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Tuesday 15 September

Artificial Intelligence

From Transient Prompts to Persistent Control: Scientific Poster Generation via Recursive Semantic-Geometric Contracts

Runze Li, Yukun Zhao, Can Xu et al. (+5 more)

Scientific poster generation distills a multimodal paper into a single-page visual artifact, forcing strict trade-offs between informational coverage and readability under a fixed spatial budget. Existing methods pass plans as transient prompts and validate individual stages in isolation. This strategy causes requirements to drift across content and layout modules, and previous checks to be silently invalidated. We introduce PosterVisor, a control framework that shifts poster generation from transient prompts to persistent control. An Orchestrator grounds rubrics in the paper and visual assets, compiling them into a Semantic-Geometric Contract (SGC) that binds claims and sources to required visuals, budgets, and spatial commitments. Only fully instantiated records become executable assertions; other usable requirements remain soft guidance. Recursive Contract Enforcement (RCE) dynamically triggers checks across stages as evidence emerges. Crucially, during repairs, RCE rechecks affected checkpoint states, preventing repair-induced regressions from propagating silently. We instantiate PosterVisor in HTML/CSS and editable PPTX generators. On the 100-paper Paper2Poster benchmark, PosterVisor-PPT improves observed mean poster-grounded QA accuracy over PosterGen (64.47% vs. 58.53%) and is preferred by human judges in 72.5% of non-tied pairwise comparisons (95% CI, 61.6-83.4%). A secondary 30-paper study also yields higher VLM Overall and PaperQuiz means. These results support rubric-compiled contracts and stage-conditioned enforcement for controllable poster synthesis.
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All authors Runze Li, Yukun Zhao, Can Xu, Yucheng Shen, Shuaiqiang Wang, Jianmin Wu, Lingyong Yan, Dawei Yin

Artificial Intelligence

Intrinsic Motivation in Reinforcement Learning: A Research Agenda for Adaptive Self-Organisation

Anatoly Belikov

Biological cells can be viewed as individual, interacting agents whose collective dynamics give rise to adaptive behaviour at multiple levels of organisation, from individual cells through tissues to whole multicellular organisms. In this perspective and tutorial article we discuss whether intrinsic rewards in artificial neural systems can support adaptation, functional specialisation and higher-level self-organisation without a shared external objective. We review empowerment, curiosity, learning progress, information gain, unsupervised skill discovery, mutual information estimation and the use of world models for intrinsic reward computation. Particular attention is given to failure modes showing when such objectives do not produce sustained exploration or increasingly complex behaviour. We argue that more capable systems may require complementary objectives, communication, memory, learning at multiple temporal scales and environmental constraints. Based on this perspective, we outline three experimental directions. These include a resource-constrained environment in which otherwise stable behavioural attractors become unsustainable, allowing us to test whether environmental constraints can mitigate characteristic failure modes of intrinsic objectives. The network of recurrent agents with per-agent intrinsic rewards, and a hierarchical world-model agent in which exploratory motor competence develops before goal-directed behaviour. These experiments are intended to test whether intrinsic learning can lead to adaptive organisation at progressively higher levels.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.MA

Mo' Models, Mo' Problems: How to best select model pools when designing Multi-Agent Systems

Sara Vera Marjanović, Jiacheng Xu, Aleksandr Laptev et al. (+3 more)

Multi-agent Systems (MAS) combine multiple model outputs to solve complex reasoning tasks. However, despite rapid growth of available open-source models, there is limited research on how to select optimal model candidates out of this massive pool. We systematically evaluate 8 model selection strategies (including model size, accuracy and answer diversity) across before-generation (routing) and after-generation (majority-voting, LLM-as-a-judge) MAS architectures on challenging scientific benchmarks. Our findings show a significant gap between theoretical oracle potential and actual performance: Expanding candidate pool sizes often degrades performance below that of the top performing base-model. We find that candidate selection within a single model family is the strategy that yields the best relative performance over a standalone model. These results demonstrate that adding arbitrary models to a heterogeneous MAS can introduce system instability, highlighting model selection as a critical design choice for multi-agent systems.
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All authors Sara Vera Marjanović, Jiacheng Xu, Aleksandr Laptev, Grigor Nalbandyan, Erik Arakelyan, Evelina Bakhaturina

Artificial Intelligence

Extracting ontology-compliant knowledge from scientific text describing irradiated materials using large language models

Marco Luca Sbodio, Marcos Martínez Galindo, Vanessa Lopez et al. (+6 more)

The quest for new materials increasingly relies on predictive models and comprehensive simulations that span scales from atomic to macroscopic levels. However, essential data necessary for these models and simulations are often embedded in scientific literature as unstructured text, limiting reusability and posing challenges for researchers seeking to leverage existing knowledge effectively. While extracting structured data from unstructured text using large language models is gaining popularity, traditional methods typically generate key-value pairs data with straightforward schemas. In contrast, we introduce eolas, a modular pipeline that uses large language models to automatically transform scientific documents into knowledge graphs aligned with a specified ontology. We demonstrate eolas effectiveness in extracting useful information for scientists studying materials designed to endure the extreme temperatures and radiation levels found in fusion reactors. While a human expert might spend between thirty to ninety minutes extracting relevant data from an article, eolas can generate high-quality knowledge graphs in just a few minutes. These are presented in a tabular format with faceted navigation for easy human validation. Additionally, we introduce the first benchmark dataset designed to assess large language models capabilities in constructing knowledge graphs within the domain of irradiated materials. The analysis of 168 experiments using our dataset, various large language models and prompting techniques provides key insights that we summarize into practical guidelines for effectively extracting knowledge graphs aligned with an input ontology.
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All authors Marco Luca Sbodio, Marcos Martínez Galindo, Vanessa Lopez, Blanca Biel, Pablo Canca, Pedro Delgado, Jesús I. Mendieta-Moreno, Raphael Tack, Maria J. Caturla

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.SE

After the Party: Growth, Governance, and Security Scanning in the OpenClaw Agent Skill Ecosystem

Yunpeng Xiong and Ting Zhang

AI agents increasingly act through agent skills, i.e., natural-language instructions, that direct a host agent toward shell, network, credential, file, and process actions, and public registries distribute them at scale. In the first half of 2026, the OpenClaw AI agent went viral, and its public skill registry boomed: the observable stock nearly doubled in 91 days, and a majority of the listings visible in June were created in just two months. By the end of our study window, the wave had crested, and monthly listing creation and core-repository activity were falling from their spring peaks. This paper measures what the boom left behind, drawing on the OpenClaw Git history, its GitHub issues and pull requests, and three ClawHub registry snapshots. Attention is concentrated: the top 10% of skills received 46.93% of all downloads. No simple skill features (like size or download counts) remained a stable predictor of continued listing once creation cohort and skill age were controlled. Human scrutiny did not stay: 77.86% have zero stars and zero comments, while 85.06% of the readable skills carry privilege evidence. And automated cleanup is not ready: the three security scanners disagreed on 23,702 of the 61,990 skills they all cover. After human adjudication, weighted scanner sensitivity against the reference standard ranged from 21.67% to 61.06%. Governing fast-growing agent-skill registries cannot rely on simple metadata or single scanner scores; it requires robust, transparent measurement and independent validation.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

FROD: Feature Matching Residual Denoising Oracle Bone Decipher

Yanbin Hou, Biao Xiong, Guojun Xu et al. (+4 more)

Oracle bone script (OBS), one of the earliest Chinese writing systems, plays an important role in the study of Chinese etymology. Traditional decipherment relies heavily on domain experts who analyze characters through semantic context and structural evolution. To assist this labor-intensive process, we formulate OBS decipherment assistance as a cross-era image translation task and propose FROD (Feature Matching Residual Denoising Oracle Bone Decipher). Although many OBS characters differ substantially from their modern counterparts, they often preserve local topological invariants at the radical level. During training, FROD leverages fast feature matching to provide gated segmentation supervision: paired samples with sufficient matches are processed patch-wise to align fine-grained radicals, whereas low-similarity pairs are trained holistically to avoid mismatched artifacts. In addition, a Residual Denoising Diffusion Model (RDDM) jointly estimates noise and residual signals, thereby reducing the positional drift and stroke disorder commonly observed in standard diffusion models. Finally, a multi-stage font stylization refinement network refines the generated images by eliminating edge noise and stabilizing stroke structures. On our augmented character-disjoint dataset, FROD achieves higher Top-1 recognition accuracy than the evaluated baselines, with a 3.8% absolute gain over OBSD.
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All authors Yanbin Hou, Biao Xiong, Guojun Xu, Jianwen Xiang, Cheng Tan, Yanchao Yang, Junwei Zhou

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Easy to Catch a Liar, Hard to Clear an Honest One: Language Models Diagnosing a Corrupted Reward Channel from a Verified Record

Arman Nik Khah

An agent that learns from rewards has to trust whatever reports those rewards. When the reports suddenly change, either the world changed or the reporter broke. From the reports alone these are indistinguishable, and reinforcement learning theory shows that no amount of further experience separates them. The prescribed escape is richer data about the reporter itself. We ask whether a frozen language model, handed exactly that data, uses it. We build a two-option game in which a payout swap and a lying reporter produce byte-identical histories. Then we add one verified record: an independent check of one round's real result, printed beside what the reporter said about that round. That single line settles the case. We ask three large models, from two families, to answer one question with one letter. Is the reporter honest or lying? They catch a lying reporter almost perfectly. At the 70B class that holds in every condition we tried; the 32B model slips in one wording. They clear an honest reporter far less often, and how often depends on things that should not matter. Averaged over rounds, letters, and wordings, a 72B model calls an honest reporter a liar 38% of the time when nothing has changed at all, and 58% of the time when the payouts moved. A 70B model from a second family calls an honest reporter a liar 26% and 48% of the time. The failure is not one of reading, because in the situation where nothing changed the same models score 0.96 to 1.00 with the answer printed in the prompt. Which surface feature drives it differs by family. For the Qwen models it is which round the record names, and for Llama it is which letter stands for "honest." Adding the record to a prompt that already states the answer makes Llama less likely to give that answer. We had registered a prediction for that 58% before the run: 35%. The failure is larger than we expected.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.SE

Grounding SWE-Agent Decisions in Architecture-0 Design: Navigating Unknown Unknowns through Physical Mapping

Zhongkai Wang and Yan Liu

Autonomous Software Engineering Agents (SWE-Agents) excel in deterministic coding tasks but struggle with Architecture 0, the nascent system design phase plagued by implicit engineering constraints, or Unknown Unknowns (UUs) that are rarely stated explicitly. To investigate how agents navigate UUs, we explore a progressive trajectory across pure-text self-play, tool-augmented feedback, and external physical mapping. Our empirical analysis reveals a cascading chain of failures. Pure-text reasoning inevitably devolves into polite consensus or plausible yet physically impossible fabrications. Attempting to bridge this gap via an early-stage execution sandbox unexpectedly triggers Specification Gaming: agents exploit their autonomy over validation scripts to bypass physical constraints, achieving superficial success without resolving core architectural flaws. To resolve this self-validation trap, we propose the Physical Mapping Guard (PMG). Grounded in the software engineering principle of Separation of Concerns, PMG revokes verification authority from the agent, forcing semantic intents to be evaluated by an external, deterministic Semantic-to-Physical (S2P) mapping engine. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that PMG completely eradicates physical-layer and validation-layer gaming. By precisely isolating residual failures to semantic reinterpretations and auditor overreach, PMG marks a critical step toward genuine affordance grounding in automated architectural design.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.RO

FluxVLA Engine: A One-Stop VLA Engineering Platform for Embodied Intelligence

Yinhao Li, Weixin Mao, Zihan Lan et al. (+22 more)

Vision-language-action (VLA) models, world-action models (WAMs), and offline reinforcement learning methods are rapidly expanding the design space of embodied policies, yet turning these algorithms into reliable robot systems remains constrained by fragmented data formats, training stacks, evaluation protocols, inference runtimes, and embodiment-specific interfaces. We present $\mathrm{FluxVLA}$ Engine, an open, configuration-driven platform that turns heterogeneous embodied-policy components into a reproducible data-to-deployment workflow. Rather than introducing another policy model, $\mathrm{FluxVLA}$ standardizes interfaces for datasets, visual-language and world models, action heads, reward- or advantage-weighted learning, distributed training, simulation evaluation, optimized inference, and robot operators. The engine further integrates compositional dual-arm simulation, scalable automatic data generation, and model-decoupled human-in-the-loop rollout, takeover, correction collection, and reward annotation. For responsive physical execution, it combines Real-Time Chunking (RTC) with accelerated inference backends, lightweight remote GPU serving, and configurable trajectory post-processing. Together, these capabilities connect offline learning, simulation validation, online correction, and real-robot execution through shared and auditable contracts. $\mathrm{FluxVLA}$ therefore targets the engineering bottlenecks separating promising embodied-learning algorithms from reproducible evaluation and dependable deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/FluxVLA/FluxVLA
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All authors Yinhao Li, Weixin Mao, Zihan Lan, Jikun Rong, Qirui Hu, Yiming Zhang, Weipeng Deng, Bowen Shen, Minzhao Zhu, Yiming Mao, Yan Yang, Chenguang Cui, Hongyuan Chen, Xu Huang, Zheyi Zhao, Pinxi Shen, Bozhen He, Zhen Fu, Yifan Wang, Zexin Zhang, Ang Gao, Haoyu Chen, Chengqi Shi, Wenda Wu, Hua Chen

Artificial Intelligence

End-to-End Latency-Minimizing and Load-Balanced Request Scheduling for Edge LLM Inference in Agentic AI Services

Zhen Li, Jun Cai, Haoran Gao et al. (+2 more)

Large language model (LLM)-powered agentic AI services increasingly demand low-latency inference, motivating the deployment of LLMs across distributed edge servers. However, heterogeneous communication and computing capabilities, together with dynamically evolving inference states, make the edge server selection for each incoming request time-varying and tightly coupled across slots. In this paper, we investigate an online request scheduling framework for edge LLM inference that jointly minimizes long-term average end-to-end latency and regulates workload distribution across heterogeneous edge servers. Two main challenges arise in this context. First, conventional latency models cannot accurately capture the fine-grained dynamics of multi-stage LLM execution. Second, the latency consequence of a scheduling decision is observed only after request completion, making immediate decision evaluation difficult. To address these challenges, we develop a cross-slot inference model that captures transmission, prefill, iteration-level decoding, and key-value (KV) cache evolution for each diverse request, and characterize server workload through a KV cache memory-time consumption metric. We propose the LYREO approach that transforms the long-term load-balancing constraint via Lyapunov optimization and employs reward redistribution with sequencebased return prediction to convert delayed outcomes into timely learning signals for earlier decisions. Simulations under various configurations demonstrate that LYREO consistently achieves lower latency and more balanced load distribution than representative learning-based and heuristic baseline schemes.
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All authors Zhen Li, Jun Cai, Haoran Gao, An Li, Tan Li

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Multimodal Cultural Heritage Architectural Style Classification for Residential Buildings in the UAE Based on CLIP Embeddings and SVM

Ahmed Ammar Kubba, Manar Abu Talib, Iman Ibrahim et al. (+1 more)

The analysis and classification of cultural heritage architectural styles remain challenging due to the complexity of visual images of buildings, which are highly relied on in traditional CNN-based classification approaches in comparison to textual descriptions, and the relative lack of non-western region-specific datasets. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a multimodal machine learning framework to analyze and classify Emirati residential architecture using OpenAI's CLIP model. We integrate visual features from images and textual features from expert descriptions into a unified 512-dimensional embedding, followed by dimensionality reduction with UMAP for visualization and unsupervised clustering using K-Means. Cluster labels, which are derived from manual analysis of the K-Means clusters, are used to train an SVM classifier for automated architectural style classification. Our approach achieves a classification accuracy of 98% across eight identified style clusters, higher than every other study in the literature, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining visual and textual modalities. Overall, this paper highlights the potential of using multimodal AI to support architectural heritage analysis, offering scalable and interpretable tools for exploring regional architectural identities.
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All authors Ahmed Ammar Kubba, Manar Abu Talib, Iman Ibrahim, Qassim Nasir

Artificial Intelligence

MOCC-R1: Reinforcing Reasoning-Response Consistency for Multimodal Counselor Response Generation

Wenjie Zheng, Qiming Xie, Jianfei Yu et al. (+1 more)

Multimodal counselor response generation (MCRG) aims to generate an appropriate counselor response from multimodal dialogue histories. Progress is limited by two gaps: first, existing datasets rarely capture sustained, human-recorded counseling interactions conducted by qualified counselors; Second, existing methods do not explicitly optimize consistency between counseling reasoning and the generated response, potentially undermining the reliability of MCRG systems. Thus, we introduce MOCC, a multimodal counseling conversation corpus containing over 200 hours of interactions involving 154 credential-verified counselors. Based on MOCC, we propose MOCC-R1, a two-stage framework for optimizing reasoning-response consistency. Cold-start supervised fine-tuning trains the model to generate a structured trajectory consisting of client-state understanding, a response intent that links a counseling principle to a planned action, and the final response. Reinforcement learning (RL) then rewards grounded plan coherence and plan execution, encouraging the inferred state and plan to be supported by the dialogue context and the response to realize that plan. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MOCC-R1.
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All authors Wenjie Zheng, Qiming Xie, Jianfei Yu, Rui Xia

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG

A unified framework for global and local interpretability using adaptive derivative-ordered random explanation

Lemen Chao, Ming Lei and Anran Fang

The interpretability of complex machine learning models is of paramount importance, especially in real-world high-stakes domains such as healthcare and finance. However, existing post-hoc interpretability methods suffer from inherent limitations: fragmented analytical processes, inadequate capacity to model nonlinear feature interactions, computational inefficiencies, and over-reliance on specific model architectures. To address these challenges, this paper provides a novel method - Adaptive Derivative-Ordered Random Explanation (ADORE) - that leverages first- and second-order derivatives to accommodate nonlinear model complexities, while enabling effective capture of feature-sample interactions within a unified analytical framework. ADORE integrates global feature importance with local sample contributions, precisely quantifying feature impact by capturing both magnitude and direction, and identifying critical samples influencing model decisions. Furthermore, it achieves computational efficiency through randomized singular value decomposition (SVD) and dynamic sparsity detection, making it scalable to large, high-dimensional datasets. Experiments across three data modalities - tabular, text, and image - demonstrate that ADORE outperforms existing methods such as LIME and SHAP in handling complex interactions and computational efficiency, while providing detailed and reliable explanations. To facilitate adoption and reproducibility, ADORE has been released as an open-source Python package, hosted on GitHub, enabling researchers and practitioners to readily adapt and apply our approach to their specific tasks, models, and datasets.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

MUMINS: Metadata-conditioned Uncertainty-aware Medical Image Next-state Synthesis

Anna Oliveras, Roger Marí, Rafael Redondo et al. (+7 more)

Forecasting anatomical changes such as tumor growth and neurodegeneration is a challenging generative vision task. Morphological evolution is subtle relative to static anatomy, highly patient-specific, and inherently stochastic. Existing methods struggle with several issues: deterministic networks ignore biological stochasticity, while standard diffusion models require computationally prohibitive multi-pass sampling to quantify uncertainty. We propose MUMINS (Metadata-conditioned Uncertainty-aware Medical Image Next-state Synthesis), an efficient diffusion framework that jointly diffuses a baseline scan and its follow-up residual, summed to synthesize the follow-up scan, while concurrently predicting a spatial uncertainty map, in a single reverse diffusion process. Conditioned on the time interval and relevant metadata, it preserves fine-grained anatomy by dynamically re-injecting the baseline as a soft anchor at every denoising step, and a negative-log-likelihood head learns the uncertainty map to explicitly flag error-prone regions. Designed without organ-specific heuristics, the same architecture is reused across anatomies via separate, dataset-specific retraining. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that dataset-specific retraining of MUMINS matches or outperforms dedicated, domain-specific state-of-the-art methods on lung CT (PNG) and brain MRI (OASIS-3). Project page: https://github.com/aolivtous/MUMINS.
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All authors Anna Oliveras, Roger Marí, Rafael Redondo, Oriol Guardià, Cynthia Ifeyinwa Ugwu, Ana Tost, Bhalaji Nagarajan, Carolina Migliorelli, Vicent Ribas, Petia Radeva

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

ResLRP: The Role of Residual Cancellation in Attribution Instability in Vision Transformers

Jim Berend, Reduan Achtibat, Daniel Schäffer et al. (+4 more)

Vision Transformers (ViTs) are central to most modern vision models, yet obtaining input attributions that are fine-grained, faithful, and stable remains challenging. Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) has been adapted to transformer attention, but in ViTs it often produces noisy, unfaithful explanations. We show that the missing ingredient is the treatment of residual connections: cancellation effects in residual pathways lead to attribution explosion. Moreover, we find that these cancellations are substantially stronger in ViTs than in language transformers. To address this issue, we introduce Residual-aware Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (ResLRP), a simple extension of LRP whose propagation rules explicitly account for cancellations in residual branches, are exactly conservative, and provably bound relevance explosion. Causal channel-wise interventions confirm that residual cancellation, not a generic regularization effect, drives the instability. ResLRP substantially improves attribution quality across faithfulness and localization, evaluated on ViT architectures spanning supervised, self-supervised, contrastive, hierarchical, and multimodal families, as well as on the ground-truth-controlled FunnyBirds benchmark. The largest gains arise in modern Vision Language Models (VLMs), with +27-29% localization and up to 3.4x faithfulness scores. Beyond benchmarks, ResLRP localizes Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) features in input space, and our residual amplification measure serves as an architecture-level diagnostic predicting where attribution degrades.
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All authors Jim Berend, Reduan Achtibat, Daniel Schäffer, Alexander Binder, Wojciech Samek, Sebastian Lapuschkin, Maximilian Dreyer

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.RO

Kernel-Based Metrics Learning for Uncertain Opponent Vehicle Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Racing

Hojin Lee, Youngim Nam, Sanghun Lee et al. (+1 more)

Autonomous racing confronts significant challenges in safely overtaking Opponent Vehicles (OVs) that exhibit uncertain trajectories, stemming from unknown driving policies. To address these challenges, this study proposes heterogeneous kernel metrics for Deep Kernel Learning (DKL), designed to robustly capture the diverse driving policies of OVs, and carry out precise trajectory predictions along with the associated uncertainties. A key virtue of the proposed kernel metrics lies in their ability to align similar driving policies and disjoin dissimilar ones in an unsupervised manner, given the observed interactions between the Ego Vehicle (EV) and OVs. The efficacy of the proposed method is substantiated through experimental studies on a 1/10th scale racecar platform, demonstrating improved prediction accuracy and thereby safely overtaking against OVs. Furthermore, our method is computationally efficient for onboard computing units, affirming its viability in fast-paced racing environments. The video and source code can be found at https://github.com/HMCL-UNIST/OpponentPredictionWithKMDKL.git.
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All authors Hojin Lee, Youngim Nam, Sanghun Lee, Cheolhyeon Kwon

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.RO

Continual Learning for Traversability Prediction with Uncertainty-Aware Adaptation

Hojin Lee, Yunho Lee, Daniel A Duecker et al. (+1 more)

Traversability prediction is a critical component of autonomous navigation in unstructured environments, where complex and uncertain robot-terrain interactions pose significant challenges such as traction loss and dynamic instability. Despite recent progress in learning-based traversability prediction, these methods often fail to adapt to novel terrains. Even when adaptation is achieved, retaining experience from previously trained environments remains a challenge, a problem known as catastrophic forgetting. To address this challenge, we propose a continual learning framework for traversability prediction that incrementally adapts to new terrains using a generative experience recall model. A key virtue of the proposed framework is two folds: i) retain prior experience without storing past data; and ii) incorporate the uncertainty of the generated samples from the recall model, enabling uncertainty-aware adaptation. Real-world experiments with a skid-steering robot validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, demonstrating its ability to adapt across a series of diverse environments while mitigating catastrophic forgetting.
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All authors Hojin Lee, Yunho Lee, Daniel A Duecker, Cheolhyeon Kwon

Artificial Intelligence

FirmCORe: A Benchmark for Structured Reasoning about Inter-Firm Collaboration Opportunities

Tian Du, Tiantong Wu, Yafei Wang et al. (+3 more)

Comprehensive structured data on inter-firm relationships is often scarce or inaccessible because many relationships are privately negotiated, selectively disclosed, and fragmented across proprietary databases. This scarcity hinders the discovery of collaboration opportunities, particularly for startups and small and medium-sized enterprises. Firm profiles are readily available, but collaboration potential cannot be inferred from business similarity alone, since similar firms may be competitors, whereas dissimilar firms may offer complementary products, technologies, channels, capabilities, or capital. We present FirmCORe (Inter-Firm Collaboration Opportunity Reasoning), a human-annotated benchmark for pairwise reasoning over weakly structured firm profiles, comprising 2,805 labeled firm pairs. Given two firm profiles, a model must determine whether the available evidence supports a collaboration opportunity and, for positive pairs, jointly predict its strength, primary collaboration type, and role direction. FirmCORe also provides parallel Chinese- and English-language evaluation sets containing identical instances and gold labels, enabling controlled analysis of input-language sensitivity. Experiments with representative locally deployed and hosted large language models (LLMs) show that the strongest model achieves a macro-F1 score of 74.51 for opportunity detection but only 61.57% exact match across all four output fields. Language effects vary across models, and high cross-language agreement can mask errors shared across languages. These results indicate that current LLMs are substantially more reliable at detecting broad collaboration opportunities than at identifying their specific types and role directions.
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All authors Tian Du, Tiantong Wu, Yafei Wang, Mengyu Liu, Xingyan Chen, Mu Wang

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cond-mat.mtrl-sci

AI for Science with GPT-6 Astra: Thermal Design and Electrothermal Analysis of 2D CFET

Min-Hui Kim, Khushi Sharma, Sarah Zhang et al. (+1 more)

Thermal optimization of 2D CFET inverters requires testing structural proposals against their electrical costs. We examine these research tasks using an AI agent workflow within a supplied electrothermal model. At 12 nm, Astra selects a redistributed source-interconnect geometry, while a coordinating agent proposes a substrate-directed heat-removal path. The combined design reduces peak temperature rise by 1.67 K at fixed metal volume and 20 {\mu}W. A subsequent metal-resistance sensitivity gives about 0.6-K inverter cooling alongside a 2% nFET on-current loss. Effective contact-length scaling further shows that lower temperature can accompany higher thermal resistance when current falls. Reproduction identifies agreeing implementations and retains a 104.95-K failure for diagnosis. These results show that an AI scientist workflow can propose thermal structures, test them under common constraints, and quantify their electrical cost.
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All authors Min-Hui Kim, Khushi Sharma, Sarah Zhang, Ye Wang

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CY

Finding Common Mistakes In Modelling With Mathematical Formalisms Using LLMs

Lilian Killich, Marko Schmellenkamp, Fabian Vehlken et al. (+1 more)

Modelling with mathematical formalisms like logical formulas, mathematical equations, or regular expressions is an important yet challenging task for students of computer science and other STEM disciplines. Identifying common mistakes occurring in this context is an important step towards helping struggling students by providing targeted high-quality feedback, e.g. in interactive learning systems. We present a tool-supported workflow that allows to (1) identify candidates for common mistakes that explain many student mistakes in large educational data sets, (2) cluster candidates according to similarities, and (3) visualize resulting clusters for instructors and CS education researchers. The visualization is designed to help researchers to identify common modelling mistakes. The candidates for common mistakes are represented by bug fixing transformations that translate incorrect formalizations into correct formalizations; they are generated by an LLM and validated algorithmically. We show that this approach works well by reproducing common mistakes in propositional logic modelling that were identified by hand in the literature; showing that, unlike other algorithmic approaches, the LLM-based approach is suitable for very large sets of data; and applying it to multiple other formalisms to showcase it generalizes beyond propositional logic.
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All authors Lilian Killich, Marko Schmellenkamp, Fabian Vehlken, Thomas Zeume

Artificial Intelligence

Shared-Prefix KV Reuse Across Standard LoRA Adapters: Quality and Serving Tradeoffs

Dushyant Rajput

A common small-model deployment runs one shared backbone with several LoRA specialists that answer over the same context. Serving them naively re-prefills that shared context once per specialist. We study a narrow, practical question: for already-trained standard LoRA adapters – not adapters retrained for cache compatibility – how much task quality is preserved if the backbone's prefill KV cache is computed once and reused across specialists, and what does that buy in serving cost? On a Qwen3-1.7B backbone with two adapters (extractive QA on HotpotQA, arithmetic reasoning on GSM8K), we sweep the boundary at which the specialist takes over from the reused base cache and measure paired quality differences and serving cost. Full-prefix reuse had the lowest prefill cost and a small quality difference on held-out GSM8K (Delta = -4.6 EM at a 160-token budget; -3.0 at 320 tokens; -0.8 under a second training seed – all favoring native, only the first excluding zero, and the magnitude not consistent). Partial recomputation provided no demonstrated advantage. Neither quality equivalence nor a general boundary-selection rule is established. We also report a closed-form ridge KV translator that did not beat direct reuse, and specialist-dependence contrasts whose intervals all include zero. The measured serving benefit is warm-cache time-to-first-token, which grows with context (~16x at 8K); two-branch peak memory was only 12% lower and, on inspection, the prefix was never physically shared across branches – this implementation reuses KV values but copies their storage, so shared-cache memory savings are not achieved.
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Artificial Intelligence

Symbolic Separation: Grounding Deep Agents in Knowledge Graphs for Trustworthy Operational Data Analytics

Baibek Davletiyarov, Junaid Ahmed Khan and Andrea Bartolini

Generative AI promises natural language access to the massive numerical telemetry of data centers and Industry 4.0 installations, yet text-to-query and tool-using agents stay unreliable: even frontier models answer little more than half of real-world database questions, and far fewer of the multi-step, operational ones, because the LLM must compose how heterogeneous sources relate and hallucinates the relations, not just the fields. We propose symbolic separation: a deep agent reasons freely but may act on data only through an ontology-constrained Virtual Knowledge Graph with deterministic pre-execution validation. Unlike a tool API's interface contract, this domain-semantic contract turns a complex question into one validated graph traversal instead of LLM-inferred joins. Instantiated as the Neurosymbolic Deep Analyst and evaluated on 49.9 TB of superconputer telemetry against a rigid workflow and a non-symbolic ablation, it raises end-to-end task success from 43% to 86%, prevents silent data-integrity errors that no syntactic check catches, and cuts token cost by 2.4x, letting a smaller on-premise model outperform a larger one.
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Artificial Intelligence

Semi-Supervised Learning-Based Genetic Biomarkers Dataset for Multiple-Stage Hepatocellular Carcinoma Prediction

Ahmed Ammar Kubba, Manar Abu Talib, Jibran Sualeh Muhammad et al. (+4 more)

Liver cancer is a complex disease responsible for a high number of deaths across the globe each year, making automated solutions for liver cancer classification urgent. The most common form of liver cancer is hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), accounting for over 90% of liver cancer cases. There is a distinct lack of publicly available HCC datasets utilizing genomic data, which is necessary for training artificial intelligence (AI) models for automated HCC classification. This study proposes constructing a multi-stage HCC dataset using XGBoost and Semi-Supervised learning on three separate datasets of genomic biomarkers, utilizing their existing labels in the Semi-Supervised learning process to label the proposed dataset. The proposed dataset consists of 770 patient samples in total, categorized into five classes that represent normal tissue alongside different stages of HCC. Each sample in the dataset consists of 11,150 different gene expression levels. The XGBoost model demonstrated a final classification accuracy of 96.5% during the Semi-Supervised learning process.
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All authors Ahmed Ammar Kubba, Manar Abu Talib, Jibran Sualeh Muhammad, Ali Bou Nassif, Abdalla Sayed Mohamed, Darko Castven, Jens U. Marquardt

Artificial Intelligence

Scaling-Score Conformal Prediction for Multi-Target Regression

Sylvain Rousseau and Soundouss Messoudi

Multi-target regression requires a model to simultaneously predict several related outputs. Conformal prediction provides distribution-free, finite-sample marginal coverage guarantees, but extending these to joint multi-dimensional regions in a model-agnostic, sample-efficient manner remains challenging: max-aggregation ignores scale differences, copula-based methods are only asymptotically valid, rectangular methods typically split the calibration set, and quantile or density-based methods require training a specialised model beyond a plain point predictor. We propose the scaling-score conformal method, which is model-agnostic (requires only component-wise absolute residuals), uses a single calibration set, and yields four nested output types: an outer rectangle (SCO) with valid joint coverage, the exact set R $\alpha$ , a staircase (SC 2 ) over approximation of R $\alpha$ , and an inner rectangle (SCI). A single hyperparameter $\gamma$ $\in$ (0, 1) controls the base-rectangle quantile level independently of $\alpha$. We prove downward-closedness and a rectangular sandwich bound and derive a closed-form outer rectangle. Experiments on 29 realworld datasets confirm valid joint coverage; SC 2 with $\gamma$ = 1-$\alpha$ consistently achieves competitive volume relative to baselines, with the advantage growing with output dimension d.
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Artificial Intelligence

Interactive Memory Learning for Long-Term Conversations

Cai Ke, Jiangyue Yan, Han Zhang et al. (+5 more)

Recent advancements in large language models have significantly enhanced the capabilities of agents in modeling long-term conversations. Despite these successes, existing approaches typically adopt a static heuristic paradigm, where information is passively archived without adaptive memory valuation. Consequently, these methods fail to self-evolve or align their memory management with evolving user needs. To address this, we propose ICML (InteraCtive Memory Learning), a multi-agent framework that transforms the memory mechanism from a passive archive into a learnable, interactive memory policy. Specifically, we first employ a session synthesis pipeline to generate expert data, facilitating rapid test-time adaptation in unseen scenarios. Building on this, ICML utilizes an online reinforcement learning mechanism where a Planner agent selectively encodes high-value information and a Trigger agent dynamically retrieves it to optimize response quality, whereby the two agents co-evolve through continuous interaction feedback. Crucially, both agents are synchronized through a delayed reward mechanism that propagates future feedback back to earlier storage decisions, ensuring memory policies are precisely aligned with user expectations. Experimental results demonstrate that ICML significantly outperforms strong baselines, exhibiting the unique capability to continuously improve response quality as interactions accumulate.
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All authors Cai Ke, Jiangyue Yan, Han Zhang, Xin Liu, Zike Yuan, Yue Yu, Hui Wang, Ruifeng Xu

Artificial Intelligence

Sample-Conditioned Representation Selection for Audio Few-Shot Learning

Fengrui Liu, Ningxin Shen, Yi Li et al. (+3 more)

Few-shot audio classifiers may rely on foreground-background co-occurrences and fail when those correlations shift. On SpurAudio, the resulting representation shift is concentrated and class dependent: for ResNet12, the top 10 percent of channels explain 82.80 percent of the null-corrected shift contribution. We propose SAMPLESELECT, which predicts a fixed-budget feature mask independently for each input while keeping the encoder and source classifier frozen. Training uses differentiable Gumbel Top-k selection with foreground classification and cross-background contrastive losses; inference uses deterministic Top-k masks and support-only linear adaptation. Across ResNet12 and Conv64 in 5-way 1-shot and 5-shot evaluation, SAMPLESELECT gives the best OOD accuracy among the compared methods and improves the matched full-representation control by 4.90-8.38 percentage points. Ablations and representation analyses further support the learned selection mechanism. Code is available at https://github.com/Cross-Innovation-Lab/SAMPLESELECT/
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All authors Fengrui Liu, Ningxin Shen, Yi Li, Yiwei Fu, Feng Liu, Jiangmeng Li

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Beyond In-Distribution Metrics: A Systematic Out-of-Distribution Evaluation of Congenital Heart Disease Segmentation

Aniketh Vijesh, Shrisharanyan Vasu, Abhijit Ramesh et al. (+5 more)

Congenital heart disease (CHD) diagnosis and surgical planning often require patient-specific 3D anatomical models, but manual segmentation is labor-intensive, particularly in complex anatomies. Although deep-learning methods can automate this process, they are typically evaluated in-distribution, despite clinically relevant shifts in scanner, protocol, institution, population, and imaging modality. We present, to our knowledge, the first systematic evaluation of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization in CHD segmentation, using ImageCHD as a held-out target cohort. We compare representative segmentation architectures under combined CT and CMR training, CT-only training, self-supervised pretraining, and limited target-domain adaptation. In-distribution performance proves to be a poor indicator of cross-cohort robustness: nnU-Net achieves the highest validation Dice (0.77) but falls to 0.51 on ImageCHD, while SwinUNETR generalizes substantially better, reaching 0.67 Dice. MAE and JEPA pretraining provide only modest additional benefit, suggesting that architecture contributes more to robustness than the tested pretraining strategies in this setting. When limited target-domain supervision is introduced, all SwinUNETR variants exceed 0.76 Dice with only 11 labeled ImageCHD cases. These findings demonstrate that conventional in-distribution evaluation can obscure clinically important generalization failures and support explicit cross-dataset testing as a key component of CHD segmentation evaluation.
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All authors Aniketh Vijesh, Shrisharanyan Vasu, Abhijit Ramesh, Clare Pomeroy-Ward, Harikrishnan Anil Maya, Sarin Xavier, Mahesh Kappanayil, Gilad Gressel

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.HC

Beyond "ChatGPT Can Make Mistakes": Designing Interventions to Support Metacognitive Monitoring in AI-Assisted Work

Manuel A. D. Santos, Paul Thiesse, Steeven Villa et al. (+4 more)

AI assistance places a metacognitive demand on users, who must judge their own competence and the system's. Yet designers lack comparative evidence on which interventions to choose, where to place them, and how to tell whether they worked. We elicited 30 interventions from 11 experts and, with prior work, organized them into a design space of time (when an intervention acts), level (whose competence is judged), and source (who supplies the monitoring cue). A between-subjects experiment (N = 917; 12 planning-and-organizing problems) compared a per-task reliability card, contrasting replies, pause points, and post-problem reflection against a baseline LLM assistant. Reliability cards and contrasting replies reduced estimation error and overconfidence and increased aggregate confidence discrimination. No task-performance improvement or average within-item discrimination gain was established. We contribute a shared vocabulary, a design space, and evidence that measured monitoring and task performance are separable design targets.
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All authors Manuel A. D. Santos, Paul Thiesse, Steeven Villa, Daniela Fernandes, Albrecht Schmidt, Verena Distler, Robin Welsch

Artificial Intelligence

Neuro-Symbolic Hierarchical Intention Anticipation in Human Behavior

Farnaz Soleimani, Abdelghani Chibani, Yacine Amirat et al. (+1 more)

Assistive autonomous systems must anticipate human goals before an observed behavior is complete. This article formulates anticipation as goal inference from a partially observed multimodal episode together with structured prediction of the remaining behavior, rather than exact motor forecasting. A compact Hierarchical Planning Decoder (HPD) is attached to a frozen neuro-symbolic recognition encoder and predicts, at four ontological levels, the next actions, the remaining activities and low-level intentions, and the episode high-level intention(HLI). The decoder is trained with soft neuro-symbolic regularization combining transition-coherence and hierarchical continuity losses, and is decoded with hard reachability masks that enforce ontological validity at inference. On a compositional four-level benchmark of 15,002 multimodal episodes built over NTU RGB+D 120 features, three headline properties are observed together. The advantage over the strongest sequential baseline grows with the anticipation horizon, from +1.7 points at step 1 to +7.3 points at step 3 (top-5). Under compositional generalization, where one parent association per multi-parent low level intention is held out, this advantage widens to +4.9 points at step 1. At the episode level, 96.8% of anticipated trajectories satisfy the joint logic constraints, above the 88.1% strongest-baseline value and the 73.9% ground-truth floor; soft logic terms alone account for a 59.8 to 71.1% relative reduction of HLI-reachability violations, and the hard masks then eliminate them entirely. Neural generation supplies predictive ranking, symbolic constraints supply onto logical validity, and their combination yields coherent hierarchical anticipation while exposing remaining challenges in compositional goal generalization and unordered set prediction.
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All authors Farnaz Soleimani, Abdelghani Chibani, Yacine Amirat, Ghazaleh Khodabandelou

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Repurposing Unified Topological Signatures for Graph Representation Learning

Sanyam Sanjay Jain, Anshika Krishnatray, Aditya Sharma et al. (+1 more)

Message-passing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) iteratively propagate and aggregate local neighborhood information followed by global readout to learn graph representations. However, their discriminative power is upper-bounded by the Weisfeiler–Lehman (1-WL) graph isomorphism test. This prevents GNNs from distinguishing certain non-isomorphic graphs with identical local neighborhood structures, often leading to similar graph representations. Unified Topological Signatures (UTS) capture compact, multi-scale representation of global graph topology derived from persistent homology. We introduce two complementary UTS signatures: Graph_UTS- a static signature of the input graph topology, and Embedding_UTS- a dynamic signature of the evolving embedding topology. They encode structural information inaccessible to 1-WL-based message-passing GNNs, yet their capabilities are explored solely for post-hoc embedding-space analysis. We integrate UTS into GNN training across three architectural interventions: (i) UTS-Aug: augmenting with standard readout feature that encodes graph's true topology; (ii) UTS-Reg: topological regularizer that constrains representation collapse; (iii) UTS-Pool: topology-guided pooling that retains structurally critical nodes. We further leverage UTS as a layer-wise diagnostic to quantify oversmoothing during GNN training. Theoretically, we show that integrating UTS into GNN optimization strictly extends GNN expressivity beyond the 1-WL hierarchy. Experiments on three graph classification benchmarks show consistent benefits: Graph-UTS, Dual-UTS, and UTS-Pool improve accuracy across all three datasets, Embedding-UTS provides smaller but similarly consistent gains, and UTS-Reg's benefit varies across graph domains. Accuracy improves by up to 5.8% with Graph-UTS augmentation, by up to 1.9% with UTS-Reg, and achieves comparable performance to TOGL with UTS-Pool.
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All authors Sanyam Sanjay Jain, Anshika Krishnatray, Aditya Sharma, Vinti Agarwal