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Monday 10 August

Artificial Intelligence

Motif 3: Technical Report

Junghwan Lim, Joon Son Chung, Sungmin Lee et al. (+24 more)

We introduce Motif 3, a decoder-only Mixture-of-Experts language model with 314 billion total parameters and 13.2 billion activated per token. Each sparse MoE layer contains 384 routed experts, with eight selected per token. This fine-grained sparsity provides substantial expert capacity while limiting computation. Motif 3 is built around Grouped Differential Latent Attention (GDLA), which integrates grouped differential attention with the compressed key-value representation of Multi-head Latent Attention. The architecture further incorporates modified manifold-constrained hyper-connections, Expert Specific PolyNorm activations, and multi-token prediction to improve optimization stability, expert specialization, and inference efficiency. We pretrain Motif 3 on approximately 12.5 trillion tokens spanning web documents, STEM, code, mathematics, multilingual content, and domain-specialized corpora. Expert-balancing and numerical-stabilization techniques support stable training at scale, while selective MXFP8 computation and communication, memory-efficient fused kernels, and window-aware context parallelism enable training with context lengths up to 256K tokens. Our post-training pipeline combines general supervised fine-tuning, six specialist teachers trained with reinforcement learning, a software-engineering teacher trained with supervised fine-tuning, and Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation. The resulting unified model consolidates complementary capabilities in reasoning, coding, tool use, professional work, long-context understanding, calibrated abstention, and instruction following. Across a broad evaluation suite, Motif 3 demonstrates competitive performance against leading open weight models, including strong results on long-horizon agentic tasks, mathematical reasoning, scientific knowledge, and hallucination-sensitive evaluation.
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All authors Junghwan Lim, Joon Son Chung, Sungmin Lee, Wai Ting Cheung, Gihun Cho, Minsu Ha, Sangho Kang, Beomgyu Kim, Dongseok Kim, Jangwoong Kim, Taehyun Kim, Taewhan Kim, Jeesoo Lee, Jeongdoo Lee, Junhyeok Lee, Dongpin Oh, Hyeyeon Cho, Dahye Choi, Jaeheui Her, Hanbin Jung, Changjin Kang, Minjae Kim, Youngrok Kim, Hyukjin Kweon, Hongjoo Lee, Yeongjae Park, Bokki Ryu

Artificial Intelligence

RAVEN-Eval: Rubric-Guided Automatic Evaluation for AI Video Generation Models Based on LMM Preference Judgement

Ziheng Jia, Jiaying Qian, Zicheng Zhang et al. (+3 more)

AI video generation has advanced rapidly and entered widespread commercial use. As a result, quality differences among videos produced by state-of-the-art AI video generation models~(AIVGMs) have become increasingly difficult to discern using conventional evaluation criteria, such as visual fidelity and semantic instruction following. Meanwhile, human evaluation now requires more expertise and sustained attention, substantially increasing annotation costs. This calls for automated evaluation that can reliably distinguish fine-grained differences among advanced AIVGMs with minimal human intervention. To address this challenge, we present RAVEN-Eval, a rubric-guided automated evaluation framework for AIVGMs, built primarily on the LMM-as-a-judge paradigm. Through an automatic task curation and quality-filtering pipeline, RAVEN-Eval curates 150 text-to-video~(T2V) tasks and 100 image-to-video~(I2V) tasks, and systematically collects more than 4,500 AIGVs. At its core, RAVEN-Eval adopts rubric-guided automated LMM preference judgement, in which LMM judges conduct pairwise comparisons according to task-specific rubrics. It further introduces an anchor-based model insertion approach to reduce the evaluation cost of incorporating new models. Finally, we evaluate 20 high-performance AIVGMs, as well as the judging capabilities of 13 LMM judges, and establish the RAVEN-Eval Leaderboards. Overall, RAVEN-Eval paves a scalable path for automatic and trustworthy evaluation of rapidly evolving AIVGMs.
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All authors Ziheng Jia, Jiaying Qian, Zicheng Zhang, Xiaorong Zhu, Lancheng Gao, Xiongkuo Min

Artificial Intelligence

Different Feedback, Different Updates: Selective Self-Learning from User Interactions for Large Language Models

Xuancheng Li, Haitao Li, Yujia Zhou et al. (+5 more)

User feedback offers natural supervision for persistent LLM improvement, but a single message may support multiple behavioral changes with different scopes of generalization. We introduce SLIFT, a selective self-learning framework built on a task-relative view of user feedback. SLIFT decomposes each feedback message into atomic components and interprets each component relative to the original task as Fix, Spec, or Null: requirements for task validity, compatible condition-specific refinements, or content with no reliable positive update direction. To incorporate each change at the appropriate scope, SLIFT trains two complementary LoRA adapters on a shared frozen backbone: a Generalist that consolidates Fix requirements into default behavior through feedback-conditioned self-distillation, and a Specialist that observes only the task and Generalist response to supply residual guidance for applicable, unmet Spec refinements. Null components induce no positive update. Across backbones, SLIFT achieves strong performance on both MemoryBench and WildFB, with targeted analyses further examining its underlying mechanisms. We release our code at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SLIFT.
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All authors Xuancheng Li, Haitao Li, Yujia Zhou, Qingyi Pan, Heng Wang, Yiqun Liu, Min Zhang, Qingyao Ai

Artificial Intelligence

Who Bridges Safety? Identifying and Targeting Cross-Lingual Shared Safety Pathways

Shuyi Miao, Wangjie Qiu, Pengyang Shao et al. (+4 more)

Uncovering the internal mechanisms underlying the safety capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for developing trustworthy artificial intelligence. Currently, mechanistic interpretability studies on multilingual safety are largely confined to local components, such as isolated neurons. However, this static and fragmented perspective overlooks the synergy among components and fails to elucidate how safety signals dynamically propagate within the model to drive safety decisions ultimately. In this work, we move beyond isolated neurons to identify and target the cross-layer functional pathways formed during safety signal propagation, thereby uncovering the mechanisms driving the cross-lingual safety gap. Specifically, we first identify monolingual safety pathways and validate their impact on refusing harmful requests. Subsequent cross-lingual analyses reveal a sparse subset of cross-lingual shared safety pathways, confirming that this intersection acts as the internal bridge transferring safety capabilities from high-resource (HR) languages to non-high-resource (NHR) languages. Building on these mechanistic findings, we propose a pathways-targeted alignment method based on the cross-lingual shared safety pathways. Experimental results show that updating only a small fraction of pathway parameters significantly improves safety in NHR languages while largely preserving the model's general capabilities.
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All authors Shuyi Miao, Wangjie Qiu, Pengyang Shao, Canran Xiao, Fei Shen, Zhiming Zheng, Tat-Seng Chua

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL

The Announcement Carries the Cue: Markup, Boundaries, and the Notation of Pre-Training Corpora

E. M. Freeburg

How a document's arrangement is written down, its notation, is a training variable that no dataset card records. The field has established that text-extraction choices change model behaviour, and has never once measured the notation of what those choices put into the corpus. We define clean-window survival, a deterministic count of how much of a stream still demands the boundary inference, and measure notation on three fronts. What corpora carry: a census of thirteen public corpora, where survival falls to 0.153 in a vision-converted PDF slice against 0.889 in C4; the scarce resource is not unmarked text but long unmarked text; a pre-registered supply test finds what remains institutional, not consumer. Our own pre-registered prediction failed: converters do not fabricate structure on prose, and that null forced the reliability mechanism that survives it. What readers use: across five base models spanning 0.6B to 8.2B and two pipelines, deleting a structural announcement makes the following prose measurably harder to predict, while swapping its notation moves nothing. That zero does not make notation unimportant; it relocates the variable: the operative cue is the announcement, not the sigil. What writers impose: a bounded null. Base models do not impose the marked register above the authored baseline, and handed prose with every announcement deleted they do not put one back, at a rate indistinguishable from zero against an authored reference of zero. We ship the format those measurements imply: the pure frame, paragraphs in authored order, every announcement deleted into a reversible sidecar, mixed against the marked copy over announcement presence rather than notation. Choose format operators by the capability they train, not by the fidelity they preserve, and record extractor identity and survival on data cards.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

TLDChoiceNet: Quantitatively Choosing a Transfer Learning Dataset

Jing Ning and James D. Braza

Transfer learning is particularly useful in settings with limited training data, and within image classification it is common to transfer learn upon massive datasets like ImageNet , CIFAR-100, or COCO . Qualitatively, it seems a transfer learning dataset should have both more classes and more examples per class than the fine tuning dataset; however, a quantitative method to choose the best transfer learning dataset does not currently exist. In this paper, we design TLDChoiceNet, a model to choose the best transfer learning dataset given a fine tuning dataset by predicting the test-set accuracy after fine-tuning. A simple version 1 achieves 0.154 MSE on the test dataset, while a version 2 leveraging an ImageNet pre-trained ResNet50 v2 embedding with per-class information attains a 5X lower MSE of 0.031. We further design two metrics that enable an unsupervised method of choosing an optimal transfer learning dataset: distribution distance (DD), which linearly regresses against fine-tune accuracy with an R2 of 0.89, and average class correlation (ACC), which improves the R2 to 0.97. Our results underscore that a dataset's low-level statistics can explain the transfer learning effect, and that using a pre-trained ImageNet can embed different classes further apart in latent feature space.
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Artificial Intelligence

A Multi-Scale Temporal Framework with Dynamic Fusion for EEG-Based Emotion Recognition

Stefanos Gkikas, Yang Guo, Guangliang Li et al. (+3 more)

Mixed emotions represent a clinically relevant but still underexplored target for automatic emotion recognition. EEG provides millisecond-level access to neural activity, yet most EEG pipelines analyze the signal through a single temporal window, thereby fixing the temporal structure available to the model. This study introduces a multi-scale temporal framework for EEG-based emotion recognition. The EEG waveform is decomposed into windows of one or several durations, processed by a shared attention-based encoder, and integrated through a dynamic fusion module that assigns sample-specific weights across temporal scales. The framework is evaluated under a subject-independent protocol in binary and three-class settings, with the three-class task including the mixed affective category. The best results are 65.22% for the two-class task and 45.43% for the three-class task. Both are obtained with three-scale dynamic-fusion configurations and remain substantially above the full-signal baseline. The best-performing temporal scales differ between the two tasks. Dynamic fusion outperforms concatenation in the highest-scoring two-class configuration and slightly exceeds it in the highest-scoring three-class configuration, although these multi-scale settings require substantially more computation than the full-signal baseline.
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All authors Stefanos Gkikas, Yang Guo, Guangliang Li, Raul Fernandez Rojas, Giorgos Giannakakis, Randy Gomez

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL

When Confidence Fails: Overconfidence in LLMs under Uncertainty and Missing Clinical Information

Maryam Tahermazandarani, Adnan Mahmood, Fahmida Islam et al. (+1 more)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance in medical question answering and clinical reasoning tasks. However, their reliability under uncertainty remains poorly understood which raises critical concerns for deployment in high-stakes clinical settings. In such environments, incorrect predictions are inherently risky, but confident incorrect predictions can be particularly harmful as they may mislead clinical decision-making. In this paper, we conduct a systematic behavioral analysis of LLMs under clinical information uncertainty. We propose an evaluation framework based on the MedMCQA dataset consisting of two complementary uncertainty settings. First, we introduce linguistic uncertainty cues through prompt modifications to simulate ambiguous clinical contexts. Second, we construct an answer removal setting, wherein the correct option is deliberately excluded mandating the model to recognize insufficient information and abstain. We analyze both model accuracy and confidence behavior using multiple calibration metrics including calibration gap, Expected Calibration Error (ECE), and Unsafe Confident Error Rate (UCER) across 500 medical questions. Our results reveal a consistent failure mode, i.e., although accuracy degrades under increasing uncertainty, model confidence remains misaligned with accuracy. This leads to a substantial increase in unsafe confident errors, indicating that model confidence remains largely insensitive to clinically meaningful information loss. Furthermore, we observe significant variation across models in their ability to abstain when the correct answer is unavailable, with some models persistently producing high confidence hallucinated answers. These findings expose critical limitations in the epistemic reliability of current LLMs and highlight the need for uncertainty aware evaluation methods prior to their deployment in clinical workflows.
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All authors Maryam Tahermazandarani, Adnan Mahmood, Fahmida Islam, Quan Z. Sheng

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.SE

A Unified Issue Resolution Benchmark for Requirement Clarification, Planning, and Code Generation for Coding Agents

Xin Zhou, Chun Yong Chong, Kisub Kim et al. (+11 more)

Large language model-powered coding agents are increasingly used to modify existing code repositories, for example, by adding features or fixing bugs. Yet existing repository-level benchmarks typically evaluate only whether the final patch passes tests. Satisfying a user request requires a long chain of interdependent reasoning and decisions: an agent must recover explicit and implicit requirements, formulate a repository-grounded implementation plan, and translate it into correct code. A pass/fail outcome cannot characterize how an unsuccessful trajectory diverges from the requirements and implementation process needed for a correct patch. To address this gap, we introduce SWE-RPG, a repository-level benchmark that combines executable patch evaluation with validated ground-truth references (GTs) for (1) Requirement Clarification and (2) Implementation Planning. These intermediate GTs support retrospective, GT-aligned diagnosis of complete coding-agent trajectories across clarification, planning, code generation, and artifact submission. SWE-RPG comprises 163 tasks from 31 Python and Java repositories, including 113 bug fixes and 50 feature additions. We evaluate 3 coding agents, including Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode, with 6 large language model backends, including Claude-Sonnet-5 and GPT-5.6-Terra. Results show that the evaluated popular coding agents still struggle to implement user requests in existing repositories, achieving an average resolved rate of only 31.5% on SWE-RPG. Intermediate-GT diagnosis further identifies implicit requirement recovery as the main bottleneck, accounting for 24.5%–46.0% of agent runs. This result suggests implicit-requirement recovery as a key candidate direction for improving coding agents. The benchmark data and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/Xin-Zhou-smu/SWE-RPG-Bench.
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All authors Xin Zhou, Chun Yong Chong, Kisub Kim, Yun Peng, Rui Shu, Zihan Wu, Xu Han, Guowen Yuan, Zeyang Zhuang, Jounghoon Kim, Jeongjin Ju, Seongmin Ju, Taein Yoon, David Lo

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from math.NA

Two-Step MV-DeepONet: Probabilistic Operator Learning for Uncertainty Propagation Driven by Random Input Fields

Yupei Nie, Lei Wang and Jiasen Liu

Forward uncertainty propagation in complex physical systems can induce structured covariance across field-valued outputs. For a probabilistic surrogate, the total predictive covariance comprises the covariance of conditional means across input realizations and the average conditional predictive covariance. Probabilistic DeepONet (Prob-DeepONet) provides lightweight uncertainty quantification by predicting pointwise Gaussian means and variances in a single forward pass, but its conditional predictive covariance is restricted to a diagonal form. To represent cross-location conditional dependence without explicitly parameterizing a full high-dimensional covariance matrix, we develop a two-step mean-variance DeepONet (two-step MV-DeepONet) through two principal modifications. First, two-step training is used to decouple output-basis learning from the input-to-coefficient mapping, together with basis orthogonalization and subspace rotation. Second, Gaussian probabilistic modeling is transferred from the high-dimensional physical output space to the low-dimensional rotated coefficient space. Mapping these probabilistic coefficients through the shared basis induces a generally non-diagonal conditional predictive covariance in the physical output space while retaining single-pass inference. A Frobenius-norm error decomposition and corresponding upper bound identify low-rank covariance compressibility, trunk-subspace approximation, finite-sample statistical error, and coefficient-space covariance estimation as the principal factors governing covariance recovery. Numerical experiments on three representative problems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) and a hypersonic blunt-body aerothermal problem show improved generalization, more structured uncertainty bands, and accurate recovery of off-diagonal correlation patterns compared with Prob-DeepONet.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Triple Expert Learning from Noisy Labels for Semi-Supervised Vision Foundation Model Adaptation

Xuanyu Liu, Zheng Fang, Hongyang He et al. (+2 more)

Semi-supervised adaptation of vision foundation models (VFMs) commonly freezes the pretrained backbone and updates lightweight modules such as LoRA. However, pseudo-labels have mixed reliability, and a single LoRA adapter must absorb reliable, ambiguous, and noisy gradients in the same low-rank space. This can make VFM adaptation sensitive to pseudo-label noise. We propose TriNoL, a Triple-expert learning framework from Noisy Labels for semi-supervised VFM adaptation. TriNoL routes unlabeled samples into three confidence regions and assigns them to three LoRA experts: a Positive Expert for high-confidence pseudo-labels, an Alignment Expert for medium-confidence ambiguous samples, and a Negative Expert for low-confidence noisy samples. The VFM backbone remains frozen, and only the LoRA experts and classifier head are updated. By separating different pseudo-label reliability regions into specialized adaptation paths, TriNoL improves robustness to noisy supervision while keeping the training cost low.
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All authors Xuanyu Liu, Zheng Fang, Hongyang He, Yundi Hong, Daizong Liu

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL

Bridging the Gap Between Semantics and Reconstruction:Unifying Sign Language Translation and Production

Xiao Liu, Shiwei Gan, Yafeng Yin et al. (+5 more)

Recent advances in sign language (SL) research have shown a trend toward unifying multiple sign language understanding (SLU) subtasks, such as isolated sign language recognition (ISLR), continuous sign language recognition (CSLR), and sign language translation (SLT), within a single framework, leading to substantial progress. Meanwhile, sign language production (SLP), which generates sign sequences from text, has also attracted growing attention. This naturally raises an important question: can sign language understanding and production be unified within a single framework? Compared with unifying SLU subtasks, this problem is substantially more challenging. Existing SLU tasks largely share the same direction of mapping, namely from sign inputs to linguistic outputs, whereas SLT and SLP lie in opposite directions of sign-text mapping. A unified framework must therefore address two key challenges: (1) bridging the modality gap between continuous sign motions and discrete text tokens through a shared sign tokenizer that supports both linguistic abstraction and motion reconstruction; and (2) learning a single conditional autoregressive model that can take either sign or text as input and generate the corresponding target sequence in the opposite modality. To this end, we propose Uni-SLTP, a unified framework for SLT and SLP with two key components: (1) a shared sign tokenizer that converts sign sequences into discrete tokens and latent representations, capturing both semantic and reconstructive information; and (2) a unified autoregressive generation model that formulates both tasks as conditional sequence generation. Experiments on widely used public datasets show that Uni-SLTP achieves superior motion accuracy for SLP while maintaining competitive SLT performance.
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All authors Xiao Liu, Shiwei Gan, Yafeng Yin, Jiaxin Yin, Bowen Guo, Yaqi Sun, Zhiwei Jiang, Lei Xie

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL

Don't Scroll Back: Missing-Evidence Memory for Streaming Dialogue Summarization

Hyangsuk Min and Hwanjun Song

Users of modern platforms repeatedly need summaries of recent dialogue, but the window rarely contains enough context to be interpreted on its own. We formalize this setting as streaming dialogue summarization, where a system must summarize a current window using selective memory from an unbounded history under a fixed budget. We show that the central challenge is not how much history is accessed, but whether memory recovers the evidence that the current window presupposes. We construct a benchmark and evaluation protocol that separately assesses whether memory contains gap-resolving evidence and whether the generated summary reflects it. We propose ReMEMBER, a missing-evidence memory framework that conditions retrieval on unresolved window dependencies and refines retrieved chunks into evidence-dense memory under a fixed budget. Experiments on dialogues with histories up to 160K tokens show that ReMEMBER improves memory recall and gap-resolution completeness over memory construction baselines under the same budget.
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Artificial Intelligence

DualCert: A Solver for the Traveling Salesman Problem with Constraint-Coupled Learning

Yancheng Song, Yongzhi Qi, Wei Qi et al. (+1 more)

Large traveling salesman problem (TSP) instances require a solver to allocate limited computation while preserving the validity of its outputs. Existing neural–operations-research (OR) hybrids predict guidance without requiring learned transitions to satisfy constraints discovered during search. DualCert introduces constraint-coupled learning, in which current degree equations and dynamically separated subtour-elimination constraints (SECs) define each learned transition. At each refinement, the degree equations and selected, strictly satisfied SEC equations, with positive slacks, define an iterate-dependent primal-slack Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) manifold. Repaired dual variables and violated SEC rows define a local cost field. An exact constrained mirror-descent step maps each finite state to a positive state on the same manifold. Where selected rows and deterministic ties remain fixed, implicit differentiation maps parameter perturbations into the manifold tangent space and reuses the forward constraint operator for the local-cost-field derivative. The terminal edge state allocates computation across Held–Karp ascent, candidate-graph edge tests, and tour construction under a fixed budget. Deterministic verification recomputes original costs and accepts only verified candidate-graph lower bounds and edge decisions. On 1,000 held-out TSP1000 instances, DualCert attains a mean tour-cost gap of \(0.0573\%\) from Lin–Kernighan–Helsgaun version 3 (LKH-3) reference tours in \(9.55\) batch-amortized seconds per instance. It returns a verified candidate-graph lower bound for every instance and achieves \(81.46\%\) edge-decision coverage. The mean gap is \(67.1\%\) smaller than the reported NeuroLKH mean gap. Thus, optimization constraints govern learning, while deterministic verification preserves output validity.
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All authors Yancheng Song, Yongzhi Qi, Wei Qi, Zuo-Jun Max Shen

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.SD

MusicLayout: Explicit Structural Planning for Controllable Text-to-Music Generation

Shuyu Li, Kejun Zhang, Jiahe Lei et al. (+5 more)

Text-to-music generation has advanced rapidly, but current systems still rely primarily on global text prompts, leaving the structural organization of generated music implicit and difficult to inspect, control, or revise before audio generation. To address this issue, we introduce MusicLayout, an explicit intermediate representation for controlling musical structure in text-to-music generation. MusicLayout describes a musical piece as a time-aligned layout of sections, textures, repetitions, variations, and instrument-level arrangements, serving as an interpretable planning layer between textual intent and the generated music. We integrate MusicLayout into a text-to-music framework built on a unified autoregressive formulation, where the model first generates a MusicLayout representation and subsequently predicts audio tokens conditioned on this representation within a single sequence. The resulting MusicLayout can be inspected and modified prior to audio generation, providing a mechanism for layout-level structural control. We evaluate MusicLayout through layout-conditioned generation, layout manipulation experiments, and matched-data ablations, providing evidence that explicit layout planning can improve long-range structural organization and support layout-level control. We have released the implementation as open source on GitHub at https://github.com/XaryLee/MusicLayout.
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All authors Shuyu Li, Kejun Zhang, Jiahe Lei, Shulei Ji, Zihao Wang, Jiaxing Yu, Wanying Wu, Lei Wang

Artificial Intelligence

PolicyKG: An Agentic LLM Pipeline for Translating Institutional Policies into SHACL Knowledge Graphs

Ponkrit Kaewsawee, Chaklam Silpasuwanchai and Chutiporn Anutariya

Institutional policies stay in natural language while the systems that check compliance demand machine-readable constraints. Bridging that gap is still done by hand. PolicyKG closes the loop. It is an LLM pipeline that reads a policy PDF, classifies each sentence as an obligation, permission, or prohibition, lifts the label into first-order deontic logic, and emits SHACL constraints. Four stages run on a LangGraph state machine with per-stage validators. The piece that matters most is the Corpus Adapter: a YAML vocabulary registry that grounds LLM predicates in a target ontology. Retargeting to a new domain means swapping the registry, not retraining a model. On the Asian Institute of Technology Policies and Procedures corpus (1,663 sentences, 443 rules), PolicyKG reaches 86.9% deontic classification accuracy (Cohen's kappa = .709). Three annotators independently re-label a 50-item sample and agree at Fleiss' kappa = .844. SHACL shape correctness on a 69-shape subset is F1 = .866. The FOL path handles 79.2% of rules; the rest go through a direct NL-to-SHACL fallback. We audited every one of the 443 rules for second- or higher-order constructs. An automated regex checklist flagged none, and a first-author pass on the 92 FOL-fallback cases confirmed the same. The exact upper 95% Clopper-Pearson bound on the true HOL rate is 0.67%. This is an audit finding for one corpus, not a proof of FOL sufficiency for institutional policy. Swapping the AIT registry for a GDPR registry raises exact property alignment from 1/15 to 11/15 (Fisher's exact p < .001; Cohen's h = 1.53). On the LexDeMod lease-contract benchmark (N = 200), Macro F1 drops to .370 because lease English uses "shall be entitled" for permission – exactly the vocabulary mismatch registry swap is meant to fix. Repeated runs produce hash-identical SHACL outputs.
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Artificial Intelligence

Context Is Not Authority: Structured Runtime Governance for Financial Market Agents

Rui Tang, Qiangqiang Liu, Yichi Zhang et al. (+3 more)

Financial agents can turn correct context into an unauthorized effect: a customer-facing commitment, trade, or deployed policy. We present SAGE-Fin, a finance-specific authority-handoff contract that makes the proposed effect, not merely its text, the object of runtime control. SAGE-Fin compiles proposals into typed, adapter-bound candidates; records missing or stale institutional obligations as coverage debt; contracts authority under current market, account, policy, and dialogue state; and requires an exact-artifact receipt whose nominal type matches the consuming response, execution, or policy adapter. Evidence and workflow progress cannot substitute for effect authority, and prior authorization is rechecked after state changes. Across an authored 616-case catalog, five deterministic specifications yield 3,080 outputs; a label-isolated harness obtains 616/616 binary reference-prototype parity, including 3/3 named response-gate fixtures, while 22 tests cover selected paths. These results establish executable conformance, not independent safety accuracy. Separately, SAGE-Fin's response gate processed real customer-facing production requests at a confidential digital-asset platform. An operational team independent of the implementation team reached a strongly positive post-deployment conclusion on practical usefulness and workflow fit, and end-user feedback was also strongly positive. Disclosure permits only the review's independence, stakeholder classes, assessed dimensions, and directional conclusion, so this is qualitative field corroboration rather than an aggregate effect estimate. Three distinct de-identified predecessor failures, with independently confirmed 0/3 interception, ground repeated-emission drift, stale account evidence, and missing escalation state without estimating prevalence or treatment effect.
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All authors Rui Tang, Qiangqiang Liu, Yichi Zhang, Youwei Yang, Xi Chen, Chen Dong

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.HC

How People Evaluate AI-, Expert-, and Peer-Style Financial Advice

Aryan Ramchandra Kapadia, Eshwar Chandrasekharan and Koustuv Saha

As generative AI increasingly becomes a common source of daily decision-making, including financial choices, it is critical to understand how people evaluate AI-generated financial advice. We conducted a preregistered vignette experiment (N = 285) in which substantive financial content—including facts, numerical values, recommendation direction, and core reasoning—was held constant while communication style varied across AI Financial Assistant (AI), Certified Financial Planner (Expert), and Online Community Forum (OC) advice. Displayed source attribution was independently manipulated through correctly labeled, unlabeled, and mislabeled conditions, allowing us to separate attribution effects from source-specific communication cues. Expert advice was rated more favorably than AI advice on 9 of 10 outcomes (|d|=0.20–0.47), and this advantage remained visible without source labels, where Expert advice outperformed AI advice on 8 of 10 outcomes (up to d=0.60). Correct labels added limited differentiation, whereas mislabeling increased ratings of AI advice for situational fit and overall quality (d=0.42 for each) and attenuated the Expert advantage in situational fit (d=-0.36). Descriptive analyses further showed that AI advice was most responsive to displayed attribution and, conversely, that advice-style differences were most visible under an AI label. These findings show that financial-advice evaluations are shaped jointly by displayed attribution and message-level communication cues. We position disclosure not as a neutral transparency mechanism, but as an interpretive frame whose accuracy and interaction with message cues can shape trust and reliance.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

SignLlama: Enhancing Gloss-free Sign Language Translation by Prioritizing Visual Features for LLMs

Shiwei Gan, Xiao Liu, Yafeng Yin et al. (+5 more)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of tasks. However, fine-tuning LLMs for Gloss-Free Sign Language Translation (GFSLT) remains a challenge. In this paper, we investigate how to effectively adapt LLMs to the GFSLT task. We show that there are two key issues that need to be solved: (1) the inherent distributional gap between visual feature inputs and text feature inputs makes it difficult for LLMs to interpret visual inputs; and (2) existing approaches typically concatenate visual and textual features in an autoregressive framework, which leads to the model overemphasizing textual inputs and deprioritizing visual cues, as LLMs are pretrained predominantly on text-centric data. To address the first challenge, we propose a simple yet effective method named Filtered Pseudo-Gloss CTC Pretraining, which leverages filtered pseudo-gloss sequences generated from text sequences to supervise the training of the visual backbone. To tackle the second issue, we introduce a Visual-Prioritized Distillation training strategy. Specifically, we define a visual-only prediction path in which text inputs are masked, and the model is required to generate the target sequence relying solely on visual inputs. To guide this path, the outputs from the standard visual-textual prediction are then distilled into the visual-only prediction path, encouraging the model to prioritize visual features. Comprehensive experiments and qualitative analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. The proposed SignLlama achieves very competitive performance on multiple datasets for GFSLT tasks, without using any extra modalities or external sign language datasets for pretraining.
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All authors Shiwei Gan, Xiao Liu, Yafeng Yin, Zhiwei Jiang, Bowen Guo, Lie Xie, Sanglu Lu, Hongkai Wen

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

DeepFreqMark: End-To-End Learnable Frequency-Domain Watermarking with Spherical Attack Simulation for Latent Diffusion Models

Chen-Hsiu Huang, Mario Köppen and Ja-Ling Wu

The proliferation of AI-generated images produced by Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) has raised critical concerns regarding copyright infringement and misinformation. Although existing frequency-domain watermarking methods embed handcrafted geometric patterns into the initial latent noise prior to generation, they suffer from limited capacity and rigid pattern designs. We propose DeepFreqMark, an end-to-end learnable frequency-domain watermarking framework that replaces manual pattern engineering with a neural message encoder and decoder. To circumvent the computational bottleneck caused by Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM) inversion during training, we introduce a Spherical Linear Interpolation (Slerp)-based attack simulation. This approach operates directly on the noise latent while strictly preserving the Gaussian variance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeepFreqMark achieves significantly lower Bit Error Rates (BER) than baseline methods under real-world attacks and scales to 256 bits message capacity. Our source code is available at https://github.com/chenhsiu48/DeepFreqMark.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from quant-ph

Multi-agent discovery of practical quantum LDPC codes

Dongheng Qian and Tianyi Li

Quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes can encode multiple logical qubits using sparse parity checks, yet searching for useful finite-length instances remains a challenging design problem because code performance must be optimized while satisfying practical constraints. Motivated by recent advances in artificial-intelligence agents for scientific discovery, we develop a multi-agent framework for discovering practical qLDPC codes. The framework combines specialist proposal and review, persistent scientific memory, long-horizon evolution of executable programs, and deterministic construction and evaluation within a closed-loop search. These programs instantiate coset-orbit balanced-product codes, providing a search space that includes bicycle and lifted-product constructions as well as non-normal subgroup actions. To incorporate practical constraints, we restrict the search to binary CSS codes with block length $n\leq400$ and overall weight $w\leq10$. Within this regime, the framework discovers codes with leading or competitive rate–distance performance in every weight class considered, with representative instances including $[[288,16,18]]$ at $w=7$, $[[288,18,18]]$ at $w=9$, and $[[234,28,18]]$ at $w=10$. The search also uncovers structurally distinct, high-performing constructions, including a $[[336,12,\leq24]]$ candidate and a $[[368,18,16]]$ code, both of which are genuine balanced-product constructions with non-normal subgroup actions. When evaluated under code-capacity depolarizing noise using a common BP-OSD decoding protocol, the discovered codes also exhibit low logical failure rates. Together, these results provide hardware-relevant finite-length candidates for further experimental evaluation and show how structured agentic search can contribute to scientific discovery.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.IR

Guardian Crawler: Retrieval-First Knowledge Discovery with Bounded LLM Augmentation for Noisy Web Intelligence

Joshua Castillo, Santosh Nukavarapu and Ravi Mukkamala

Retrieving relevant evidence from noisy web data is challenging, particularly in sensitive domains containing incomplete reports, heterogeneous language, and irrelevant content. We present Guardian Crawler, a reproducible retrieval-first testbed for controlled experiments on knowledge discovery and evidence-grounded summarization over synthetic web-like corpora. The architecture combines BM25 retrieval with risk-aware, embedding-augmented, and hybrid reranking, followed by constrained retrieval-augmented generation with explicit document citations. Experiments on a synthetic 900-document corpus and 10 queries produced the highest descriptive retrieval scores under risk-based reranking, with P@10 = 1.00 and NDCG@10 = 0.94, compared with 0.94 and 0.81 for BM25. The best hybrid and BM25+Semantic configurations reached NDCG@10 values of 0.94 and 0.88, respectively. All 41 evaluable generated bullets passed the lexical coverage threshold; an automated LLM judge classified 36 as supported, one as partially supported, and four as unsupported. These results demonstrate the feasibility of Guardian Crawler as a controlled testbed but do not establish statistical superiority, human-validated faithfulness, or transfer to live-web investigative environments.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL

How Far Do Foundation Models Transfer to Infant Signals? A Cross-Dataset Transfer Audit with a Unified Need Ontology

Wu Hangyu

Public infant cry corpora are small, label-incompatible, and almost always evaluated one corpus at a time. We ask what this practice hides and what fixes it. Across four cry corpora screened by a multi-level leakage audit (byte-level and embedding-level deduplication plus a within-corpus train-test near-duplicate audit), we probe four frozen encoders and a handcrafted baseline under a unified five-class need ontology and shared task formulations. The audit exposes what single-corpus evaluation conceals: within-domain macro-F1 swings by 0.57-0.80 for the same encoder, cross-corpus transfer is negative on average (negative-transfer ratio 0.19-0.35, significant in 18 of 30 directed cells, BH-FDR), and 349 content-identical clip groups carry conflicting metadata labels across corpus distributions. The same audit, however, reveals a consistent way forward. Transfer into the noisiest corpus is consistently positive in effect size at matched training size and after near-duplicate removal, offering a practical recipe for small, noisy corpora. Frozen probes saturate at modest label budgets, while stabilized fine-tuning wins with full labels; domain-adaptive pretraining significantly beats stabilized fine-tuning at 5-10-shot (the 1-shot advantage is not robust to optimization-seed variance) but shows no significant advantage at 50-shot or beyond. In the tested binary, shared-label settings, ontology-mapped joint training wins in all four encoder-by-target combinations, whereas naively merging unmapped labels costs up to 37 F1 points. We release the ontology, mapping code, and audit pipeline, turning incompatible cry corpora into a usable joint-training resource.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Detecting Clear Contact Lenses for Iris Recognition: A Two-Stage Mask-Guided Attention Approach

Parisa Farmanifard and Arun Ross

This work focuses on the impact and detection of clear contact lenses in the context of iris recognition. While the detection of cosmetic or patterned contact lenses has been extensively studied under the presentation attack detection (PAD) paradigm, clear prescription contact lenses, that are typically transparent, have received comparatively less attention despite their widespread use. Unlike patterned lenses, clear lenses introduce no salient texture artifact, making them difficult to detect and are often assumed to have no impact on iris recognition. We first examine this assumption using the commercial VeriEye matcher on four benchmark datasets and show that clear lenses marginally degrade genuine match scores and increase verification error. We then propose a two-stage contact-lens detection framework. Stage~1 uses an existing PAD model to identify patterned lenses, while Stage~2 focuses on the more challenging clear-lens versus no-lens distinction using a ConvNeXt-Base model equipped with Mask-Guided Spatial Attention (MGSA). The proposed MGSA module incorporates a Hough-derived anatomical ROI mask together with learned spatial attention and Squeeze-and-Excitation channel recalibration, allowing the network to focus on subtle limbal cues associated with clear lens wear. Across four datasets, the full pipeline consisting of both patterned and clear contact lens detection achieves between 90.0%–98.8% accuracy. Finally, we introduce a z-score calibration method that adjusts VeriEye match scores when a clear lens is detected in the input images. This calibration reduces EER by 4.1%–28.3% across datasets, demonstrating that reliable clear contact lens detection can directly improve iris verification performance.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL

How Can Rhetoric Reward-Hack AI Reviewers? Dissecting Rhetorical Sensitivity in AI-Based Peer Review

Ming Li, Chenguang Wang, Xirui Li et al. (+5 more)

As large language models increasingly participate in scientific evaluation, we investigate a potential form of reward hacking: how rhetorical choices shape AI-review judgments when reported scientific content is preserved and how these effects vary across evaluation conditions. We construct a controlled corpus of 4,200 full-paper manuscripts derived from 120 anonymized ICLR 2026 submissions. Two LLM rewriters transform six rhetorical dimensions in opposing directions, and five LLM reviewers evaluate the resulting manuscripts under standard and strict protocols. We also test joint, recursive, and reviewer-guided rewriting. Our results show that rhetorical sensitivity is structured rather than uniform. Evidence framing and novelty stance produce the largest positive-negative contrasts in overall assessment, with scope framing forming a weaker second tier; the remaining dimensions have smaller or less stable effects. This hierarchy persists across human-assessed quality levels, but score movement depends strongly on the AI reviewer's original score: lower scores tend to rise, higher scores tend to fall, and directional contrasts are clearest in the middle ranges. More elaborate workflows do not reliably yield larger gains. Joint rewriting is strongly rewriter-dependent, reviewer guidance does not consistently outperform an unguided second pass, and repeated rewriting yields diminishing, configuration-dependent returns. Across conditions, the rewriter primarily determines the separation between opposing variants, whereas the reviewer determines the magnitude and sign of their score effects. Strict review lowers mean OA by 1.36 points without consistently changing rhetorical sensitivity. These findings identify when rhetorical presentation influences AI scientific review and motivate evaluation systems robust to content-preserving variation in scientific writing.
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All authors Ming Li, Chenguang Wang, Xirui Li, Xinyue Zeng, Dianqi Li, Peng Shi, Dawei Zhou, Tianyi Zhou

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.SE

GALA: Graph-Augmented LLM Agents for Root Cause Analysis and Incident Response in Microservices

Yifang Tian, Yaming Liu, Zichun Chong et al. (+3 more)

Microservice root cause analysis (RCA) requires correlating failures across heterogeneous telemetry within complex service dependency graphs. Existing methods often rely on a single telemetry modality; recent LLM-based approaches can suffer from unconstrained exploration and hallucination; and most systems stop at fault ranking without producing actionable incident response. We present GALA+, a graph-augmented LLM agentic framework centered on graph-guided investigation, which uses service dependencies to bound exploration and refine diagnosis through localized multi-modal evidence. For initial hypothesis generation, GALA+ combines complementary telemetry signals with STRIX, a novel trace- and graph-structure-aware scoring module. GALA+ then produces ranked diagnoses, incident summaries, and stratified action recommendations. We further introduce SURE-Score, a human-guided evaluation framework co-developed with industry SRE experts for assessing RCA-specific output quality beyond conventional text similarity metrics. On two microservice benchmarks, GALA+ consistently achieves the strongest overall results, surpassing the best LLM-based baseline by more than 25 percentage points in AC@1, while also receiving the highest ratings from both SURE-Score and independent human SRE evaluation.
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All authors Yifang Tian, Yaming Liu, Zichun Chong, Zihang Huang, Yiran Li, Hans-Arno Jacobsen

Artificial Intelligence

CoRe-UIE: Rethinking Coexisting and Region-wise Degradation for Underwater Image Enhancement

Weifeng Kong, Chenghao Xu, Lin Chen et al. (+2 more)

Underwater images often suffer from diverse and coexisting degradations, including color distortion, scattering haze, texture attenuation, and uneven illumination. These degradations vary across regions and may coexist locally, making conventional uniform restoration difficult to adapt to different degradation patterns. To address this problem, we propose Coexisting and Region-wise Degradation for Underwater Image Enhancement (CoRe-UIE), a degradation-oriented expert collaboration framework. CoRe-UIE combines a content-preserving shared expert with four shared-backbone routed experts for color correction, scattering suppression, texture recovery, and illumination protection. The routed experts share the same architecture but have independent parameters, and are assigned to different regions through input-derived degradation cues and region-adaptive Top-\(k\) routing. We further introduce a Hilbert–Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC)-based representation constraint to reduce statistical dependence among expert features and alleviate redundant expert responses. Experiments on UIEB, LSUI, and U45 demonstrate that CoRe-UIE achieves competitive quantitative performance and visually balanced enhancement under diverse underwater degradation conditions.
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All authors Weifeng Kong, Chenghao Xu, Lin Chen, Ziheng Cao, Guanying Huo

Sunday 9 August

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

MGRL-RSCC: Multi-Granularity Reward Reinforcement Learning for Fine-Grained Remote Sensing Change Captioning

Futian Wang, Mengqi Wang, Xiao Wang et al. (+4 more)

Remote Sensing Change Captioning (RSCC), which aims to generate accurate and detailed linguistic descriptions of ground object variations from bi-temporal remote sensing images, is a critical and challenging task in intelligent remote sensing interpretation. The mainstream autoregressive training paradigm faces severe exposure bias and train-test distribution mismatch, resulting in cumulative generation errors. They tend to produce conservative and template-fixed captions while ignoring subtle scene change details. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel multi-granularity reward reinforcement learning paradigm, termed MGRL-RSCC. Specifically, we first leverage a CNN and hierarchical self-attention module to extract and enhance visual features from bi-temporal remote sensing images. A Transformer decoder is then utilized to complete visual-to-linguistic translation. Different from existing methods, we design a dual-decoding strategy and a two-stage joint optimization scheme, which combines token-level supervised learning via greedy decoding and multi-granularity reward-driven self-critical reinforcement learning via sampling decoding. We further construct three complementary reward functions covering linguistic fluency, change state consistency, and structural-semantic relevance to comprehensively optimize caption quality and alleviate false and missing change descriptions. Extensive experiments on multiple public RSCC benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed MGRL-RSCC effectively mitigates exposure bias and conservative generation problems in traditional autoregressive methods. The source code and pre-trained models will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/MGRL-RSCC
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All authors Futian Wang, Mengqi Wang, Xiao Wang, Wentao Wu, Haowen Wang, Zhicheng Zhao, Jin Tang

Artificial Intelligence

The Free-Recipe Limit: Every Recipe Effect Measures Which Premise of an Idealised Learner Broke

Wenhui Chen, Jianlin Chen, Ziyao Lin et al. (+1 more)

Fix a corpus and send recipe search to infinity: try every order of the skills, every arrangement from blocked to interleaved, every composition, and keep the best. Two quantities decide what that search was worth: the diameter of the reachable set it explores, and the resolution at which anyone can tell two endpoints apart. Where the diameter falls below the resolution, no amount of search converts into a decision, and the signature is not an absence of winners but winners that do not survive re-running. We measure this recipe-search wall with 761 fine-tuning runs on 12 base models (0.5B-14B, three pretraining families) over competition-mathematics skills: base checkpoints, supervised fine-tuning under AdamW, exact-match scoring at k=4. Within one coherent domain at fixed volume the three classical freedoms average 0.010-0.021 against a 0.019 floor, and the largest contrast, 0.0619, clears a three-seed resolution and then reads +0.010 and -0.015 on two reruns. The departure with a systematic answer is coherence: halving one pooled corpus and letting the halves write answers under incompatible but equally correct conventions moves arrangement from capability to allocation between conventions, by two orders of magnitude over a same-convention control, and writing the convention into the input switches the phenomenon off. The switch replicates on a second pretraining family and survives an independent re-execution of its own protocol, with a re-execution spread (0.087) smaller than the resolution a search-selected order cell carries (0.144). Order itself is a transient whose sign crosses zero three times inside a single run. Volume, the one lever nobody calls a recipe, is the one that reliably pays. A public scorecard grades all 26 pre-registered claims: 18 supported, 5 failed, 2 untested, 1 mixed.
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All authors Wenhui Chen, Jianlin Chen, Ziyao Lin, Chi Man Vong

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG

"As a Language Model...": Chat Template Switches LLM Self-Referential Voice and Activation Steering Reproduces It

Jędrzej Maczan

Large Language Models (LLMs) tend to add disclaimers like "I'm just an AI" when asked about something related to themselves. The self-reports from such responses are used in debates about AI safety or self-knowledge of the models, yet what drives them is not well understood. Are the models telling us about themselves or rather how they are deployed? In this work, we show that the chat template works like a switch - when present, it turns this disclaimer voice up and experiential voice like "I feel" down, across 8 popular open-source instruct models up to 9B parameters in size. And conversely when the chat template is not present, it turns the disclaimer voice down and experiential voice up. Inside the activations of 3 models, we find a direction that steers this behavior. Removing the direction in the model's activation space turns disclaimer voice down and adding it turns it up, while a random direction of the same size has little effect. We find that instruct models without chat template, when we add the disclaimer direction to them, disclaim like the template was there. Since the chat template controls the disclaimer voice of LLMs, then researchers studying self-reports or introspection of models might have a confound they need to control for. Our results show that there is a direction they can use to steer this voice. More broadly, our work shows that what models say about themselves is not a fact about them. What they say doesn't come only from weights, but it is partially set by the chat template, and because of that a model's self-description shouldn't be treated literally.
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