Machine Learning · Cross-listed from eess.SP
6G Native AI and Channel Foundation Models
Shugong Xu, Jun Jiang and Yuan Gao
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and wireless communications is widely regarded as a core objective of sixth-generation (6G) systems. However, both the meaning of native AI and the type of AI capability that should be embedded into future wireless systems remain open to interpretation. This paper discusses 6G native AI from a system-design perspective and argues that native AI should be co-designed, optimized, and deployed as an intrinsic component of the wireless system rather than as a removable post-deployment add-on. From this perspective, conventional task-specific supervised models are difficult to use as the main technical basis of native AI because they depend heavily on labeled data, generalize poorly across propagation conditions, and require fragmented designs for different channel-related tasks. Motivated by these limitations, we position channel foundation models (CFMs) as a channel-centric foundation-model paradigm for 6G native AI. We define the scope of CFMs, clarify their differences from task-specific wireless AI models and large
language models, and summarize three pretraining families: generative, discriminative, and hybrid pretraining. We further discuss how CFMs may support physical-layer processing,
radio access network intelligence, and integrated sensing and communications. Preliminary CSI-CLIP-based results are included as bounded evidence that CFM-style pretraining can improve positioning and beam prediction when task-specific labels are limited.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CL
When More Becomes Less: Position-Dependent Repetition Effects in Language Models
Han-yu Wang
Cloze-style probes that vary how often a target
token appears implicitly assume that more copies of a target affect prediction the same way regardless of where the readout slot sits. We show this assumption fails. Our two-probe design holds a repeated-target prefix fixed and varies only the readout position: the adjacent probe places the slot immediately after the repeated block; the displaced probe places it inside a fresh sentence frame. Adjacent repetition behaves as priming intuition predicts: $P(\text{target})$ climbs with $N$ and plateaus. Displaced repetition produces an inverted-U: $P(\text{target})$ rises to an early peak and then declines as more copies are added. The displaced inverted-U shows a per-word drop with bootstrap CI excluding zero in all 13 open-access encoder and decoder models we test, and replicates across Spanish, Chinese, German, and French in 42 of 42
multilingual cells. A six-condition causal ablation isolates the effect to exact lexical repetition rather than length, generic redundancy, or semantic-neighbour exposure. A frame-pragmatics control rules out an artefact of the readout frame. Internally, per-target-
token attention falls with $N$ while the total budget assigned to the repeated block grows in causal LMs but not in the masked LM we probe. Probes that vary repetition count cannot treat the readout position as orthogonal to what they measure.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CL
Obshazard-bench: Benchmarking Multimodal Foundation Models for Real-Time Disaster Intelligence from Raw Earth Observation Streams
Fengxiang Wang, Qiuyang Yu, Yueying Li et al. (+14 more)
Multimodal Large
Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly used to interpret Earth observation data, yet their capability to support real-world disaster emergency response remains insufficiently evaluated. Existing remote sensing
benchmarks largely rely on static, post-hoc, and expert-processed products, such as gridded reanalysis data, which are difficult to align with operational disaster scenarios where hazards evolve rapidly and decisions must be made under strict time constraints. To bridge this gap, we introduce Obshazard-bench, a real-time, observation-driven
benchmark for evaluating disaster intelligence in MLLMs. Unlike image-centric or post-event
benchmarks, Obshazard-bench directly integrates raw, high-frequency satellite sounding streams from diverse satellite sensors with concurrent ground-station observations, historical disaster records, and socio-economic indicators, bypassing delayed expert-processing and physical-inversion pipelines. The
benchmark covers 8 major disaster categories and 28 sub-categories across more than 60 countries, incorporating over 120 historically documented extreme-event cases and thousands of lifecycle-oriented VQA samples. Moreover, Obshazard-bench further defines a three-stage evaluation taxonomy aligned with the operational disaster workflow: Predictive Crisis Anticipation for pre-disaster risk detection and early
forecasting, Active
Evolution Reasoning for in-situ disaster tracking and termination prediction, and Multi-faceted Impact Quantification for post-disaster magnitude deduction, humanitarian burden estimation, and socio-economic impact assessment. Experiments on representative general-purpose and Earth-focused foundation models reveal substantial limitations in transforming raw multi-channel physical observations into temporally grounded and decision-relevant disaster
reasoning.
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All authors Fengxiang Wang, Qiuyang Yu, Yueying Li, Mingshuo Chen, Chengchi Fei, Kaiyi Xu, Lixin Gu, Wangxu Wei, Junchao Gong, Lipeng Ma, Jiong Wang, Fenghua Ling, Wenlong Zhang, Xue Yang, Wenjing Yang, Ben Fei, Long Lan
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.AI
SpecPrefetch: Parameter-Efficient Expert Prefetching for Sparse MoE Foundation Models
Jinwei Kong, Runqi Meng, Fanyi Wang et al. (+4 more)
Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models expand foundation model capacity through conditional expert activation, but their full expert pools remain difficult to deploy under limited accelerator
memory. Although expert offloading alleviates
memory pressure by moving inactive experts to host
memory or storage, it introduces a routing-dependent transfer bottleneck: required experts are known only after native top-\(K\) routing, which serializes routing, expert loading, and expert execution during inference. To address this bottleneck, we propose SpecPrefetch, a parameter-efficient prefetching framework for offloaded MoE inference. SpecPrefetch uses a shared lightweight adapter to predict next-layer expert candidates only for asynchronous transfer, while the frozen native router still determines the final executed experts. By separating transfer prediction from execution routing, SpecPrefetch reduces exposed expert-loading latency without changing pretrained routing semantics, so prediction errors affect transfer efficiency rather than model outputs. In addition, a window-aware scheduler prioritizes feasible transfers under cache and bandwidth constraints. Across Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B and DeepSeek-VL2-Tiny, SpecPrefetch achieves the best average expert recall in 9 out of 10 model-
benchmark settings with substantially fewer trainable parameters than learned predictor baselines. On a Snapdragon 8 Elite device, SpecPrefetch further improves decoding throughput by up to \(20\%\) over a compute-optimized offloading runtime, demonstrating practical benefits for storage-constrained MoE deployment. The code and model weights are available at https://github.com/wei390/SpecPrefetch.
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All authors Jinwei Kong, Runqi Meng, Fanyi Wang, Wentao Qiu, Haotian Hu, Yongjian Zhou, Zhenhua Ge
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.AI
Extracting Algorithms in Pre-trained LLMs: A Case on Hidden Markov Models
Yijia Dai, Zhaolin Gao, Yahya Sattar et al. (+2 more)
Large
language models (LLMs) display a striking ability to predict next observations from Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) via in-context learning (ICL), but the
algorithm underlying this capability remains undetermined: prior work has proposed several candidates without consensus, and none has been grounded in the model's internal activations. We close this gap with a three-stage pipeline. First, we empirically compare LLM behavior against a suite of candidate
algorithms and narrow the space to three classes – though no single class explains LLM behavior across all HMM settings and sequence lengths. Second, we derive theoretical connections between the three classes and show how each can be implemented in-context by a
Transformer, validating the construction in a small trained
Transformer. Third, returning to pre-trained LLMs, we introduce the Principal Activations Probe (PAP), a layer-wise probing and intervention method that isolates algorithmic signals in model activations. PAP reveals low-dimensional linear representations that causally drive model predictions and track empirical ICL performance. PAP further reveals how these representations shift with properties of the underlying HMM regime; distinct computational stages are localized to different layers. Together, our results connect the in-context behavior of pre-trained LLMs to the underlying internal mechanisms and advance our understanding of how LLMs perform ICL on HMMs.
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All authors Yijia Dai, Zhaolin Gao, Yahya Sattar, Jennifer J. Sun, Sarah Dean
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.AI
DocHRL: A Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Framework for Cost-Optimised Document Classification
Mohammed Yousif, Prabhjot Singh, Arjun Pankajakshan et al. (+1 more)
Real-world document classification pipelines typically apply the same sequence of models to every incoming document, regardless of its complexity or type. This leads to inefficient use of compute and human resources: simple documents are over-processed while difficult ones may not receive enough scrutiny. We introduce DocHRL, a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that learns to adaptively and dynamically select the most cost-effective classification policy on a per-document basis. DocHRL formulates document classification as a sequential decision problem with a two-level policy hierarchy: a top-level policy selects among broad options (
vision classifiers, LLMs, OCR, and human-in-the-loop review), while option-specific sub-policies choose the concrete model or tool to invoke. The reward signal is the negative total expected cost, which captures inference cost, cost of misclassification, and cost of human labelling. Trained with Proximal Policy Optimisation on the RVL-CDIP
benchmark, DocHRL achieves a macro F1 of 0.973 across 16 document classes while reducing average per-document cost to 2.74 normalised units compared to substantially higher costs incurred by fixed standalone classifiers. Our results demonstrate that cost-aware reinforcement learning can simultaneously improve classification performance and operational efficiency in document understanding systems.
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All authors Mohammed Yousif, Prabhjot Singh, Arjun Pankajakshan, Madhu Reddiboina
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.AI
CRAFT: Learn the Schema, Execute the Plan
Aakash Kolekar, Sahika Genc, Shahriar Shariat et al. (+10 more)
Enterprise coding
agents translate natural-
language analytical requests into executable code over proprietary APIs, schemas, and metric definitions. Yet the prevailing deployment pattern injecting exhaustive schema and tool documentation into each
prompt increases inference overhead, complicates schema
evolution, and undermines reliability in multi-turn analysis. We investigate whether stable schema knowledge and tool-use behavior can instead be acquired through post-training while preserving the consistency required for production-facing analytics. We present CRAFT, a two-stage post-training recipe for schema-grounded coding
agents. First, schema-stripped PLAN supervised fine-tuning learns domain-structured plans and executable behaviors from validated trajectories without exhaustive
prompt-time schema injection. Second, execution-shaped reinforcement learning aligns the policy for tool selection, code quality, plan-code consistency, and recovery from failed executions. Training trajectories are curated through a Tri-Gate filter combining execution validation, data-integrity checks, and LLM-judge
reasoning audit. We evaluate CRAFT for planned rollout in advertising analytics, covering campaign performance analysis, metric drill-downs, entity-level performance analysis, and multi-turn analytical refinement. The enterprise evaluation environment incorporates beta APIs as the
agent-facing tool surface and spans 25 schema-linked core entities and 30 agentic workflows. Relative to a schema-stuffed baseline, CRAFT improves composite
Agent Score by +9.6 pp, consistency by +4.1 pp, and multi-turn coherence by +4.2 pp, while reducing input-
token burden by approximately 9x and schema-discovery loops by up to 5x. We further report deployment tradeoffs, reward-shaping limitations, and training-infrastructure extensions required for multi-turn tool-use reinforcement learning in enterprise settings.
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All authors Aakash Kolekar, Sahika Genc, Shahriar Shariat, Bunyamin Sisman, Tibor Mezi, Barbara Poblete, Shree Vandana Kachroo, Calvin Chi, Parth Parmar, Ari Singer, Prayaas Jain, Cindy Barker, Benoit Dumoulin
Machine Learning
From Weights to Words: Expressing and Editing Preference Model Inferences in Natural Language
Zachary Wojtowicz, Ayush Nayak and Jacob Andreas
The growing use of statistical learning
algorithms to infer human preferences from high-dimensional choice data runs up against a fundamental challenge: choice alternatives typically differ in many ways simultaneously, so it is generally unclear which factors actually drove an observed decision and should be credited as preferences. Compounding this problem, the opacity of these methods leaves human operators unable to inspect, contest, or correct models when they err. We introduce weights to words, a method that takes a
dataset of choice problems as input and automatically discovers a collection of domain-relevant preference dimensions, each described in natural
language and paired with a vector in the model's representational space. These dimensions address both under-determination and opacity: they can be applied to concentrate attribution on a small set of meaningful factors, and they can externalize the model's inferences in natural
language so that users can inspect and edit them in real time. We first qualitatively illustrate the method's versatility on four diverse domains: moral dilemmas, movies, wines, and free-form LLM responses. We then report two pre-registered human-subjects experiments, on moral dilemmas ($N=450$) and movie selection ($N=449$), that demonstrate its benefits for learning preference models: (1) regularizing a preference model toward the learned basis increases prediction accuracy on held-out choices, and (2) incorporating participants' structured edits further improves accuracy. In head-to-head comparisons, participants prefer the method's inferred preference profiles and endorse its predictions as more accurate.
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Machine Learning
Orthogonal Gradient Constraints Shape Noisy-Label Memorization Dynamics
Richard Mai
Modern neural networks can fit corrupted training labels, making noisy-label learning a useful setting for studying memorization-driven overfitting. Most regularization methods modify the objective, architecture, or data distribution; here we instead study a
geometric intervention on the optimizer update itself. We evaluate OrthoGrad, which removes the component of each weight gradient parallel to the current weight vector, in noisy-label image classification. On MNIST with small-data regimes, OrthoGrad improves test accuracy most clearly for CNNs while reducing corrupted-label fitting. Mechanism diagnostics based on weight norms and gradient-weight cosine similarity suggest that the projection has the strongest effect when the raw gradient contains a nontrivial radial component, and becomes weaker in larger-data regimes where gradients are already nearly orthogonal to weights. Additional CIFAR-10 ResNet-18 experiments show that the method can alter memorization trajectories but does not prevent eventual noisy-label memorization. These results support orthogonal update constraints as a useful diagnostic for studying learning dynamics, while showing that OrthoGrad is regime-dependent rather than universally regularizing.
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Machine Learning
RouteCost: A Production-Inspired Multi-Stage Framework for Pre-Order Shipping Cost Estimation in E-Commerce
Xianling Zeng, Zihan Yu, Sichen Zhao et al. (+2 more)
Accurate pre-order shipping cost estimation is important in e-commerce because it affects price presentation, margin planning, and conversion. In practice, shipping cost is shaped not only by distance but also by destination demand mix, billable weight, dimensional pricing, surcharge triggers, and latent operational effects such as shipment consolidation. Static lookup methods therefore miss important sources of variation, while monolithic regressors may exploit strong but non-causal correlations. We propose RouteCost, a production-inspired multi-stage framework that decomposes the problem into time-aware demand
forecasting, fee-card-informed baseline pricing, Stage 2 residual correction, and proxy-based box-consolidation inference. Route-level cost estimates are aggregated through a route-weighted expectation formulation to produce product-level shipping cost predictions. Across over 250,000 orders, 260 products, and 18 months of order history, the framework improves predictive quality and aggregate calibration while preserving route-level interpretability.
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All authors Xianling Zeng, Zihan Yu, Sichen Zhao, Yalun Qi, Zhiming Xue
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from stat.AP
FinBench: Time-Gated Calibration and Uncertainty Benchmarking for Agentic Financial Forecasting
Rishab Ghosh and Vinay Devarakonda
Large
language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as components of agentic systems that observe, plan, and act. In finance, even "assistive" systems become decision-relevant once their outputs are used to size trades or allocate risk. A key failure mode is the confidence–competence gap: a model that is only slightly better than chance but consistently overconfident will, under typical bet-sizing rules, generate negative long-run growth. Existing
benchmarks emphasize semantic understanding or point accuracy, but do not directly test probabilistic calibration under the temporal constraints and non-stationarity that define real
markets. We introduce FinBench, a
benchmark designed to evaluate calibration and uncertainty quality for financial
forecasting in a setting that is (i) strictly time-gated to avoid look-ahead bias and (ii) evaluated with strictly proper scoring rules that penalize hallucinated confidence. FinBench tasks require models to output (a) a probability of positive return and (b) an 80% prediction interval for realized log return; evaluation uses the Brier score and the Winkler interval score, along with skill scores against hard baselines. This paper describes the
benchmark specification and reports a small pilot run (one trading day; three
liquid tickers; 33 forecasts) as a sanity check of the pipeline. The pilot illustrates how calibration-sensitive metrics distinguish between "confident but fragile" behavior and uncertainty-aware
forecasting.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from math.NA
A Physics-Informed Neural Network with a Modified Lorentzian Activation for Nonlocal Gradient-Flow Equations in Dynamic Density Functional Theory
Dimitrios Gourzoulidis, Soumaya Elkantassi and Serafim Kalliadasis
We develop a physics-informed neural network (PINN) framework for nonlocal partial differential equations arising in dynamic density functional theory (DDFT). Such equations are challenging for standard PINN methods because they involve nonlinearities, nonlocal interaction terms, and an underlying gradient-flow structure, often leading to slow convergence and difficult optimization. We adapt the PINN methodology to DDFT gradient-flow equations and introduce two computational components: a modified Lorentzian activation function that behaves approximately linearly for small inputs and decays toward zero as the input magnitude increases, and a precomputed discrete operator for evaluating the nonlocal convolution term efficiently during training. The method is tested on four examples in one and two space dimensions. In the first example, the exact stationary solution is known, while in the remaining cases the neural-network approximations are validated against reference solutions computed using continuous and discontinuous Galerkin finite element discretizations. Accuracy and physical consistency are assessed through $L^1$, $L^2$, and $L^\infty$ errors, together with mass conservation and free-energy dissipation. The results show that the proposed activation function accelerates convergence relative to the standard $\tanh$ function, while the overall framework maintains good agreement with the reference solutions and captures the expected gradient-flow behaviour. These findings demonstrate the potential of the proposed PINN framework for solving nonlocal gradient-flow equations arising in DDFT.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from eess.SP
Transformer-based Multisensor Data Fusion of Ultrasonic Guided Wave and FBG-based Strain Measurements for Multitask Aerospace Structural Health Monitoring
Xin Yang, Morteza Moradi, Tongtong Yan et al. (+4 more)
Structural health monitoring (SHM) has emerged as an essential tool for ensuring the integrity and reliability of critical engineering structures, particularly in aerospace applications. Since each sensing technology has its limitations, the fusion of different modalities enables capturing a more complete picture of inhomogeneous materials, like composites. However, effective multisensor data fusion in SHM is often hindered by heterogeneous sensing modalities that operate at disparate sampling frequencies and acquisition intervals. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a
Transformer-based data fusion framework that integrates multisensor data streams from piezoelectric transducer (PZT) capturing ultrasonic guided wave signals and fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors for strain measurements. By incorporating an
attention-mechanism visualization, the proposed framework enables transparent, multitask learning for both health indicator (HI) prediction and damage localization. The framework was experimentally validated using aircraft composite structures subjected to compression-compression fatigue cyclic loading. For HI prediction, the framework consistently achieved a mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean squared error (RMSE) below 0.1, representing a nearly 60% performance improvement over single-sensor approaches (PZT or FBG alone) and baseline deep learning models. For damage localization, the model demonstrated the highest accuracy, maintaining an MAE and RMSE below 0.0465 and 0.1571, respectively. These results demonstrate that the proposed
Transformer-based data fusion framework significantly outperforms single-source models and state-of-the-art deep learning models in both HI prediction and damage localization accuracy.
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All authors Xin Yang, Morteza Moradi, Tongtong Yan, Jinbo Du, Yunlai Liao, Dimitrios Zarouchas, Dimitrios Chronopoulos
Machine Learning
Can AI Draw Science? A Benchmark for Evaluating Scientific Figure Generation by Text-to-Image and Multimodal Models
Davie Chen
Text-to-image and
multimodal generative models are increasingly used to produce scientific figures such as mechanism diagrams, experimental-design schematics, conceptual frameworks, and graphical abstracts. Yet existing image-generation
benchmarks (e.g., GenEval, T2I-CompBench, DPG-Bench) evaluate natural images and measure compositionality, object counting, or photorealism. None of them measure what makes a generated scientific figure usable: correct and legible text labels, faithful depiction of entities and their relations, coherent diagrammatic structure, and adherence to disciplinary drawing conventions. We introduce SciDraw-Bench, a
benchmark of 32 structured scientific-figure generation tasks spanning eight figure types and ten disciplines, where each task pairs a natural-
language prompt with a machine-checkable specification of required labels, relations, components, conventions, and negative constraints. We propose a four-dimensional evaluation protocol: Text Fidelity (OCR-based label recall and character error rate), Semantic Correctness (
vision-
language-model judging against the specification), Structural Quality, and Convention Adherence, together with a meta-evaluation protocol and a preliminary inter-judge reliability analysis (human-rating validation is ongoing). We evaluate a domain-specific system, SciDraw AI, against representative general-purpose text-to-image models, and outline a code-to-figure baseline as a planned extension. In a pilot over all eight figure types, the domain-specific system substantially outperforms the general-purpose baselines on every dimension and figure type, with the largest gaps on semantic correctness and convention adherence; text fidelity remains the hardest dimension for all systems.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.SE
Reinforcement Learning for Software Vulnerability Analysis: A Systematic Review with Emphasis on C/C++ Source Code and Static Analysis
Bruno Caro-Vásquez, Carola Figueroa-Flores and Gastón Marquez
Vulnerability detection in C/C++ software remains a major security challenge due to code complexity, manual
memory management, and the limitations of traditional static analysis. Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach, particularly for fuzzing, test generation, program exploration, and, more recently, vulnerability detection and localization. Following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, this work reviews RL techniques for software vulnerability analysis, focusing on C/C++ source code and static analysis. We identified 21 primary studies published between 2015 and 2026 from major scientific databases and complementary searches. We analyze the addressed tasks,
algorithms, state-action-reward-environment formulations, code representations,
datasets, and evaluation metrics. Results show that 15 studies focus on fuzzing and guided exploration, only 3 on direct vulnerability detection, and just 1 on statement-level localization. Moreover, statically extracted structural representations such as Control Flow Graphs (CFGs) and Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) are rarely used as
agent states, and
benchmarks lack comparability. We propose a task- and formulation-oriented taxonomy and identify a key research gap: the absence of RL
agents that use source-code CFGs as states to detect and localize vulnerable nodes.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CV
Vision-driven Preference Synthesis for Mitigating Hallucinations in VLMs
Yunhun Nam and Jongheon Jeong
Vision-
Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong performance in visual understanding, yet they still suffer from
hallucinations, generating content that is not grounded in the image. Preference
alignment is a promising approach to improve visual faithfulness, but its success depends heavily on how preference pairs are constructed. Existing methods exhibit two key limitations; (a) intervention-based methods often introduce significant deviation from the policy distribution, and (b) sampling-based methods often underuse visual information during the construction. In this paper, we propose ViPSy (
Vision-driven Preference Synthesis), a framework for constructing preference data that are both policy-aligned and visually grounded. Our framework consists of two stages; in the first stage, ViPSy derives a visual cue from recurring object-level content across semantically aligned image variants, so preference construction can rely on visual information rather than
language priors. In the second stage, ViPSy conditions the policy's own rollouts on this cue, allowing candidates to be guided by visually grounded content while staying close to the policy's response distribution. The resulting candidates remain close to the policy's response distribution while better leveraging visual information from the image. Experiments show that the resulting VLM, preference-aligned with ViPSy-constructed preference pairs, achieves a new state-of-the-art in
hallucination mitigation. Compared with the previous state-of-the-art method, it reduces
hallucination rates on AMBER and Object HalBench by 35.7% and 24.5%, respectively. The resulting model further improves on general visual grounding
benchmarks, e.g., MMStar, MMVP, and CV-Bench, while also yielding gains in semantic
segmentation and ImageNet linear probing, underscoring the effectiveness of our framework in enhancing the model's visual capabilities.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CV
Meta-learning as a principle for human-like visual representations
Can Demircan, Marcel Binz, Alireza Modirshanechi et al. (+1 more)
The structure of human visual representations underpins our capacity for adaptive behaviour. While pretrained neural networks model human visual representations with unprecedented success, a large discrepancy remains. We propose one reason: these networks optimise a single fixed objective, whereas human representations must support open-ended tasks. We hypothesise this flexibility arises from meta-learning (learning to learn), a pressure shaping representations to acquire new tasks from few observations. To test this, we train a sequence model, without any supervision from human data, across thousands of semantically rich tasks mapping images to high-level concepts. Compared to their pretrained base encoders, meta-learned representations better predict human similarity judgements, semantic rule learning, and high-level visual cortex. Behavioural gains depend on disentangled, high-level task distributions, while
brain alignment is driven primarily by the learning-to-learn pressure. Our results suggest the flexibility of human visual representations reflects the functional demand to learn new semantic relationships on the fly.
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All authors Can Demircan, Marcel Binz, Alireza Modirshanechi, Eric Schulz
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CV
RadarTwin: Scene-Specific mmWave Radar Simulation and Learning for Mobile Indoor Perception
Emily Bejerano, Federico Tondolo, Devang Gupta et al. (+5 more)
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar perception is limited by data scarcity: models trained on existing radar
datasets fail to generalize to new objects, environments, and sensing trajectories. We present RadarTwin, a framework for generating deployment-specific radar training data before real data collection. Given a 3D reconstruction of a target space (phone
LiDAR,
robot-mounted sensing, or RGB-to-3D), RadarTwin uses a
vision-
language model to infer radar-relevant surface materials and a physics-based ray tracer to synthesize raw frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar measurements with multi-bounce propagation. To study what transfers from simulation to reality, we collect a paired real-simulated
dataset spanning household objects, material classes, distances, rotations, translations, and mobile sensing trajectories. We show that simulated and real radar share the same object-discriminative shape and material features, and that modeling the environment's multipath is essential to matching real measurements. A representation trained on simulation alone recognizes real objects at 2.5 times chance with no real radar labels, and a few labeled examples raise this to 95.3% on a 12-way recognition task. RadarTwin enables training radar perception for a new space before any real radar data is collected there.
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All authors Emily Bejerano, Federico Tondolo, Devang Gupta, Aaron Mano Cherian, Taeyoo Kim, Ayaan Qayyum, Xiaofan Yu, Xiaofan Jiang
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.SE
Recall Before Rerank: Benchmarking Deep Learning Models for Large-Scale Code-to-Code Retrieval
Leonardo Venuta, Francesco Tosoni and Paolo Ferragina
Semantic code search and clone detection are essential for software development, maintenance, and reuse. This paper evaluates the effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability of contemporary deep learning models for first-stage recall in large-scale code-to-code search engines. Benchmarking across multiple programming
languages and
datasets reveals critical limits in the precision and scalability of these models on Terabyte-scale source-code collections. We present LLM-based code normalisation and query-rewriting schemes that yield significant gains in precision for lower-performing models. Our results question the sustainability of resource-constrained deployment and the assumed robustness of current code-specialised LLMs across
datasets. We conclude with actionable insights for building scalable, efficient code-
retrieval systems.
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Machine Learning
Finding the Time to Think: Learning Planning Budgets in Real-Time RL
Aneesh Muppidi, Firas Darwish, Dylan Cope et al. (+2 more)
Deliberating takes time. In real-time settings, that time is not free. Standard reinforcement learning (RL) sidesteps this as the environment waits indefinitely for the
agent's decision. Instead, we study real-time RL environments where the environment progresses while waiting for the
agent's action. Building on prior real-time formalizations, we introduce variable-delay real-time RL, where the
agent chooses how long to deliberate at each decision point since the environment progresses. For the planning
agents we use, the right delay is state-dependent, and naively planning how long to plan can paralyze the
agent. We instead approach this setting by training a lightweight gating policy on top of a planner to select state-dependent planning budgets. Across real-time Pac-Man, Tetris, Snake, Speed Hex, and Speed Go, our gating policy outperforms fixed-budget and heuristic baselines, and transfers to a real-time setup where the environment and
agent run on two different GPUs.
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All authors Aneesh Muppidi, Firas Darwish, Dylan Cope, João F. Henriques, Jakob Nicolaus Foerster
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from stat.ML
A probabilistic framework for online test-time adaptation
Daniel Corrales and David Ríos Insua
This paper presents a probabilistic framework for online test-time adaptation problems. In them, a model is trained on labeled data but must adapt to unlabeled data at test time under the assumption that training and test distributions potentially differ, that is, there might have been a distributional shift. The framework is based on a state-space modelling architecture from which parameter learning, parameter time
evolution, prior tuning, and prediction can be characterized.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CV
Active Adversarial Perturbation-driven Associative Memory Retrieval for RGB-Event Visual Object Tracking
Xiao Wang, Xufeng Lou, Zikang Yan et al. (+5 more)
RGB-Event tracking improves localization robustness by fusing RGB appearance textures and dense temporal motion cues from event sensors. While this multi-modal scheme broadens tracking applicability, real-world scenes suffer diverse structured signal degradations that hinder traditional multi-modal fusion. In harsh environments, either modality can lose reliability drastically, and targets frequently appear incomplete due to occlusion, edge truncation and foreground clutter.To tackle the above challenges, we present a hierarchical perturbation and
retrieval framework tailored for RGB-Event tracking with robustness against partial target missing and modal degradation, termed APRTrack. To mimic real-world signal corruption, APRTrack constructs structured degradation via two
adversarial perturbation branches at the modality and spatial levels, which separately simulate full-modal failure and localized target region absence. A hierarchical routing mechanism is designed to disentangle the training pipelines of the two perturbation types, effectively eliminating feature collapse induced by superimposed degradation constraints. Furthermore, we devise Footprint-guided Channel-calibrated Hopfield
Retrieval (FCHR) for reliable historical information compensation. This module evaluates
retrieval confidence based on association footprints between queries and
memory banks, and calibrates the
retrieval metric space prior to Hopfield matching, realizing controllable historical feature compensation bounded to target regions. Extensive experiments on FE108, COESOT, VisEvent, and FELT
datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed strategies for the RGB-Event visual object tracking. The source code and pre-trained models will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/OpenEvTracking
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All authors Xiao Wang, Xufeng Lou, Zikang Yan, Lan Chen, Sibao Chen, Yaowei Wang, Yonghong Tian, Jin Tang
Machine Learning
Optimizing CUDA like a Human: Micro-Profiling Tools as Expert Surrogates for LLM-Based GPU Kernel Optimization
Jiading Gai, Shuai Zhang, Kaj Bostrom et al. (+6 more)
We present KernelPro, a closed-loop multi-
agent system that automatically generates, profiles, and iteratively optimizes GPU kernel code by integrating large
language model (LLM) code generation with hardware profiler feedback and pluggable bottleneck detection tools. KernelPro introduces four contributions: (1) a semantic feedback operator that encodes expert heuristics as pluggable micro-profiling tools, transforming raw hardware metrics into actionable natural
language guidance; (2) a two-stage tool invocation architecture where roofline-based bottleneck classification filters which specialized analysis tools execute, combining kernel-level (ncu), instruction-level (SASS), and system-level (nsys) profiling; (3) a domain-adapted MCTS with progressive widening, asymmetric branching, log-reward calibration, dead-end
pruning, and search
memory for cross-iteration learning; and (4) direct CuTe source-level code generation via autonomous code search over the CUTLASS/CuTe codebase. On KernelBench, KernelPro achieves
geometric mean speedups of 2.42x/4.69x/5.30x on Levels 1/2/3, establishing state-of-the-art performance across all difficulty levels. On VeOmni's expert-optimized MoE training kernels, KernelPro achieves 1.23x over hand-tuned Triton by generating a from-scratch raw-CUDA+CuTe Hopper WGMMA kernel. Ablation studies demonstrate that each design component independently and significantly improves optimization quality: micro-profiling tools (p < 0.0001 vs raw metrics), MCTS search (26% higher
geometric mean vs greedy, p = 0.004), and proactive tool orchestration (23% improvement, p = 0.035). Finally, KernelPro is the first CUDA kernel coding
agent to optimize energy efficiency beyond the speed-only focus of prior systems, demonstrating an 11.6% measured energy reduction at matched speed.
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All authors Jiading Gai, Shuai Zhang, Kaj Bostrom, Jin Huang, Vihang Patil, Haoyang Fang, Bernie Wang, Huzefa Rangwala, George Karypis
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.SD
Listening Like a Judge: A Music-Aware Framework for Automatic Singing Performance Evaluation
Neelam Saini and Sourav Ghosh
Automatic singing quality assessment (SQA) requires evaluating lyrical correctness and musical fidelity while handling expressive variations. However, existing systems largely rely on either acoustic cues or lyric transcriptions exclusively, limiting holistic performance evaluation. Furthermore, their integration is non-trivial due to challenges in robust singing transcription amid melisma, vibrato, and tempo elasticity. To this end, we propose MusicJudge, a modality-guided framework for automated SQA that performs block-aligned
multimodal analysis by coupling lyric correctness with pitch-rhythm fidelity. It detects semantically meaningful lyric blocks using multi-signal matching that integrates semantic
embeddings, lexical similarity, and phonetic
alignment. To improve singing audio transcription, we introduce Modality-Guided LoRA for ASR fine-tuning. Experiments across
datasets demonstrate strong agreement with human expert judgments and validate the generalizability of MusicJudge.
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Machine Learning
Embedding Foundation Model Predictions in Discrete-Choice Models with Structural Guarantees
Yingshuo Wang, Xian Sun, Yanhang Li et al. (+2 more)
Tabular foundation models achieve strong accuracy on choice prediction tasks, but their predictions often violate the economic logic those tasks require: raising a price can increase predicted demand, implied willingness-to-pay estimates are frequently negative or implausible, and unavailable alternatives receive nonzero probability. We propose a two-stage adapter that takes a foundation model's predicted choice probabilities as a precomputed feature and embeds them inside a multinomial logit's utility. In Stage 1, we fit the multinomial logit's structural coefficients by maximum likelihood with sign constraints; in Stage 2, we freeze those coefficients and fit a small neural correction operating on the foundation model's predictions. We prove that this composition exactly preserves the multinomial logit's marginal rate of substitution, so analytically computable value-of-time becomes a mathematical guarantee rather than an empirical accident. Across three
datasets and two foundation models, the adapter gains 6.4 percentage points (pp) of test accuracy on average over the multinomial logit and up to 12.8 pp, maintains 100% cost monotonicity, and produces values of time within the published transportation-economics range on the transportation
datasets. Performance degrades gracefully under foundation-model context restriction, retaining at least 6 pp of accuracy gain even at 10% of the original foundation-model context.
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All authors Yingshuo Wang, Xian Sun, Yanhang Li, Zhichao Fan, Zexin Zhuang
Machine Learning
DualEval: Joint Model-Item Calibration for Unified LLM Evaluation
Aaron J. Li, Hao Huang, Youngmin Park et al. (+6 more)
Current LLM evaluation relies on two complementary but often disconnected signals: static
benchmarks with objective correctness labels and arena-style preference data that better reflect open-ended user interactions. We introduce DualEval, a latent model-item calibration framework that represents models and evaluation items in a shared space, jointly estimating model ability together with item difficulty and sharpness. We apply DualEval across four domains: coding, math, miscellaneous domain-knowledge tasks, and generic everyday user queries. Our evaluation uses 18 frontier LLMs, static
benchmark labels, and reward-model scores validated against held-out human preferences for open-ended model responses. Empirically, our framework produces reliable and balanced model rankings, and its learned item-level profiles support downstream applications such as
benchmark compression for sample-efficient evaluation and anomaly detection for contamination or outlier analysis. Overall, DualEval unifies static and arena-style evaluation through joint model-item calibration, producing model rankings and item-level diagnostics that support more sample-efficient, interpretable, and auditable evaluation pipelines.
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All authors Aaron J. Li, Hao Huang, Youngmin Park, Yitong Ma, Wei-Lin Chiang, Li Chen, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Bin Yu, Ion Stoica
Machine Learning
Rethinking Training & Inference for Forecasting: Linking Winner-Take-All back to GMMs
Qiyuan Wu, Katie Z Luo, Bharath Hariharan et al. (+2 more)
Trajectory
forecasting for autonomous driving has advanced rapidly, yet representative models often produce uninformative posteriors over forecast modes, causing problems for mode
pruning. We trace this to a modeling-training mismatch: forecasters are typically modeled as conditional Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) but trained with a winner-take-all (WTA) loss that assigns each sample to its nearest mode. We argue that this K-means-like hard assignment (one-hot), while preventing mode collapse, is the source of uninformative mode probabilities: it over-segments the trajectory space, ignores relatedness among nearby modes, and yields assignment instability under small perturbations. Guided by this lens, we introduce two post-hoc treatments: (1) test-time posterior-weighted merging that aggregates nearby candidate trajectories; and (2) a one-step expectation-maximization (EM) update that replaces hard labels with soft responsibilities, sharing probability mass across neighboring modes. Across several WTA-trained architectures, these lightweight steps produce more informative, faithfully ranked mode posteriors and strengthen final forecasts on popular displacement metrics – without retraining. Our analysis unifies recent design choices through a GMM-vs-K-means perspective and offers principled, practical corrections that better align training objectives with inference.
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All authors Qiyuan Wu, Katie Z Luo, Bharath Hariharan, Wei-Lun Chao, Mark Campbell
Machine Learning
Otter Weather: Skillful and Computationally Efficient Medium-Range Weather Forecasting
Cristiana Diaconu, Jonas Scholz, Aliaksandra Shysheya et al. (+4 more)
State-of-the-art medium-range AI weather models can outperform traditional Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) but require massive training budgets. This restricts usage for under-resourced groups and severely limits fast model iteration. Here we develop Otter Weather, a highly efficient spatiotemporal
forecasting model designed to democratise high-performance weather prediction with AI. Evaluated on ERA5 reanalysis data at 1.5{\deg} resolution using standard WeatherBench protocols, the Otter family significantly advances the skill-compute Pareto frontier. The deterministic version outperforms the best NWP baseline by 9.6% at a 24-hour lead time while requiring fewer than 3.5 A100-days for training. It provides a 2x efficiency gain over lightweight AI models and a 100-fold reduction in compute compared to resource-intensive frontier architectures. We extend these efficiency gains into probabilistic
forecasting by training via the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS). Scaling to a larger architecture, Otter-XL achieves a 9.7% CRPS improvement over the IFS ENS baseline. This yields an almost two-fold increase in predictive skill over comparable lightweight models at similar compute budgets. Otter-XL also outperforms frontier architectures like GenCast by over 2%, while using an order of magnitude less compute. Finally, Otter is applied out-of-the-box to a complex acoustic scattering PDE task where it outperforms a state-of-the-art foundation modelling approach, suggesting that the advances made here might apply across a range of scientific domains.
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All authors Cristiana Diaconu, Jonas Scholz, Aliaksandra Shysheya, Stratis Markou, Payel Mukhopadhyay, Miles Cranmer, Richard E. Turner
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.AI
Unbiased Canonical Set-Valued Oracles Via Lattice Theory
Jobst Heitzig
An oracle that tells you the probability of some future event can change that very probability because you act on the answer. We argue that this performativity is OK as people consult oracles to be informed, and hence moved, by the answer. We worry about instead that asking for a self-consistent answer, one that still holds once it has been announced, may leave the oracle with several answers to pick from, and whichever rule it uses to pick is a lever it could learn to pull. We propose to take away that choice: The oracle reports a credal set instead of a point estimate, which lifts the oracle's reaction function to an isotone operator on a
lattice. We make the oracle report that operator's least fixed point, which exists because of Knaster and Tarski. As that answer is fixed by a rule laid down in advance, nothing is left to choose by the oracle. We show that solution exists, is self-consistent, is never empty, can be computed by iterating from below, and equals the ordinary point estimate if the question is not performative after all. For simple queries about probabilities, we propose to restrict answers to intervals and show that, under a mild monotonicity assumption, the answer is simply the interval from the no-information baseline to the self-fulfilling
equilibrium one would end up at by iteratively querying a point oracle until the answer is self-consistent. As our proposal is purely order-theoretic, it carries over unchanged to arbitrary random variables and to bounded continuous statistics of their law. Finally we show that a fixed finite family of polytopes suffices to approximate every answer uniformly, which turns the construction into a terminating computation. We close by placing the construction inside the Scientist AI programme, where it offers a choice-free criterion for a step that programme currently hands to audited human judgement.
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Machine Learning
Beyond Feedforward Networks: Reentry Neural Systems as the Fundamental Basis of Subjecthood and Intrinsic Safety of Next-Generation AGI
A. S. Ushakov and Yu. N. Berdinsk
We propose a complete architectural blueprint for safe artificial general intelligence based on a closed reentry loop (D <-> I cycle). In contrast to feedforward networks, which are directed acyclic graphs (C=0, S=0) incapable of self-reference, the proposed architecture contains a structural cycle (C >= 1) with self-sustaining amplification (rho > 1), mathematically guaranteeing the emergence of a self-model, instrumental self-preservation, and unprogrammed goal-directed behaviour. The
agent's goals are encoded as a non-textual D-vector in the architecture itself, making them immune to reinterpretation and
prompt injection. We present the S-measure – a
polynomial-time [O(N^3)] computable alternative to Tononi's NP-hard Phi – with machine-verified Lean 4 proof that S>0 implies positive integrated information. The work provides full Python/NumPy implementations (Tarjan-based cycle complexity, Delta-S barrier), industrial horizontal scaling via Apache Kafka and Docker Compose, a taxonomy of six epochs of AI
evolution, a zoo of future reentry architectures (RAS,
diffusion attractors, fractal loops), gauge-invariant networks for safe swarms, fault-tolerance and recovery protocols, and eight falsifiable predictions. All formal proofs are machine-verified in Lean 4. This architecture is deployable today and represents a topologically protected, safe-by-design approach to AGI.
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