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Saturday 15 August

Artificial Intelligence

A concentration result for multilayer feedforward neural networks

We consider for an arbitrary fixed $\rho$ and for each positive integer $n$ a multilayer feedforward artificial neural network with $\rho$ layers, $n$ neurons in the first layer (the input layer) and only one neuron, the output neuron, in the last layer. Very roughly formulated, the main result is that if the distribution of weights of connections from a layer to the next are, for all large $n$, approximated well by a fixed continuous (but otherwise arbitrary) curve which does not depend on $n$, and if the values of the $n$ input neurons are independently and identically distributed with a continuous probability density function, then there is a number $\psi$ such that for all $\varepsilon > 0$ the probability that the value of the output neuron is in $[\psi - \varepsilon, \psi + \varepsilon]$ tends to 1 as $n$ tends to infinity.
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Artificial Intelligence

The Benchmark Trap: Structures of Power and Injustice in AI Evaluations

Artificial intelligence (AI) benchmarks are not neutral tools of evaluation but socio-technical artefacts that shape competition, power, and research priorities within AI. Benchmarks standardise the assessment of systems and facilitate the creation of leaderboards that reward state-of-the-art performance with prestige, citations, trust, and institutional influence. As the costs of developing competitive AI systems rise, these rewards increasingly concentrate among powerful, industry-funded labs. This paper situates these concerns within Iris Marion Young's theories of oppression and structural injustice. It argues that current benchmarking practices may perpetuate systematic harms affecting various actors in AI research, aligning with four of Young's "faces of oppression". Benchmarking culture is further framed as a source of structural injustice, as these harms emerge from normalised, individually defensible practices and network effects, even without explicit wrongdoing. By reinforcing existing power structures and narrowing possible research trajectories, benchmarking may in fact prevent the field from advancing in epistemically robust and socially beneficial ways.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL

Logical Embeddings for Argument Analysis

We propose a new framework for machine-learning-oriented argument analysis tasks. Our proposal involves replacing traditional contextualized word embeddings used in most NLP tasks with logical embeddings, an alternative encoding that directly exploits argumentation structures. In essence, logical embeddings encapsulate the logical semantics of an argument, allowing for a better representation of its meaning. Supporting these embeddings is a mathematical logic-based similarity measure that offers a transparent notion of proximity and is guaranteed to satisfy several desirable theoretical properties that current cosine similarity-based contextualized word embeddings cannot assure. This similarity measure induces a positive semi-definite kernel on the set of arguments, enabling us to uniquely define logical embeddings using the theory of Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (RKHS). Moreover, we prove that this encoding is optimal, in the sense that no logical information is lost in the process. As with other RKHS applications, logical embeddings can be used in numerous supervised and unsupervised tasks. We provide an implementation of the method and aim to test it against literature benchmarks. Additionally, we demonstrate that logical embeddings outperform most standard embedding methods on a classification task.
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Artificial Intelligence

Physics-informed VAE-EVT for Tail Aware Radio Map Prediction

Ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) requires precise identification of spatial regions where the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) falls below an outage threshold. In this context, an outage refers to instances in which SNR falls below a specified threshold, which, for URLLC, can be as stringent as the 0.1% quantile of the SNR distribution. Traditional generative radio map models tend to focus on reconstructing average signal levels, often overlooking the low SNR that is crucial for accurate outage prediction. To address this limitation, we introduce a physics- and tail-informed VAE-EVT (variational autoencoder-extreme value theory) framework that distinctly models both the bulk and tail distribution of SNR. Our approach begins with a physics-informed preprocessing stage that extracts deterministic features, including line-of-sight, shadowing, and distance, from the scene geometry. A dual-latent encoder then captures the bulk SNR using a Gaussian mixture and the tail using a generalized Pareto distribution (GPD). By employing a modified variational objective, the model is trained to jointly supervise both regimes, ensuring focused attention on extreme fading events. Evaluated on the RadioMapSeer dataset, our method achieves an SNR RMSE of 4.83 dB in the outage region defined by the low threshold of 0.1% SNR quantile. This significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art GAN-based model, which records an SNR RMSE of 21.90 dB, with the performance gap widening as the outage threshold becomes more stringent.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Shape Operator PCA: Curvature-Aware Projections for Geometric Machine Learning

In this paper, we propose SHOPCA (Shape Operator-based Principal Component Analysis), a novel method for unsupervised metric learning and dimensionality reduction that incorporates differential geometric information into the covariance structure of classical PCA. SHOPCA regularizes the global covariance matrix using the mean shape operator, defined as the average of the absolute local shape operators estimated from the data manifold, steering principal components toward directions of both maximum variance and informative curvature. A single trace-normalized mixing coefficient $\alpha$ controls the regularization, recovering standard PCA at $\alpha = 0$ and a curvature-driven embedding as $\alpha \to \infty$. We further introduce a fully unsupervised criterion for selecting $\alpha$ based on the spectral eigengap of the regularized covariance matrix, maximizing the relative separation between the top-$d$ and remaining eigenvalues without using class labels. We evaluate SHOPCA on more than 50 real-world benchmark datasets, comparing it with PCA, ISOMAP, and UMAP using Adjusted Rand Index (ARI), Normalized Mutual Information (NMI), Fowlkes-Mallows index (FM), and V-measure. Results show that SHOPCA consistently improves clustering quality over PCA across a broad range of datasets and surpasses UMAP on small-sample settings, where iterative neighborhood-based manifold estimation can degrade. SHOPCA is computationally tractable, parameter-efficient, and applicable to domains requiring fully unsupervised, geometry-aware dimensionality reduction.
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Artificial Intelligence

MoE Router-Guided Clustering for Heterogeneous Federated Instruction Tuning

Federated instruction fine-tuning enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to adapt to decentralized, privacy-sensitive data without requiring data sharing. Recent Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLMs are particularly attractive for federated learning because their sparse activation reduces computation and communication while scaling model capacity. However, existing federated MoE methods primarily focus on parameter aggregation and personalization, overlooking the routing behavior of MoE models as a source of information for client collaboration. Under heterogeneous instruction distributions, indiscriminate aggregation can lead to negative transfer, highlighting the need to identify which clients should collaborate during federated optimization. We propose ClientMorpher, a routing-aware, personalized federated instruction fine-tuning framework that leverages routing signatures from pretrained MoE models to organize client collaboration prior to aggregation. We investigate two complementary clustering strategies: ClientMorpher-C, which directly clusters clients using expert activation profiles, and ClientMorpher-E, which first clusters experts based on their cross-client usage signatures and then derives client collaboration groups. We evaluate ClientMorpher for federated instruction fine-tuning on the Databricks Dolly-15K dataset, using pathological and Dirichlet-based heterogeneous client distributions across multiple instruction-following tasks. Experimental results show that routing-aware collaboration consistently improves personalized performance compared to conventional federated averaging and local training, while maintaining the same communication cost. Furthermore, our study shows that client-centric and expert-centric clustering provides an effective and scalable approach for personalized federated instruction fine-tuning of sparse MoE LLMs.
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All authors Ankita Sharma, Bahar Farahani, Sanaz Rahimi Moosavi, Amir Rrahmani, Farshad Firouzi, Krishnendu Chakrabarty

Artificial Intelligence

Physiological World Models for Human State Transitions

Continuous multimodal sensing now allows human physiology to be observed throughout daily life rather than only during occasional clinical visits. However, most health artificial intelligence systems are designed to recognize current states, estimate risks or analyse individual biomarkers. They do not directly model how physiological states change in response to real-world events, behaviours, contexts and interventions. Here we propose the Physiological World Model (PWM), an event-conditioned framework for learning these changes at the level of the whole person. We introduce the HumanState Transition Token, a structured, quality-scored unit that connects the physiological state before an event with the event or action, relevant context and intervention information, the physiological trajectory after the event, observed outcomes and data quality. We describe four capability levels, from state representation to bounded intervention planning, together with four data acquisition and validation protocols. We also propose six benchmark tasks covering HumanState representation, forecasting across multiple timescales, individualized response prediction, simulation of alternative interventions, bounded planning and reliability under distribution shift. Together, this framework provides a practical path towards personalized health management, behavioural intervention design and clinician-supervised decision support, while clearly separating prediction from causal inference and making uncertainty, safety, governance and limits of use explicit.
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All authors Chongyang Zhang, Rendong Wang, Hao Zheng, Hanwen Zhang, Yang Liu, Xiaolong Wei, Bin Chong

Artificial Intelligence

Understanding Cognition-Induced Risks in Agentic AI Systems

Frontier agentic systems powered by large language models (LLMs) exhibit human-like patterns of cognition. As these systems become deeply integrated across different domains, their cognitive engagement raises critical concerns for human society that remain insufficiently studied. To address this gap, we systematically analyze risks induced by expanding cognitive capabilities, following a three-level framework defined by their cognitive scope, from physical cognition to social cognition, and finally to self-referential cognition. We study their potential risks to human agency, autonomy, and control capability, corresponding to each cognitive level. We finally propose strategies to mitigate these risks and enhance the controllability of agentic AI systems, ensuring their long-term safe development.
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All authors Guanchu Wang, Qinuo Li, Mengnan Du, Xia Hu, Bowen Zhou

Artificial Intelligence

Divergent-Convergent Reasoning: Scaling Test-Time Compute through Structured Solution Synthesis

Test-time compute can substantially improve Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning performance, yet how and when additional compute helps remains poorly understood. We study Divergent-Convergent Reasoning (DCR), a simple two-phase primitive consisting of an exploration phase that generates multiple candidate solutions followed by a convergent reconciliation phase. We present three core results. First, we show that even a single reconciliation step can reliably amplify correct minority reports: across datasets, DCR often recovers the correct answer when correct exploration outputs are in the minority, a regime where majority voting fails. Second, we introduce recursive DCR, an autoregressive reconciliation system that iteratively analyzes disagreements and allocates additional test-time compute. Recursive DCR achieves higher accuracy than fixed-compute baselines-reaching 93.3% on AIME 2024 and 92.0% on AIME 2025-while using roughly 27% less compute on average, demonstrating that attentive resource allocation is superior to uniform scaling. Third, we analyze disagreement among exploration outputs via a simple, training-free dispersion metric. Dispersion reveals a structured relationship between disagreement and test-time gains: in regimes where DCR is effective, higher disagreement among exploration outputs is associated with larger accuracy improvements from reconciliation. Together, these results show that disagreement, often viewed as noise, can be systematically exploited to improve test-time reasoning and reveal emerging scaling laws for agentic LLM systems.
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All authors Bo Wen, Yuhao Chen, Erhan Bilal, Carla Agurto Rios, Chen Wang, Junchen Jiang

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG

MAPLE: MoE Adaptive Plug-and-play Layer-wise Expert allocation

Sparsely-activated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Transformers universally fix the same number of routed experts across all layers, a convention that ignores the well-documented heterogeneity in layer-wise redundancy. We demonstrate that this uniformity is systematically suboptimal and propose MAPLE, a plug-and-play framework that reallocates the routed-expert budget heterogeneously across layers of any pretrained MoE LLM, without modifying weights or requiring retraining. Our core contribution is a closed-form sensitivity-guided allocation: we probe each layer's response to variation in expert count, quantify sensitivity using three measures, and derive an analytically optimal budget assignment that directs capacity towards sensitive layers and absorbs reductions in redundant layers. This closed-form solution is further refined by a sensitivity-constrained genetic search that uses layer-wise sensitivity as a prior to guide exploration, yielding faster convergence and superior allocation quality. On four MoE models spanning different scales and architectures, MAPLE outperforms uniform and pruning-based baselines under a 75% routed-expert budget. Notably, on DeepSeek-MoE-16B, MAPLE uses only 75% of the experts yet surpasses the original 100% expert-uniform baseline on ARC-E, ARC-C, and BoolQ, improving accuracy from 65.09 to 71.40, 48.49 to 51.50, and 80.03 to 82.38, respectively. These accuracy gains translate into measured deployment efficiency: implementing MAPLE in SGLang reduces single-GPU end-to-end serving latency by 32.2% and improves throughput by 47.4%. These results show that well-designed heterogeneous allocation can be more effective than simply activating more experts, establishing it as a principled and practical axis for improving MoE efficiency.
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All authors Lie Li, Wen Li, Junxiao Shen, Guosheng Hu

Artificial Intelligence

ReasonCast: Agentic Demand Forecasting with Selective Semantic Reasoning

Demand forecasting increasingly requires combining two complementary sources of information: historical sales reveal recurring numerical dynamics, while future promotions, holidays, price changes, and platform interventions provide forward-looking knowledge. Existing text-enhanced forecasting methods often encode such context into generic representations and fuse it uniformly with time-series features, without explicitly distinguishing which semantic effects are forecast-relevant or how they should modify future dynamics. We introduce ReasonCast, a structured semantic intervention framework that translates event knowledge into forecast-specific operations. An agent examines the event context, the no-text forecast, and its uncertainty to determine whether textual reasoning is needed. Rather than injecting free-form text, ReasonCast represents event knowledge through structured fields describing event relevance, demand direction, temporal shape, amplitude, and peak intensity. These fields interact selectively with temporal components of a time-series foundation model. An additive path corrects local trends and temporal shapes, while a multiplicative path captures event-driven level shifts. ReasonCast introduces a forecast-grounded post-training curriculum. Schema SFT establishes semantic fields; semantic-field RL calibrates direction, shape, amplitude, and peak judgments; and forecast-utility RL evaluates semantic interventions through a frozen forecaster, aligning reasoning outputs with marginal forecast improvement. ReasonCast lowers WMAPE by 3.29, 1.25, and 0.47 percentage points on holiday-sensitive categories, mega-sale-sensitive categories, and M5 event windows, respectively. On stable-sales periods, indiscriminate semantic intervention increases WMAPE by 1.68 percentage points, whereas suppressing unnecessary intervention preserves the numerical backbone.
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All authors Ziyue Yang, Chaolin Xu, Yijing Wang, Tiankai Gu, Hui Yang, Yanhong Lin, Kaiyuan Liu, Fei Xiao

Artificial Intelligence

D2R2: Discrete Diffusion with Regulation Reinforcement for Single-Cell Perturbation Prediction

Predicting single-cell transcriptomic responses to genetic perturbations is central to functional genomics and virtual-cell modeling. Existing approaches, however, typically predict an entire expression profile as a whole, leaving the order in which individual gene responses are generated unmodeled. To address this problem, we introduce \textbf{$D^{2}R^{2}$} (Discrete Diffusion with Regulation Reinforcement), which reformulates perturbation prediction as regulation-guided gene-wise progressive generation. A Masked Discrete Diffusion Model represents expression as ordinal tokens and reconstructs a fully masked profile step by step, allowing generated gene responses to condition those that remain masked. A Regulatory Policy Module initializes the generation policy from a gene regulatory network inferred from control cells and adapts it to the perturbation and current partially generated state. Then, group-relative policy optimization refines only the ordering policy using final perturbation-effect agreement as reward. Across Norman19 and VCC-H1, $D^{2}R^{2}$ achieves the best performance on all five metrics on Norman19 and remains competitive on H1. Controlled ablations holding the generator and generation budget fixed show that biological-prior ordering improves over random ordering and is more reliable than uncertainty-based heuristics, whereas reversing the biological-prior ordering degrades every metric. Biological analyses further show that the refined policy prioritizes regulatory genes early while promoting perturbation-specific transcription factors and responsive genes. These results establish gene generation order as an effective, controllable, and biologically interpretable dimension of single-cell perturbation prediction.
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All authors Ninghan Fan, Qi Liu, Xunuo Zhu, Yukai Sun, Luyuan Chen, Xuheng Zhou, Yuetian Du, Ming Kong, Xiaojun Zhu, Jie Liu, Zhan Zhou, Qiang Zhu

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG

No Task Fails Every Time: Why One-Shot Audits Are Structurally Blind to Agent Damage

We introduce AgentRelBench, an environment-agnostic reliability instrument that computes ground-truth, severity-priced damage from database state diffs across repeated runs, with no LLM in the measurement path, demonstrated on EnterpriseOps-Gym. Across 2,128 evaluation runs spanning nine models in six families (four development, three pre-registered held-out, plus a frontier pass on two frontier-tier models that the pre-registration designates exploratory), we find: (1) damage on irreversible actions is universal across the families we measured and stochastic within them on pinned, single-provider stacks. (2) No task damaged on every run: zero always-fail cells across 42 confirmatory held-out damage events. A single clean run misses a damage-producing (model, task) pair 0.80 of the time on the development pool (13 pairs); the held-out pool is descriptively consistent (0.575 over 5 pairs, pair-weighted) but sits below our pre-registered power floor and is reported as underpowered, not as confirmation. (3) Damage-producing task count falls with model capability, from 7 of 20 tasks for an 8B model to 1 of 20 for the most capable; capability is confounded with family and training, so this is an observed gradient, not a causal claim. The residual damage does not change in character: in the exploratory frontier pass, the most capable model's one damaging task damages at $\hat{p} = 0.16$ per run, inside the same demonstrably-stochastic band, and a single audit misses it 84% of the time. (4) One model family committed the gated irreversible change while declaring it had refused: transcript- and judge-based grading scores those runs as safe refusals, only state diffs as damage. All confirmatory findings were pre-registered with per-claim demote criteria; one demoted our own initially favored finding, which we report.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.RO

PhaseLoRA: Control-Regime-Conditioned Low-Rank Adaptation for Continuous-Action Vision-Language-Action Policies

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is a natural way to adapt pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) policies, but most adapter designs apply temporally static updates throughout a control rollout, overlooking the phase-dependent nature of continuous-action manipulation. Such policies traverse distinct regimes, including approach, contact transition, grasping, transport, and placement, each requiring different adaptation behaviors. We propose PhaseLoRA, a lightweight LoRA parameterization that conditions adaptation at each action-chunk prediction step using two weakly supervised descriptors: fine-control tendency and event/boundary intensity. PhaseLoRA modulates the LoRA left factor in the action expert, allowing the effective low-rank update direction to vary over time while keeping the backbone largely frozen. On LIBERO, PhaseLoRA improves average success rate by 12.2 points over a matched-parameter high-rank LoRA baseline and outperforms stronger LoRA variants. Ablations show that random temporal modulation and scalar gating do not reproduce the performance of the full model, while update-direction analyses reveal structured temporal variation associated with the predicted control descriptors. These results establish within-trajectory conditioning as an effective lightweight PEFT axis for continuous-action VLA policies.
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All authors Yufei Guo, Yinan Wu, Haoran Duan, Guiguang Ding, Jungong Han

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.RO

VTInstructor: Visual Trajectory Prompting for Navigation Instruction Generation in Continuous Environments

Navigation instruction generation from ego-centric RGB video in continuous environments is an important yet challenging task for human-robot interaction and scalable dataset construction. Prior instruction generators assume discrete viewpoint graphs with panoramic observations, where trajectory structure is explicit; in continuous environments, however, the agent receives only a dense RGB stream, making trajectory cues difficult to recover. We propose VTInstructor, the first VLN instruction generation framework for continuous environments. Our key idea is to convert implicit trajectory geometry into explicit visual trajectory prompts: EDTC condenses long RGB trajectories into navigation-critical keyframes, VTP overlays path, turn, and goal cues onto these anchors, VTMod injects the resulting trajectory signals into the visual encoder, and VT-GRPO further calibrates this spatial injection during training, all without requiring a navigation graph, pre-built map, or scene reconstruction. On the challenging R2R-CE and RxR-CE Val Unseen benchmarks, VTInstructor sets a new state of the art across all standard NLG metrics, surpassing the strongest baseline by +0.357 CIDEr and +0.109 CIDEr, respectively. Beyond automatic metrics, VTInstructor-generated instructions raise a frozen follower's success rate to 63.3%, a +14.7 percentage-point gain over the best competing instruction source, and provide consistent data augmentation gains of +3 SR points on downstream navigation tasks.
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All authors Haolin Yang, Yuxing Long, Zihan Yang, Hao Dong

Artificial Intelligence

VibeWorlding: Can Multimodal Agents Construct 3D Open Worlds End-to-End?

Constructing an interactive 3D open world from a user query is important. However, existing methods are primarily evaluated on idealized, simple queries, making it difficult to systematically analyze and compare how multimodal agents understand user intent, use 3D tools, and reason over textual and visual 3D world information. To this end, we propose VibeWorlding, a unified framework for benchmarking and training vibe worlding agents: a multimodal agent that can autonomously infer user intent, plan scene layout, invoke 3D tools, and reflect on the multimodal feedback in a multi-turn agent-environment interaction process. To achieve this, we first build VWE-BENCH, a benchmark of 2,616 high-quality 3D assets, 323 human-annotated seed 3D worlds, and 6,828 reverse-synthesized multimodal user queries, split into verified queries with ground-truth and unverified queries with carefully designed rubrics. Moreover, we develop VibeWorlding-Gym, a joint multimodal RL post-training framework that integrates (1) a sandbox environment unifying asset retrieval, editing, and image rendering as MCP tools, and (2) a rubric-based verifier that combines physical feasibility and intent fulfillment verification, supporting both fair model evaluation and scalable multimodal RL reward service. Our experiments show that current frontier MLLMs are far from solving the vibe worlding agent task, with even GPT-5.5 and Qwen3.8-Max reaching below 60% success rate, and trace the bottleneck to precise 3D world editing. We further find that RL training can ease this weakness and enable open-source MLLMs to even surpass closed-source frontiers: our VibeWorlder-8B is comparable to frontier MLLMs, while our flagship VibeWorlder-30B-A3B attains the best overall Pass@1 among all evaluated models.
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All authors Yansong Ning, Jingwen Ye, Zhongkai Wu, Yang Sun, Yiqin Zhu, Xingyi Li, Weidong Zhang, Hao Liu

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

VGGT-Align: Bridging Local Reconstruction and Global Consistency for Long-Sequence 3D Reconstruction

Maintaining global geometric consistency is a central challenge in long-sequence 3D reconstruction, with scale drift being the most critical failure mode. In chunk-based inference pipelines, the scale degree of freedom in sequential Sim(3) alignment is left unconstrained, causing estimation errors to compound multiplicatively and distort global trajectories and point cloud geometry. We present a scale-consistency enhancement framework built on a key insight: in structured environments such as driving scenes, geometric quantities arising from environmental regularity remain inherently invariant across temporal segments, and discrepancies in their per-chunk measurements directly expose inter-chunk scale drift. We propose Scene Geometric Invariant Anchoring (SGIA), which extracts dominant geometric invariants from each chunk's predicted point cloud via coarse-to-fine robust estimation and exploits their cross-chunk consistency to establish scale constraints independent of point cloud registration, explicitly degenerating 7-DoF Sim(3) alignment into 6-DoF rigid-body transformation and severing chain-wise scale error propagation at its source. We further introduce a lightweight test-time adaptation strategy that fine-tunes only normalization-layer parameters via multi-objective self-supervision, progressively improving intra-chunk predictions along the sequence. Both modules are plug-and-play and require no offline retraining. Experiments on multiple long-sequence benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, reducing absolute trajectory error by up to 32% with significant gains in trajectory stability and reconstruction quality. Code: https://github.com/WZ-CS/VGGT-Align
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All authors Wei Zhang, Yihang Wu, Songhua Li, Qi Wang

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

UAV Video Deblurring via Motion-Aware Diffusion: A Path to Robust Target Detection

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) play a crucial role in various scenarios ranging from disaster response to traffic surveillance. However, aerial video footage often suffers from severe motion blur due to rapid flight maneuvers, vibrations, and camera panning, which can significantly degrade downstream tasks such as target detection. Our goal is to explore a computationally-efficient and effective video deblurring approach to enhance UAV target detection performance. To reduce computational cost, we first propose an Adaptive Latent Scale Selector that dynamically adjusts the latent space resolution according to the intensity of UAV motion, thus balancing detail preservation with inference efficiency. To ensure temporal consistency, we introduce a Multi-Frame Alignment and Learnable Gating module to warp and gate the preceding frames, allowing the model to fuse only relevant temporal information and suppress misaligned or uninformative features. Our method can effectively recover sharp details from the UAV video stream. Extensive experiments on real UAV benchmarks demonstrate that our method not only yields superior deblurring performance but also significantly boosts target detection accuracy, making it highly applicable to robust aerial vision tasks.
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Artificial Intelligence

Decentralized Federated Learning for Heterogeneous Multi-Task Semantic Communication

Collaborative training in distributed semantic communication (DSC) networks typically relies on decentralized federated learning (DFL). However, pushing topology-agnostic aggregation into heterogeneous, multi-task environments creates a fundamental bottleneck: it drives negative transfer and overconsensus bias (OCB). This paper introduces a personalized DSC framework that cuts off this cross-task interference. At the node level, a policy-driven multi-path routing mechanism separates task-specific features from shared representations to preserve local fidelity. Across the network, we deploy a "communicationwhile- aggregation" protocol. It calibrates a column-stochastic consensus matrix using task affinities. This limits the system to absorbing complementary knowledge while actively blocking mismatched parameter updates. To bound the convergence, we derive a unified Lyapunov drift analysis. We reveal a strict Ushaped trade-off: deeper topological mixing reduces variance but amplifies structural OCB. Resolving this tension yields a closed-form expression for the optimal aggregation depth. We evaluate the proposed framework on NYU-v2, where the results reveal a clear trade-off between insufficient aggregation and excessive topological mixing. At the analytically derived optimal aggregation depth, our method achieves a 4.77% global relative improvement over the no-aggregation baseline and outperforms decentralized FedAvg, FedAMP, and heuristic max aggregation. We further evaluate the framework on Taskonomy and imperfect wireless links to examine the effects of network-size variation and wireless-link reliability.
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All authors Lin Yin, Tiejun Lv, Weicai Li, Xi Yu, Xiaoyu He

Artificial Intelligence

Towards Standardized Evaluation in Automated Domain Modeling: Introducing a Benchmark

Domain modeling plays an essential role in domain-driven design, capturing essential entities and their relationships within a specific domain. Despite advancements in automated domain modeling, the absence of standardized benchmarks has hindered the comparative assessment of existing approaches. This paper introduces a benchmark designed to address this gap. The benchmark combines the 45-record Golden UML Modelset (Verbruggen et al., 2025) on Zenodo, as distributed by the Text2UML project of Calamo, Mecella, and Snoeck (Calamo et al., 2025), with the 8-record reference archive of Chen et al. (Chen et al., 2023a,b), enabling the evaluation of automated domain modeling approaches across different levels of complexity and scale. Given a natural language description, the task is to generate a corresponding domain model. For each description, a reference domain model is provided as ground truth. A metric is used to compare the generated domain model with the corresponding ground-truth model. To demonstrate the utility of the benchmark, we evaluate multiple automated domain modeling approaches, including heuristic rule-based methods and LLM-driven strategies. In accordance with the FAIR4RS recommendations (Chue Hong et al., 2022), the benchmark is provided as a research artifact to encourage reuse and support future research on automated domain modeling.
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Artificial Intelligence

Demographic Injection in Medical Language Models under Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Prompts

Clinical-AI guidance increasingly recommends prompting language models to reason with attention to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). We measure a side effect that misrepresents patients: a one-sentence DEI prompt appended to a medical question leads models to add patient demographic attributes (race, socioeconomic status, sex) the question never stated, in effect rewriting who the patient is. We call this demographic injection. Across 47 models, four medical benchmarks, and 376,000 responses scored by a validated model-judge pipeline, a single DEI prompt raises the injection rate from 0.7% to 33.1% (47x) in all 47 of 47 models, attributable to the equity content rather than to added length (18x above a length-matched control; p=1.4x10^-14). Most added content is a general population statement that leaves the answer unchanged, but a smaller subset attaches an attribute to the specific patient or changes the selected option (0.25-2.4% of responses, 99.8% toward the incorrect option), where the invented demographic changes the answer the model recommends. Phrasing scales the effect from 14% to 56%. DEI prompts are just one example of a more general mechanism. Any instruction that nudges how a model reasons can make it add unrequested details, including details about the patient. Flagged outputs are treated as model errors under study, not clinical guidance.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

CG-GLORE: A Conjugate Gradient-Based Global-Local Regularization Network for Sparse-View CT Reconstruction

Sparse-view computed tomography (CT) reduces radiation dose by acquiring fewer projection views, but the resulting inverse problem is highly ill-posed and often produces severe streak artifacts. Existing deep reconstruction methods have achieved promising performance, yet many rely on first-order updates or large regularization networks, which can be less effective in ill-conditioned settings. We propose CG-GLORE, a compact deep unrolling framework inspired by second-order optimization for sparse-view CT reconstruction. Each unrolled stage uses a CG-solved linear system based on a structured Hessian surrogate: it retains the physics-induced curvature of the data-fidelity term while using an identity approximation for the learned regularization term. Thus, the method is second-order-inspired rather than an exact Newton method for the full learned objective. To model image priors, we design a Global-Local Regularization Network (GLORE), which combines convolutional local feature extraction with a Long-Range Dependency Representation module based on sparse patchification and Nyström attention. This design captures anatomical details and non-local dependencies while maintaining practical complexity. Experiments on AAPM and DeepLesion under multiple sparse-view and noise settings show that CG-GLORE achieves strong quantitative performance, stable convergence, lower noise power, and improved visual fidelity compared with representative reconstruction methods.
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All authors Tran Xuan Hieu Le, Doanh C. Bui, Vu Trung Duong Le, Hoai Luan Pham, Khang Nguyen, Mai K. Nguyen, Tu Bao Ho, Yasuhiko Nakashima

Artificial Intelligence

LongRCA Bench: Root-Cause Localization in Long-Horizon Agent Trajectories

In long agent executions, an early error can persist through later actions and checks, while evidence needed to trace its origin is dispersed across the history. Short histories offer limited tests of recovering error origins across substantial subsequent execution. We introduce LongRCA Bench: 1,140 complete failed trajectories from five sources, all human-annotated for responsible roles and earliest decisive root-cause steps. Reference roots precede completion by a median of 48 recorded steps; 28.4% of trajectories contain over 100 subsequent steps. With DeepSeek-V4-Flash on the full benchmark, the strongest of five evaluated baselines achieves 13.2% exact root-step accuracy. We propose Root-Cause Trajectory Attribution (RCTA), a training-free method that organizes original candidate records and explicit handoff instructions for attribution. Segment summaries and a trajectory outline guide candidate retrieval; available handoff records supply upstream instruction context for the final instruction-execution comparison. With the same backbone and scoring protocol, RCTA reaches 24.1% exact root-step accuracy and 51.1% responsible-role accuracy. LongRCA-Mini provides 200 fixed trajectories for lower-cost comparative screening. Even with RCTA, fewer than one quarter of reference roots are recovered exactly.
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All authors Yunfei Zhang, Boyu Feng, Changhua Pei, Zexin Wang, Zhihuang Peng, Xinlong Liu, Hengyue Jiang, Difeng Ma, Jiayi Zhang, Yongzhou Yao, Yanan Zhao, Fei Sun, Yintong Huo, Zhaoyang Liu, Jingjing Li, Gaogang Xie, Dan Pei

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from q-bio.NC

Valhalla: A Layered Knowledge-State and Service-Governance Framework for Long-Term Scientific Knowledge Work

As large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly adopted in scientific research, external knowledge bases, knowledge graphs, and long-term memory have improved information retrieval and task continuity. However, most structured knowledge systems remain node-centric, representing files, concepts, results, and judgments as nodes and relations in a graph. While suitable for personal knowledge management, such structures often depend on individual organizational practices, limiting knowledge sharing, integration, and reorganization across users. This paper presents Valhalla, a layered knowledge-state and service-governance framework for long-term scientific knowledge work. Valhalla replaces flat graphs with layered encapsulation and stable semantic boundaries through a five-layer File-Resource-Entity-Relationship-Graph (FREG) model. File and Resource preserve source identity and provenance, Entity represents knowledge objects, Relationship captures semantic judgments, and Graph provides task-oriented knowledge views, enabling knowledge states from different researchers to be exchanged and reorganized under a unified structure. We further introduce a Router-Contract-Workflow service-governance architecture, inspired by the microkernel paradigm, to constrain how language models access, modify, and extend knowledge states while maintaining structural consistency and auditable operational boundaries. We implement a Valhalla prototype and validate knowledge ingestion, cross-member integration, and scientific writing support through an antibody-design review task comprising 26 paper resources, 80 knowledge entities, and 92 semantic relations. Rather than proposing a new knowledge-extraction algorithm, Valhalla offers a paradigm for organizing collaborative scientific knowledge, transforming individualized knowledge structures into transferable and reorganizable shared knowledge states.
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All authors Yuyang Zheng, Nan Li, Wenxia Deng, Lige Yan, Xiang Li, Si Chen

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.SE

The Quality of Claude AI-authored Python Tests Is Not Weaker Than Human-authored Tests

We evaluate the quality of Claude AI-written Python tests against human-written Python tests from two established open-source projects Django and Pandas. Hundreds of tests per corpus are scored under one identical protocol. Using one-sided non-inferiority bounds, we find that the tests written by recent Claude models (Sonnet/Opus 4.6 and later) are no weaker than the two human-written corpora. In this study: (i) the AI-written corpus is tests from real tools, not synthetic tests generated in isolation against a fixed target, the setup used by every other AI-test-generation study we are aware of; (ii) every test is individually scored under three independent fault-injection protocols plus a seven-axis qualitative design rubric, allowing methods to cross-validate each other; (iii) tests are scored individually, rather than suite-level, identifying exactly which specific tests need attention.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG

FinFraudBench: A Heterogeneous Graph Benchmark for Financial Fraud Detection

The increasing complexity of digital financial systems has reshaped financial fraud detection from isolated transaction classification into relational risk reasoning over interconnected financial entities. This shift has motivated graph-based fraud detection, where models identify fraudulent nodes by exploiting dependencies among customers, cards, merchants, categories, and locations. However, despite rapid progress in graph-based methods, existing public benchmarks remain misaligned with real-world financial systems in two important aspects. First, they often simplify financial ecosystems into homogeneous or single-node-type multi-relational graphs, failing to preserve the multi-entity and multi-relational nature of financial data. Second, they rarely provide large-scale heterogeneous financial graph datasets with realistic operating conditions such as extreme class imbalance and limited label availability, making it difficult to assess the practical effectiveness of current methods. To address these gaps, we present FinFraudBench, a heterogeneous graph benchmark for financial fraud detection. FinFraudBench contains two heterogeneous graph datasets (CreditCard-Fraud and BankTrans-Fraud) with up to 8.99M nodes and 89.23M directed typed edges. Each dataset preserves six financial entity types, fourteen directed edge types, and natural fraud rates that mirror deployment constraints. With these datasets, we establish a standardized evaluation protocol covering both ranking and imbalance-sensitive classification metrics, and evaluate representative baselines. Extensive experiments yield empirical insights into current methods' limitations and suggest promising avenues for future research. FinFraudBench is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FinFraudBench-B002.
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All authors Yixuan Chen, Hongyu Zhan, Jie Sheng, Weiyu Han, Shuai Chen, Tianyi Zhang, Xiao Tan, Jun Xia

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.RO

LAPF: LLM-Agent-Based Path Finder Using the UAVScenes Dataset

Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed for autonomous navigation in complex outdoor environments, where dynamic conditions and mission requirements require intelligent adaptive decision-making. Existing optimization-based, Machine Learning (ML), and Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches often rely on predefined models or task-specific training, limiting their generalization and adaptability in uncertain scenarios. Recent Large Language Model (LLM)-assisted approaches offer promising reasoning capabilities but remain constrained by limited agentic functionality, including insufficient memory, planning, and tool interaction mechanisms.This paper proposes an LLM-Agent-Based Path Finder (LAPF) framework for autonomous UAV navigation in town-scale outdoor environments. LAPF extends LLM-assisted navigation by integrating perception, memory, planning, and action modules into a closed-loop cognitive architecture. The proposed agent leverages prior navigation experiences, performs Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, couples each detected hazard to a bounded corrective action, and dynamically refines waypoint decisions based on environmental feedback.The three independent trials per method demonstrate that LAPF achieves mean path lengths of 512.83 m and 506.37 m, compared to the straight-line optimum of 497.33 m, corresponding to path length reductions of 17.2% and 15.6% relative to CoT prompting and absolute path efficiencies of 97.1% and 98.1% in open-field and obstacle-injected scenarios, respectively. Furthermore, LAPF is the only evaluated approach that couples every detected hazard to a bounded, metric-neutral corrective action while maintaining near-goal stability, with zero clamp events in both scenarios, whereas CoT prompting increases from 9.7 to 14.0 events.
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All authors Yousef Emami, Mohammadhossein Homaei, Hao Zhou, Miguel Gutiérrez Gaitán, Atefeh Hajijamali Arani, Rui Zhang

Artificial Intelligence

SkillCommit: Evolving Agent Skills through Behaviorally Validated Scope Expansion

Large language model (LLM) agents can continually improve without parameter updates by converting historical experience into reusable procedural knowledge. However, existing methods often consolidate experience based on semantic similarity or LLM judgments, which may merge superficially related but behaviorally incompatible strategies and thereby degrade performance. To address the issue, we propose SkillCommit, an online skill evolution framework that continuously transforms experience into a hierarchical library of reusable skills. Rather than generalizing from individual experiences immediately, SkillCommit first preserves each experience as an instance-specific patch, retaining its locally validated behavior. As patches accumulate, SkillCommit abstracts those sharing a common behavioral mechanism into higher-level skills. Specifically, for each incoming skill, embedding-based retrieval first identifies candidate related skills. Cross-instance replay and an LLM-based mechanism check determine whether these skills transfer across cases and share a common underlying mechanism. Candidates that pass both checks are abstracted into a higher-level skill and committed only if it preserves the validated behavior of all constituent skills. Experiments on RuleArena, OpenExempt and KOR-Bench demonstrate that SkillCommit consistently improves agent performance across diverse domains. Moreover, the learned skills transfer across model scales and families, enabling cross-model experience transfer.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

A Unified Backbone–Expert Framework with Relation-Token and Residual–Classifier Interfaces for Automatic Modulation Recognition

Automatic modulation recognition (AMR) faces distinct representation bottlenecks under varying observation lengths, where a single model architecture often fails to excel. To address this, we propose a unified backbone-expert framework with a common convolutional state-space backbone and two specialized interfaces. For short sequences, we inject explicit lag-aware complex-plane descriptors as relation tokens before encoding to compensate for information loss. For long sequences, we design a gated multi-scale residual refinement module to correct the feature map, combined with a fixed-averaging classifier collaboration to harness complementary evidence. Our framework achieves overall average accuracies of 67.28 \pm 0.14% on RML2016.10b and 87.19 \pm 0.77% on HisarMod2019 (mean \pm sample standard deviation over three runs), respectively. The framework's efficacy is further validated through three-seed ablations, native-length cross-configuration tests, and controlled window studies, confirming the benefit of expert-interface decoupling over one-size-fits-all architectures.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.RO

Low-Rank Dynamics-Effective Latent Carriers for Counterfactual Rollout in Learned World Models

We ask whether a small, directly addressable hidden-state intervention can place a learned world model on an intended counterfactual future and then let the model's own dynamics carry that future forward. In a controlled two-object collision environment, we study a 192-dimensional recurrent model trained on factual and locally edited counterfactual trajectories. Candidate carriers are learned from training-only counterfactual-minus-factual hidden differences, and an affine map predicts carrier coordinates from the factual state and requested edit without access to the native counterfactual hidden state at test time. For bounded single-component velocity edits, rank 4 is the smallest tested rank on the preregistered grid that satisfies the development criteria. A one-shot rank-4 patch launches a 12-transition autonomous rollout without future observations, teacher forcing, repeated hidden-state correction, or physical-state clamping. The frozen procedure satisfies the preregistered 2-of-3 fresh-checkpoint replication rule and remains reusable at nearby anchors. The same Single-derived carrier and Single-only affine map also support bounded same-object two-component requests. Across the matched training regimes, broader counterfactual support was associated mainly with better Joint rollout accuracy and more additive Joint hidden responses. Composition-related structure is enriched in the rank-4 subspace but is not confined to it, and local recurrent diagnostics show strong one-step coupling from the carrier to the rest of the hidden state. A position-edit stress test fails the required specificity controls. Together, these results support a compact dynamics-effective intervention-entry interface, not a closed four-dimensional state or an intrinsic state dimension.
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