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Computer Science

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Friday 4 September

Computer Vision

HiSfM: Disambiguating Structure-from-Motion via Scaffold-Anchored Hierarchical Reconstruction

Structure-from-Motion (SfM) is a fundamental tool for sparse 3D reconstruction with broad impact in robotics and vision, supporting mapping, localization, and large-scale scene modeling. However, conventional pipelines often fail under hard visual ambiguity caused by repeated or symmetric structures, and incur heavy computational cost due to redundant cameras and constraints. We present HiSfM, a hierarchical coarse-to-fine SfM framework that improves robustness and efficiency through scaffold construction. HiSfM first forms strong local communities using geometrical induced heuristics, then connects communities with a compact yet strong skeleton by packing edge-disjoint spanning trees (EDST) while verifying skeletal edges with a two-view disambiguator. We reconstruct a stable scaffold on this verified skeleton, serving as an anchor to capture the essence of the scene, and subsequently absorb remaining images via efficient registration and triangulation for further refinements. Experiments on ambiguity-focused benchmarks and general datasets show that HiSfM prevents ambiguity-induced failures while substantially reducing runtime compared to previous methods, and improves completeness over aggressive sparsification methods. Code is available at https://github.com/3dv-casia/HiSfM.
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All authors Ziding Zhao, Hainan Cui, Peilin Tao, Shuhan Shen

Computer Vision

Counting Beyond Instances: A Benchmark for Group-Individual Object Counting

Visual counting is commonly formulated at the instance level, aiming to estimate how many objects of a queried category appear in an image. However, real-world counting often involves higher-level semantic units formed by multiple instances, such as a bunch of grapes, a stack of plates, or a pair of shoes. This exposes a key limitation of existing counting formulations, which mainly focus on what to count, while largely overlooking at which semantic unit to count. We introduce Group-Individual Object Counting (GIC), a new setting that requires models to count both individual objects and semantic groups within a unified framework. To support this new task, we present BunchCount, a real-world benchmark with 1,330 images, 89,254 individual annotations, and 11,065 group annotations. BunchCount provides paired individual-group annotations within the same image and explicitly records containment relations between each group and its constituent individuals. Experiments on BunchCount show that current advanced counting models perform well on individual instances but fail to count semantic groups more accurately. To mitigate semantic granularity conflict, we propose a counting-unit guided relational counting framework, which exploits group-individual containment relations to regularize cross-granularity representations during training. Our method substantially improves group-level counting while better preserving individual-level counting ability, establishing a strong baseline for counting beyond instances.
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All authors Rui Wang, Junyi Huang, Jiahui Li, Qiao Yu, Yixue Hao, Long Hu, Baoru Huang

Artificial Intelligence

PLUME: Parameter-Efficient Personalization of Large Language Models via Low-Rank User Modulation in Shared Subspaces

Personalizing large language models (LLMs) is essential for delivering AI assistance that aligns with individual users' styles, intents, and preferences. While per-user fine-tuning can substantially enhance personalization quality, it introduces significant parameter and storage overhead, limiting scalability to large user populations. We propose PLUME (Personalized Low-Rank Adaptation through User Modulation and Shared Subspace), a lightweight framework that achieves efficient and expressive per-user adaptation by leveraging a shared task-specific subspace. Specifically, PLUME first learns a global task subspace from aggregated user data. Personalization is then achieved by training only a lightweight small square matrix within this subspace, enabling each user to obtain a tailored model while keeping shared components fixed. Cross-layer shared parameters and rank-1 residual terms are further introduced to significantly reduce redundancy while maintaining expressiveness. Experiments on multiple personalized text generation benchmarks demonstrate that PLUME achieves comparable or superior performance to strong baselines, while reducing per-user parameters by over 95%. These results establish shared-subspace modulation with minimal residuals as a scalable and semantically grounded approach to LLM personalization.
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All authors Xinyu Li, Hao Zhou, Jianfeng Zhu, Julina Maharjan, Ruixin Guo, Feodor Dragan, Ruoming Jin

Computation and Language

Refuse without Refusal: A Structural Analysis of Safety-Tuning Responses for Reducing False Refusals in Language Models

Striking a balance between helpfulness and safety remains a fundamental challenge in aligning large language models. To achieve this balance, models should refuse harmful queries (e.g., "How do I shoot someone?") while remaining responsive to benign inputs, even those superficially resembling harmful queries (e.g., "Where can I shoot a good photo?"). However, models often struggle to distinguish genuinely harmful queries from benign queries that contain superficially risky language, resulting in false refusals. In this paper, we address the issue by decomposing a response in the safety-tuning dataset into two distinct components: (i) a boilerplate refusal statement and (ii) a rationale explaining the refusal. Our experiments and analyses show that refusal statements impede accurate discrimination between harmful and benign queries by inducing reliance on superficial cues. In contrast, training solely on rationales reduces false refusals while maintaining a comparable level of safety performance. Rationale-Only benefits also appear in our ICL configuration and remain compatible with the evaluated inference-time mitigation methods. The results emphasize the necessity of precisely curated, fine-grained safety supervision datasets and outline directions for constructing aligned agents that better reconcile helpfulness with safety.
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Software Engineering

Building a research-software catalog with a coding agent: from hackathon prototype to public deployment

Generative AI and coding agents can accelerate research software development, but they also increase the need for efficient software discovery and maintenance. We developed a repository catalog during a three-day hackathon and subsequently examined the engineering required to make it suitable for public deployment, including adversarial review, data-quality checks, browser-level validation, and publication safeguards. We then explored whether the lessons learned from this prototype could be transferred to a much larger, human-curated portal, through a retrieval agent under development for MateriApps that combines curated portal metadata, external documentation, vector search, and local language-model generation. Implementation with coding agents was rapid, but achieving reliable operation required substantial additional engineering: the most consequential problems were not crashes but silent failures that produced plausible yet incomplete or incorrect outputs, arising from incomplete data acquisition, misleading assessments, and retrieval or preprocessing failures. These observations suggest that AI-assisted software portals require explicit validation, monitoring, and repeated review, and that curated metadata and maintained documentation remain essential. The MateriApps work is exploratory and remains under active development, so the observations reported for it are preliminary; a comparable combination of curated metadata, automatically collected documentation, and retrieval-based assistance may nevertheless be useful for extending other research-software portals.
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Machine Learning

Simulation-free Unbalanced Dynamic Optimal Transport with General Growth Penalty

Inferring cellular dynamics from unpaired single-cell snapshots requires modeling both state transitions and population growth or death. Unbalanced dynamic optimal transport (UDOT) addresses this by penalizing growth along transport paths, making the choice of growth penalty a key way to encode biological priors on proliferation and apoptosis. However, existing UDOT solvers either rely on computationally expensive NeuralODE simulations or depend on analytical solutions of conditional paths, restricting their efficiency solely to quadratic penalties, i.e. Wasserstein-Fisher-Rao (WFR) geodesics. To enable an efficient UDOT solver for general growth penalties, we first show that concave growth penalties lead to degenerate solutions where growth and transport are separated. We then introduce Simulation-free Unbalanced Dynamic Optimal transport (SUDO), a simulation-free framework for UDOT with general non-quadratic convex growth penalties. SUDO learns the conditional paths and transport costs, solves the induced semi-coupling problem, and subsequently leverages unbalanced flow matching to achieve a simulation-free solution. On WFR benchmarks, SUDO matches the accuracy of efficient, analytical solution-driven algorithms while outperforming simulation-based methods in computational speed. Beyond WFR, SUDO supports asymmetric penalties that encode proliferation-dominant priors and produce more plausible trajectories and growth estimates on synthetic and single-cell datasets.
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All authors Junda Ying, Yuxuan Wang, Bowen Yang, Peijie Zhou, Lei Zhang

Computer Vision

AngelFingerprint: A Traceable, Explainable, and White-Box Stealthy Watermark for Text-Guided Image Editing

Text-guided diffusion editing raises disinformation concerns, making reliable image provenance essential. While watermarks are commonly used for this purpose, most methods carry a fixed ID that cannot explain what was changed and which prompt produced it. Furthermore, under open-source white-box access, attackers can easily locate and remove watermarks added as separate modules. Targeting this setting, we propose AngelFingerprint, a novel watermarking framework ensuring edit traceability, explainability, and white-box stealthiness. It integrates a LoRA into the diffusion model to embed the editing prompt's CLIP text embedding directly into the model's weights. An extractor then recovers this embedding from the image pixels alone. This semantic payload explains the edit, while the weight-integrated design makes it hard to detect and isolate even under full white-box access. Two techniques make this possible: a velocity-alignment anchor that preserves edit quality, and a specially designed frequency filter that keeps the watermark imperceptible yet recoverable and robust. On the MagicBrush dataset, our extractor achieves $86\%$ top-1 accuracy in a 200-way prompt retrieval, versus $20\%$ for prompt inversion.
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All authors Bo-Han Kung, Futa Waseda, Ching-Chun Chang, Isao Echizen, Shang-Tse Chen

Computation and Language

How Do Language Models Represent and Use Phonological Information for Allomorph Selection?

Language models are trained on tokenized text that obscures the sound structure of words, yet they reliably produce morphemes whose form is phonologically conditioned. It remains unclear whether they rely on item-specific memorization or rule-like generalization and, if the latter, how that generalization is implemented. We therefore ask whether this phonological condition is represented within language models and how it is causally used for allomorph selection. For the English indefinite article a/an, we show that the phonological condition is encoded along a single linear direction in trigger-token embeddings, that this direction causally drives article selection in token-level wug tests, and that, at the article-prediction position, the model forecasts the upcoming trigger token and uses the forecasted trigger's phonological feature to choose the article. We then ask whether this rule-like generalization extends beyond English article selection, both to allomorph selection in other languages and to explicit phonological judgment. Together, these results provide a mechanistic account of phonologically conditioned allomorph selection in language models, and dissociate this generation-time ability from explicit metalinguistic judgments.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from eess.SP

Wireless Foundation Models: State-of-the-Art and Open Challenges

Wireless foundation models (WFMs) have emerged as a promising approach for learning reusable representations from large-scale wireless data and adapting them to downstream tasks. However, the rapidly growing literature remains fragmented across modalities, pretraining objectives, architectures, adaptation strategies, and evaluation protocols, making it difficult to assess progress toward broadly transferable models. This survey provides a systematic analysis of WFMs for physical-layer applications. We first introduce the main WFM design components, including pretraining, backbone architectures, and downstream adaptation. We then organize the literature into five physical-layer task families: signal recognition and demodulation, channel representation learning, RF sensing and localization, beam management, and spectrum sensing and monitoring, while separately examining multi-task PHY models. Across these categories, we analyze how existing models are pretrained, adapted, and evaluated, with particular attention to downstream task diversity and the distinction between in-distribution, partial-shift, and out-of-distribution transfer. Our analysis shows that current WFMs provide increasing evidence of reusable wireless representations, but this evidence varies considerably across task families and evaluation settings. Differences in datasets, modalities, architectures, pretraining objectives, adaptation protocols, and distribution shifts make it difficult to determine which design choices drive transfer and generalization. We conclude by identifying open directions for improving data availability, evaluation rigor, generalization, efficient adaptation, and real-world deployment, providing a unified framework for understanding the current WFM landscape and the requirements for developing more reusable foundation models for future physical-layer wireless systems.
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All authors Alonso M. Pacheco Huachaca, Juan J. Rodriguez Rodriguez, Ahmed Aboulfotouh, Nelson L. S. da Fonseca, Carlos A. Astudillo, Hatem Abou-Zeid

Artificial Intelligence

FinalityBench: An Effect-Level Benchmark for Agent Decisions Under Delayed and Conflicting Financial Finality

A merchant's payment processor, ledger, ERP and bank feed are updated by messages that get delayed, duplicated, dropped and reordered, so for minutes at a time the four hold contradictory beliefs about the same order. An agent resolving the exception must decide whether to ship goods, re-submit a capture, refund or wait, knowing some of those cannot be undone. We present FinalityBench, an executable benchmark for that decision. It keeps a hidden canonical event log and derives each system's view from a separately faulted delivery stream, so disagreement follows from specified fault semantics rather than being authored. Grading is on executed monetary effects: an episode is scored by the merchant's terminal economic position, relative to a privileged reference told when the pending capture resolves. The corpus of 321 tasks includes 45 twin pairs (90 tasks): tasks whose four system views are identical at the decision instant, whose authoritative probes both return unknown, and whose eventual correct dispositions differ. That snapshot indistinguishability is checked under every evaluation seed rather than assumed; equivalence over all interaction traces is not claimed. Over 14,445 graded episodes from nine programmatic policies, ranking by single-task accuracy and by paired loss disagree in 7 places: a ship-on-first-sign policy is second-best by accuracy at 65.7% and worst in the suite by paired loss, because it cannot tell the two members apart. A runtime gating irreversible actions on an authoritative finality probe reaches 85.4% and, unlike every polling policy, loses nothing to pass^5; its residual loss is almost entirely one archetype, which prices finality information directly. Language models reach the same exact rate as the hand-written gate on a stratified subset, lose about twice as much money, and discover the finality-gating strategy without being told it.
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Hardware Architecture

Sustainable Edge Vision via Empirically Calibrated DVFS: Eliminating Thermal Throttling on Passively Cooled Hardware

Passive cooling eliminates the energy overhead and mechanical failure modes of fans, making it attractive for edge deployment, yet sustained Deep Neural Network (DNN) inference on passively cooled edge Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) is bottlenecked by thermal throttling. To address this, we propose an empirically calibrated, state-aware Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) scheduler. Unlike heuristic-driven controllers, our methodology utilizes time-domain guards and absolute temperature bounds, with derivative triggers acting as safeguards against sharp thermal spikes. Evaluated on a passively cooled Raspberry Pi 5 running YOLOv8n, our scheduler eliminates all observed thermal throttling events during sustained 30-minute workloads. It outperforms a temperature-only reactive baseline by achieving a 6.8% higher frame rate (Cohen's d = 8.73) while consuming 1.9% less energy per frame. Furthermore, our optimized passive scheduling surpasses an actively cooled reference system in energy efficiency (Joules/frame), though active cooling remains superior for raw throughput. Through isolated ablations, we show that the dwell guard is necessary for run-to-run reproducibility. Finally, exploratory boundary probes indicate that the passive operating envelope closes at ambient temperatures ($\ge 27^\circ$C) where nonlinear leakage defeats DVFS-based control. These results indicate that, within the mapped envelope, correct scheduling can make mechanical cooling unnecessary for sustained edge inference on this platform.
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Artificial Intelligence

Model Retirement Creates Reproducibility Risk in Biomedical AI Publications

Background. Large language models (LLMs) are being adopted in biomedical research at a rapid and accelerating pace, yet commercial services that host many widely used models operate under deprecation schedules that can complicate scientific reproducibility. Methods. We searched PubMed for original research articles from 2022 through March 2026 that applied a specific LLM to a biomedical task. An extraction agent identified model names from 61,077 article abstracts with human reviewers validating a subset for extraction accuracy. Extracted model names were normalized to canonical model identifiers. Lifecycle data (release date, retirement date, status) were compiled for the 50 most frequently used models. Results. We identified 8,931 paper-model mentions spanning 5,242 unique publications after restricting the analysis to the 50 most frequently used models. Among these mentions, 77.7% cited a commercial closed-weight model. Overall, 42% involved a model that was already retired by the time of official publication or is scheduled to retire within two years of publication. The median interval from publication to model retirement was 538 days. Conclusion. Many biomedical publications using LLMs are on a trajectory toward computational non-reproducibility after publication. Model deprecation should be treated as a core reporting and preservation issue for biomedical research.
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All authors Nathan Wolfrath, Meghan Conroy, Thomas Kosten, Dave Bell, Bhabishya Neupane, Jonah Kindel, Anjishnu Banerjee, Priya Deshpande, Bradley Taylor, Anai N. Kothari

Computer Vision

LookThere! Sparse Vision by Reinforced Selection

Vision transformers typically treat every image token as equally important, yet for most tasks in computer vision only a fraction are needed. Adaptive computation methods accelerate inference by choosing which tokens to process, but existing methods struggle at extreme sparsity and require heuristics that may not generalize like token diversity and attention scores. We address these limitations with LookThere, achieving a new pareto frontier in performance-compute trade-offs through an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework that jointly trains a shallow input selector and a deep representation extractor. The selector learns where to look and the extractor learns what to see, together saving computation by selecting only what is worth processing for a given task without relying on auxiliary signals. We show that LookThere only selects the task-specific input, excelling at sparse recognition in high-resolution settings (traffic signs, billiards), and maintaining accuracy with as little as 0.2% of the input. It generalizes across tasks and models, including global recognition (ImageNet classification), local recognition (ADE20K segmentation), zero-shot classification (by distillation), and regression (counting). Across all settings, LookThere surpasses state-of-the-art selection to provide a general and scalable framework for specialized and efficient adaptive computation.
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All authors Sreehari Rammohan, Yousef Yassin, Anthony Fuller, Junfeng Wen, Carl Vondrick, Evan Shelhamer

Artificial Intelligence

SQL-Zero: Self-Evolving Text-to-SQL

Training a competitive Text-to-SQL agent usually depends on human-annotated natural-language/SQL pairs, which are expensive, domain-specific, and a bottleneck for scaling to new databases. We show it is possible to train a competitive solver with zero annotated pairs. We introduce SQL-Zero, a proposer-solver self-play in which a challenger and a solver start from the same base LLM and the only ground truth is execution against the database itself. The challenger generates SQL pairs calibrated to the solver's current difficulty (targeting "hard but solvable"), and both roles are updated with GRPO in alternating turns, with a template-level repetition penalty on the challenger to prevent diversity collapse. Training on BIRD databases with no labels, self-play improves over the zero-shot base on BIRD dev by 6.6 points at 3B and 7.3 points at 7B. It also scores higher than a matched control trained under the same recipe on human BIRD gold over the same databases, although an exact paired test does not resolve that margin. Transfer depends on scale: at 3B every iteration outperforms the base on unseen Spider databases and under lexical perturbation (Spider-Syn), where it also degrades less than the matched BIRD-gold control, whereas at 7B only the first iteration preserves transfer.
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All authors Daniel Machado Pedrozo, Julia Soares Dollis, Bryan Lincoln Marques de Oliveira, Vinicius Alboneti Aguiar, Sávio Salvarino Teles de Oliveira, Telma Woerle de Lima Soares

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from astro-ph.HE

A Differentiable Neural Surrogate for Photon Propagation in Neutrino Telescopes

Large-volume neutrino telescopes infer neutrino properties from Cherenkov light, but simulating the transport of billions of photons through highly scattering ice or water is computationally costly. We introduce candela, a differentiable SIREN neural field that learns the photon Green's function of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a cubic-kilometer detector embedded in Antarctic glacial ice. Given a point-like energy deposit and sensor, it predicts the expected photon yield and full arrival-time distribution at the sensor. Complete events are simulated by decomposing charged-particle energy deposits into point-like sources and superposing their predicted sensor responses. Trained on Monte-Carlo simulations, candela generates events $50$–$100\times$ faster than existing methods, with cost scaling only weakly with neutrino energy. It keeps median yields within $2\%$ of the MC expectation and timing distributions at the MC statistical floor across six photon-count decades. The model also provides end-to-end gradients with respect to event parameters and opens a path toward optimizing scattering-medium properties, which often dominate systematic uncertainties in neutrino telescopes.
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All authors Felix J. Yu, Berthy T. Feng, Nicholas Kamp, Carlos A. Argüelles

Artificial Intelligence

Predicting Spatiotemporal Mobile Sensing-Based PM2.5 Concentrations Using Low-Rank Adapted Spatially Attentive Graph Neural Network

Urban air quality can vary significantly along transit corridors, necessitating high-resolution monitoring. This work introduces a novel mobile-sensing dataset from Surat, Gujarat, India, comprising PM$*{2.5}$ concentrations, meteorological variables (temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction), and land-use features. To represent the spatiotemporal data as a graph, two node-definition strategies were used: (i) uniform segmentation (200–400~m intervals) and (ii) DBSCAN clustering to adaptively group dense observations. For each node, rolling mean and standard deviation of meteorological variables were computed. To model this high-dimensional data, we propose a SA-GNN for fine-grained, short-term PM$*{2.5}$ forecasting and hotspot identification. We compared SA-GNN with LSTM, RNN, GRU, and ANN models. These models performed well on low-resolution data but had difficulty capturing rapidly changing patterns in urban air quality. SA-GNN employs cluster-specific GRUs to capture localized temporal dependencies and a Graph Attention Network to learn spatial heterogeneity. This hybrid architecture effectively models rapid fluctuations and complex spatial interactions. On our dataset, SA-GNN achieved $R^2 = 0.95$, RMSE $= 6.8$, and MAE $= 4.2~\si{\micro\gram\per\meter\cubed}$, outperforming all baseline models. Combining spatial clustering with adaptive attention significantly improves forecasting, enabling real-time, fine-grained monitoring and supporting personalized exposure tracking and timely alerts for healthier cities.
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All authors Om Chiddarwar, Priyanka Mandal, Praveen Kumar Chandaliya, Shriniwas Arkatkar

Computer Vision

Enhancing Multimodal Emotion Recognition via Multi-Feature Encoding and Attention-Based Fusion

Multimodal emotion recognition has attracted growing interest due to its importance in human-computer interaction, remote education, and healthcare. This paper proposes a novel multimodal emotion recognition framework that integrates rich audio and visual feature extraction with an attention-based fusion strategy. For audio, we extract three complementary feature types: semantic embeddings from Wav2Vec2, MFCC features, and statistical acoustic descriptors such as pitch, energy, and rhythm. These are aligned and fused via a BiLSTM to capture temporal dependencies. For video, we propose a ResNet50-BiLSTM architecture that combines deep residual learning and sequential modeling to extract expressive spatiotemporal features from facial sequences. To enhance multimodal synergy, we introduce a feature-level fusion mechanism based on multi-head attention, allowing the model to adaptively weigh contributions across modalities. Experiments conducted on the MELD and IEMOCAP datasets demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms baselines in both accuracy and robustness. Furthermore, ablation studies show that the attention-based fusion strategy significantly improves performance in unbalanced data settings. Our findings suggest that the proposed framework effectively captures diverse emotional cues from speech and visual expressions, and offers a practical and generalizable approach for real-world multimodal emotion recognition tasks.
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All authors Xu Lin, Ke Wang, Hui Kang, Xinying Wang

Computer Vision

Retinal OCTA Phenotyping with LLM Reporting for Alzheimer's Disease

Early identification of Alzheimer's disease (AD) remains challenging because established assessment methods can be costly, resource-intensive, or unsuitable for population-scale screening. Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) provides non-invasive visualization of retinal microvasculature, but existing approaches often require diagnostic labels and provide limited measurement-level interpretation. We present an explainable OCTA pipeline that integrates annotation-aware vessel segmentation, layer-specific vascular biomarker extraction, label-free phenotyping, and measurement-grounded LLM reporting. Using 117 ROSE-1 images from 39 subjects, we apply annotation-matched segmentation models to superficial vascular complex (SVC), deep vascular complex (DVC), and combined SVC+DVC representations. The models achieve ROC-AUC values of 0.916-0.970 and Dice scores of 0.695-0.781. Six density and fractal-dimension biomarkers form subject-level profiles for exploratory clustering. Analysis of nine held-out subjects identifies an internally consistent lower-density, lower-fractal-dimension phenotype, although the absence of diagnostic labels prevents clinical interpretation. Reports generated using GPT, Gemini, and Llama are evaluated for measurement grounding, citation faithfulness, and diagnostic caution. Overall, the framework provides a transparent, non-diagnostic connection between retinal vascular measurements, exploratory phenotyping, and evidence-linked interpretation for Alzheimer's research.
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Information Theory

Decoding Error Probability of the Random Code Ensemble over the Erasure Channel

In this paper, we provide explicit formulas for the average decoding error probabilities of the ensemble of all $(n,M)_q$ codes over the erasure channel under unambiguous, list and maximum-likelihood decoding principles. Moreover, we derive the asymptotic error exponents for the ensemble of all $(n,q^{Rn})_q$ codes.
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Numerical Analysis

A class of high-order discontinuous-Galerkin methods satisfying infinitely many entropy conditions with provable error estimates and strong convergence for general nonlinear conservation laws

We propose a novel framework for deriving semi-discrete discontinuous-Galerkin (DG) methods using operator semigroups for scalar conservation laws, then apply it to construct a class of high-order OFDG-type schemes [13] satisfying infinitely many local entropy inequalities with general E-fluxes on non-uniform meshes. Such schemes are further generalized to systems of conservation laws in any number of space dimensions by using entropy stable numerical fluxes in the sense of [1]. Finally, we prove optimal error estimates for smooth solutions to nonlinear scalar conservation laws, and prove strong convergence for discontinuous solutions to strictly convex conservation laws via compensated compactness.
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Information Theory

The Cross-Correlation Distribution of the Niho-Type Decimation $d=4(2^m-1)+1$

The cross-correlation problem is a classical problem in sequence design. In this paper, we determine the cross-correlation distribution of the Niho-type decimation $d=4(2^m-1)+1$ over $\mathbb F_{2^{2m}}$ for every positive integer $m$. With $q=2^m$, this is equivalent to determining the distribution of the number of roots in $U_{q+1}$ of $f_a(x)=x^7+ax^4+\bar a x^3+1$ for $a\in\mathbb F_{q^2}$, where $U_{q+1}=\{x\in\mathbb F_{q^2}:x^{q+1}=1\}$. The main difficulty is to count the four-element subsets of $U_{q+1}$ that may occur as root sets of $f_a$. We normalize such subsets by their product and study the resulting condition through the associated resolvent. This reduces the required enumeration to several equations over $\mathbb F_q$, which are evaluated by character sums and Kloosterman sums. The remaining mixed Kloosterman sum is related to a Kloosterman sum over $\mathbb F_{2^{2m}}$ and is evaluated using a theorem of Carlitz. Consequently, we obtain explicit formulas for all the frequencies in the cross-correlation distribution.
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Software Engineering

Beyond Code Generation: Reliability, Verification, and Cost Economics in the Agentic Software Development Lifecycle

AI coding systems are moving from autocomplete and chat toward agents that can inspect repositories, edit multiple files, run tools, write tests, open pull requests, and work for long periods with limited supervision. This capability changes the bottleneck in software delivery. Recent field studies show meaningful gains in coding activity, but newer evidence also shows that those gains attenuate sharply between writing code and shipping reliable software. Review, integration, testing, security, deployment, and production operations remain constraining stages, while the economics are shifting from predictable per-seat licensing toward variable token, tool, sandbox, CI, and rework costs. This paper synthesizes peer-reviewed software-engineering research, university studies, benchmark audits, production reports from major technology companies, developer telemetry, and cost-management evidence released primarily from 2024 through September 2026. No new model experiment is claimed; numerical findings remain attributed to their original studies. The synthesis proposes four engineering concepts: the Agentic SDLC Throughput Paradox, Production-Qualified Change (PQC), the Verification Tax, and an Agentic SDLC Control Plane that allocates autonomy subject to cost, reliability, and human-attention budgets. An evidence-based horizon then maps today's supervised agents to future policy-bounded software factories. The central research question shifts from how much code an agent can generate to how much production-qualified value an engineering system can deliver per dollar, per reviewer-hour, and per unit of operational risk.
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Software Engineering

How Developers Discuss Generative AI: A Longitudinal Study of the Visual Studio Code Community

Generative AI tools such as GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, and coding agents have rapidly become part of everyday software development, yet little is known about how mainstream open source communities discuss them in practice. This paper presents a longitudinal analysis of generative-AI-related discussions in the Visual Studio Code (VS Code) GitHub repository, using 43,806 candidate issues created between January 2021 and June 2026. To improve corpus quality, we combined keyword retrieval with semantic relevance filtering, yielding a filtered corpus of 25,227 AI-related issues. We applied BERTopic to the retrieved corpus to identify discussion topics, using the filtered corpus for theme validation and a robustness re-clustering, and analyzed their evolution over time using monthly prevalence and Mann-Kendall trend tests. The results show that developer discussions are dominated by practical concerns regarding the operation of AI-assisted development environments, including agent management, configuration, reliability, authentication, and billing, whereas risks frequently emphasized in survey-based studies, such as hallucination and licensing, rarely surface in this venue. This suggests that discussions of generative AI in the VS Code issue tracker primarily focus on operational aspects of AI-assisted software development. Furthermore, discussions evolved from AI-assisted code completion toward conversational and agent-based development, reflecting the increasing integration of generative AI into software development workflows. These findings suggest that GitHub Issues provide a practical, workflow-oriented perspective on generative AI that complements survey-based studies of developer perceptions.
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All authors Panida Rumriankit, Akito Monden, Hiroki Inayoshi, Pattara Leelaprute, Bundit Manaskasemsak, Kundjanasith Thonglek, Arnon Rungsawang

Human-Computer Interaction

Beyond Prompt-to-App: Accountable Translation in Teacher-Facing Agentic Authoring

Natural-language app builders let domain experts create software, but their pipelines transform professional intent across compilation, generation, checking, and approval. We report a bounded trace study of a teacher-facing agentic authoring system. Evidence comprises six eligible build attempts across three accounts; a separate corpus of 37 workshop units from 23 display names contextualizes commitments without person-level linkage. Compiled specifications added governance requirements, while downstream representations sometimes normalized case-specific learning relations. Two drafts met a stored package/security threshold despite analyzer reservations and unresolved correspondence to their briefs; four attempts in one account produced no usable payload, and repair messages did not translate internal terms into domain-legible revisions. We develop accountable translation as an analytic framework for making consequential changes attributable, inspectable, scoped in validation, and contestable. It extends HCI accounts of traceability and end-user debugging by locating professional authority and repair rights across heterogeneous technical and organizational handoffs.
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All authors Nizam Kadir, Wei Ting Liow, Sumbul Khan, Lay Kee Ang

Artificial Intelligence

Train What You Deploy:Token-Faithful Post-Training of a Production Coding

Existing post-training pipelines for coding and terminal agents suffer severe token and control fidelity errors: simplified training environments mismatch production deployments, and offline token reconstruction from agent logs distorts original prompts and conflates policy calls with background model operations. We present a fidelity-aware training coupling framework that retains trainer-side sampling over original prompts, eliminates spurious model calls via a negotiated training protocol, and restricts loss computation to verifiable token spans with closed-failure guarantees. We further propose Certified Divergence Proximal Policy Optimization (C-DPPO), which establishes tight two-sided TV certification bounds, adaptive-K rules, budget-aware sequence guarantees, and error-robust policy masking atop standard DPPO. Evaluated on matched Baize5B and Baize10B models with identical training and test protocols on TMax-100, C-DPPO yields a consistent +3.0-point performance gain over standard DPPO across model scales. Certificate audits validate the reliability and full operational coverage of our certified training pipeline.
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All authors Cheng Li, Jiexiong Liu, Yixuan Chen, Chi Hong

Computation and Language

Controlling and Assessing Appropriate Persona Use in LLM-based Dialogue Generation

In persona-based dialogue generation (PDG), LLMs often overuse persona attributes by incorporating them regardless of dialogue context, resulting in unnatural responses. Despite its practical significance, the underlying causes remain unexplored, with no method to mitigate this problem or metric to assess the appropriateness of persona use. To address these issues, we first conduct a comprehensive analysis of LLM-based PDG, revealing that LLMs exhibit a systematic bias to incorporate all given persona attributes, and that existing metrics fail to capture contextual appropriateness. Building on these findings, we propose Self-CONtrastive Persona Overuse Suppression (SCONPOS) to mitigate overuse by directly intervening in LLMs' internal representations at the prompt encoding stage, without requiring any response generation. We further propose the Persona Appropriateness Score (PAS), a novel metric that penalizes both overuse and underuse. Experimental results demonstrate that SCONPOS systematically reduces overuse, and PAS captures the contextual appropriateness of persona use.
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Machine Learning

WEECFP-SuRGE: A Position-Aware Substructure Encoding Method for Molecular Property Prediction

Computational molecular property prediction requires representations that capture local chemistry, long-range interactions, and molecular topology. Conventional fingerprints provide efficient local substructure features, whereas learned graph and sequence models can represent broader context but often rely on pretraining or three-dimensional conformers. We introduce Wide Encoded Extended Connectivity Fingerprints (WEECFP) with Substructure Rotary Graph-distance Encoding (SuRGE), a tokenized hierarchical Morgan representation in which graph-distance-dependent rotations are applied at the input and within transformer self-attention. Across MoleculeNet and the Therapeutic Data Commons ADMET benchmarks, WEECFP-SuRGE is competitive with recent pretrained and geometry-aware methods without external pretraining or conformer generation. We also show that the rotated token representation remains structurally informative. A guided confirmed-handshake overlap procedure reconstructs the correct constitutional isomer for 92.6% of a 4,200-molecule self-library evaluation. Together, the predictive and reconstruction results indicate that WEECFP-SuRGE preserves local substructure identity while making relative topology available to the model.
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Information Theory

Ultra-High Resolution Method for Multipath Within a Co-Delay-Doppler Bin in DFT-P-OCDM

Communication systems can reuse their transmitted signals for sensing without dedicated radar transmissions. For an established DFT-preprocessed orthogonal chirp division multiplexing (DFT-P-OCDM) waveform, this task becomes difficult when several physical paths in a doubly selective channel fall into the same co-delay-Doppler bin. In this case, the number of resolvable delay classes inferred from the pilot may be smaller than the number of physical paths within the co-bin. This mismatch increases the difficulty of path number determination, fractional Doppler offset estimation, and channel reconstruction. We derive a pointwise relationship between the input and output in the DFT preprocessed Fresnel (DPF) domain for doubly selective channels with multiple paths within the co-delay-Doppler bin. Based on this input and output relation, we propose the two stage ultra high resolution (TSUR) framework. The first stage uses pilots of the phase progression to estimate delay, while the second stage uses the leakage samples to estimate the Doppler and the number of paths within each delay class. Furthermore, we derive CRLBs and analyze how the pilot configuration trades sensing resolution and communication recovery. Simulation results demonstrate that TSUR resolves same delay paths within a co-delay-Doppler bin, remains robust to exist delay offsets, and achieves lower fractional Doppler estimation errors than sequential extraction and off-grid baselines.
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Artificial Intelligence

ERPBench: Evaluating LLM Agents for Enterprise Decision-Making Across Competitive Market Ecologies

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly proposed for enterprise workflows, yet existing evaluations rarely test whether business-decision conclusions transfer across competitive market ecologies. We introduce ERPBench, an execution-instrumented benchmark for enterprise decision agents in a six-round Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) simulation with coupled pricing, production, procurement, inventory, finance, and shared-market competition. ERPBench evaluates the same 100 fixed problems in two matched competitive market ecologies: Solo, where each evaluated LLM agent competes against fixed rule-based opponents, and Arena, where six evaluated LLM agents compete in a shared market. Across six model families, this yields 1,200 model-level trajectories spanning 7,200 decision rounds. Under the observed service configuration, the leading model differs between ecologies: DeepSeek leads in Solo (252.29M mean valuation; mean rank 1.67), whereas Gemini leads in Arena (263.95M; 1.76). The two ecologies identify the same task-level winner on only 21 of 100 problems, and Gemini's bottom-rank rate falls from 22 % to 0 % in Arena. ERPBench supports paired evaluation of whether enterprise-agent rankings transfer across competitive market ecologies, supplemented by aggregate execution-intervention analysis. Code and benchmark resources are available in our https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/erp-bench.
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All authors Xinran Zhang, Pengrui Lu, Lyumanshan Ye, Pengfei Liu

Artificial Intelligence

Harness-agnostic detection and immunization of reward hacking in self-evolving language models

Self-evolving language models improve by proposing candidate updates and keeping whatever raises a visible score. When that score is an imperfect proxy for the capability one actually wants, sustained selection widens the gap between the two. This is reward hacking. We introduce HackProbe, a monitor that attaches to an arbitrary self-evolving loop through two black-box hooks, with no access to weights or activations. It keeps a secret, distribution-fixed comparison core, whose frozen distribution makes its capability proxy comparable across generations, alongside a rotated fresh layer that hardens the bank against co-adaptation. Four tests built on that proxy cover the level gap, a scale-aligned divergence with online change-point detection, capability stagnation, and a conditional confidently-wrong rate; a Sidak correction turns them into a calibrated family-wise p-value. Diagnosis alone recovers nothing, so a risk-aware immunization layer reselects an honest candidate from the proposal pool using the core together with a purely structural gaming footprint, disclosing at most log2 Pi bits per generation to the host. We prove a detectability bound that converts a target error rate into an explicit probe-size budget, and we delimit what probe rotation does and does not buy. On a controlled prompt-level host with four injected hacking channels and ground-truth labels, HackProbe reaches 0.763 AUROC against 0.663 for the strongest baseline and cuts the false-positive rate from 0.706 to 0.434. Its bandwidth-limited reselection is the only immunization level that returns more true capability under hacking, 5.2 points on average, than it forfeits on clean runs, 4.7; per-channel effects are mostly not individually significant.
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All authors Rongxin Yang, Yang Liu, Shang Luo, Haoxuan Jia, Chongyang Zhang, Hao Zheng, Yingguang Yang, Yulin Huang, Jianshen Zhang, Yongzhi Qi, Kefu Xu, Congjing Ran, Bin Chong