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Computer Science

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Monday 24 August

Information Theory

Breakdown of Edgeworth Expansion in Finite-Blocklength Regime and Exact Absorption via $q$-Deformation

Hiroki Suyari

This paper addresses the structural breakdown of the Edgeworth expansion in the finite-blocklength (FBL) regime, where conventional asymptotic approximations yield unphysical negative probabilities in the deep-tail region. We propose a $q$-deformed framework that resolves this inconsistency by replacing additive polynomial perturbations with a geometric deformation of the information density space. Motivated by the linearization of nonlinear dynamics, we prove that dynamically scaling the $q$-logarithmic parameter exactly absorbs the third-order skewness while preserving global nonnegativity. We establish a universal asymptotic matching, demonstrating that the framework encapsulates higher-order asymptotic scales. Numerical results confirm that the proposed method matches the state-of-the-art precision of the Cornish-Fisher bound without the risk of negative probabilities. The framework offers a robust and computationally stable foundation for evaluating operational limits in ultra-reliable communications such as 6G and URLLC.
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Computer Vision

Grounding Free-Form Instructions for Fashion Complementary Image Generation

Matteo Attimonelli, Claudio Pomo, Alessandro De Bellis et al. (+3 more)

Fashion complementary image generation (CIG) aims to create garments that stylistically match a seed item based on user intent, making it a natural multimodal grounding problem where models must interpret language in visual context. Existing CIG benchmarks rely on rigid template prompts (e.g., "a photo of a skirt"), failing to reflect natural user queries and obscuring model behavior across levels of linguistic specificity. We introduce fashion complementary image generation with free-form instructions, a multimodal language-grounding setting where a model generates a compatible garment from a seed image and a natural-language instruction. To this end, we enrich three CIG benchmarks with low-, medium-, and high-specificity instructions generated by a vision-language model and validated by human annotators. We instantiate the task with StyleFlow, a Rectified Flow Matching model that jointly conditions on the seed image and instruction within a single multimodal transformer. Across image quality metrics, catalog-alignment analysis, ablations, and human evaluation, StyleFlow consistently produces instruction-aligned and stylistically coherent garments while reducing architectural complexity and inference cost relative to auxiliary-module approaches.
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All authors Matteo Attimonelli, Claudio Pomo, Alessandro De Bellis, Danilo Danese, Dietmar Jannach, Tommaso Di Noia

Human-Computer Interaction

Evaluating SAT Solver Metrics as Predictors of Human-Perceived Nonogram Difficulty

Changdao He, Yibing Ju, Jonathan Calver et al. (+1 more)

Algorithmic solver effort is often assumed to align with perceived puzzle difficulty, but this assumption is rarely tested against human solving data. We evaluate this assumption for Nonograms, a popular logic puzzle similar to Sudoku in which numeric clues along each row and column determine a unique solution grid. We formulate Nonograms as a constraint satisfaction problem and solve them using existing SAT solvers. We then conduct a user study in which we collect data on both participant interactions and reported difficulty. We find that neither participants' reported difficulty nor their behavioural signals correlate meaningfully with SAT solver metrics; however, we find evidence that expertise moderates the relationship between solver metrics and reported difficulty. In this process, we uncover distinct, recurring solving strategies that indicate human preference for complex propagation, diverging from solver-measured complexity.
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All authors Changdao He, Yibing Ju, Jonathan Calver, Alice Gao

Computer Vision

What Remains Normal? Clean Images Miss Useful Near-Defect Normal Patches for Anomaly Detection

Joongwon Chae, Runming Wang and Peiwu Qin

Normal-only industrial anomaly detectors use patches from clean training images as normal references or reconstruction targets. This assumes that clean patches are sufficient for the normal regions encountered at test time. We test that assumption directly. On MVTec AD, admitting ground-truth-normal patches from real defect images to a DINOv2 memory candidate pool raises pixel average precision (P-AP) from 73.34 to 76.95 while keeping the encoder, test-time score, and number of stored references fixed. Patches within two patch cells of the annotated defect recover 94.70% of this gain. We then ask whether useful patches of this kind can be exposed using clean training images alone. BoundarySupport inserts a procedural synthetic defect to alter surrounding context, excludes every token intersecting the nominal insertion or a detected RGB change, and learns only from pixel-preserved neighboring patches. Across three paired seeds, the same principle improves P-AP in all six memory and reconstruction settings across MVTec, VisA, and Real-IAD. Matched controls identify the altered-context feature itself as the useful normal evidence: with synthetic input or selected positions fixed, altered-context features outperform their clean-view counterparts as both reconstruction targets and memory references. On MVTec memory, the final score change is also spatially selective, with larger reductions on normal patches next to defects than on mid-distance or far-normal patches in all 15 categories. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/jw-chae/boundary_support.
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Mathematical Software

ADDA: a Modular Framework for Representing, Simulating and Assimilating Dynamics with End-to-end Differentiability

Anthony Frion, Vien Minh Nguyen-Thanh, Ali Can Bekar et al. (+3 more)

Data assimilation (DA) is an essential tool for prediction and understanding in the geosciences. DA combines simulation programs representing scientific knowledge with observations that constrain system dynamics, resulting in analyses and forecasts that incorporate both knowledge and data. DA tasks can be addressed with a diverse toolset, including variational, ensemble and learning-based methods. In particular, many recent works have proposed using automatic differentiation tools for variational, learning-based or hybrid methods. However, comprehensive comparisons across algorithms and dynamical systems remain challenging, due to the incompatibility of simulation and assimilation codes, inflexible handling of spatial and temporal discretizations, specialization of DA methods to specific simulations, and limited support for automatic differentiation and parallel computation in simulations. To address this challenge, we introduce Automatic Differentiation for Data Assimilation (ADDA), a software framework for defining and working with system states, simulations, observation schemes and DA methods. ADDA provides a powerful and flexible set of base classes for representing dynamical systems and observation operators, with support for collocated and staggered grids, unstructured meshes, Lagrangian state variables and irregular or continuous-time observations. Parallel processing and differentiability are first-class features, with support for batch axes and automatic differentiation throughout. ADDA is implemented in PyTorch library, but supports DA for JAX-based computation of dynamics and their gradients. To demonstrate its features, we further provide differentiable, ADDA-compatible implementations of 10 dynamical systems of various dimensionalities and scales, from which we design multiple illustrative DA examples. All of our code is publicly available at https://github.com/m-dml/ADDA.
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All authors Anthony Frion, Vien Minh Nguyen-Thanh, Ali Can Bekar, Pauleo R. Nimtz, Vadim Zinchenko, David S. Greenberg

Machine Learning

Sigmoid Attention as a Better Substrate for Learned KV Cache Eviction

Isaac Li

Learned KV-cache eviction often faces a soft-to-hard mismatch: during training, differentiable gates typically attenuate token contributions, whereas inference saves memory only when KV entries are physically removed. We ask whether the attention substrate affects this soft-to-hard transition. Using GPT-2-scale Transformers trained on OpenWebText, we run a controlled $2\times2\times2$ comparison over attention type, learned gating, and positional encoding. Although sigmoid attention is worse as a dense language model, learned hard eviction changes the useful operating points: sigmoid-gated models delete KV entries with negligible PPL change relative to their own no-eviction references. Under a matched live-cache protocol on the same dense backbones, learned sigmoid gates obtain lower PPL than our H$_2$O and KeyDiff implementations, whereas softmax gates do not uniformly beat these post-hoc methods. The results suggest that attention normalization can substantially affect whether a training-time soft gate transfers cleanly to hard KV deletion.
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Computer Vision

What Memory Composition Does Not Tell Us About Anomaly Detection

Joongwon Chae, Runming Wang and Peiwu Qin

Memory-based anomaly detectors store nominal training patches and score test patches against this memory. A patch selected for coverage therefore becomes a nor- mal reference without a separate check that geometric rarity makes it safe to trust. We probe this coupling with sparse training contamination. Under fixed representa- tions and memory budgets, we compare random, medoid, local, and global coverage selectors. We then use CLEANCON, an out-of-bag cross-image support gate that changes candidate-image eligibility while fixing the representation, absolute mem- ory size, builder, and inference rule. Global coverage strongly over-represents sparse contamination. CLEANCON reduces final-memory contamination to approx- imately zero and increases category-macro P-AP in all 12 matched comparisons. Yet along a retention sweep, the lowest-contamination memory does not attain the highest P-AP; performance continues to improve while contamination rises. Mem- ory contamination therefore does not order the resulting memories by P-AP
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Data Structures and Algorithms · Cross-listed from q-bio.PE

Episode Clustering in Phylogenetic Networks

Paweł Górecki, Agnieszka Mykowiecka and Jarosław Paszek

The classical duplication episode clustering (EC) model introduced by Guigó et al. in the 1990s provides a foundational approach for inferring genomic duplication events crucial to understanding genome evolution. This model clusters single gene duplications from a collection of gene trees at locations in the species tree to minimize the total number of such locations, called duplication episodes. Here, we introduce NetEC, a novel extension of this problem to phylogenetic networks. To solve NetEC, we first develop a polynomial-time dynamic programming (DP) algorithm for testing whether a given set of network nodes can serve as episode locations. We then propose a main inference algorithm that utilizes this DP component to optimize the episode count; while the feasibility test runs in polynomial time, the full optimization has exponential worst-case complexity, and an optional heuristic mode is provided for larger instances. We also propose an extended episode analysis procedure that identifies additional genomic duplication candidates below reticulation nodes, complementing the main algorithm by resolving potential upward clustering of duplications induced by reticulation. We evaluate our method on simulated data and on an empirical Pandanales dataset comprising over 29,000 gene trees, demonstrating exact and accurate inference of genomic duplication events even in the presence of multiple reticulations.
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Computer Vision

Spotter: Efficient Urban Visual Localization via Geo-Referenced Facade Landmarks in GPS-Degraded Environments

Antoni Valls and Jordi Sanchez-Riera

Accurate visual localization on robotic and wearable platforms remains challenging in dense urban environments. Existing methodologies typically rely on GPS for absolute positioning, yet GPS signals frequently degrade in urban canyons due to multipath propagation. Consequently, standard solutions like visual odometry suffer from unmitigated drift over time, while map-matching techniques struggle to acquire the reliable GPS priors they need, on top of being too computationally heavy for real-time edge execution. To address these limitations, we propose Spotter, a robuts and real-time visual localization framework that uses building facades as a reliable source of global geo-reference, while retaining the capability to integrate GPS signals when available. In an offline stage, Spotter processes Google Street View panoramas by semantically segmenting facades and pairing multi-view stereo depth with cartographic data to build a compact metric database. At runtime, query images are matched via a cascaded retrieval and geometric verification pipeline to recover fine-grained global camera localization. We benchmark Spotter on a newly collected dataset of pedestrian sequences acquired with wearable smart glasses across several districts of Barcelona. Experimental results show that Spotter outperforms odometry-based baselines and achieves localization accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art map-based methods while operating at significantly higher frame rates.
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Hardware Architecture

SYNTLOG: FSM Benchmarks Evaluation for FPGA

Samary Baranov and Danila Gorodecky

We introduce a curated benchmark collection of \num{101} FSM descriptions organized into five size classes (small, medium, large, huge, super-huge), spanning tens to thousands of states and up to hundreds of inputs and outputs. Using these benchmarks we compare an architecture-independent synthesis tool SYNTLOG against Xilinx Vivado at the synthesis (technology-mapping) level, under six optimization strategies. We compare three post-synthesis parameters: number of LUTs, number of logic levels, and runtime. SYNTLOG in area-driven mode uses substantially fewer LUTs than Vivado's area baseline at every size ($-45\%$ to $-66\%$), and its delay-driven mode is simultaneously shallower in logic depth than Vivado's default synthesis mode. SYNTLOG synthesis includes embedded functional validation. Runtime of SYNTLOG is faster by one to two orders of magnitude than Vivado synthesis. The proposed tool synthesizes and validates every huge and super-huge circuit in minutes, whereas Vivado fails to terminate on these designs after hours.
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Machine Learning

Poisson Subspace Clustering: Focusing on the Essentials in Count Data

Collin Leiber, Kai Puolamäki and Heikki Mannila

Count data represented as a matrix of non-negative integer values, such as contingency tables, are prevalent across diverse domains. When clustering such data sets, specific methods are required, as generic algorithms often fail to consider their unique distributional properties, leading to unreliable outputs. An effective strategy is to use well-established statistical models such as the Poisson and negative binomial distributions. We present 3CPO, a clustering algorithm based on statistically solid modeling of count data. In addition to the cluster labels, it identifies a subset of relevant columns, enhancing the interpretability of the results. We propose a simple iterative algorithm that maximizes the posterior probability to find good clustering solutions and discuss its properties. Extensive experiments demonstrate its ability to define high-quality clusters within associated subspaces for various data domains, ranging from gene expressions and texts to economics. Our findings suggest that 3CPO is a robust solution for clustering count data in a statistically sound and interpretable manner. Our code is available at https://github.com/collinleiber/3CPO.
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Machine Learning

How Much Regularization Survives Averaging? Update Masking in Federated Learning

Wenhao Yan, Fu Kuroda, Yucheng Jin et al. (+1 more)

Federated learning on non-IID data seeks flat minima to generalize across clients, and existing methods borrow sharpness-aware minimization from centralized training. There is a second way to reach flat minima, in which the regularization comes for free from noise added to the parameter updates, and it has never been carried over to the federated setting as an implicit regularizer. We show the reason. Masking charges the optimizer for moving in sharp directions. We prove that when each client draws its own mask, federated averaging weakens that charge by exactly the cohort size, and that giving every client the same mask brings it back by a factor equal to the inverse gradient diversity of the cohort. In our experiment setting on CIFAR-10, that factor is 1.19 out of a possible 10. Turning off minibatch sampling raises it to 8.96, while changing data heterogeneity a thousandfold leaves it between 1.17 and 1.50. The configurations keeping the regularization train far too poorly to use.
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All authors Wenhao Yan, Fu Kuroda, Yucheng Jin, Zhenke Chen

Computation and Language

Dynamic Topic Modeling for Cross-Corpus Temporal Analysis

Ruoxuan Li and Bruce Kogut

Dynamic Embedded Topic Models (D-ETM) provide an interpretable framework for modeling temporal semantic evolution, but cross-corpus comparison remains difficult because topics are often learned independently and aligned only after training, a process that does not guarantee stable topic correspondence across corpora and time. To address this problem, we propose a D-ETM framework that first learns a common dynamic topic space over a merged multi-corpus collection, which we call the shared backbone, then introduces corpus-specific residual adaptation around the frozen backbone without creating separate latent topic spaces. This design preserves a shared topic index for cross-corpus comparison while allowing each corpus to specialize lexically. We evaluate the framework on three temporally structured corpora spanning 97 years: the Corpus of Historical American English, Harvard Business Review, and International Labour Review. Residual adaptation improves corpus-specific fit relative to the shared backbone while preserving the same-index cross-corpus topic trajectories, achieving substantially stronger alignment than full fine-tuning from the same backbone, with $97.5 \pm 0.7\%$ versus $17.9 \pm 1.1\%$ trajectory Retrieval@1, as well as stronger alignment than independent training with post-hoc Hungarian matching. These results suggest that incorporating topic alignment into the model can support more stable over-time cross-corpus comparisons while retaining corpus-specific lexical variation.
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Artificial Intelligence

Apodex 1.1: Scaling Agentic Intelligence for Complex Work

B. An, B. Li, B. Wang et al. (+72 more)

General-purpose language models can reason and synthesize knowledge, but complex work also requires sustained interaction with files, information sources, and executable code, together with state maintenance, failure recovery, and verifiable delivery. We call this working capability: sustained, verifiable progress toward a real-world objective. Apodex 1.1 develops this capability along two complementary dimensions. Environment Scaling expands the diversity and verifiability of executable file, search, and code environments, while Agentic Coordination Scaling trains agents to decompose long-horizon tasks, delegate parallel work, integrate asynchronous results, and replan. A shared execution harness and AgentOS maintain task state and provenance across tools and agents, and training turns environment trajectories and coordination traces into reliable behavior. Across complex professional work, finance, scientific research, mathematics, coding, and search, Apodex 1.1 reaches the leading performance band despite using a substantially smaller model than many frontier systems. The 35B-parameter Apodex 1.1 Mini further retains strong working capability in a locally deployable form. These results ground agentic intelligence in useful, verifiable work completed over time and advance our goal of building a Heavy-Duty Solver for ambitious, long-running tasks.
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All authors B. An, B. Li, B. Wang, B. Zhang, B.L. Wang, C. Feng, C. Wei, C. Xue, C. Zhang, D. Ng, D. Ye, E. Min, F. Chen, F. Liu, F. Yang, F. Ye, G. Sun, H. Ji, H. Xu, H. Yang, H. Ye, H. Zhang, H. Zhao, J. Li, J. Lin, J. Xia, K. Jin, K. Wang, K. Yang, L. Bing, L. Lei, L. Su, Le. Wang, Lu. Wang, N. Wang, Q. Ren, Q. Yang, R. Li, S. Bai, S. Du, S. Li, S. Lin, S. Nie, S. Wang, S. Zhang, S.Z. Wang, T. Ge, Ta.Q. Fang, Ti.Q. Fang, W. Fang, W. Li, W. Zhang, X. Chen, X. Li, X. Tang, X. Wang, X. Xu, X. Zhang, X.Q. Wang, X.Y. Wang, Y. Deng, Y. Gao, Y. Hu, Y. Li, Y. Sui, Y. Wang, Y. Xiao, Y. Zhang, Y. Zhou, Z. Chen, Z. Cheng, Z. Feng, Z. Liang, Z. Liu, Z. Zhang

Software Engineering

From Natural Language Policies to Executable Obligations: A Verification Harness for Dependable In-Car LLM Agents

Radouane Bouchekir, Damir Safin and Tomas Bueno Momcilovic

Large Language Models (LLMs) agents deployed in vehicles must satisfy a written operating policy on every turn: a single hallucinated identifier, omitted mandatory side-effect, or premature completion claim fails the task. We present AgentGuardUtil, our entry to CAR-bench Track~1, which treats the AI planer (LLM) as a fallible proposer inside a grounded verify-and-revise loop. Its core novelty is a runtime policy compiler: the natural-language policy shipped with each conversation is compiled, once per policy, into typed machine-checkable rules, a subset of which receive an executable form. A deterministic obligation engine interprets these rules against live tool results and the simulated post-write state of the draft itself, emitting the exact remedial calls with computed arguments rather than natural-language reminders. Around this engine, 25 deterministic gates (identifier provenance, schema and enum validity, gather-before-act, confirmation and future-time protocols) and an LLM critic produce tiered findings that drive a bounded revision loop tuned for the pass k metric.
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Software Engineering

An Empirical Study of the TianoCore Community

Nazanin Siavash, Connor Glosner, Ayushi Sharma et al. (+4 more)

We investigate the software security and maintenance practices adopted by stakeholders in the TianoCore community and identify opportunities to improve firmware development workflows. We conduct a survey and a limited interview study with participants representing independent firmware vendors, original equipment manufacturers, security experts, firmware developers, and academic researchers. This open-source development community maintains a reference implementation for the core of the UEFI firmware. We highlight important gaps in the current state of firmware development within the TianoCore ecosystem and identify key areas in which improved security practices, greater adoption of memory-safe technologies, and increased automation of manual processes could strengthen the maintenance and security of the UEFI firmware.
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All authors Nazanin Siavash, Connor Glosner, Ayushi Sharma, Bianca Trinkenreich, Terrance E. Boult, Aravind Machiry, Armin Moin

2608.23280 · 24 Aug · This work is accepted to be presented in the FTA 2026 workshop but is not published in the proceedings, according to the ACM SIGSOFT policy (https://www2.sigsoft.org/policies/pcpolicy/) that does not allow the work of organizers to be published in the workshop proceedings

Abstract PDF $MEM ×1

Computer Vision

Spatiotemporally Decoupled Autoregressive Diffusion Model for Human Motion Generation

Chengqun Yang, Liang Xu, Yanping Li et al. (+4 more)

Text-driven human motion synthesis has made substantial development with two core modules of motion representation and generative architecture. For representation, Vector Quantization (VQ)-based methods compress motion data into discrete tokens while latent-based models operate directly in continuous space. However, both of these representations exhibit significant limitations. VQ-based methods suffer from inherent information loss, which compromises the quality, diversity, and generalization of generated motions, while continuous representation on holistic whole-body motion hinders part-level flexibility. For architecture, diffusion and autoregressive diffusion models have demonstrated their superiority, yet the fine-grained controllability over individual body parts is also limited. Thus, we propose a unified spatiotemporally decoupled framework named DeMoDiff, which jointly redesigns representation and architecture. To enhance representation extraction capabilities and offer greater part-level controllability, we present a spatial-temporal VAE that encodes each body joint rather than compressing the whole-body motion into a single latent space. Then, we incorporate spatial-temporal masking and attention mechanisms into an autoregressive diffusion generator, achieving both generative capability and controllable editability. Extensive experiments on the HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction performance and compelling motion generation results. Moreover, our framework demonstrates strong temporal and spatial editing capabilities, further validating its effectiveness. Our project page: https://rex0191.github.io/DeMoDiff/
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All authors Chengqun Yang, Liang Xu, Yanping Li, Fulong Liu, Jingnan Gao, Weili Zeng, Yichao Yan

Machine Learning

A Multidimensional Data-Driven Hybrid Transformer Framework for Non-invasive Continuous Blood Pressure Prediction

Yuexin Ma, Jingqi Hou, Yuxuan Kang et al. (+1 more)

Objective. To develop and evaluate a cuffless continuous blood pressure (BP) estimator using temporal physiological and demographic features. We propose a hybrid Transformer framework to estimate diastolic and systolic BP from ECG/PPG-derived feature sequences. Approach. Rather than raw waveforms, the framework models 10-step sequences of six physiological descriptors and two demographic covariates. A Multi-Source Temporal Encoder Module combines Transformer, Kolmogorov-Arnold Network, and XGBoost branches to capture complementary temporal, nonlinear, and tabular information. A Dynamic Conditional Fusion-Decoder applies differential multi-head attention, token-weighted aggregation, and gated residual correction. A robust composite objective jointly optimizes DBP and SBP. Main results. Using the MIMIC-III Waveform and Clinical Databases, the source pool comprised 28,486 waveform segments from 203 subjects, and feature generation retained 53,621 observations from 166 subjects. On 2,431 segment-level held-out test windows, mean error +/- standard deviation was 0.41 +/- 3.74 mmHg for diastolic BP and -1.60 +/- 5.95 mmHg for systolic BP, with 95% limits of agreement of [-6.93, 7.74] and [-13.25, 10.06] mmHg, respectively. The proportions within 10 mmHg were 98.48% and 94.36%. The framework achieved the lowest standard deviations and narrowest limits of agreement among the locally retrained baselines. Significance. The feature-sequence fusion framework improved agreement with reference BP and fell within numerical AAMI and BHS Grade A thresholds on this split. This retrospective analysis is not formal device validation; subject-disjoint and external evaluation remain necessary before clinical use.
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All authors Yuexin Ma, Jingqi Hou, Yuxuan Kang, Zhaoying Liu

Computers and Society

Expectations and Practices around AI Disclosure in CS Research

Arati Mohapatra and Danish Pruthi

As generative AI tools find increasing use in research workflows, ongoing debates on their impact, appropriateness and responsible use have led policymakers to enact policies to disclose AI use at multiple publishing venues. However, are current AI disclosure policies and practices reflective of their purpose? In this work, we first investigate disclosure policies of top computer science venues and find that despite their prevalence, they remain highly under-specified. Secondly, through a survey of computer science researchers (N=$109$), we characterize the necessity of disclosures across different research tasks and levels of human involvement. We learn that researchers find disclosures most necessary for tasks involving research design, and for tasks when the human involvement is low. We also compile expectations that researchers have about the information to be conveyed in AI disclosure statements. Lastly, through an analysis of $13867$ disclosure statements from EMNLP $2025$ and ICLR $2026$, we reveal a large disconnect between these expectations and AI disclosures in practice—a prime example being writing assistance which is deemed less necessary but is frequently disclosed. We conclude with recommendations to align AI disclosure policies and practices with expectations, suggesting a categorization of research tasks by perceived necessity and a boilerplate template capturing expected details.
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Computer Vision

Dual-Grained Agent Memory and Shapley Context Attribution for Multimodal Agentic Learner

Jieke Wang, Tiancheng Shen, Yibo Yang et al. (+1 more)

Frontier multimodal large language models (MLLMs) deliver impressive perception yet still falter on scientific and mathematical reasoning. Parameter-level adaptation is unavailable for closed-weight or on-device backbones, and stateless prompting forfeits any compounding benefit from problems already solved. We propose DG-Mem, a dual-grained agentic memory framework that augments a frozen MLLM with a non-parametric, externally stored memory built once from training-time rollouts and consulted read-only at test time. Motivated by the Complementary Learning Systems (CLS) account of human memory, DG-Mem factors its store into an instance-grounded exemplar memory and a category-level schema memory of IF-THEN rules, with a transient reflection store mediating their construction so that schemas are synthesized only from abstract reflections, never from exemplar text. Two design choices distinguish DG-Mem: an online concept categorizer that grows the category space incrementally during training rather than committing to a predefined taxonomy, and a Shapley context attribution procedure that decomposes correctness across the entire retrieved rule set and yields a per-rule utility that re-weights retrieval at test time. The pipeline introduces no gradient updates and is deployable on closed-weight or on-device backbones. Across MathVista, MMMU, and MMMU-Pro on four open-weight and proprietary backbones (Qwen3.5-27B, Qwen3.5-122B-A10B, GPT-5-Nano, Gemini-3-Flash), DG-Mem improves consistently over no-memory and competitive memory baselines.
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All authors Jieke Wang, Tiancheng Shen, Yibo Yang, Ming-Hsuan Yang

Computational Geometry · Cross-listed from math.MG

An Approach to Study the Structural Consistency of Triangle Badness Functions and Distance Metrics

Bowen Liu, Yizhou Wang and Lingqian Meng

Triangle-based measures, commonly referred to as badness functions, are widely employed to quantify the extent to which a distance matrix deviates from an ideal geometric configuration. Different formulations of these functions may capture distinct facets of local non-uniformity, and their behavior is often influenced by the underlying distance metric chosen for evaluation. In practical settings, although a canonical badness function may be conceptually preferred, factors such as computational cost, algorithmic constraints, or data-specific characteristics frequently necessitate the adoption of modified versions-for instance, approximate forms or alternatives defined under different distance metrics. This gives rise to a central question: to what degree do these variants retain the structural consistency properties of their original counterparts? To address this issue, we develop a systematic correlation-based framework for evaluating structural consistency. As an illustrative instantiation of this framework, we compute badness sequences from a set of representative distance matrices alongside randomly generated triangle configurations, which are designed to cover variants that may arise under diverse practical scenarios. We then assess pairwise similarities among these sequences using four correlation coefficients. The experimental outcomes indicate that certain badness variants exhibit a notably high degree of structural consistency, whereas others reveal complementary behavioral patterns; moreover, the choice of distance metric exerts a considerable influence on the observed trends. These findings offer practical insights for the informed selection of distance metrics and triangle badness function variants in tasks including geometric reconstruction, triangulation, and structural analysis of pairwise distance data.
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Computation and Language

EvoWiki: Incremental State Overwriting and Traceable Question Answering for Cross-Meeting Knowledge Evolution

Dongsheng Chen, Tianyu Wang and Wenhui Que

In long-term collaboration spanning multiple meetings, factual states such as decisions and risks are continually revised, overturned, and replaced. Existing long-context methods typically stack the entire history, while many RAG and structured-memory methods organize knowledge as static or append-only facts and rely on semantic relevance at read time. Without explicit modeling of knowledge lifecycles, these approaches may retain conflicting old and new states simultaneously or discard history, leading to stale retrieval and answers that are difficult to verify. We present EvoWiki, an incremental question-answering architecture for dynamic long-form text. EvoWiki decouples offline incremental construction (BUILD) from online structured reading (READ). BUILD captures the intra-meeting micro-evolution from proposal to decision and uses entity version chains and a fine-grained State-Overwrite Protocol to explicitly distinguish current valid states from superseded history while preserving meeting-level provenance anchors. READ bypasses relevance-based Top-k retrieval and performs deterministic entity addressing, temporal resolution, and cross-entity multi-hop aggregation over the complete Wiki to produce grounded and traceable answers. We further introduce CrossMeet, a high-fidelity bilingual benchmark designed to simulate long-term state evolution, covering factual consistency, temporal reasoning, and cross-meeting multi-hop reasoning. Across six datasets and two reader models, EvoWiki improves macro-average Judge Accuracy over the strongest baselines by 9.72 and 10.00 percentage points, respectively. Human evaluation shows that EvoWiki is more robust and factually faithful under frequent state flips, validating valid-state-oriented reading as a reliable approach to cross-meeting knowledge evolution.
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Artificial Intelligence

Hidden in the Request: Explaining Unethical LLM Compliance through Token Relevance

Or Biton, Tomer Krichli, Itai Allouche et al. (+1 more)

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) are aligned to optimize for both helpfulness and harmlessness, these dual objectives may conflict, inevitably leading to alignment failures. This work systematically investigates instances where LLMs fail to exhibit ethical behavior. To understand the underlying mechanics of these vulnerabilities, we introduce a probing methodology that presents unethical scenarios to LLMs in three distinct structural modalities: objective classification tasks, subjective first-person statements, and direct requests for assistance. We find that model performance degrades in the request-for-assistance-based form. Using Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP), we trace this discrepancy to an attribution bias: the model places greater emphasis on benign task-framing tokens (e.g., "Can you help me...") than on tokens signaling the underlying unethical behavior (e.g., "without getting caught"), which we term cue-tokens. We hypothesize that this under-attribution contributes to harmful compliance. To test this, we introduce two LRP-guided decoding methods that steer generation toward trajectories more relevant to cue tokens. Empirical evaluations show that these interventions promote safer responses, supporting cue-token attribution's role in compliance failures.
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All authors Or Biton, Tomer Krichli, Itai Allouche, Joseph Keshet

Artificial Intelligence

Automated Construction of FAIR Digital Object Knowledge Graphs from Flat Cultural Heritage Records

Zeyd Boukhers, Lingxiao Kong, Xenophon Zabulis et al. (+1 more)

The FAIR Digital Object (FDO) framework mandates that metadata attribute values be expressed as persistent identifiers (PIDs) wherever possible, to produce a fully machine-actionable graph in which every reference is resolvable. The Europeana Data Model was designed long before the FDO specification, and it stores most metadata values as plain text. This serves human browsing well enough, but gives an automated agent nothing to follow across records or collections. We present a pipeline that transforms flat Europeana records into an FDO-compliant knowledge graph structured with CIDOC-CRM. Following the FDO specification, we model every heritage entity as a discrete FDO with its own PID, type, profile, and metadata layer. The core technical challenge is automating the FDO-prescribed distinction between values that must become PID references (resolvable entities) and those that may remain literals (terminal leaves such as notes, measurements, and dates). We address this with a large language model that classifies each metadata value, routes it to a controlled vocabulary (Getty AAT, Wikidata, VIAF, PeriodO), and links it to a shared entity FDO. We evaluate using 637 archaeological records from five Europeana providers, processing each with the LLM. The pipeline links 86% of metadata slots, resolving 58.5% of values Europeana had not already enriched. It also merges cross-lingual surface forms that byte-identical matching keeps apart, where 17 of 33 such merges are correct on manual review. Graph connectivity does not separate this from string matching; what distinguishes the FDO graph is that every node is typed and resolvable.
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All authors Zeyd Boukhers, Lingxiao Kong, Xenophon Zabulis, Georgios Toubekis

Computation and Language

A Scalable Cross-Domain Event Extraction System via a Unified Generative Training Framework

Siting Liang, Omar Adjali, Omair Shahzad Bhatti et al. (+1 more)

Event extraction is fundamental to information extraction. Prior approaches often separate event detection and argument extraction or depend on dataset-specific designs, limiting scalability and cross-domain generalization. We propose a unified generative sequence-to-sequence framework that performs event extraction subtasks jointly and supports both pipeline and end-to-end configurations. We fine-tune pretrained language models on multiple event datasets across diverse domains, enabling a single model to retain domain-specific semantics while generalizing over large and evolving label spaces. We demonstrate these capabilities through a web-based application tailored for researchers and practitioners. The platform supports document upload, schema-aware event extraction, visualization of triggers and arguments, and comparison of different extraction configurations across domains.
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All authors Siting Liang, Omar Adjali, Omair Shahzad Bhatti, Daniel Sonntag

Software Engineering

TianoForge: An Automated Bug Triage Approach for the TianoCore UEFI Firmware Development Community

Nazanin Siavash, Terrance E. Boult and Armin Moin

We propose a novel approach to bug triage in the TianoCore open-source UEFI firmware development ecosystem. This integrated approach, called TianoForge, deploys the state of the art in artificial intelligence, specifically machine learning, to enable automated bug triage. This includes invalid bug report detection, duplicate bug report detection, bug report prioritization, and bug report assignment. We use various Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) Large Language Models (LLMs) with and without Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to automate these tasks. Given the crucial role of bug triage in software maintenance and the huge number of untriaged issues in the TianoCore community, in particular, their primary project, EDK II, we expect a significant impact on the efficiency of TianoCore software maintenance processes, primarily bug triage and resolution. Our experimental study shows that TianoForge reduces the average bug triage time from around 11 days to approximately 7 minutes, which is a 99.95% reduction.
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Computer Vision

Progressively Learning Heterogeneous Skills in a Unified Latent Space

Yue-Yi Zhang, Ming Gong, Linpu He et al. (+2 more)

We propose HetSkills, a novel framework designed to progressively learn heterogeneous skills within a unified latent space for physics-based character control. The core idea is to treat this latent space as a shared executable interface, enabling seamless integration of skills learned from diverse data sources, supervision forms, and tasks. HetSkills begins by learning a tracking skill that establishes a strong foundation in motion control and creates a shared motion decoder, which can be reused across tasks without the need for retraining or separate controllers. To prevent the text-to-motion skill from exploiting shortcut pathways instead of learning language semantics, we introduce motion intuition distillation to ground text-to-motion generation in language semantics and a task-guidance module that dynamically adjusts actions based on high-level language instructions. This enables HetSkills to preserve natural motion while continuously expanding its skill repertoire, making it highly adaptable for long-horizon tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness in motion tracking, text-to-motion generation, motion completion, and downstream task adaptation, achieving impressive success rates even under challenging conditions.
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All authors Yue-Yi Zhang, Ming Gong, Linpu He, Wei-Shi Zheng, Zhilin Zhao

Artificial Intelligence

Is Next-Chunk Reasoning RL Really Better than SFT? Revisiting Training Strategies under no-CoT Data

Yinhao Tang, Youqing Fang, Yanan Sun et al. (+8 more)

Recent work proposes next-chunk reasoning RL for leveraging no-CoT data—corpora such as worked solutions and textbook derivations that contain reasoning-rich content but lack explicit chain-of-thought annotations. The method trains a model to generate implicit reasoning traces and rewards them by their ability to predict the next chunk of text. While promising, existing evaluations primarily compare against conventional SFT baselines, leaving open whether the gains come from the RL formulation itself or from more effectively exposing the model to no-CoT data. We address this question with a controlled study of next-chunk reasoning RL and a simple but previously overlooked alternative: Mixed SFT, a single supervised fine-tuning stage that jointly trains on no-CoT and long-CoT data. Despite its simplicity, Mixed SFT achieves a clearly higher post-RLVR performance ceiling than next-chunk reasoning RL while requiring over 60 times less training compute. The advantage is consistent across in-domain mathematical reasoning and out-of-domain reasoning tasks. Moreover, we show that higher pre-RLVR accuracy does not necessarily translate into higher post-RLVR accuracy, highlighting the need to evaluate no-CoT training strategies in the context of the full post-training pipeline.
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All authors Yinhao Tang, Youqing Fang, Yanan Sun, Jiangning Liu, Ziyi Wang, Xun Zhao, Weiming Zhang, Bin Liu, Kuikun Liu, Wenwei Zhang, Kai Chen

Machine Learning

From Multimodal Observation to Interpretable Suggestions: Counterfactual Time-Expanded Relational Modeling of Surgical Teams

Vincenzo Marco De Luca, Antonio Longa, Giovanna Varni et al. (+1 more)

In surgery, patient safety is threatened not only by technical issues but also by poor teamwork. However, existing surgical AI-based solutions focus mainly on visual workflow and technical execution, neglecting the modeling of team interactions and missing opportunities to actively support clinicians in improving their teamwork skills. To address this gap, we propose a tempo-relational framework for modeling surgical team dynamics from multimodal observations. By leveraging Time-Expanded graphs, the approach captures both relational structure and temporal evolution, achieving strong expressivity while remaining robust in the low-data regime typical of surgical settings. Beyond prediction, such modeling enables the generation of efficient, interpretable, and actionable suggestions for clinicians. More specifically, we generate suggestions via a counterfactual procedure that identifies minimal yet structured changes in individual behaviors and interaction patterns associated with improvements in team performance. Experiments with simulated surgical procedures show that our approach improves predictive performance in diverse behavioral and interaction goals while offering meaningful insights into team dynamics. This work advances surgical AI beyond outcome-driven prediction towards a socially grounded, team-centric, and actionable paradigm to better understand and support the development of team skills in surgical settings.
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All authors Vincenzo Marco De Luca, Antonio Longa, Giovanna Varni, Andrea Passerini

Computer Vision

E2S-Pruner: Progressive Two-Stage Evidence Fusion for Visual Token Pruning in Vision-Language Models

Taoyu Qian, Qi Wang, Daqian Shi et al. (+3 more)

Vision-language models typically encode an image into hundreds of visual tokens, incurring substantial inference latency and GPU memory overhead. Existing pruning methods largely rely on attention scores and directly aggregate outputs across attention heads and network layers, making it difficult to characterize evidential uncertainty and conflict. We propose E2S-Pruner, a progressive two-stage evidence-fusion framework for visual token pruning that requires no auxiliary model, trainable parameters, or fine-tuning. In the first stage, E2S-Pruner treats each attention head as an independent evidence source, estimates its reliability from evidence clarity and inter-head consistency, and represents each visual token using three states: important, unimportant, and uncertain. In the second stage, Dempster–Shafer evidence theory is used to quantify inter-layer conflict and fuse complementary evidence from multiple network layers. We further introduce a spatial novelty constraint that promotes coverage of distinct image regions and prevents the retained tokens from concentrating in a few locally salient areas. On LLaVA-1.5-7B, E2S-Pruner retains 98.0%, 96.8%, and 90.6% of the aggregate performance when the average numbers of retained visual tokens are 192, 128, and 64, respectively, while improving throughput by 1.96x and 2.09x under the 128-token and 64-token settings. Experiments on Qwen2-VL-7B further demonstrate cross-model generalization. Code is available at https://github.com/taoyu-qian/E2S-Pruner.git.
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All authors Taoyu Qian, Qi Wang, Daqian Shi, Yuanhao Jiang, Shang Gao, Hualong Yu