices are substantive governance decisions that determine whether multi-agent systems act as strategic reasoners or identity-driven actors, with important implications for real-world deployment.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10102
Academic Papers
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3e70bdef2ead1ed728488b8bfe8ad54c64384c9b4a14b69258e93a4894df06cb
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
FlowAct-R1: Towards Interactive Humanoid Video Generation
arXiv:2601.10103v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Interactive humanoid video generation aims to synthesize lifelike visual agents that can engage with humans through continuous and responsive video. Despite recent advances in video synthesis, existing methods often grapple with the trade-off between high-fidelity synthesis and real-time interaction requirements. In this paper, we propose FlowAct-R1, a framework specifically designed for real-time interactive humanoid video generation. Built upon a MMDiT architecture, FlowAct-R1 enables the streaming synthesis of video with arbitrary durations while maintaining low-latency responsiveness. We introduce a chunkwise diffusion forcing strategy, complemented by a novel self-forcing variant, to alleviate error accumulation and ensure long-term temporal consistency during continuous interaction. By leveraging efficient distillation and system-level optimizations, our framework achieves a stable 25fps at 480p resolution with a time-to-first-frame (TTFF) of only around 1.5 seconds. The proposed method provides holistic and fine-grained full-body control, enabling the agent to transition naturally between diverse behavioral states in interactive scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that FlowAct-R1 achieves exceptional behavioral vividness and perceptual realism, while maintaining robust generalization across diverse character styles.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10103
Academic Papers
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fe4dec5f2eda2ab42ca3211119f28371a8b08644723ec3e4e051a16ef99bb0ea
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
MathDoc: Benchmarking Structured Extraction and Active Refusal on Noisy Mathematics Exam Papers
arXiv:2601.10104v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The automated extraction of structured questions from paper-based mathematics exams is fundamental to intelligent education, yet remains challenging in real-world settings due to severe visual noise. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on clean documents or generic layout analysis, overlooking both the structural integrity of mathematical problems and the ability of models to actively reject incomplete inputs. We introduce MathDoc, the first benchmark for document-level information extraction from authentic high school mathematics exam papers. MathDoc contains \textbf{3,609} carefully curated questions with real-world artifacts and explicitly includes unrecognizable samples to evaluate active refusal behavior. We propose a multi-dimensional evaluation framework covering stem accuracy, visual similarity, and refusal capability. Experiments on SOTA MLLMs, including Qwen3-VL and Gemini-2.5-Pro, show that although end-to-end models achieve strong extraction performance, they consistently fail to refuse illegible inputs, instead producing confident but invalid outputs. These results highlight a critical gap in current MLLMs and establish MathDoc as a benchmark for assessing model reliability under degraded document conditions. Our project repository is available at \href{https://github.com/winnk123/papers/tree/master}{GitHub repository}
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10104
Academic Papers
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f3eee2019ed4d9617fa53e8173578acef4a80e45260d147365b4a4af72ce36a3
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Fuzzychain-edge: A novel Fuzzy logic-based adaptive Access control model for Blockchain in Edge Computing
arXiv:2601.10105v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid integration of IoT with edge computing has revolutionized various domains, particularly healthcare, by enabling real-time data sharing, remote monitoring, and decision-making. However, it introduces critical challenges, including data privacy breaches, security vulnerabilities, especially in environments dealing with sensitive information. Traditional access control mechanisms and centralized security systems do not address these issues, leaving IoT environments exposed to unauthorized access and data misuse. This research proposes Fuzzychain-edge, a novel Fuzzy logic-based adaptive Access control model for Blockchain in Edge Computing framework designed to overcome these limitations by incorporating Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), fuzzy logic, and smart contracts. ZKPs secure sensitive data during access control processes by enabling verification without revealing confidential details, thereby ensuring user privacy. Fuzzy logic facilitates adaptive, context-aware decision-making for access control by dynamically evaluating parameters such as data sensitivity, trust levels, and user roles. Blockchain technology, with its decentralized and immutable architecture, ensures transparency, traceability, and accountability using smart contracts that automate access control processes. The proposed framework addresses key challenges by enhancing security, reducing the likelihood of unauthorized access, and providing a transparent audit trail of data transactions. Expected outcomes include improved data privacy, accuracy in access control, and increased user trust in IoT systems. This research contributes significantly to advancing privacy-preserving, secure, and traceable solutions in IoT environments, laying the groundwork for future innovations in decentralized technologies and their applications in critical domains such as healthcare and beyond.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10105
Academic Papers
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41bcc85f30fabe70bb641f11db82914fd0cf952386e38c0c23e9bca3a91f5e23
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Enhancing Visual In-Context Learning by Multi-Faceted Fusion
arXiv:2601.10107v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual In-Context Learning (VICL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm, enabling models to perform novel visual tasks by learning from in-context examples. The dominant "retrieve-then-prompt" approach typically relies on selecting the single best visual prompt, a practice that often discards valuable contextual information from other suitable candidates. While recent work has explored fusing the top-K prompts into a single, enhanced representation, this still simply collapses multiple rich signals into one, limiting the model's reasoning capability. We argue that a more multi-faceted, collaborative fusion is required to unlock the full potential of these diverse contexts. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel framework that moves beyond single-prompt fusion towards an multi-combination collaborative fusion. Instead of collapsing multiple prompts into one, our method generates three contextual representation branches, each formed by integrating information from different combinations of top-quality prompts. These complementary guidance signals are then fed into proposed MULTI-VQGAN architecture, which is designed to jointly interpret and utilize collaborative information from multiple sources. Extensive experiments on diverse tasks, including foreground segmentation, single-object detection, and image colorization, highlight its strong cross-task generalization, effective contextual fusion, and ability to produce more robust and accurate predictions than existing methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10107
Academic Papers
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4f40a06efecf7e9032df5f19e6e43e4b6828650d7095d8f8646b3fc57eb7e6f4
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
SIN-Bench: Tracing Native Evidence Chains in Long-Context Multimodal Scientific Interleaved Literature
arXiv:2601.10108v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating whether multimodal large language models truly understand long-form scientific papers remains challenging: answer-only metrics and synthetic "Needle-In-A-Haystack" tests often reward answer matching without requiring a causal, evidence-linked reasoning trace in the document. We propose the "Fish-in-the-Ocean" (FITO) paradigm, which requires models to construct explicit cross-modal evidence chains within native scientific documents. To operationalize FITO, we build SIN-Data, a scientific interleaved corpus that preserves the native interleaving of text and figures. On top of it, we construct SIN-Bench with four progressive tasks covering evidence discovery (SIN-Find), hypothesis verification (SIN-Verify), grounded QA (SIN-QA), and evidence-anchored synthesis (SIN-Summary). We further introduce "No Evidence, No Score", scoring predictions when grounded to verifiable anchors and diagnosing evidence quality via matching, relevance, and logic. Experiments on eight MLLMs show that grounding is the primary bottleneck: Gemini-3-pro achieves the best average overall score (0.573), while GPT-5 attains the highest SIN-QA answer accuracy (0.767) but underperforms on evidence-aligned overall scores, exposing a gap between correctness and traceable support.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10108
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0e002cd546256c4e5e5ed55dfb016f33c449e1c44827df73788b76e1119755a4
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Skill-Aware Data Selection and Fine-Tuning for Data-Efficient Reasoning Distillation
arXiv:2601.10109v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large reasoning models such as DeepSeek-R1 and their distilled variants achieve strong performance on complex reasoning tasks. Yet, distilling these models often demands large-scale data for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), motivating the pursuit of data-efficient training methods. To address this, we propose a skill-centric distillation framework that efficiently transfers reasoning ability to weaker models with two components: (1) Skill-based data selection, which prioritizes examples targeting the student model's weaker skills, and (2) Skill-aware fine-tuning, which encourages explicit skill decomposition during problem solving. With only 1,000 training examples selected from a 100K teacher-generated corpus, our method surpasses random SFT baselines by +1.6% on Qwen3-4B and +1.4% on Qwen3-8B across five mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Further analysis confirms that these gains concentrate on skills emphasized during training, highlighting the effectiveness of skill-centric training for efficient reasoning distillation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10109
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5ac0cdb4050c4920aac1425fcbd1336842c2fca6e19f8a081fc6a417a5f9a0c5
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Multi-Constrained Evolutionary Molecular Design Framework: An Interpretable Drug Design Method Combining Rule-Based Evolution and Molecular Crossover
arXiv:2601.10110v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study proposes MCEMOL (Multi-Constrained Evolutionary Molecular Design Framework), a molecular optimization approach integrating rule-based evolution with molecular crossover. MCEMOL employs dual-layer evolution: optimizing transformation rules at rule level while applying crossover and mutation to molecular structures. Unlike deep learning methods requiring large datasets and extensive training, our algorithm evolves efficiently from minimal starting molecules with low computational overhead. The framework incorporates message-passing neural networks and comprehensive chemical constraints, ensuring efficient and interpretable molecular design. Experimental results demonstrate that MCEMOL provides transparent design pathways through its evolutionary mechanism while generating valid, diverse, target-compliant molecules. The framework achieves 100% molecular validity with high structural diversity and excellent drug-likeness compliance, showing strong performance in symmetry constraints, pharmacophore optimization, and stereochemical integrity. Unlike black-box methods, MCEMOL delivers dual value: interpretable transformation rules researchers can understand and trust, alongside high-quality molecular libraries for practical applications. This establishes a paradigm where interpretable AI-driven drug design and effective molecular generation are achieved simultaneously, bridging the gap between computational innovation and practical drug discovery needs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10110
Academic Papers
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bbcd0b0b325b5984dea8d2674e8ef6bbe759d3218364bdc45823e176833c404f
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Repository Intelligence Graph: Deterministic Architectural Map for LLM Code Assistants
arXiv:2601.10112v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Repository aware coding agents often struggle to recover build and test structure, especially in multilingual projects where cross language dependencies are encoded across heterogeneous build systems and tooling. We introduce the Repository Intelligence Graph (RIG), a deterministic, evidence backed architectural map that represents buildable components, aggregators, runners, tests, external packages, and package managers, connected by explicit dependency and coverage edges that trace back to concrete build and test definitions. We also present SPADE, a deterministic extractor that constructs RIG from build and test artifacts (currently with an automatic CMake plugin based on the CMake File API and CTest metadata), and exposes RIG as an LLM friendly JSON view that agents can treat as the authoritative description of repository structure. We evaluate three commercial agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) on eight repositories spanning low to high build oriented complexity, including the real world MetaFFI project. Each agent answers thirty structured questions per repository with and without RIG in context, and we measure accuracy, wall clock completion time, and efficiency (seconds per correct answer). Across repositories and agents, providing RIG improves mean accuracy by 12.2\% and reduces completion time by 53.9\%, yielding a mean 57.8\% reduction in seconds per correct answer. Gains are larger in multilingual repositories, which improve by 17.7\% in accuracy and 69.5\% in efficiency on average, compared to 6.6\% and 46.1\% in single language repositories. Qualitative analysis suggests that RIG shifts failures from structural misunderstandings toward reasoning mistakes over a correct structure, while rare regressions highlight that graph based reasoning quality remains a key factor.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10112
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032665e57105488ede7ee90842b5ae191b5431644cd274709a8526af94afb620
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Following the Teacher's Footsteps: Scheduled Checkpoint Distillation for Domain-Specific LLMs
arXiv:2601.10114v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are challenging to deploy for domain-specific tasks due to their massive scale. While distilling a fine-tuned LLM into a smaller student model is a promising alternative, the capacity gap between teacher and student often leads to suboptimal performance. This raises a key question: when and how can a student model match or even surpass its teacher on domain-specific tasks? In this work, we propose a novel theoretical insight: a student can outperform its teacher if its advantage on a Student-Favored Subdomain (SFS) outweighs its deficit on the Teacher-Favored Subdomain (TFS). Guided by this insight, we propose Scheduled Checkpoint Distillation (SCD), which reduces the TFS deficit by emulating the teacher's convergence process during supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on the domain task, and a sample-wise Adaptive Weighting (AW) mechanism to preserve student strengths on SFS. Experiments across diverse domain tasks--including QA, NER, and text classification in multiple languages--show that our method consistently outperforms existing distillation approaches, allowing the student model to match or even exceed the performance of its fine-tuned teacher.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10114
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7202f5c9bb18264c3c54e72ce30dd4087f1709543479dc5f64c52ed19d92b0f3
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
CoCoPlan: Adaptive Coordination and Communication for Multi-robot Systems in Dynamic and Unknown Environments
arXiv:2601.10116v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-robot systems can greatly enhance efficiency through coordination and collaboration, yet in practice, full-time communication is rarely available and interactions are constrained to close-range exchanges. Existing methods either maintain all-time connectivity, rely on fixed schedules, or adopt pairwise protocols, but none adapt effectively to dynamic spatio-temporal task distributions under limited communication, resulting in suboptimal coordination. To address this gap, we propose CoCoPlan, a unified framework that co-optimizes collaborative task planning and team-wise intermittent communication. Our approach integrates a branch-and-bound architecture that jointly encodes task assignments and communication events, an adaptive objective function that balances task efficiency against communication latency, and a communication event optimization module that strategically determines when, where and how the global connectivity should be re-established. Extensive experiments demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods by achieving a 22.4% higher task completion rate, reducing communication overhead by 58.6%, and improving the scalability by supporting up to 100 robots in dynamic environments. Hardware experiments include the complex 2D office environment and large-scale 3D disaster-response scenario.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10116
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1317ee3d7a3eafb9f2e6a89604a86b6fa999368e4320de7b8ee69e2364018c77
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Beyond Single Prompts: Synergistic Fusion and Arrangement for VICL
arXiv:2601.10117v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision In-Context Learning (VICL) enables inpainting models to quickly adapt to new visual tasks from only a few prompts. However, existing methods suffer from two key issues: (1) selecting only the most similar prompt discards complementary cues from other high-quality prompts; and (2) failing to exploit the structured information implied by different prompt arrangements. We propose an end-to-end VICL framework to overcome these limitations. Firstly, an adaptive Fusion Module aggregates critical patterns and annotations from multiple prompts to form more precise contextual prompts. Secondly, we introduce arrangement-specific lightweight MLPs to decouple layout priors from the core model, while minimally affecting the overall model. In addition, an bidirectional fine-tuning mechanism swaps the roles of query and prompt, encouraging the model to reconstruct the original prompt from fused context and thus enhancing collaboration between the fusion module and the inpainting model. Experiments on foreground segmentation, single-object detection, and image colorization demonstrate superior results and strong cross-task generalization of our method.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10117
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89bb815cbe1cdd2b1b8857599858ea3525bb80a707a43b02e03260b8a2787007
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Advanced Encryption Technique for Multimedia Data Using Sudoku-Based Algorithms for Enhanced Security
arXiv:2601.10119v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Encryption and Decryption is the process of sending a message in a ciphered way that appears meaningless and could be deciphered using a key for security purposes to avoid data breaches. This paper expands on the previous work on Sudoku-based encryption methods, applying it to other forms of media including images, audio and video. It also enhances the security of key generation and usage by making it dependent on the timestamp of when the message was transmitted. It is a versatile system that works on multimodal data and functions as a block-based transposition cipher. Instead of shuffling, it can also employ substitution methods like XOR, making it a substitution cipher. The resulting media are highly encrypted and resilient to brute-force and differential attacks. For images, NPCR values approach 100% and for audio, SNR values exceed 60dB. This makes the encrypted audio significantly different from the source, making decryption more difficult.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10119
Academic Papers
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a22035a24088f770bbe2ff873939bbf1ed4ac96995a55b656cb212e9b07f2da6
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
TopoDIM: One-shot Topology Generation of Diverse Interaction Modes for Multi-Agent Systems
arXiv:2601.10120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optimizing communication topology in LLM-based multi-agent system is critical for enabling collective intelligence. Existing methods mainly rely on spatio-temporal interaction paradigms, where the sequential execution of multi-round dialogues incurs high latency and computation. Motivated by the recent insights that evaluation and debate mechanisms can improve problem-solving in multi-agent systems, we propose TopoDIM, a framework for one-shot Topology generation with Diverse Interaction Modes. Designed for decentralized execution to enhance adaptability and privacy, TopoDIM enables agents to autonomously construct heterogeneous communication without iterative coordination, achieving token efficiency and improved task performance. Experiments demonstrate that TopoDIM reduces total token consumption by 46.41% while improving average performance by 1.50% over state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the framework exhibits strong adaptability in organizing communication among heterogeneous agents. Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TopoDIM-8D35/
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10120
Academic Papers
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a9e37ef795154a8011e8bbf864537c2fdd00704c586c38a60545366e8d00c6f8
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Role-Playing Agents Driven by Large Language Models: Current Status, Challenges, and Future Trends
arXiv:2601.10122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, with the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), role-playing language agents (RPLAs) have emerged as a prominent research focus at the intersection of natural language processing (NLP) and human-computer interaction. This paper systematically reviews the current development and key technologies of RPLAs, delineating the technological evolution from early rule-based template paradigms, through the language style imitation stage, to the cognitive simulation stage centered on personality modeling and memory mechanisms. It summarizes the critical technical pathways supporting high-quality role-playing, including psychological scale-driven character modeling, memory-augmented prompting mechanisms, and motivation-situation-based behavioral decision control. At the data level, the paper further analyzes the methods and challenges of constructing role-specific corpora, focusing on data sources, copyright constraints, and structured annotation processes. In terms of evaluation, it collates multi-dimensional assessment frameworks and benchmark datasets covering role knowledge, personality fidelity, value alignment, and interactive hallucination, while commenting on the advantages and disadvantages of methods such as human evaluation, reward models, and LLM-based scoring. Finally, the paper outlines future development directions of role-playing agents, including personality evolution modeling, multi-agent collaborative narrative, multimodal immersive interaction, and integration with cognitive neuroscience, aiming to provide a systematic perspective and methodological insights for subsequent research.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10122
Academic Papers
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70822210bf921e84f72b6746fc205dbbdd4e921c1f822f40ee31cfbf1ffbf4d7
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Fairness Driven Multi-Agent Path Finding Problem
arXiv:2601.10123v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) problem aims at finding non-conflicting paths for multiple agents from their respective sources to destinations. This problem arises in multiple real-life situations, including robot motion planning and airspace assignment for unmanned aerial vehicle movement. The problem is computationally expensive, and adding to it, the agents are rational and can misreport their private information. In this paper, we study both variants of the problem under the realm of fairness. For the non-rational agents, we propose a heuristic solution for this problem. Considering the agents are rational, we develop a mechanism and demonstrate that it is a dominant strategy, incentive compatible, and individually rational. We employ various solution methodologies to highlight the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed solution approaches.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10123
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18b4db988bb3bc52367ff07c9aac8359dbeb346dafdd183f7279a4a5d88595f8
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
VQ-Seg: Vector-Quantized Token Perturbation for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation
arXiv:2601.10124v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Consistency learning with feature perturbation is a widely used strategy in semi-supervised medical image segmentation. However, many existing perturbation methods rely on dropout, and thus require a careful manual tuning of the dropout rate, which is a sensitive hyperparameter and often difficult to optimize and may lead to suboptimal regularization. To overcome this limitation, we propose VQ-Seg, the first approach to employ vector quantization (VQ) to discretize the feature space and introduce a novel and controllable Quantized Perturbation Module (QPM) that replaces dropout. Our QPM perturbs discrete representations by shuffling the spatial locations of codebook indices, enabling effective and controllable regularization. To mitigate potential information loss caused by quantization, we design a dual-branch architecture where the post-quantization feature space is shared by both image reconstruction and segmentation tasks. Moreover, we introduce a Post-VQ Feature Adapter (PFA) to incorporate guidance from a foundation model (FM), supplementing the high-level semantic information lost during quantization. Furthermore, we collect a large-scale Lung Cancer (LC) dataset comprising 828 CT scans annotated for central-type lung carcinoma. Extensive experiments on the LC dataset and other public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. Code available at: https://github.com/script-Yang/VQ-Seg.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10124
Academic Papers
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9c1820956894d46954ea762ccde398d318036a76246a0dca9894ea553d3ed2a4
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
A Generalizable Framework for Building Executable Domain-Specific LLMs under Data Scarcity: Demonstration on Semiconductor TCAD Simulation
arXiv:2601.10128v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific and engineering verticals often suffer from data scarcity and strict executability requirements: models must generate not only fluent text, but also syntactically valid, tool-compilable scripts. We present a schema-first alignment framework for building compact, executable domain-specific LLMs in low-resource settings. The framework integrates three core components: (i) large-scale synthetic QA data generation from expert documentation to instill foundational domain knowledge; (ii) a code-centric IR->DPO workflow that converts verified tool decks into interpretable intermediate representations (IR), performs equivalence-preserving diversification, and constructs preference pairs to directly optimize instruction compliance and code executability; and (iii) a controlled evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), showing that while RAG benefits general LLMs, it can marginally degrade the performance of already domain-aligned models. We demonstrate the framework by instantiating TcadGPT for semiconductor Technology Computer-Aided Design (TCAD). Using 1.5M synthetic QA pairs and an IR-driven DPO dataset, TcadGPT attains 85.6% semantic accuracy and an 80.0% syntax pass rate on SDE executability tests, substantially outperforming state-of-the-art general LLMs such as GPT-4o. To probe portability beyond TCAD, we apply the same recipe to the open-source FEM solver Elmer, observing consistent improvements in script-level success rates over general-purpose baselines. All datasets, benchmarks, and code (including P1, P2, and IR->DPO) are released for reproducibility. Together, these results suggest that the proposed framework provides a robust and reproducible path toward executable LLMs in specialized, data-scarce professional domains.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10128
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23f63eacc0dcbef478190891270a0841c877ce7f7c4a8eda92ff00b06b172e2c
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
LaViT: Aligning Latent Visual Thoughts for Multi-modal Reasoning
arXiv:2601.10129v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current multimodal latent reasoning often relies on external supervision (e.g., auxiliary images), ignoring intrinsic visual attention dynamics. In this work, we identify a critical Perception Gap in distillation: student models frequently mimic a teacher's textual output while attending to fundamentally divergent visual regions, effectively relying on language priors rather than grounded perception. To bridge this, we propose LaViT, a framework that aligns latent visual thoughts rather than static embeddings. LaViT compels the student to autoregressively reconstruct the teacher's visual semantics and attention trajectories prior to text generation, employing a curriculum sensory gating mechanism to prevent shortcut learning. Extensive experiments show that LaViT significantly enhances visual grounding, achieving up to +16.9% gains on complex reasoning tasks and enabling a compact 3B model to outperform larger open-source variants and proprietary models like GPT-4o.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10129
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be9f47c065fd63ed4032e606ea9e17bdeec137938e6477c99dcabcd7a02a25d2
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Redundancy-Driven Top-$k$ Functional Dependency Discovery
arXiv:2601.10130v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Functional dependencies (FDs) are basic constraints in relational databases and are used for many data management tasks. Most FD discovery algorithms find all valid dependencies, but this causes two problems. First, the computational cost is prohibitive: computational complexity grows quadratically with the number of tuples and exponentially with the number of attributes, making discovery slow on large-scale and high-dimensional data. Second, the result set can be huge, making it hard to identify useful dependencies. We propose SDP (Selective-Discovery-and-Prune), which discovers the top-$k$ FDs ranked by redundancy count. Redundancy count measures how much duplicated information an FD explains and connects directly to storage overhead and update anomalies. SDP uses an upper bound on redundancy to prune the search space. It is proved that this upper bound is monotone: adding attributes refines partitions and thus decreases the bound. Once the bound falls below the top-$k$ threshold, the entire branch can be skipped. We improve SDP with three optimizations: ordering attributes by partition cardinality, using pairwise statistics in a Partition Cardinality Matrix to tighten bounds, and a global scheduler to explore promising branches first. Experiments on over 40 datasets show that SDP is much faster and uses less memory than exhaustive methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10130
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19c200132a3a168d23c76b2f1a1851a5fce437263a2a2950ee016fc69815a2d8
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
M^4olGen: Multi-Agent, Multi-Stage Molecular Generation under Precise Multi-Property Constraints
arXiv:2601.10131v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generating molecules that satisfy precise numeric constraints over multiple physicochemical properties is critical and challenging. Although large language models (LLMs) are expressive, they struggle with precise multi-objective control and numeric reasoning without external structure and feedback. We introduce \textbf{M olGen}, a fragment-level, retrieval-augmented, two-stage framework for molecule generation under multi-property constraints. Stage I : Prototype generation: a multi-agent reasoner performs retrieval-anchored, fragment-level edits to produce a candidate near the feasible region. Stage II : RL-based fine-grained optimization: a fragment-level optimizer trained with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) applies one- or multi-hop refinements to explicitly minimize the property errors toward our target while regulating edit complexity and deviation from the prototype. A large, automatically curated dataset with reasoning chains of fragment edits and measured property deltas underpins both stages, enabling deterministic, reproducible supervision and controllable multi-hop reasoning. Unlike prior work, our framework better reasons about molecules by leveraging fragments and supports controllable refinement toward numeric targets. Experiments on generation under two sets of property constraints (QED, LogP, Molecular Weight and HOMO, LUMO) show consistent gains in validity and precise satisfaction of multi-property targets, outperforming strong LLMs and graph-based algorithms.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10131
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90974f7e9acf64017e44d53c365b60f1a5019c0d5dc0093d4bd3ce186b7c5361
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Is More Context Always Better? Examining LLM Reasoning Capability for Time Interval Prediction
arXiv:2601.10132v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in reasoning and prediction across different domains. Yet, their ability to infer temporal regularities from structured behavioral data remains underexplored. This paper presents a systematic study investigating whether LLMs can predict time intervals between recurring user actions, such as repeated purchases, and how different levels of contextual information shape their predictive behavior. Using a simple but representative repurchase scenario, we benchmark state-of-the-art LLMs in zero-shot settings against both statistical and machine-learning models. Two key findings emerge. First, while LLMs surpass lightweight statistical baselines, they consistently underperform dedicated machine-learning models, showing their limited ability to capture quantitative temporal structure. Second, although moderate context can improve LLM accuracy, adding further user-level detail degrades performance. These results challenge the assumption that "more context leads to better reasoning". Our study highlights fundamental limitations of today's LLMs in structured temporal inference and offers guidance for designing future context-aware hybrid models that integrate statistical precision with linguistic flexibility.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10132
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35f712c8d5d0d0477330715560849d1ce44fb88a62e0e8786952f86bef39b288
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Function Correcting Codes for Maximally-Unbalanced Boolean Functions
arXiv:2601.10135v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Function-Correcting Codes (FCCs) enable reliable computation of a function of a $k$-bit message over noisy channels without requiring full message recovery. In this work, we study optimal single-error correcting FCCs (SEFCCs) for maximally-unbalanced Boolean functions, where $k$ denotes the message length and $t$ denotes the error-correction capability. We analyze the structure of optimal SEFCC constructions through their associated codeword distance matrices and identify distinct FCC classes based on this structure. We then examine the impact of these structural differences on error performance by evaluating representative FCCs over the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel using both soft-decision and hard-decision decoding. The results show that FCCs with different distance-matrix structures can exhibit markedly different Data BER and function error behavior, and that the influence of code structure depends strongly on the decoding strategy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10135
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3f037ff1c2c1ef9f5d9c23103d0aa1bf0f1e1c79bcf946035facdd45cd723e47
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Step-by-Step Causality: Transparent Causal Discovery with Multi-Agent Tree-Query and Adversarial Confidence Estimation
arXiv:2601.10137v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal discovery aims to recover ``what causes what'', but classical constraint-based methods (e.g., PC, FCI) suffer from error propagation, and recent LLM-based causal oracles often behave as opaque, confidence-free black boxes. This paper introduces Tree-Query, a tree-structured, multi-expert LLM framework that reduces pairwise causal discovery to a short sequence of queries about backdoor paths, (in)dependence, latent confounding, and causal direction, yielding interpretable judgments with robustness-aware confidence scores. Theoretical guarantees are provided for asymptotic identifiability of four pairwise relations. On data-free benchmarks derived from Mooij et al. and UCI causal graphs, Tree-Query improves structural metrics over direct LLM baselines, and a diet--weight case study illustrates confounder screening and stable, high-confidence causal conclusions. Tree-Query thus offers a principled way to obtain data-free causal priors from LLMs that can complement downstream data-driven causal discovery. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Repo-9B3E-4F96.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10137
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9612dc7aedba9c94a50830c03979f5dba25e80121c3031defe5ed4d7543aa73e
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Understanding and Preserving Safety in Fine-Tuned LLMs
arXiv:2601.10141v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning is an essential and pervasive functionality for applying large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. However, it has the potential to substantially degrade safety alignment, e.g., by greatly increasing susceptibility to jailbreak attacks, even when the fine-tuning data is entirely harmless. Despite garnering growing attention in defense efforts during the fine-tuning stage, existing methods struggle with a persistent safety-utility dilemma: emphasizing safety compromises task performance, whereas prioritizing utility typically requires deep fine-tuning that inevitably leads to steep safety declination. In this work, we address this dilemma by shedding new light on the geometric interaction between safety- and utility-oriented gradients in safety-aligned LLMs. Through systematic empirical analysis, we uncover three key insights: (I) safety gradients lie in a low-rank subspace, while utility gradients span a broader high-dimensional space; (II) these subspaces are often negatively correlated, causing directional conflicts during fine-tuning; and (III) the dominant safety direction can be efficiently estimated from a single sample. Building upon these novel insights, we propose safety-preserving fine-tuning (SPF), a lightweight approach that explicitly removes gradient components conflicting with the low-rank safety subspace. Theoretically, we show that SPF guarantees utility convergence while bounding safety drift. Empirically, SPF consistently maintains downstream task performance and recovers nearly all pre-trained safety alignment, even under adversarial fine-tuning scenarios. Furthermore, SPF exhibits robust resistance to both deep fine-tuning and dynamic jailbreak attacks. Together, our findings provide new mechanistic understanding and practical guidance toward always-aligned LLM fine-tuning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10141
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9f4cb787507128ba454965973594ded8cfc71235ad3feda5b059e88416203b4b
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Actors, Frames and Arguments: A Multi-Decade Computational Analysis of Climate Discourse in Financial News using Large Language Models
arXiv:2601.10142v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Financial news media shapes trillion-dollar climate investment decisions, yet discourse in this elite domain remains underexplored. We analyze two decades of climate-related articles (2000-2023) from Dow Jones Newswire using an Actor-Frame-Argument (AFA) pipeline that extracts who speaks, how issues are framed, and which arguments are deployed. We validate extractions against 2,000 human-annotated articles using a Decompositional Verification Framework that evaluates completeness, faithfulness, coherence, and relevance. Our longitudinal analysis uncovers a structural transformation: pre-2015 coverage emphasized risk and regulatory burden; post-Paris Agreement, discourse shifted toward economic opportunity and innovation, with financial institutions becoming dominant voices. Methodologically, we provide a replicable paradigm for longitudinal media analysis with LLMs; substantively, we reveal how financial elites have internalized and reframed the climate crisis across two decades.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10142
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3b0e432adb6af826dcda891ae4b7cacaee43f89760b5e34ee71de3e017e3d7c8
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
History Is Not Enough: An Adaptive Dataflow System for Financial Time-Series Synthesis
arXiv:2601.10143v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In quantitative finance, the gap between training and real-world performance-driven by concept drift and distributional non-stationarity-remains a critical obstacle for building reliable data-driven systems. Models trained on static historical data often overfit, resulting in poor generalization in dynamic markets. The mantra "History Is Not Enough" underscores the need for adaptive data generation that learns to evolve with the market rather than relying solely on past observations. We present a drift-aware dataflow system that integrates machine learning-based adaptive control into the data curation process. The system couples a parameterized data manipulation module comprising single-stock transformations, multi-stock mix-ups, and curation operations, with an adaptive planner-scheduler that employs gradient-based bi-level optimization to control the system. This design unifies data augmentation, curriculum learning, and data workflow management under a single differentiable framework, enabling provenance-aware replay and continuous data quality monitoring. Extensive experiments on forecasting and reinforcement learning trading tasks demonstrate that our framework enhances model robustness and improves risk-adjusted returns. The system provides a generalizable approach to adaptive data management and learning-guided workflow automation for financial data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10143
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4ec569e3da4cb86951fc1bd89fecdaae5816d81a51745241cae580c547ed8ec5
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
DecisionLLM: Large Language Models for Long Sequence Decision Exploration
arXiv:2601.10148v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-sequence decision-making, which is usually addressed through reinforcement learning (RL), is a critical component for optimizing strategic operations in dynamic environments, such as real-time bidding in computational advertising. The Decision Transformer (DT) introduced a powerful paradigm by framing RL as an autoregressive sequence modeling problem. Concurrently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in complex reasoning and planning tasks. This inspires us whether LLMs, which share the same Transformer foundation, but operate at a much larger scale, can unlock new levels of performance in long-horizon sequential decision-making problem. This work investigates the application of LLMs to offline decision making tasks. A fundamental challenge in this domain is the LLMs' inherent inability to interpret continuous values, as they lack a native understanding of numerical magnitude and order when values are represented as text strings. To address this, we propose treating trajectories as a distinct modality. By learning to align trajectory data with natural language task descriptions, our model can autoregressively predict future decisions within a cohesive framework we term DecisionLLM. We establish a set of scaling laws governing this paradigm, demonstrating that performance hinges on three factors: model scale, data volume, and data quality. In offline experimental benchmarks and bidding scenarios, DecisionLLM achieves strong performance. Specifically, DecisionLLM-3B outperforms the traditional Decision Transformer (DT) by 69.4 on Maze2D umaze-v1 and by 0.085 on AuctionNet. It extends the AIGB paradigm and points to promising directions for future exploration in online bidding.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10148
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d3eca6eaded94f15cbfb5373d07ba21ea5c805a007247d3057510970cc44bb50
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
New Second-order Convergent Schemes for Solving decoupled FBSDEs
arXiv:2601.10149v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper proposes a new second-order symmetric algorithm for solving decoupled forward-backward stochastic differential equations. Inspired by the alternating direction implicit splitting method for partial differential equations, we split the generator into the sum of two functions. In the computation of the value process Y, explicit and implicit schemes are alternately applied to these two generators, while the algorithms from \citep{ZhaoLi2014} are used for the control process Z. We rigorously prove that the two new schemes have second-order convergence rate. The proposed splitting methods show clear advantages for equations whose generator consists of a linear part plus a nonlinear part, as they reduce the number of iterations required for solving implicit schemes, thereby decreasing computational cost while maintaining second-order convergence. Two numerical examples are provided, including the backward stochastic Riccati equation arising in mean-variance hedging. The numerical results verify the theoretical error analysis and demonstrate the advantage of reduced computational cost compared to the algorithm in \citep{ZhaoLi2014}.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10149
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82cff031b0b713fb701f6e3933c92a39e4ad25dd72f9490a5fe93617acfe05f4
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Simple Network Graph Comparative Learning
arXiv:2601.10150v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The effectiveness of contrastive learning methods has been widely recognized in the field of graph learning, especially in contexts where graph data often lack labels or are difficult to label. However, the application of these methods to node classification tasks still faces a number of challenges. First, existing data enhancement techniques may lead to significant differences from the original view when generating new views, which may weaken the relevance of the view and affect the efficiency of model training. Second, the vast majority of existing graph comparison learning algorithms rely on the use of a large number of negative samples. To address the above challenges, this study proposes a novel node classification contrast learning method called Simple Network Graph Comparative Learning (SNGCL). Specifically, SNGCL employs a superimposed multilayer Laplace smoothing filter as a step in processing the data to obtain global and local feature smoothing matrices, respectively, which are thus passed into the target and online networks of the siamese network, and finally employs an improved triple recombination loss function to bring the intra-class distance closer and the inter-class distance farther. We have compared SNGCL with state-of-the-art models in node classification tasks, and the experimental results show that SNGCL is strongly competitive in most tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10150
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5e0e6698e95df2e14452e42648e082c1bfba105250cec8aa48b154eb9bbbd760
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Leveraging Digital Twin Technologies: All-Photonics Networks-as-a-Service for Data Center Xchange in the Era of AI [Invited Tutorial]
arXiv:2601.10153v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents a data center exchange (Data Center Xchange, DCX) architecture for all-photonics networks-as-a-service in distributed data center infrastructures, enabling the creation of a virtual large-scale data center by directly interconnecting distributed data centers in metropolitan areas. Key requirements for such an architecture are identified: support for low-latency operations, scalability, reliability, and flexibility within a single network architecture; the ability to add new operator-driven automation functionalities based on an open networking approach; and the ability to control and manage remotely deployed transponders connected via access links with unknown physical parameters. We propose a set of technologies that enable digital twin operations for optical networks, including a cloud-native architecture for coherent transceivers, remote transponder control, fast end-to-end optical path provisioning, transceiver-based physical-parameter estimation incorporating digital longitudinal monitoring, and optical line system calibration, demonstrating their feasibility through field validations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10153
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258496c525dd61a956f5dc2fef576f728c3544b09119bbdf5236de871fd8829a
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
MHub.ai: A Simple, Standardized, and Reproducible Platform for AI Models in Medical Imaging
arXiv:2601.10154v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform medical imaging by automating image analysis and accelerating clinical research. However, research and clinical use are limited by the wide variety of AI implementations and architectures, inconsistent documentation, and reproducibility issues. Here, we introduce MHub.ai, an open-source, container-based platform that standardizes access to AI models with minimal configuration, promoting accessibility and reproducibility in medical imaging. MHub.ai packages models from peer-reviewed publications into standardized containers that support direct processing of DICOM and other formats, provide a unified application interface, and embed structured metadata. Each model is accompanied by publicly available reference data that can be used to confirm model operation. MHub.ai includes an initial set of state-of-the-art segmentation, prediction, and feature extraction models for different modalities. The modular framework enables adaptation of any model and supports community contributions. We demonstrate the utility of the platform in a clinical use case through comparative evaluation of lung segmentation models. To further strengthen transparency and reproducibility, we publicly release the generated segmentations and evaluation metrics and provide interactive dashboards that allow readers to inspect individual cases and reproduce or extend our analysis. By simplifying model use, MHub.ai enables side-by-side benchmarking with identical execution commands and standardized outputs, and lowers the barrier to clinical translation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10154
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7ed2ad73e81b7968bfa97685d307c28803c5c3610d8fc344ab49cb03e0ed3184
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
LOOKAT: Lookup-Optimized Key-Attention for Memory-Efficient Transformers
arXiv:2601.10155v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compressing the KV cache is a required step to deploy large language models on edge devices. Current quantization methods compress storage but fail to reduce bandwidth as attention calculation requires dequantizing keys from INT4/INT8 to FP16 before use. We observe that attention scoring is mathematically equivalent to the inner product similarity search and we can apply some compression techniques from vector databases to compress KV-cache better. We propose LOOKAT, which applies product quantization and asymmetric distance computation, to transformer architecture by decomposing key vectors into subspaces, learning codebooks and computing attention tables via lookup tables. This transforms attention from memory-bound to compute-bound. LOOKAT achieves 64 $\times$ compression at 95.7\% output fidelity and 32 $\times$ compression at 95.0\% fidelity when tested on GPT-2. LOOKAT requires no architecture changes or training while maintaining rank correlation $\rho > 0.95$. Theoretical analysis confirms that rank correlation degrades as $O(d_k/mK)$, with guarantees validated across sequence lengths up to 1024 tokens.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10155
Academic Papers
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611efff2255f9746f6670d957dd612205f9bd6358ecec5990b46ef27b89130e2
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
ToolSafe: Enhancing Tool Invocation Safety of LLM-based agents via Proactive Step-level Guardrail and Feedback
arXiv:2601.10156v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While LLM-based agents can interact with environments via invoking external tools, their expanded capabilities also amplify security risks. Monitoring step-level tool invocation behaviors in real time and proactively intervening before unsafe execution is critical for agent deployment, yet remains under-explored. In this work, we first construct TS-Bench, a novel benchmark for step-level tool invocation safety detection in LLM agents. We then develop a guardrail model, TS-Guard, using multi-task reinforcement learning. The model proactively detects unsafe tool invocation actions before execution by reasoning over the interaction history. It assesses request harmfulness and action-attack correlations, producing interpretable and generalizable safety judgments and feedback. Furthermore, we introduce TS-Flow, a guardrail-feedback-driven reasoning framework for LLM agents, which reduces harmful tool invocations of ReAct-style agents by 65 percent on average and improves benign task completion by approximately 10 percent under prompt injection attacks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10156
Academic Papers
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972206f47e05d8b769ecf9e926177e0db1fddfc536d0d3a5a4a7ca81b0dd2202
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
MMPG: MoE-based Adaptive Multi-Perspective Graph Fusion for Protein Representation Learning
arXiv:2601.10157v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely adopted for Protein Representation Learning (PRL), as residue interaction networks can be naturally represented as graphs. Current GNN-based PRL methods typically rely on single-perspective graph construction strategies, which capture partial properties of residue interactions, resulting in incomplete protein representations. To address this limitation, we propose MMPG, a framework that constructs protein graphs from multiple perspectives and adaptively fuses them via Mixture of Experts (MoE) for PRL. MMPG constructs graphs from physical, chemical, and geometric perspectives to characterize different properties of residue interactions. To capture both perspective-specific features and their synergies, we develop an MoE module, which dynamically routes perspectives to specialized experts, where experts learn intrinsic features and cross-perspective interactions. We quantitatively verify that MoE automatically specializes experts in modeling distinct levels of interaction from individual representations, to pairwise inter-perspective synergies, and ultimately to a global consensus across all perspectives. Through integrating this multi-level information, MMPG produces superior protein representations and achieves advanced performance on four different downstream protein tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10157
Academic Papers
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1c227ff8a702fdf07698ec2bc5d1053c408a932660205c012c2355dbffd2ef37
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
What Gets Activated: Uncovering Domain and Driver Experts in MoE Language Models
arXiv:2601.10159v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most interpretability work focuses on layer- or neuron-level mechanisms in Transformers, leaving expert-level behavior in MoE LLMs underexplored. Motivated by functional specialization in the human brain, we analyze expert activation by distinguishing domain and driver experts. In this work, we study expert activation in MoE models across three public domains and address two key questions: (1) which experts are activated, and whether certain expert types exhibit consistent activation patterns; and (2) how tokens are associated with and trigger the activation of specific experts. To answer these questions, we introduce entropy-based and causal-effect metrics to assess whether an expert is strongly favored for a particular domain, and how strongly expert activation contributes causally to the model's output, thus identify domain and driver experts, respectively. Furthermore, we explore how individual tokens are associated with the activation of specific experts. Our analysis reveals that (1) Among the activated experts, some show clear domain preferences, while others exert strong causal influence on model performance, underscoring their decisive roles. (2) tokens occurring earlier in a sentence are more likely to trigger the driver experts, and (3) adjusting the weights of domain and driver experts leads to significant performance gains across all three models and domains. These findings shed light on the internal mechanisms of MoE models and enhance their interpretability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10159
Academic Papers
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9d30963444f51976e7caf2afa3193c7cd8836b9436aa2fc33e012a4d9687c2e3
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Alignment Pretraining: AI Discourse Causes Self-Fulfilling (Mis)alignment
arXiv:2601.10160v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretraining corpora contain extensive discourse about AI systems, yet the causal influence of this discourse on downstream alignment remains poorly understood. If prevailing descriptions of AI behaviour are predominantly negative, LLMs may internalise corresponding behavioural priors, giving rise to self-fulfilling misalignment. This paper provides the first controlled study of this hypothesis by pretraining 6.9B-parameter LLMs with varying amounts of (mis)alignment discourse. We find that discussion of AI contributes to misalignment. Upsampling synthetic training documents about AI misalignment leads to a notable increase in misaligned behaviour. Conversely, upsampling documents about aligned behaviour reduces misalignment scores from 45% to 9%. We consider this evidence of self-fulfilling alignment. These effects are dampened, but persist through post-training. Our findings establish the study of how pretraining data shapes alignment priors, or alignment pretraining, as a complement to post-training. We recommend practitioners pretrain for alignment as well as capabilities. Our models and datasets are available at alignmentpretraining.ai
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10160
Academic Papers
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26b93e85f3b25bf9ff02b04befd77748dee20a5e8058d348a8c2d5df7572669b
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
AWED-FiNER: Agents, Web applications, and Expert Detectors for Fine-grained Named Entity Recognition across 36 Languages for 6.6 Billion Speakers
arXiv:2601.10161v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce AWED-FiNER, an open-source ecosystem designed to bridge the gap in Fine-grained Named Entity Recognition (FgNER) for 36 global languages spoken by more than 6.6 billion people. While Large Language Models (LLMs) dominate general Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, they often struggle with low-resource languages and fine-grained NLP tasks. AWED-FiNER provides a collection of agentic toolkits, web applications, and several state-of-the-art expert models that provides FgNER solutions across 36 languages. The agentic tools enable to route multilingual text to specialized expert models and fetch FgNER annotations within seconds. The web-based platforms provide ready-to-use FgNER annotation service for non-technical users. Moreover, the collection of language specific extremely small sized open-source state-of-the-art expert models facilitate offline deployment in resource contraint scenerios including edge devices. AWED-FiNER covers languages spoken by over 6.6 billion people, including a specific focus on vulnerable languages such as Bodo, Manipuri, Bishnupriya, and Mizo. The resources can be accessed here: Agentic Tool (https://github.com/PrachuryyaKaushik/AWED-FiNER), Web Application (https://hf.co/spaces/prachuryyaIITG/AWED-FiNER), and 49 Expert Detector Models (https://hf.co/collections/prachuryyaIITG/awed-finer).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10161
Academic Papers
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6597ea6c726a47e9f43eed8ebb37a933b5f70ad8220443c0299e0fc1f05b59e0
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Towards Online Malware Detection using Process Resource Utilization Metrics
arXiv:2601.10164v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid growth of Cloud Computing and Internet of Things (IoT) has significantly increased the interconnection of computational resources, creating an environment where malicious software (malware) can spread rapidly. To address this challenge, researchers are increasingly utilizing Machine Learning approaches to identify malware through behavioral (i.e. dynamic) cues. However, current approaches are limited by their reliance on large labeled datasets, fixed model training, and the assumption that a trained model remains effective over time-disregarding the ever-evolving sophistication of malware. As a result, they often fail to detect evolving malware attacks that adapt over time. This paper proposes an online learning approach for dynamic malware detection, that overcomes these limitations by incorporating temporal information to continuously update its models using behavioral features, specifically process resource utilization metrics. By doing so, the proposed models can incrementally adapt to emerging threats and detect zero-day malware effectively. Upon evaluating our approach against traditional batch algorithms, we find it effective in detecting zero-day malware. Moreover, we demonstrate its efficacy in scenarios with limited data availability, where traditional batch-based approaches often struggle to perform reliably.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10164
Academic Papers
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4c921bc4f9bf046a749bdd0b7a92e99f71a0f373cceab60d1302238a415ac0da
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Advancing Adaptive Multi-Stage Video Anomaly Reasoning: A Benchmark Dataset and Method
arXiv:2601.10165v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent progress in reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models(MLLMs) has highlighted their potential for performing complex video understanding tasks. However, in the domain of Video Anomaly Detection and Understanding (VAD&U), existing MLLM-based methods are largely limited to anomaly localization or post-hoc description, lacking explicit reasoning processes, risk awareness, and decision-oriented interpretation. To address this gap, we define a new task termed Video Anomaly Reasoning (VAR), which elevates video anomaly analysis from descriptive understanding to structured, multi-stage reasoning. VAR explicitly requires models to perform progressive reasoning over anomalous events before answering anomaly-related questions, encompassing visual perception, causal interpretation, and risk-aware decision making. To support this task, we present a new dataset with 8,641 videos, where each video is annotated with diverse question types corresponding to different reasoning depths, totaling more than 50,000 samples, making it one of the largest datasets for video anomaly. The annotations are based on a structured Perception-Cognition-Action Chain-of-Thought (PerCoAct-CoT), which formalizes domain-specific reasoning priors for video anomaly understanding. This design enables systematic evaluation of multi-stage and adaptive anomaly reasoning. In addition, we propose Anomaly-Aware Group Relative Policy Optimization to further enhance reasoning reliability under weak supervision. Building upon the proposed task and dataset, we develop an end-to-end MLLM-based VAR model termed Vad-R1-Plus, which supports adaptive hierarchical reasoning and risk-aware decision making. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed benchmark and method effectively advance the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs on VAR tasks, outperforming both open-source and proprietary baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10165
Academic Papers
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69fcfe2c8fbea73984f09955628a6c01516a01ae2a9e0d43ce10ce125026d15f
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Credit C-GPT: A Domain-Specialized Large Language Model for Conversational Understanding in Vietnamese Debt Collection
arXiv:2601.10167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Debt collection is a critical function within the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sector, relying heavily on large-scale human-to-human conversational interactions conducted primarily in Vietnamese contact centers. These conversations involve informal spoken language, emotional variability, and complex domain-specific reasoning, which pose significant challenges for traditional natural language processing systems. This paper introduces Credit C-GPT, a domain-specialized large language model with seven billion parameters, fine-tuned for conversational understanding in Vietnamese debt collection scenarios. The proposed model integrates multiple conversational intelligence tasks, including dialogue understanding, sentiment recognition, intent detection, call stage classification, and structured slot-value extraction, within a single reasoning-based framework. We describe the data construction process, annotation strategy, and training methodology, and evaluate the model on proprietary human-annotated datasets. Experimental results show consistent improvements over traditional pipeline-based approaches, indicating that domain-specialized conversational language models provide a scalable and privacy-aware solution for real-time assistance and post-call analytics in enterprise contact centers.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10167
Academic Papers
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f3aee305bf6004c339c6887beea15e8bf1718442cecd2d3d6f85e5cb140e1d52
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
RAG-3DSG: Enhancing 3D Scene Graphs with Re-Shot Guided Retrieval-Augmented Generation
arXiv:2601.10168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-vocabulary 3D Scene Graph (3DSG) generation can enhance various downstream tasks in robotics, such as manipulation and navigation, by leveraging structured semantic representations. A 3DSG is constructed from multiple images of a scene, where objects are represented as nodes and relationships as edges. However, existing works for open-vocabulary 3DSG generation suffer from both low object-level recognition accuracy and speed, mainly due to constrained viewpoints, occlusions, and redundant surface density. To address these challenges, we propose RAG-3DSG to mitigate aggregation noise through re-shot guided uncertainty estimation and support object-level Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) via reliable low-uncertainty objects. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic downsample-mapping strategy to accelerate cross-image object aggregation with adaptive granularity. Experiments on Replica dataset demonstrate that RAG-3DSG significantly improves node captioning accuracy in 3DSG generation while reducing the mapping time by two-thirds compared to the vanilla version.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10168
Academic Papers
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3877698d1d2d2497ba6d6c1e8cb896b58340e7c6df1d4dca9fa142c702f20141
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
CtD: Composition through Decomposition in Emergent Communication
arXiv:2601.10169v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compositionality is a cognitive mechanism that allows humans to systematically combine known concepts in novel ways. This study demonstrates how artificial neural agents acquire and utilize compositional generalization to describe previously unseen images. Our method, termed "Composition through Decomposition", involves two sequential training steps. In the 'Decompose' step, the agents learn to decompose an image into basic concepts using a codebook acquired during interaction in a multi-target coordination game. Subsequently, in the 'Compose' step, the agents employ this codebook to describe novel images by composing basic concepts into complex phrases. Remarkably, we observe cases where generalization in the `Compose' step is achieved zero-shot, without the need for additional training.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10169
Academic Papers
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8f0c1163ae3ddf9c9c6e74840aeb6fb661fdb4dcd44b210491dd9cf9010494aa
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
On Existence of Girth-8 QC-LDPC Code with Large Column Weight: Combining Mirror-sequence with Classification Modulo Ten
arXiv:2601.10170v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quasi-cyclic (QC) LDPC codes with large girths play a crucial role in several research and application fields, including channel coding, compressed sensing and distributed storage systems. A major challenge in respect of the code construction is how to obtain such codes with the shortest possible length (or equivalently, the smallest possible circulant size) using algebraic methods instead of search methods. The greatest-common-divisor (GCD) framework we previously proposed has algebraically constructed QC-LDPC codes with column weights of 5 and 6, very short lengths, and a girth of 8. By introducing the concept of a mirror sequence and adopting a new row-regrouping scheme, QC-LDPC codes with column weights of 7 and 8, very short lengths, and a girth of 8 are proposed for arbitrary row weights in this article via an algebraic manner under the GCD framework. Thanks to these novel algebraic methods, the lower bounds (for column weights 7 and 8) on consecutive circulant sizes are both improved by asymptotically about 20%, compared with the existing benchmarks. Furthermore, these new constructions can also offer circulant sizes asymptotically about 25% smaller than the novel bounds.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10170
Academic Papers
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93ccaea4e64f9122ed6ddb67fd2c7723e012d7aca8db1ec71934d6286db6569a
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
ReasAlign: Reasoning Enhanced Safety Alignment against Prompt Injection Attack
arXiv:2601.10173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled the development of powerful agentic systems capable of automating complex workflows across various fields. However, these systems are highly vulnerable to indirect prompt injection attacks, where malicious instructions embedded in external data can hijack agent behavior. In this work, we present ReasAlign, a model-level solution to improve safety alignment against indirect prompt injection attacks. The core idea of ReasAlign is to incorporate structured reasoning steps to analyze user queries, detect conflicting instructions, and preserve the continuity of the user's intended tasks to defend against indirect injection attacks. To further ensure reasoning logic and accuracy, we introduce a test-time scaling mechanism with a preference-optimized judge model that scores reasoning steps and selects the best trajectory. Comprehensive evaluations across various benchmarks show that ReasAlign maintains utility comparable to an undefended model while consistently outperforming Meta SecAlign, the strongest prior guardrail. On the representative open-ended CyberSecEval2 benchmark, which includes multiple prompt-injected tasks, ReasAlign achieves 94.6% utility and only 3.6% ASR, far surpassing the state-of-the-art defensive model of Meta SecAlign (56.4% utility and 74.4% ASR). These results demonstrate that ReasAlign achieves the best trade-off between security and utility, establishing a robust and practical defense against prompt injection attacks in real-world agentic systems. Our code and experimental results could be found at https://github.com/leolee99/ReasAlign.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10173
Academic Papers
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c83dfb3d519d65b7d5e046cc40384c380c82335e457e9d925640d33cc6c8f8ae
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
A Low-Complexity Architecture for Multi-access Coded Caching Systems with Arbitrary User-cache Access Topology
arXiv:2601.10175v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper studies the multi-access coded caching (MACC) problem under arbitrary user-cache access topologies, extending existing models that rely on highly structured and combinatorially designed connectivity. We consider a MACC system consisting of a single server, multiple cache nodes, and multiple user nodes. Each user can access an arbitrary subset of cache nodes to retrieve cached content. The objective is to design a general and low-complexity delivery scheme under fixed cache placement for arbitrary access topologies. We propose a universal graph-based framework for modeling the MACC delivery problem, where decoding conflicts among requested packets are captured by a conflict graph and the delivery design is reduced to a graph coloring problem. In this formulation, a lower transmission load corresponds to using fewer colors. The classical greedy coloring algorithm DSatur achieves a transmission load close to the index-coding converse bound, providing a tight benchmark, but its computational complexity becomes prohibitive for large-scale graphs. To overcome this limitation, we develop a learning-based framework using graph neural networks that efficiently constructs near-optimal coded multicast transmissions and generalizes across diverse access topologies and varying numbers of users. In addition, we extend the index-coding converse bound for uncoded cache placement to arbitrary access topologies and propose a low-complexity greedy approximation. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed learning-based scheme achieves transmission loads close to those of DSatur and the converse bound while significantly reducing computational time.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10175
Academic Papers
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9f26ad42df47339083aaf4e1850bae506c02d54a7b3ce4f058bf2fe93bb27a8a
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
CC-OR-Net: A Unified Framework for LTV Prediction through Structural Decoupling
arXiv:2601.10176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) prediction, a central problem in modern marketing, is characterized by a unique zero-inflated and long-tail data distribution. This distribution presents two fundamental challenges: (1) the vast majority of low-to-medium value users numerically overwhelm the small but critically important segment of high-value "whale" users, and (2) significant value heterogeneity exists even within the low-to-medium value user base. Common approaches either rely on rigid statistical assumptions or attempt to decouple ranking and regression using ordered buckets; however, they often enforce ordinality through loss-based constraints rather than inherent architectural design, failing to balance global accuracy with high-value precision. To address this gap, we propose \textbf{C}onditional \textbf{C}ascaded \textbf{O}rdinal-\textbf{R}esidual Networks \textbf{(CC-OR-Net)}, a novel unified framework that achieves a more robust decoupling through \textbf{structural decomposition}, where ranking is architecturally guaranteed. CC-OR-Net integrates three specialized components: a \textit{structural ordinal decomposition module} for robust ranking, an \textit{intra-bucket residual module} for fine-grained regression, and a \textit{targeted high-value augmentation module} for precision on top-tier users. Evaluated on real-world datasets with over 300M users, CC-OR-Net achieves a superior trade-off across all key business metrics, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in creating a holistic and commercially valuable LTV prediction solution.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10176
Academic Papers
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aa0120265fc678d5051e3c0cfc0eb554c97554986fc048c106028adb096daf59
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Distributed Linearly Separable Computation with Arbitrary Heterogeneous Data Assignment
arXiv:2601.10177v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distributed linearly separable computation is a fundamental problem in large-scale distributed systems, requiring the computation of linearly separable functions over different datasets across distributed workers. This paper studies a heterogeneous distributed linearly separable computation problem, including one master and N distributed workers. The linearly separable task function involves Kc linear combinations of K messages, where each message is a function of one dataset. Distinguished from the existing homogeneous settings that assume each worker holds the same number of datasets, where the data assignment is carefully designed and controlled by the data center (e.g., the cyclic assignment), we consider a more general setting with arbitrary heterogeneous data assignment across workers, where `arbitrary' means that the data assignment is given in advance and `heterogeneous' means that the workers may hold different numbers of datasets. Our objective is to characterize the fundamental tradeoff between the computable dimension of the task function and the communication cost under arbitrary heterogeneous data assignment. Under the constraint of integer communication costs, for arbitrary heterogeneous data assignment, we propose a universal computing scheme and a universal converse bound by characterizing the structure of data assignment, where they coincide under some parameter regimes. We then extend the proposed computing scheme and converse bound to the case of fractional communication costs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10177
Academic Papers
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12f4e9d8ecd9ce9ae127101f7dce53de76bc3181c489b4afeea8d1ee3ab4bd24
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
HyMGP: A Customized MILP-Based Tool for Techno-Economic Planning of Islanded Microgrids
arXiv:2601.10178v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents a customized microgrid planning algorithm and tool, HyMGP, for remote sites in arid regions, which is formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem. HyMGP is compared with HOMER Pro to evaluate its performance in optimizing the sizing of microgrid components, including photovoltaic panels (PVs), vertical axis wind turbines (VAWTs), and battery energy storage systems (BESS), for remote and off-grid applications. The study focuses on a standalone microgrid in the Saudi Arabia, considering high solar irradiance, limited wind availability, and a constant load profile composed of continuous cathodic protection and daytime cooling. In the simulation environment, comparisons with HOMER solutions demonstrate the advantages of HyMGP, which provides optimal and more flexible solutions by allowing user-defined component specifications and strictly enforcing all constraints. Further analysis shows that incorporating wind turbines reduces the Net Present Cost (NPC) by decreasing the required PV and battery capacities. Increasing battery autonomy leads to a higher NPC in both PV-only and hybrid systems due to the need for larger storage. Finally, lithium iron phosphate (Li-ion LFP) batteries are found to be more cost effective than lead acid, offering lower NPCs due to their longer lifespan, deeper discharge capability, and fewer replacement cycles.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10178
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706c631310fb907c5d4adbdddf7edd3e0690e8b046bf97dd327113bc02f763da
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Bias in the Shadows: Explore Shortcuts in Encrypted Network Traffic Classification
arXiv:2601.10180v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pre-trained models operating directly on raw bytes have achieved promising performance in encrypted network traffic classification (NTC), but often suffer from shortcut learning-relying on spurious correlations that fail to generalize to real-world data. Existing solutions heavily rely on model-specific interpretation techniques, which lack adaptability and generality across different model architectures and deployment scenarios. In this paper, we propose BiasSeeker, the first semi-automated framework that is both model-agnostic and data-driven for detecting dataset-specific shortcut features in encrypted traffic. By performing statistical correlation analysis directly on raw binary traffic, BiasSeeker identifies spurious or environment-entangled features that may compromise generalization, independent of any classifier. To address the diverse nature of shortcut features, we introduce a systematic categorization and apply category-specific validation strategies that reduce bias while preserving meaningful information. We evaluate BiasSeeker on 19 public datasets across three NTC tasks. By emphasizing context-aware feature selection and dataset-specific diagnosis, BiasSeeker offers a novel perspective for understanding and addressing shortcut learning in encrypted network traffic classification, raising awareness that feature selection should be an intentional and scenario-sensitive step prior to model training.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10180
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36c03c0d754196f8112d23420c0bd7c27300aabba77a925297c05d276cc6454c
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Reinforcement Learning to Discover a NorthEast Monsoon Index for Monthly Rainfall Prediction in Thailand
arXiv:2601.10181v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Climate prediction is a challenge due to the intricate spatiotemporal patterns within Earth systems. Global climate indices, such as the El Ni\~no Southern Oscillation, are standard input features for long-term rainfall prediction. However, a significant gap persists regarding local-scale indices capable of improving predictive accuracy in specific regions of Thailand. This paper introduces a novel NorthEast monsoon climate index calculated from sea surface temperature to reflect the climatology of the boreal winter monsoon. To optimise the calculated areas used for this index, a Deep Q-Network reinforcement learning agent explores and selects the most effective rectangles based on their correlation with seasonal rainfall. Rainfall stations were classified into 12 distinct clusters to distinguish rainfall patterns between southern and upper Thailand. Experimental results show that incorporating the optimised index into Long Short-Term Memory models significantly improves long-term monthly rainfall prediction skill in most cluster areas. This approach effectively reduces the Root Mean Square Error for 12-month-ahead forecasts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10181
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bacc6e5d542ec7837809d77b04d2639ba7c61bb44675bd5d45a9675aadda7b79
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
HOMURA: Taming the Sand-Glass for Time-Constrained LLM Translation via Reinforcement Learning
arXiv:2601.10187v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable strides in multilingual translation but are hindered by a systemic cross-lingual verbosity bias, rendering them unsuitable for strict time-constrained tasks like subtitling and dubbing. Current prompt-engineering approaches struggle to resolve this conflict between semantic fidelity and rigid temporal feasibility. To bridge this gap, we first introduce Sand-Glass, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate translation under syllable-level duration constraints. Furthermore, we propose HOMURA, a reinforcement learning framework that explicitly optimizes the trade-off between semantic preservation and temporal compliance. By employing a KL-regularized objective with a novel dynamic syllable-ratio reward, HOMURA effectively "tames" the output length. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms strong LLM baselines, achieving precise length control that respects linguistic density hierarchies without compromising semantic adequacy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10187
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71114351c6ab3bc7dcc69893efcbddcc04dff3c2f95636e1884d58ca541070ab
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Model Predictive Control of Thermo-Hydraulic Systems Using Primal Decomposition
arXiv:2601.10189v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decarbonizing the global energy supply requires more efficient heating and cooling systems. Model predictive control enhances the operation of cooling and heating systems but depends on accurate system models, often based on control volumes. We present an automated framework including time discretization to generate model predictive controllers for such models. To ensure scalability, a primal decomposition exploiting the model structure is applied. The approach is validated on an underground heating system with varying numbers of states, demonstrating the primal decomposition's advantage regarding scalability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10189
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2b64767a82f2fd0798c15f83ef97bbae17c6e70f08bcb313ff781046720138b9
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
How does downsampling affect needle electromyography signals? A generalisable workflow for understanding downsampling effects on high-frequency time series
arXiv:2601.10191v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated analysis of needle electromyography (nEMG) signals is emerging as a tool to support the detection of neuromuscular diseases (NMDs), yet the signals' high and heterogeneous sampling rates pose substantial computational challenges for feature-based machine-learning models, particularly for near real-time analysis. Downsampling offers a potential solution, but its impact on diagnostic signal content and classification performance remains insufficiently understood. This study presents a workflow for systematically evaluating information loss caused by downsampling in high-frequency time series. The workflow combines shape-based distortion metrics with classification outcomes from available feature-based machine learning models and feature space analysis to quantify how different downsampling algorithms and factors affect both waveform integrity and predictive performance. We use a three-class NMD classification task to experimentally evaluate the workflow. We demonstrate how the workflow identifies downsampling configurations that preserve diagnostic information while substantially reducing computational load. Analysis of shape-based distortion metrics showed that shape-aware downsampling algorithms outperform standard decimation, as they better preserve peak structure and overall signal morphology. The results provide practical guidance for selecting downsampling configurations that enable near real-time nEMG analysis and highlight a generalisable workflow that can be used to balance data reduction with model performance in other high-frequency time-series applications as well.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10191
Academic Papers
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2f9ea871f32d17ad4ed6324c9ad1db27fb5d8b5e8d0ce555fd96a889b5c45f9b
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
From Physical Degradation Models to Task-Aware All-in-One Image Restoration
arXiv:2601.10192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: All-in-one image restoration aims to adaptively handle multiple restoration tasks with a single trained model. Although existing methods achieve promising results by introducing prompt information or leveraging large models, the added learning modules increase system complexity and hinder real-time applicability. In this paper, we adopt a physical degradation modeling perspective and predict a task-aware inverse degradation operator for efficient all-in-one image restoration. The framework consists of two stages. In the first stage, the predicted inverse operator produces an initial restored image together with an uncertainty perception map that highlights regions difficult to reconstruct, ensuring restoration reliability. In the second stage, the restoration is further refined under the guidance of this uncertainty map. The same inverse operator prediction network is used in both stages, with task-aware parameters introduced after operator prediction to adapt to different degradation tasks. Moreover, by accelerating the convolution of the inverse operator, the proposed method achieves efficient all-in-one image restoration. The resulting tightly integrated architecture, termed OPIR, is extensively validated through experiments, demonstrating superior all-in-one restoration performance while remaining highly competitive on task-aligned restoration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10192
Academic Papers
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cdf31d8992a25b0ec09cb1ea0c503c008f527d2031b9573eee06f13cc18af9de
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
GFM4GA: Graph Foundation Model for Group Anomaly Detection
arXiv:2601.10193v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Group anomaly detection is crucial in many network applications, but faces challenges due to diverse anomaly patterns. Motivated by the success of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing, graph foundation models (GFMs) is proposed to handle few-shot learning task with fewer labeling efforts. GFMs have been successfully applied to detection of individual anomalies but cannot be generalized to group anomalies, as group anomaly patterns must be detected as a whole and individuals in an abnormal group can look rather normal. Therefore, we propose GFM4GA, a novel graph foundation model for group anomaly detection. The pipeline is pretrained via dual-level contrastive learning based on feature-based estimation and group extraction, to capture potential group anomaly structure and feature inconsistencies. In the downstream tasks, the pipeline is finetuned in parameter-constrained and group-anomaly-proportion weighted few-shot settings, and its adaptive ability to unseen group anomalies expanded via group contexts determined by labeled anomaly neighbors. Experiments show that GFM4GA surpasses group anomaly detectors and GFMs for individual anomalies, achieving average improvements of 2.85% in AUROC and 2.55% in AUPRC.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10193
Academic Papers
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65b752a0fdf018a1f882699c523c2edefd9443419c887ed2fe4145573c817e28
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
HUMANLLM: Benchmarking and Reinforcing LLM Anthropomorphism via Human Cognitive Patterns
arXiv:2601.10198v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and generation, serving as the foundation for advanced persona simulation and Role-Playing Language Agents (RPLAs). However, achieving authentic alignment with human cognitive and behavioral patterns remains a critical challenge for these agents. We present HUMANLLM, a framework treating psychological patterns as interacting causal forces. We construct 244 patterns from ~12,000 academic papers and synthesize 11,359 scenarios where 2-5 patterns reinforce, conflict, or modulate each other, with multi-turn conversations expressing inner thoughts, actions, and dialogue. Our dual-level checklists evaluate both individual pattern fidelity and emergent multi-pattern dynamics, achieving strong human alignment (r=0.91) while revealing that holistic metrics conflate simulation accuracy with social desirability. HUMANLLM-8B outperforms Qwen3-32B on multi-pattern dynamics despite 4x fewer parameters, demonstrating that authentic anthropomorphism requires cognitive modeling--simulating not just what humans do, but the psychological processes generating those behaviors.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10198
Academic Papers
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25ab0583fb1fbe548523b2f1109b370364da41371a4f1d13544453cbf83ad144
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Graph Regularized PCA
arXiv:2601.10199v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-dimensional data often exhibit dependencies among variables that violate the isotropic-noise assumption under which principal component analysis (PCA) is optimal. For cases where the noise is not independent and identically distributed across features (i.e., the covariance is not spherical) we introduce Graph Regularized PCA (GR-PCA). It is a graph-based regularization of PCA that incorporates the dependency structure of the data features by learning a sparse precision graph and biasing loadings toward the low-frequency Fourier modes of the corresponding graph Laplacian. Consequently, high-frequency signals are suppressed, while graph-coherent low-frequency ones are preserved, yielding interpretable principal components aligned with conditional relationships. We evaluate GR-PCA on synthetic data spanning diverse graph topologies, signal-to-noise ratios, and sparsity levels. Compared to mainstream alternatives, it concentrates variance on the intended support, produces loadings with lower graph-Laplacian energy, and remains competitive in out-of-sample reconstruction. When high-frequency signals are present, the graph Laplacian penalty prevents overfitting, reducing the reconstruction accuracy but improving structural fidelity. The advantage over PCA is most pronounced when high-frequency signals are graph-correlated, whereas PCA remains competitive when such signals are nearly rotationally invariant. The procedure is simple to implement, modular with respect to the precision estimator, and scalable, providing a practical route to structure-aware dimensionality reduction that improves structural fidelity without sacrificing predictive performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10199
Academic Papers
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a01d8b3a42f33d7e3f2388cd9c65bd66c02738c12167b4f874c65f49f79d8dda
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
ELITE: Efficient Gaussian Head Avatar from a Monocular Video via Learned Initialization and TEst-time Generative Adaptation
arXiv:2601.10200v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce ELITE, an Efficient Gaussian head avatar synthesis from a monocular video via Learned Initialization and TEst-time generative adaptation. Prior works rely either on a 3D data prior or a 2D generative prior to compensate for missing visual cues in monocular videos. However, 3D data prior methods often struggle to generalize in-the-wild, while 2D generative prior methods are computationally heavy and prone to identity hallucination. We identify a complementary synergy between these two priors and design an efficient system that achieves high-fidelity animatable avatar synthesis with strong in-the-wild generalization. Specifically, we introduce a feed-forward Mesh2Gaussian Prior Model (MGPM) that enables fast initialization of a Gaussian avatar. To further bridge the domain gap at test time, we design a test-time generative adaptation stage, leveraging both real and synthetic images as supervision. Unlike previous full diffusion denoising strategies that are slow and hallucination-prone, we propose a rendering-guided single-step diffusion enhancer that restores missing visual details, grounded on Gaussian avatar renderings. Our experiments demonstrate that ELITE produces visually superior avatars to prior works, even for challenging expressions, while achieving 60x faster synthesis than the 2D generative prior method.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10200
Academic Papers
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30fcf3e710db5099d08e0908a4bf7f9611a74c3c77d4607866068425c76b1c16
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
PRL: Process Reward Learning Improves LLMs' Reasoning Ability and Broadens the Reasoning Boundary
arXiv:2601.10201v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Improving the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been a continuous topic recently. But most relevant works are based on outcome rewards at the trajectory level, missing fine-grained supervision during the reasoning process. Other existing training frameworks that try to combine process signals together to optimize LLMs also rely heavily on tedious additional steps like MCTS, training a separate reward model, etc., doing harm to the training efficiency. Moreover, the intuition behind the process signals design lacks rigorous theoretical support, leaving the understanding of the optimization mechanism opaque. In this paper, we propose Process Reward Learning (PRL), which decomposes the entropy regularized reinforcement learning objective into intermediate steps, with rigorous process rewards that could be assigned to models accordingly. Starting from theoretical motivation, we derive the formulation of PRL that is essentially equivalent to the objective of reward maximization plus a KL-divergence penalty term between the policy model and a reference model. However, PRL could turn the outcome reward into process supervision signals, which helps better guide the exploration during RL optimization. From our experiment results, we demonstrate that PRL not only improves the average performance for LLMs' reasoning ability measured by average @ n, but also broadens the reasoning boundary by improving the pass @ n metric. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of PRL could be verified and generalized.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10201
Academic Papers
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d3a65a0f72703876680eb44e01e892fa14c12e66c5ca02be0ebb673c67118142
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
One Instruction Does Not Fit All: How Well Do Embeddings Align Personas and Instructions in Low-Resource Indian Languages?
arXiv:2601.10205v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aligning multilingual assistants with culturally grounded user preferences is essential for serving India's linguistically diverse population of over one billion speakers across multiple scripts. However, existing benchmarks either focus on a single language or conflate retrieval with generation, leaving open the question of whether current embedding models can encode persona-instruction compatibility without relying on response synthesis. We present a unified benchmark spanning 12 Indian languages and four evaluation tasks: monolingual and cross-lingual persona-to-instruction retrieval, reverse retrieval from instruction to persona, and binary compatibility classification. Eight multilingual embedding models are evaluated in a frozen-encoder setting with a thin logistic regression head for classification. E5-Large-Instruct achieves the highest Recall@1 of 27.4\% on monolingual retrieval and 20.7\% on cross-lingual transfer, while BGE-M3 leads reverse retrieval at 32.1\% Recall@1. For classification, LaBSE attains 75.3\% AUROC with strong calibration. These findings offer practical guidance for model selection in Indic multilingual retrieval and establish reproducible baselines for future work\footnote{Code, datasets, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/aryashah2k/PI-Indic-Align.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10205
Academic Papers
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30a1b24a2fafa9bec4fefbd73eb4d952ac78d1d9dcd96aebde39be9e9a30a927
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Terrain-Adaptive Mobile 3D Printing with Hierarchical Control
arXiv:2601.10208v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mobile 3D printing on unstructured terrain remains challenging due to the conflict between platform mobility and deposition precision. Existing gantry-based systems achieve high accuracy but lack mobility, while mobile platforms struggle to maintain print quality on uneven ground. We present a framework that tightly integrates AI-driven disturbance prediction with multi-modal sensor fusion and hierarchical hardware control, forming a closed-loop perception-learning-actuation system. The AI module learns terrain-to-perturbation mappings from IMU, vision, and depth sensors, enabling proactive compensation rather than reactive correction. This intelligence is embedded into a three-layer control architecture: path planning, predictive chassis-manipulator coordination, and precision hardware execution. Through outdoor experiments on terrain with slopes and surface irregularities, we demonstrate sub-centimeter printing accuracy while maintaining full platform mobility. This AI-hardware integration establishes a practical foundation for autonomous construction in unstructured environments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10208
Academic Papers
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27150025ecbacfeb9296d881c1f785590032010b359c8c2bb4e557da4abb1b90
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
PADER: Paillier-based Secure Decentralized Social Recommendation
arXiv:2601.10212v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The prevalence of recommendation systems also brings privacy concerns to both the users and the sellers, as centralized platforms collect as much data as possible from them. To keep the data private, we propose PADER: a Paillier-based secure decentralized social recommendation system. In this system, the users and the sellers are nodes in a decentralized network. The training and inference of the recommendation model are carried out securely in a decentralized manner, without the involvement of a centralized platform. To this end, we apply the Paillier cryptosystem to the SoReg (Social Regularization) model, which exploits both user's ratings and social relations. We view the SoReg model as a two-party secure polynomial evaluation problem and observe that the simple bipartite computation may result in poor efficiency. To improve efficiency, we design secure addition and multiplication protocols to support secure computation on any arithmetic circuit, along with an optimal data packing scheme that is suitable for the polynomial computations of real values. Experiment results show that our method only takes about one second to iterate through one user with hundreds of ratings, and training with ~500K ratings for one epoch only takes <3 hours, which shows that the method is practical in real applications. The code is available at https://github.com/GarminQ/PADER.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10212
Academic Papers
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c61bdd611beb8a7018db5823f0b26ac81a45d9a438fc103a286abd30c2be298d
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Beyond Inpainting: Unleash 3D Understanding for Precise Camera-Controlled Video Generation
arXiv:2601.10214v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Camera control has been extensively studied in conditioned video generation; however, performing precisely altering the camera trajectories while faithfully preserving the video content remains a challenging task. The mainstream approach to achieving precise camera control is warping a 3D representation according to the target trajectory. However, such methods fail to fully leverage the 3D priors of video diffusion models (VDMs) and often fall into the Inpainting Trap, resulting in subject inconsistency and degraded generation quality. To address this problem, we propose DepthDirector, a video re-rendering framework with precise camera controllability. By leveraging the depth video from explicit 3D representation as camera-control guidance, our method can faithfully reproduce the dynamic scene of an input video under novel camera trajectories. Specifically, we design a View-Content Dual-Stream Condition mechanism that injects both the source video and the warped depth sequence rendered under the target viewpoint into the pretrained video generation model. This geometric guidance signal enables VDMs to comprehend camera movements and leverage their 3D understanding capabilities, thereby facilitating precise camera control and consistent content generation. Next, we introduce a lightweight LoRA-based video diffusion adapter to train our framework, fully preserving the knowledge priors of VDMs. Additionally, we construct a large-scale multi-camera synchronized dataset named MultiCam-WarpData using Unreal Engine 5, containing 8K videos across 1K dynamic scenes. Extensive experiments show that DepthDirector outperforms existing methods in both camera controllability and visual quality. Our code and dataset will be publicly available.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10214
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3508241422fd15cc068ec3f67f7ace9273963bbb99cd1c0fb57e828421299f63
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Topo-RAG: Topology-aware retrieval for hybrid text-table documents
arXiv:2601.10215v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In enterprise datasets, documents are rarely pure. They are not just text, nor just numbers; they are a complex amalgam of narrative and structure. Current Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems have attempted to address this complexity with a blunt tool: linearization. We convert rich, multidimensional tables into simple Markdown-style text strings, hoping that an embedding model will capture the geometry of a spreadsheet in a single vector. But it has already been shown that this is mathematically insufficient. This work presents Topo-RAG, a framework that challenges the assumption that "everything is text". We propose a dual architecture that respects the topology of the data: we route fluid narrative through traditional dense retrievers, while tabular structures are processed by a Cell-Aware Late Interaction mechanism, preserving their spatial relationships. Evaluated on SEC-25, a synthetic enterprise corpus that mimics real-world complexity, Topo-RAG demonstrates an 18.4% improvement in nDCG@10 on hybrid queries compared to standard linearization approaches. It's not just about searching better; it's about understanding the shape of information.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10215
Academic Papers
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81e02d2bdf1d29e03256a8333b13cb751a7db81f940b103042b409f09f4a37bf
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Agentic Pipelines in Embedded Software Engineering: Emerging Practices and Challenges
arXiv:2601.10220v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A new transformation is underway in software engineering, driven by the rapid adoption of generative AI in development workflows. Similar to how version control systems once automated manual coordination, AI tools are now beginning to automate many aspects of programming. For embedded software engineering organizations, however, this marks their first experience integrating AI into safety-critical and resource-constrained environments. The strict demands for determinism, reliability, and traceability pose unique challenges for adopting generative technologies. In this paper, we present findings from a qualitative study with ten senior experts from four companies who are evaluating generative AI-augmented development for embedded software. Through semi-structured focus group interviews and structured brainstorming sessions, we identified eleven emerging practices and fourteen challenges related to the orchestration, responsible governance, and sustainable adoption of generative AI tools. Our results show how embedded software engineering teams are rethinking workflows, roles, and toolchains to enable a sustainable transition toward agentic pipelines and generative AI-augmented development.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10220
Academic Papers
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ab353a9a0a14fcef041ec46e657911ead8125bcb3d7eabbe79e17b9fafb073a7
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Introduction to optimization methods for training SciML models
arXiv:2601.10222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optimization is central to both modern machine learning (ML) and scientific machine learning (SciML), yet the structure of the underlying optimization problems differs substantially across these domains. Classical ML typically relies on stochastic, sample-separable objectives that favor first-order and adaptive gradient methods. In contrast, SciML often involves physics-informed or operator-constrained formulations in which differential operators induce global coupling, stiffness, and strong anisotropy in the loss landscape. As a result, optimization behavior in SciML is governed by the spectral properties of the underlying physical models rather than by data statistics, frequently limiting the effectiveness of standard stochastic methods and motivating deterministic or curvature-aware approaches. This document provides a unified introduction to optimization methods in ML and SciML, emphasizing how problem structure shapes algorithmic choices. We review first- and second-order optimization techniques in both deterministic and stochastic settings, discuss their adaptation to physics-constrained and data-driven SciML models, and illustrate practical strategies through tutorial examples, while highlighting open research directions at the interface of scientific computing and scientific machine learning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10222
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9eebd0a87abc29534c4fc49b77df6523c98d5da3e40e71472c2ab7649fa164fc
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
STEAMROLLER: A Multi-Agent System for Inclusive Automatic Speech Recognition for People who Stutter
arXiv:2601.10223v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: People who stutter (PWS) face systemic exclusion in today's voice-driven society, where access to voice assistants, authentication systems, and remote work tools increasingly depends on fluent speech. Current automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, trained predominantly on fluent speech, fail to serve millions of PWS worldwide. We present STEAMROLLER, a real time system that transforms stuttered speech into fluent output through a novel multi-stage, multi-agent AI pipeline. Our approach addresses three critical technical challenges: (1) the difficulty of direct speech to speech conversion for disfluent input, (2) semantic distortions introduced during ASR transcription of stuttered speech, and (3) latency constraints for real time communication. STEAMROLLER employs a three stage architecture comprising ASR transcription, multi-agent text repair, and speech synthesis, where our core innovation lies in a collaborative multi-agent framework that iteratively refines transcripts while preserving semantic intent. Experiments on the FluencyBank dataset and a user study demonstrates clear word error rate (WER) reduction and strong user satisfaction. Beyond immediate accessibility benefits, fine tuning ASR on STEAMROLLER repaired speech further yields additional WER improvements, creating a pathway toward inclusive AI ecosystems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10223
Academic Papers
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4ac5655bbb37f3d3535711fb92ec243c0dc881973659aacbe84926f799b2efbd
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
A Unified Framework for Kinematic Simulation of Rigid Foldable Structures
arXiv:2601.10225v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Origami-inspired structures with rigid panels now span thick, kirigami, and multi-sheet realizations, making unified kinematic analysis essential. Yet a general method that consolidates their loop constraints has been lacking. We present an automated approach that generates the Pfaffian constraint matrix for arbitrary rigid foldable structures (RFS). From a minimally extended data schema, the tool constructs the facet-hinge graph, extracts a minimum cycle basis that captures all constraints, and assembles a velocity-level constraint matrix via screw theory that encodes coupled rotation and translation loop closure. The framework computes and visualizes deploy and fold motions across diverse RFS while eliminating tedious and error-prone constraint calculations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10225
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5f1f7b13b581a625929ca7825544b2d69326c68eb1901bd0a581116966b19438
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Optimizing Multimodal LLMs for Egocentric Video Understanding: A Solution for the HD-EPIC VQA Challenge
arXiv:2601.10228v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with complex video QA benchmarks like HD-EPIC VQA due to ambiguous queries/options, poor long-range temporal reasoning, and non-standardized outputs. We propose a framework integrating query/choice pre-processing, domain-specific Qwen2.5-VL fine-tuning, a novel Temporal Chain-of-Thought (T-CoT) prompting for multi-step reasoning, and robust post-processing. This system achieves 41.6% accuracy on HD-EPIC VQA, highlighting the need for holistic pipeline optimization in demanding video understanding. Our code, fine-tuned models are available at https://github.com/YoungSeng/Egocentric-Co-Pilot.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10228
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e1823d99b6e2dd2379e6cdf96c1e28f0061f15317dc6cb0778e834aa5f1a835f
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
GeoSteer: Faithful Chain-of-Thought Steering via Latent Manifold Gradients
arXiv:2601.10229v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved multi-step reasoning. Most approaches rely on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) rationales. Previous studies have shown that LLMs often generate logically inconsistent reasoning steps even when their final answers are correct. These inconsistencies reduce the reliability of step-level reasoning. We propose GeoSteer, a manifold-based framework that improves the quality of intermediate reasoning. The method consists of: (1) constructing a CoT dataset with segment-level scores, (2) training a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) model and a quality estimation model to learn a low-dimensional manifold of high-quality CoT trajectories, and (3) steering hidden states of target LLMs toward higher-quality regions in the latent space. This update in a latent space behaves like a natural-gradient adjustment in the original hidden-state space. It ensures geometrically coherent steering. We evaluate GeoSteer on the GSM8k dataset using the Qwen3 series. We measure via answer accuracy and overall reasoning performance. GeoSteer improved the exact match accuracy by up to 2.6 points. It also enhanced the pairwise win rate by 5.3 points. These results indicate that GeoSteer provides an effective and controllable mechanism for improving the quality of intermediate reasoning in LLMs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10229
Academic Papers
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48c3bc0fa1ede611dd347e6e06d851d2c2ecdd3ac18353d3f44584591011fde9
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Tables or Sankey Diagrams? Investigating User Interaction with Different Representations of Simulation Parameters
arXiv:2601.10232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding complex parameter dependencies is critical for effective configuration and maintenance of software systems across diverse domains - from Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) to cloud infrastructure and database management. However, legacy tabular interfaces create a major bottleneck: engineers cannot easily comprehend how parameters relate across the system, leading to inefficient workflows, costly configuration errors, and reduced system trust - a fundamental program comprehension challenge in configuration-intensive software. This research evaluates whether interactive Sankey diagrams can improve comprehension of parameter dependencies compared to traditional spreadsheet interfaces. We employed a heuristic evaluation using the PURE method with three expert evaluators (UX design, simulation, and software development specialists) to compare a Sankey-based prototype to traditional tabular representations for core engineering tasks. Our key contribution demonstrates that flow-based parameter visualizations significantly reduce cognitive load (51% lower PURE scores) and interaction complexity (56% fewer steps) compared to traditional tables, while making parameter dependencies immediately visible rather than requiring mental reconstruction. By explicitly visualizing parameter relationships, Sankey diagrams address a core software visualization challenge: helping users comprehend complex system configurations without requiring deep tool-specific knowledge. While demonstrated through CAE software, this research contributes to program comprehension and software visualization by showing that dependency-aware visualizations can significantly improve understanding of configuration-intensive systems. The findings have implications for any software domain where comprehending complex parameter relationships is essential for effective system use and maintenance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10232
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6f8f1e11254e993414a55764dc715f66f03d4ffc346ed4e59206b7ae6064acf0
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Proactive Local-Minima-Free Robot Navigation: Blending Motion Prediction with Safe Control
arXiv:2601.10233v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work addresses the challenge of safe and efficient mobile robot navigation in complex dynamic environments with concave moving obstacles. Reactive safe controllers like Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) design obstacle avoidance strategies based only on the current states of the obstacles, risking future collisions. To alleviate this problem, we use Gaussian processes to learn barrier functions online from multimodal motion predictions of obstacles generated by neural networks trained with energy-based learning. The learned barrier functions are then fed into quadratic programs using modulated CBFs (MCBFs), a local-minimum-free version of CBFs, to achieve safe and efficient navigation. The proposed framework makes two key contributions. First, it develops a prediction-to-barrier function online learning pipeline. Second, it introduces an autonomous parameter tuning algorithm that adapts MCBFs to deforming, prediction-based barrier functions. The framework is evaluated in both simulations and real-world experiments, consistently outperforming baselines and demonstrating superior safety and efficiency in crowded dynamic environments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10233
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14c57e86d3109485f1e536d5224c820a9b2b9fb4e1b9178662808a6e4a909da6
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Who Owns the Text? Design Patterns for Preserving Authorship in AI-Assisted Writing
arXiv:2601.10236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI writing assistants can reduce effort and improve fluency, but they may also weaken writers' sense of authorship. We study this tension with an ownership-aware co-writing editor that offers on-demand, sentence-level suggestions and tests two common design choices: persona-based coaching and style personalization. In an online study (N=176), participants completed three professional writing tasks: an email without AI help, a proposal with generic AI suggestions, and a cover letter with persona-based coaching, while half received suggestions tailored to a brief sample of their prior writing. Across the two AI-assisted tasks, psychological ownership dropped relative to unassisted writing (about 0.85-1.0 points on a 7-point scale), even as cognitive load decreased (about 0.9 points) and quality ratings stayed broadly similar overall. Persona coaching did not prevent the ownership decline. Style personalization partially restored ownership (about +0.43) and increased AI incorporation in text (+5 percentage points). We distill five design patterns: on-demand initiation, micro-suggestions, voice anchoring, audience scaffolds, and point-of-decision provenance, to guide authorship-preserving writing tools.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10236
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a8ee897f824c008c4381fb14171f6c860e8ee1a0e1bb9b05e0e71f94281fe8ca
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Fundamental Limitations of Favorable Privacy-Utility Guarantees for DP-SGD
arXiv:2601.10237v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD) is the dominant paradigm for private training, but its fundamental limitations under worst-case adversarial privacy definitions remain poorly understood. We analyze DP-SGD in the $f$-differential privacy framework, which characterizes privacy via hypothesis-testing trade-off curves, and study shuffled sampling over a single epoch with $M$ gradient updates. We derive an explicit suboptimal upper bound on the achievable trade-off curve. This result induces a geometric lower bound on the separation $\kappa$ which is the maximum distance between the mechanism's trade-off curve and the ideal random-guessing line. Because a large separation implies significant adversarial advantage, meaningful privacy requires small $\kappa$. However, we prove that enforcing a small separation imposes a strict lower bound on the Gaussian noise multiplier $\sigma$, which directly limits the achievable utility. In particular, under the standard worst-case adversarial model, shuffled DP-SGD must satisfy $\sigma \ge \frac{1}{\sqrt{2\ln M}}$ $\quad\text{or}\quad$ $\kappa \ge\ \frac{1}{\sqrt{8}}\!\left(1-\frac{1}{\sqrt{4\pi\ln M}}\right)$, and thus cannot simultaneously achieve strong privacy and high utility. Although this bound vanishes asymptotically as $M \to \infty$, the convergence is extremely slow: even for practically relevant numbers of updates the required noise magnitude remains substantial. We further show that the same limitation extends to Poisson subsampling up to constant factors. Our experiments confirm that the noise levels implied by this bound leads to significant accuracy degradation at realistic training settings, thus showing a critical bottleneck in DP-SGD under standard worst-case adversarial assumptions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10237
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c875aa172bca4a346e3e02d342395e555513071e438ed0d405c84b729731ee9b
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Loop as a Bridge: Can Looped Transformers Truly Link Representation Space and Natural Language Outputs?
arXiv:2601.10242v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit a gap between their internal knowledge and their explicit linguistic outputs. In this report, we empirically investigate whether Looped Transformers (LTs)--architectures that increase computational depth by iterating shared layers--can bridge this gap by utilizing their iterative nature as a form of introspection. Our experiments reveal that while increasing loop iterations narrows the gap, it is partly driven by a degradation of their internal knowledge carried by representations. Moreover, another empirical analysis suggests that current LTs' ability to perceive representations does not improve across loops; it is only present in the final loop. These results suggest that while LTs offer a promising direction for scaling computational depth, they have yet to achieve the introspection required to truly link representation space and natural language.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10242
Academic Papers
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71000317735b7a9317de8fb6a8402fd4a2007a1137054483ee2395f5a3ac3687
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Attend to what I say: Highlighting relevant content on slides
arXiv:2601.10244v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Imagine sitting in a presentation, trying to follow the speaker while simultaneously scanning the slides for relevant information. While the entire slide is visible, identifying the relevant regions can be challenging. As you focus on one part of the slide, the speaker moves on to a new sentence, leaving you scrambling to catch up visually. This constant back-and-forth creates a disconnect between what is being said and the most important visual elements, making it hard to absorb key details, especially in fast-paced or content-heavy presentations such as conference talks. This requires an understanding of slides, including text, graphics, and layout. We introduce a method that automatically identifies and highlights the most relevant slide regions based on the speaker's narrative. By analyzing spoken content and matching it with textual or graphical elements in the slides, our approach ensures better synchronization between what listeners hear and what they need to attend to. We explore different ways of solving this problem and assess their success and failure cases. Analyzing multimedia documents is emerging as a key requirement for seamless understanding of content-rich videos, such as educational videos and conference talks, by reducing cognitive strain and improving comprehension. Code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/meghamariamkm2002/Slide_Highlight
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10244
Academic Papers
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4e41605ebbd57a0d74d00aefa106fad7ffea3ccd58232dd983f1476fd446f3a4
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
TRIM: Hybrid Inference via Targeted Stepwise Routing in Multi-Step Reasoning Tasks
arXiv:2601.10245v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-step reasoning tasks like mathematical problem solving are vulnerable to cascading failures, where a single incorrect step leads to complete solution breakdown. Current LLM routing methods assign entire queries to one model, treating all reasoning steps as equal. We propose TRIM (Targeted routing in multi-step reasoning tasks), which routes only critical steps$\unicode{x2013}$those likely to derail the solution$\unicode{x2013}$to larger models while letting smaller models handle routine continuations. Our key insight is that targeted step-level interventions can fundamentally transform inference efficiency by confining expensive calls to precisely those steps where stronger models prevent cascading errors. TRIM operates at the step-level: it uses process reward models to identify erroneous steps and makes routing decisions based on step-level uncertainty and budget constraints. We develop several routing strategies within TRIM, ranging from a simple threshold-based policy to more expressive policies that reason about long-horizon accuracy-cost trade-offs and uncertainty in step-level correctness estimates. On MATH-500, even the simplest thresholding strategy surpasses prior routing methods with 5x higher cost efficiency, while more advanced policies match the strong, expensive model's performance using 80% fewer expensive model tokens. On harder benchmarks such as AIME, TRIM achieves up to 6x higher cost efficiency. All methods generalize effectively across math reasoning tasks, demonstrating that step-level difficulty represents fundamental characteristics of reasoning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10245
Academic Papers
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5a65df887b6f124a5e84c6eda189c7079b5fae0b42e93b3f66a694ba4cd8069d
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
coTherapist: A Behavior-Aligned Small Language Model to Support Mental Healthcare Experts
arXiv:2601.10246v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Access to mental healthcare is increasingly strained by workforce shortages and rising demand, motivating the development of intelligent systems that can support mental healthcare experts. We introduce coTherapist, a unified framework utilizing a small language model to emulate core therapeutic competencies through domain-specific fine-tuning, retrieval augmentation, and agentic reasoning. Evaluation on clinical queries demonstrates that coTherapist generates more relevant and clinically grounded responses than contemporary baselines. Using our novel T-BARS rubric and psychometric profiling, we confirm coTherapist exhibits high empathy and therapist-consistent personality traits. Furthermore, human evaluation by domain experts validates that coTherapist delivers accurate, trustworthy, and safe responses. coTherapist was deployed and tested by clinical experts. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that small models can be engineered to exhibit expert-like behavior, offering a scalable pathway for digital mental health tools.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10246
Academic Papers
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16c98e01c63c17823c949e8fe9e3f7bbefbea05b96726c2cd9a15c21be3357a7
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Restoring similarity in randomized Krylov methods with applications to eigenvalue problems and matrix functions
arXiv:2601.10248v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The randomized Arnoldi process has been used in large-scale scientific computing because it produces a well-conditioned basis for the Krylov subspace more quickly than the standard Arnoldi process. However, the resulting Hessenberg matrix is generally not similar to the one produced by the standard Arnoldi process, which can lead to delays or spike-like irregularities in convergence. In this paper, we introduce a modification of the randomized Arnoldi process that restores similarity with the Hessenberg matrix generated by the standard Arnoldi process. This is accomplished by enforcing orthogonality between the last Arnoldi vector and the previously generated subspace, which requires solving only one additional least-squares problem. When applied to eigenvalue problems and matrix function evaluations, the modified randomized Arnoldi process produces approximations that are identical to those obtained with the standard Arnoldi process. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our approach is as fast as the randomized Arnoldi process and as robust as the standard Arnoldi process.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10248
Academic Papers
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374c539b02e311bebb8a63c6268c15072209a7d599f86da61f424863205866a3
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
X-SAM: Boosting Sharpness-Aware Minimization with Dominant-Eigenvector Gradient Correction
arXiv:2601.10251v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) aims to improve generalization by minimizing a worst-case perturbed loss over a small neighborhood of model parameters. However, during training, its optimization behavior does not always align with theoretical expectations, since both sharp and flat regions may yield a small perturbed loss. In such cases, the gradient may still point toward sharp regions, failing to achieve the intended effect of SAM. To address this issue, we investigate SAM from a spectral and geometric perspective: specifically, we utilize the angle between the gradient and the leading eigenvector of the Hessian as a measure of sharpness. Our analysis illustrates that when this angle is less than or equal to ninety degrees, the effect of SAM's sharpness regularization can be weakened. Furthermore, we propose an explicit eigenvector-aligned SAM (X-SAM), which corrects the gradient via orthogonal decomposition along the top eigenvector, enabling more direct and efficient regularization of the Hessian's maximum eigenvalue. We prove X-SAM's convergence and superior generalization, with extensive experimental evaluations confirming both theoretical and practical advantages.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10251
Academic Papers
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7db9596004a70a8392290c24653e6e80c51fcb426de4c7e7a349171ea7d82886
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Developer Interaction Patterns with Proactive AI: A Five-Day Field Study
arXiv:2601.10253v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current in-IDE AI coding tools typically rely on time-consuming manual prompting and context management, whereas proactive alternatives that anticipate developer needs without explicit invocation remain underexplored. Understanding when humans are receptive to such proactive AI assistance during their daily work remains an open question in human-AI interaction research. We address this gap through a field study of proactive AI assistance in professional developer workflows. We present a five-day in-the-wild study with 15 developers who interacted with a proactive feature of an AI assistant integrated into a production-grade IDE that offers code quality suggestions based on in-IDE developer activity. We examined 229 AI interventions across 5,732 interaction points to understand how proactive suggestions are received across workflow stages, how developers experience them, and their perceived impact. Our findings reveal systematic patterns in human receptivity to proactive suggestions: interventions at workflow boundaries (e.g., post-commit) achieved 52% engagement rates, while mid-task interventions (e.g., on declined edit) were dismissed 62% of the time. Notably, well-timed proactive suggestions required significantly less interpretation time than reactive suggestions (45.4s versus 101.4s, W = 109.00, r = 0.533, p = 0.0016), indicating enhanced cognitive alignment. This study provides actionable implications for designing proactive coding assistants, including how to time interventions, align them with developer context, and strike a balance between AI agency and user control in production IDEs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10253
Academic Papers
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552fb567d380b661e836f86e5a5576077097cec1acf2a7bed37ba3c164fc097c
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
NoReGeo: Non-Reasoning Geometry Benchmark
arXiv:2601.10254v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present NoReGeo, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the intrinsic geometric understanding of large language models (LLMs) without relying on reasoning or algebraic computation. Unlike existing benchmarks that primarily assess models' proficiency in reasoning-based geometry-where solutions are derived using algebraic methods-NoReGeo focuses on evaluating whether LLMs can inherently encode spatial relationships and recognize geometric properties directly. Our benchmark comprises 2,500 trivial geometric problems spanning 25 categories, each carefully crafted to be solvable purely through native geometric understanding, assuming known object locations. We assess a range of state-of-the-art models on NoReGeo, including frontier models like GPT-4, observing that even the most advanced systems achieve an overall maximum of 65% accuracy in binary classification tasks. Further, our ablation experiments demonstrate that such geometric understanding does not emerge through fine-tuning alone, indicating that effective training for geometric comprehension requires a specialized approach from the outset. Our findings highlight a significant gap in current LLMs' ability to natively grasp geometric concepts, providing a foundation for future research toward models with true geometric cognition.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10254
Academic Papers
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dce1d9c5cdadbd14b2e27d66375acdb5f472720a1ef29a76de5f14390f7ed115
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Error-Correcting Codes for the Sum Channel
arXiv:2601.10256v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the sum channel, a new channel model motivated by applications in distributed storage and DNA data storage. In the error-free case, it takes as input an $\ell$-row binary matrix and outputs an $(\ell+1)$-row matrix whose first $\ell$ rows equal the input and whose last row is their parity (sum) row. We construct a two-deletion-correcting code with redundancy $2\lceil\log_2\log_2 n\rceil + O(\ell^2)$ for $\ell$-row inputs. When $\ell=2$, we establish an upper bound of $\lceil\log_2\log_2 n\rceil + O(1)$, implying that our redundancy is optimal up to a factor of 2. We also present a code correcting a single substitution with $\lceil \log_2(\ell+1)\rceil$ redundant bits and prove that it is within one bit of optimality.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10256
Academic Papers
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183a89df42571c6bf8f599771a5bac2d4d904515aeb971c65bda56c8423ebdc2
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Untangling Input Language from Reasoning Language: A Diagnostic Framework for Cross-Lingual Moral Alignment in LLMs
arXiv:2601.10257v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When LLMs judge moral dilemmas, do they reach different conclusions in different languages, and if so, why? Two factors could drive such differences: the language of the dilemma itself, or the language in which the model reasons. Standard evaluation conflates these by testing only matched conditions (e.g., English dilemma with English reasoning). We introduce a methodology that separately manipulates each factor, covering also mismatched conditions (e.g., English dilemma with Chinese reasoning), enabling decomposition of their contributions. To study \emph{what} changes, we propose an approach to interpret the moral judgments in terms of Moral Foundations Theory. As a side result, we identify evidence for splitting the Authority dimension into a family-related and an institutional dimension. Applying this methodology to English-Chinese moral judgment with 13 LLMs, we demonstrate its diagnostic power: (1) the framework isolates reasoning-language effects as contributing twice the variance of input-language effects; (2) it detects context-dependency in nearly half of models that standard evaluation misses; and (3) a diagnostic taxonomy translates these patterns into deployment guidance. We release our code and datasets at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CrossCulturalMoralJudgement.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10257
Academic Papers
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53046e3447e608ba76dd0ce5cb11514939a5eb14747ddfe9dd0da65d7bc8f904
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Evolving with AI: A Longitudinal Analysis of Developer Logs
arXiv:2601.10258v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI-powered coding assistants are rapidly becoming fixtures in professional IDEs, yet their sustained influence on everyday development remains poorly understood. Prior research has focused on short-term use or self-reported perceptions, leaving open questions about how sustained AI use reshapes actual daily coding practices in the long term. We address this gap with a mixed-method study of AI adoption in IDEs, combining longitudinal two-year fine-grained telemetry from 800 developers with a survey of 62 professionals. We analyze five dimensions of workflow change: productivity, code quality, code editing, code reuse, and context switching. Telemetry reveals that AI users produce substantially more code but also delete significantly more. Meanwhile, survey respondents report productivity gains and perceive minimal changes in other dimensions. Our results offer empirical insights into the silent restructuring of software workflows and provide implications for designing future AI-augmented tooling.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10258
Academic Papers
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01106bb74f40facde486684d2b492e83fc509fe4a63ebc790aee4958535745ee
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
Transmission Mask Analysis for Range-Doppler Sensing in Half-Duplex ISAC
arXiv:2601.10259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we analyze the periodic transmission masks for MASked Modulation (MASM) in half-duplex integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), and derive their closed-form expected range-Doppler response $\mathbb{E}\{r(k,l,\nu)\}$. We show that range sidelobes ($k\neq l$) are Doppler-invariant, extending the range-sidelobe optimality to the 2-D setting. For the range mainlobe ($k=l$), periodic masking yields sparse Doppler sidelobes: Cyclic difference sets (CDSs) (in particular Singer CDSs) are minimax-optimal in a moderately dynamic regime, while in a highly dynamic regime the Doppler-sidelobe energy is a concave function of the mask autocorrelation, revealing an inevitable tradeoff with mainlobe fluctuation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10259
Academic Papers
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6de42a679692e0c76dc3c61e64d7b65192c0522bdff55969b6dfc96445600e1a
2026-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
XuanJia: A Comprehensive Virtualization-Based Code Obfuscator for Binary Protection
arXiv:2601.10261v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Virtualization-based binary obfuscation is widely adopted to protect software intellectual property, yet existing approaches leave exception-handling (EH) metadata unprotected to preserve ABI compatibility. This exposed metadata leaks rich structural information, such as stack layouts, control-flow boundaries, and object lifetimes, which can be exploited to facilitate reverse engineering. In this paper, we present XuanJia, a comprehensive VM-based binary obfuscation framework that provides end-to-end protection for both executable code and exception-handling semantics. At the core of XuanJia is ABI-Compliant EH Shadowing, a novel exception-aware protection mechanism that preserves compatibility with unmodified operating system runtimes while eliminating static EH metadata leakage. XuanJia replaces native EH metadata with ABI-compliant shadow unwind information to satisfy OS-driven unwinding, and securely redirects exception handling into a protected virtual machine where the genuine EH semantics are decrypted, reversed, and replayed using obfuscated code. We implement XuanJia from scratch, supporting 385 x86 instruction encodings and 155 VM handler templates, and design it as an extensible research testbed. We evaluate XuanJia across correctness, resilience, and performance dimensions. Our results show that XuanJia preserves semantic equivalence under extensive dynamic and symbolic testing, effectively disrupts automated reverse-engineering tools such as IDA Pro, and incurs negligible space overhead and modest runtime overhead. These results demonstrate that XuanJia achieves strong protection of exception-handling logic without sacrificing correctness or practicality.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10261
Academic Papers
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