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Computer Science

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Thursday 8 October

Computation and Language

The "10th Juror": Open-Set Standpoint Screening for Bureaucratic Bias Detection

Yuchen Miao, Zijun Wang, Chang Han et al. (+3 more)

Presupposing the boundaries of bias is itself a form of bias. We study closed-loop bias governance for Dutch government documents, where a system must detect biased language, ground decisions in legal and contextual evidence, rewrite problematic sentences when intervention is warranted, and verify that the rewrite mitigates harm without distorting meaning. Existing methods face three challenges: (i) discriminative classifiers capture surface regularities but lack normative grounding; (ii) zero-shot LLMs often adopt generic viewpoints and over-flag ambiguous administrative language; and (iii) fixed taxonomies inherit the Closed-World Assumption, missing emerging local targets. We propose MARS-Gov, a standpoint-aware multi-agent framework that combines legal retrieval, open-set target screening, specialized jurors, conservative routing, and rewrite verification. When screening finds an uncovered group, MARS-Gov instantiates a dynamic "10th juror" to deliberate outside the fixed panel. On DGDB, MARS-Gov sets a new SOTA with 0.880 F1, outperforming the strongest zero-shot LLM detector by 20.2 points (29.8% relative) and the best supervised Dutch encoder by 6.8 points, while reducing unnecessary interventions to 2.5%. Leave-One-Category-Out (LOCO) evaluation recovers held-out categories with 85.1% Correct@1 and 93.8% Correct@3.
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All authors Yuchen Miao, Zijun Wang, Chang Han, Yurui Shi, Mingtai Zhang, Siyang Xu

Computation and Language

Can a System-One LLM Perform Knowledge Tracing When Few or No Learners Are Logged?

Unggi Lee and Haeun Park

Knowledge tracing (KT) models need many logged learners, so a new course or platform starts without a usable model. In LLM-based KT the LLM generates the answer, which we call System-Two; it is either fine-tuned on the target data or reasons and votes over ten samples, which is slow and gives coarse probabilities. We ask whether an off-the-shelf System-One LLM, which returns a probability for a typed question directly in a single pass, can perform KT when few or no learners are logged. On seven datasets, Jev without any data from the target platform reaches a mean AUC of .706, above the best of 28 deep KT models trained on 8 learners (.689) and above System-Two Thinking-KT on all seven datasets (.650) at about 1/100 of its API cost. Adding examples and a similar-learner statistic from the logged learners (JevKT) raises this to .722; JevKT stays significantly ahead of deep KT up to 16 learners and ahead on average up to 64, and supervised KT catches up between 64 and 128 learners. Among the readers we tested, the gain is specific to Jev, since three other LLMs queried with the byte-identical typed request through the official System-One adapter fall below it on all seven datasets, and reader swaps and contamination checks find no evidence that the input format or memorised data explain the gain. For new learners the advantage holds from their first interactions, whereas on unseen items with all learners logged, deep KT remains ahead.
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Machine Learning

QUILT: Rethinking Sparse-Attention Prefill through Shared Query Execution

Zhenduo Zhao, Qihui Zhou, Mingcong Song et al. (+7 more)

Sparse attention reduces the cost of long-context attention, but existing kernels typically process queries independently, repeatedly loading and dequantizing KV entries shared across queries. We observe substantial overlap in the KV entries selected by neighboring queries, creating opportunities for cross-query reuse. We present QUILT, a workload-aware sparse-attention execution mechanism that jointly processes neighboring queries and reuses shared KV entries to reduce redundant memory traffic and computation. QUILT introduces Shift-and-Compare Set Decomposition (SCSD), which transforms irregular set operations into regular data-parallel primitives suitable for modern accelerators, and pipelines SCSD with attention computation to hide its overhead. Cascaded sharing captures reuse hierarchically at multiple granularities. A tile-aware execution strategy balances sharing granularity with hardware tile utilization and selectively removes low-importance query-specific tails to eliminate underutilized tiles. We evaluate QUILT on LongBench using GLM-5.3 and DeepSeek-3.2 under both tensor and sequence parallelism. Compared with the state-of-the-art sparse-attention kernel, QUILT reduces average kernel latency by up to 55.1% and processed KV data by up to 55.9%, while reducing time-to-first-token (TTFT) latency by up to 36.8% with negligible accuracy degradation.
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All authors Zhenduo Zhao, Qihui Zhou, Mingcong Song, Zhiyi Chen, Chuangguan Ye, Fengfan Hou, Zequn Gong, Jing Li, Hongjie Si, Guoping Long

Machine Learning

Machine Learning Optimization for Enhanced OS Fingerprinting

Jae Sung Kim, Spencer Ekeroth and Jeremy Neale

Operating System (OS) Fingerprinting is a technique that can be used to identify a network's operating systems by evaluating network traffic in the form of TCP/IP packets. This research will explore the effectiveness of passively identifying operating systems on the CIC-IDS2017 dataset, a collection of over 47 gigabytes of pcap files with their corresponding operating systems. This research also proposes a new command line interface, OsirisML, which uses nPrint to preprocess the data into tabular data and XGBoost to apply ML to the data to generate, retrain, and test ML models. When packets are split randomly between training and testing, OsirisML models reach an accuracy of 97.66% on a down-sampled subset of the Friday capture and 84.69% on the entire capture. On the entire Monday capture, which contains no attacks, OsirisML reaches an accuracy of 73.83% and an F-1 score of 79.38%.
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Computation and Language

SFT-as-Context Mitigates Forgetting in Supervised Fine-Tuning

Kenan Tang, Andong Hua, Chengxuan Qian et al. (+2 more)

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) equips large language models (LLMs) with specialized capabilities, but often comes at the cost of forgetting the general capabilities of their parent models (i.e., the pretrained models before fine-tuning). This trade-off is especially limiting for queries that require both specialized and general capabilities. We introduce SFT-as-context, a training-free method in which the parent model uses the SFT model's response as context to answer the query. This allows the parent model to acquire fine-tuned capabilities from the SFT response through in-context learning while preserving its own general capabilities. Across 19 parent-SFT model pairs and 11 benchmarks, SFT-as-context remains close to the SFT models on fine-tuned capabilities, with gaps of only 2.2 and 2.1 percentage points on AIME 2024 and LiveCodeBench and 2.0 macro MAE on NutriBench-English, while staying within 2.2 percentage points of the parent models on general capabilities on average. Remarkably, it can solve queries requiring both fine-tuned and general capabilities, even when neither the parent nor SFT model succeeds alone. This approach also extends beyond parent-SFT pairs: responses from a small open-source SFT model can improve a strong closed-source LLM, outperforming either model alone. Furthermore, we use a Bayesian framework to derive theoretical guarantees that bound the error of SFT-as-context relative to the SFT model on fine-tuned capabilities and to the parent model on general capabilities. In addition, we visualize the attention weights and find that the parent model attends more to useful SFT responses and less to irrelevant ones, suggesting that selective attention helps the parent model use the SFT response through in-context learning.
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All authors Kenan Tang, Andong Hua, Chengxuan Qian, Saket Tiwari, Yao Qin

Sound · Cross-listed from eess.SP

SEER: Source-Conditioned Emotion Enhancement via Retrieval for Cochlear-Implant Speech

Hsing-Hang Chou, Yun-Shao Lin, Ching-Chin Sung et al. (+1 more)

Cochlear implants (CIs) restore speech access but weaken cues needed for vocal emotion recognition. Prior CI-oriented enhancement requires parallel normal/strong recordings and intensity labels. We propose SEER, a retrieval-based framework that learns which same-emotion reference helps each source remain recognizable after CI processing. A source-conditioned retriever learns CI-aware utility from sampled emotional voice conversion outcomes, while uncertainty-guided exploration avoids exhaustive pair evaluation; neither parallel recordings nor intensity labels are required. SEER improves Source macro-F1 at N8 by 7.30 points on RAVDESS and 11.66 points on ESD, with significant ESD gains across N4/N8/N16. Sixteen-listener RAVDESS gains are significant across all conditions. Exhaustive analysis finds an aggregate benefit from stronger references but little effect from matching gender or content.
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All authors Hsing-Hang Chou, Yun-Shao Lin, Ching-Chin Sung, Chi-Chun Lee

Systems and Control

A User-Triggered UAV Dispatching System for Precise and Timely Mountain Search Missions

Mingyang Wang, Yi Hong, Tungchak Lee et al. (+4 more)

Smartphones carried by hikers routinely record routes, locations, and requests for assistance, and these records can provide precise clues for mountain search. However, they are rarely transformed in a direct and timely way into unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) missions that support search and rescue. This paper presents a user-triggered UAV dispatching system that integrates mobile information collection, ground station mission management, and UAV search into a single workflow. In our system, a mobile application is designed to continuously track user records and synchronize these records to the cloud database, thereby initiating all subsequent search events and UAV-dispatch missions. A control platform is developed to retrieve records from the cloud database for operator verification and mission scheduling. A UAV prototype is implemented to execute the approved mission, follow waypoints, report status, relay phone records when available, and record downward-facing video for later inspection. Simulations are conducted for UAV-dispatching missions using a terrain-following flight altitude of $80$~m above ground level and demonstrate successful route generation, ordered waypoint traversal, and return to the launch site for landing of the UAV dispatching. Local software tests verified timeout detection with a 1s threshold and phone-record transfer from the mobile application through the UAV to the ground station. Outdoor trials showed that the UAV could fly autonomously and capture downward-facing imagery in which a person, a nearby footpath, and surrounding vegetation were clearly discernible, providing visual cues for operator assessment and further inspection of the search area.
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All authors Mingyang Wang, Yi Hong, Tungchak Lee, Ashwin Sundar, Kevin Hung, Qubeijian Wang, Yalin Liu

Artificial Intelligence

GameCommBench: A Unified Benchmark and Type-Aware Evaluation for AI-Generated Game Commentary

Qirui Zheng, Zhengteng Lin, Yunyi Xiao et al. (+7 more)

Game commentary is an open-ended generation task requiring multimodal perception, strategic reasoning, and contextual knowledge. Existing AI-Generated Game Commentary (AI-GGC) studies remain fragmented across games, modalities, and evaluation protocols, while overlap-based or holistic evaluators fail to capture the functional heterogeneity of commentary. We introduce GameCommBench, a unified benchmark spanning board games, sports, and esports, with commentary aligned to heterogeneous game contexts and annotated by commentary type. We further propose Type-Aware Commentary Evaluation (TACE), a structured framework for evaluating different types of commentary. We then validate TACE for reliability and human agreement, and use it to benchmark representative AI commentators. Results reveal non-uniform capability profiles, with live observation and strategic analysis emerging as major bottlenecks. Together, GameCommBench and TACE provide a diagnostic foundation for comparable and interpretable AI-GGC evaluation.
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All authors Qirui Zheng, Zhengteng Lin, Yunyi Xiao, Junhao Li, Keyuan Cheng, Xingbo Wang, Yongyi Wang, Lingfeng Li, Yunlong Lu, Wenxin Li

Artificial Intelligence

Balancing Reference Guidance and Free Generation in Trajectory Rollouts for Reasoning RL

Hanyu Wang, Nakul Agarwal, Hossein Nourkhiz Mahjoub et al. (+4 more)

A verified reference solution provides a correct trajectory for training a reasoning model. Alternatively, a prefix of the reference can guide the model in generating a trajectory of its own. How much reference guidance should we provide? We study this question through prefix continuation, where the model continues from a reference prefix and keeps the resulting trajectory if it passes verification, falling back to the reference otherwise. Since both procedures produce correct trajectories, we compare their distributions with the ideal distribution, the model's own distribution conditioned on successful verification. For one continuation, we derive the KL divergence in closed form, which, up to a bounded term, decreases with the product of the probability of generating a different correct trajectory and the reference surprisal, the negative log probability of the reference suffix given the prefix. Since a longer prefix tends to raise the former but lowers the latter, continuation success alone does not determine the preferred amount of guidance. From this analysis, we learn a prefix selector shared across training questions from continuation outcomes, without estimating success probabilities or additional generation. The resulting Adaptive Reference Guidance (ARG) constructs correct trajectories within a fixed generation budget, and we apply it to all-failure groups in Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Experiments on Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B across five mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that ARG achieves the highest aggregate pass@12 among the evaluated methods with competitive average sampled accuracy.
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All authors Hanyu Wang, Nakul Agarwal, Hossein Nourkhiz Mahjoub, Ehsan Moradi Pari, Makoto Fukushima, Jinghui Chen, Vaishnav Tadiparthi

Formal Languages and Automata · Cross-listed from math.GR

Conjugacy problems in higher-dimensional Thompson groups

Ville Salo

We prove that topological conjugacy of elements of the Brin–Thompson group $nV$ is undecidable for every $n\geq2$. From a Turing machine $T$, the reduction produces two elements of $nV$, which are conjugate by an involution in $nV$ if $T$ halts on the empty tape. If $T$ does not halt on the empty tape, the topological dynamics of the two group elements are distinguished by their visits to minimal subsystems of the set of (germ-)aperiodic points. In these groups, and any finitely-generated supergroups inside the homeomorphism group of Cantor space, we also obtain undecidability of the Whitehead problem (the problem of being in the same automorphism orbit), and undecidability of group-theoretic conjugacy.
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Artificial Intelligence

When Interfaces Speak: Data-Aware Generative UI Harness for Active Interaction

Xiaolong Li, Xiaohan Xu, Jinyang Li et al. (+5 more)

Most human-agent interaction today remains text-based. Natural language can impose cognitive overload, ambiguity, information chaos, and slow input for complex tasks; ephemeral generative UIs can present structured information and guide users toward task completion. We propose GenUI-Harness, a multi-agent harness pairing a Tool Agent for information retrieval and task execution with a GUI Coder Agent that identifies ambiguities and generates front-end code for structured interfaces. Training the coder with reinforcement learning is challenging: verifiable rewards for interactive UI generation require costly execution, while LLM-as-a-Judge rewards are prone to reward hacking. We address the first challenge with Dynamic UX, a lightweight package for dynamic interaction and reward collection in a single sandbox, and the second with Reward Auditor, a meta-reward mechanism that monitors reward distributions and distills diagnostic patterns into a shared rubric and scoring specification. We introduce UI-TAU Bench, a benchmark for active human-agent interaction through generated UI code, built on 10 real-world domain databases constructed from public data sources and based on Tau-Bench tool-use settings, with Lite (300 tasks) and Full (1,000 tasks) splits. GenUI-Harness achieves an average Pass@3 gain of 4.48 percentage points over smolagents on Lite. Training with GenUI-Harness improves a 4B backbone from 9.33% to 58.00% Pass@3, outperforming larger frontier models such as Claude Opus 5 (46.67%). GenUI-Harness also remains robust on ambiguous and non-ambiguous queries. In a reviewer survey comparing communication channels, generated UIs reduce average dialogue rounds from 3.4 to 1.2. These results show that data-aware generative interfaces can support effective task completion and reduce dialogue rounds in evaluated database-backed workflows.
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All authors Xiaolong Li, Xiaohan Xu, Jinyang Li, Xinnuo Xu, Ge Qu, Nan Huo, Jack Williams, Reynold Cheng

Numerical Analysis

Numerical Neural Operator: Connection Between Numerical Analysis and the Operator Learning and Building Discretized Neural Operators from Finite Element Methods

Zecheng Zhang

Operator learning aims to learn mappings between function spaces and has been widely used for PDE-related problems. This raises two fundamental questions. First, is there a connection between standard numerical methods and neural operators, given that both are designed to approximate PDE solution operators? Second, when a neural operator is trained on numerically generated data, does it approximate the underlying infinite dimension operator, the training data themselves, or the discretized numerical scheme used to generate them? A key hypothesis in the paper is that the trained neural operator may mimic the discretized numerical schemes that generate the training data. The hypothesis has been partially and preliminary verified by the linear approximation principle proposed in Chen Chen 1995 paper and the following scaling law papers. However, neural operator approximation from the perspective of numerical discretization remains unexplored. In this work, we consider a class of PDEs and derive neural operator architectures from the numerical schemes. Firstly, the numerical basis functions, such as finite element basis functions, can be approximated or directly constructed by learnable neural networks. Then the finite difference schemes for temporal discretization can be unrolled into iterative neural architectures that generate the coefficients of the basis of the resulting neural operator. By leveraging numerical analysis, we establish convergence error estimates for these numerically derived neural operators. Notably, the network size depends polynomial on the approximation error in $L_2$, improving the nested exponential dependence derived in the general neural operator approximation and aligning with the numerical observations. Finally, numerical experiments demonstrate reduced errors and improved parameter efficiency.
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Robotics

FOCUS: From Privileged States to RGB-D with Controlled Modality Switching and Representation Alignment

Filip Grigorov, Kourosh Darvish and Nandita Vijaykumar

Vision-based reinforcement learning for robotic manipulation is sample-inefficient because RGB-D observations are high-dimensional and noisy. Privileged state information available in simulation can accelerate training, but its absence at test time creates a train-test modality gap. We propose FOCUS, a single-stage PPO framework that trains the critic on privileged state while automatically regulating whether the actor collects rollouts from RGB-D or privileged-state latents. Regulation is driven by the KL divergence between the action distributions induced by the two modalities, while representation alignment encourages consistent action selection across them. Together, these mechanisms limit RGB-D rollouts when the actor's action distributions from RGB-D and privileged-state latents disagree. As they align, RGB-D exposure increases, shifting on-policy training toward the RGB-D inputs used at test time. Across five manipulation tasks, FOCUS raises average test success from 0.71 to 0.93 relative to the strongest RGB-D-at-test baseline on each task. When accounting for each method's complete training pipeline, budget-normalized training-success AUC increases from 0.47 to 0.65. On Pick-and-Place, test success rises from 0.47 to 0.86, while AUC increases from 0.12 to 0.61, a 5.0x improvement in learning efficiency over the fixed interaction budget.
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Artificial Intelligence

OpenProblemBench: Benchmarking AI on Open Problems in the Foundational Theoretical Sciences

Zhiyi Li, Sihan Hu, Tianning Xiao et al. (+4 more)

The next frontier for artificial general intelligence is tackling unresolved scientific problems, calling for benchmarks that assess progress beyond established knowledge. We introduce OpenProblemBench, a benchmark of 82 unresolved problems drawn from the mathematics and theoretical physics literature. Each problem supplies the research context, assumptions, and prior progress needed to investigate the question. We select problems whose proposed solutions admit comparatively clear checks of their decisive mathematical or computational claims. Four evaluator models independently assess the correctness, completeness, and degree of progress of each submission without reference solutions. Across seven evaluated configurations, GPT-6-Astra achieves the highest mean judged solve rate of 14.0%, compared with 5.5-6.7% for the evaluated full-size open models and 2.4-3.7% for Flash models. Case comparisons connect stronger outcomes to changes in problem representation, general arguments that extend beyond finite evidence, and proofs of the steps needed to complete a solution. By grounding evaluation in questions arising from the research literature, OpenProblemBench provides a setting for investigating the capabilities and limitations of AI as a contributor to foundational theoretical science.
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All authors Zhiyi Li, Sihan Hu, Tianning Xiao, Xiansheng Cai, Xiaojun Tan, Youjin Deng, Kun Chen

Computer Vision

MCL: Meta Convolution Layer

Naim Reza, Md Al Amin and Ho Yub Jung

Dynamic convolution enhances convolutional neural networks (CNNs) by adapting kernels to input content, but it expresses the effective kernel as a linear mixture of a small number of basis kernels, which limits expressivity and complicates optimization as the mixture size grows. In this work, we revisit dynamic convolution from a functional perspective and propose the Meta Convolution Layer (MCL), which directly models the convolutional kernel as an input-conditioned function W(x) realized via a high-order polynomial expansion. Leveraging nested residual blocks inspired by deep polynomial networks, MCL implements a structured polynomial meta-network that generates a single input-adaptive kernel, thereby decoupling representational power from the explicit number of mixture kernels and alleviating training instability. MCL is a plug-in addition with standard convolutions and can be seamlessly integrated into both CNN and transformer backbones. Experimental evaluation shows that adding MCL improves the Top-1 accuracy of Resnet- 18, Resnet-50 and ResNet-101 by 6.61%, 3.42% and 3.05% on the ImageNet dataset. Moreover, the proposed method significantly boosts the accuracy of Resnet and Wide-Resnet variants on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets. Additionally, the proposed method outperforms previous methods on fine-grained visual classification tasks using Swin and ViT backbones. These results demonstrate that high-order polynomial kernel generation is a powerful and scalable alternative to linear mixture based dynamic convolution.
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Machine Learning

Dynamics as Code: On Model Compression via Dynamic System

Fan Gao, Wei Su, Juntong Fan et al. (+4 more)

The escalating size of pretrained neural networks has rendered model compression a prerequisite for deployment under stringent memory and compute constraints. With the irrational winding as an example, earlier work introduced a dynamic system (DS) paradigm that reconceptualizes compression as compact weight representation: high-dimensional parameters are encoded by the index of a trajectory produced by a dynamic system, from which the vector is recovered during decompression. This mechanism is fundamentally distinct from pruning, quantization, knowledge distillation, and low-rank decomposition. Along this direction, we prove that under a Diophantine condition, a finite trajectory of \(M = O(\epsilon^{-(d+\nu)})\) states in the irrational winding constitutes an \(\epsilon\)-net over the \(d\)-dimensional weight space, thereby linking state resolution, decompression error, and compression ratio in a predictable manner. Furthermore, we propose a generalized DS-based model compression framework by unifying four DS families—space-filling curves (Hilbert, Peano, Morton/Z-order, Snake), chaotic systems (Lorenz), congruential and pseudo-random generators (LCG, PCG), and low-discrepancy sequences (Halton). Also, we introduce the KD-tree and coordinate-template acceleration to scale to large models as well as outlier identification to control the error. Experiments on ResNet-18 and Qwen2.5-1.5B/Qwen1.5-7B validate that DS-based compression achieves competitive compression ratios without post-hoc retraining, with controllable decompression error and flexible state-space design, establishing it as a principled and practical compression approach.
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All authors Fan Gao, Wei Su, Juntong Fan, Renfeng Peng, Hongyu Liu, Jinqiao Duan, Feng-Lei Fan

Distributed Computing

IAPRepair: In-Network Aggregation Enhanced Proactive Repair for Erasure-Coded Storage System

Lei Liu, Yong Wang, Junqi Chen et al. (+3 more)

Erasure-coded storage provides fault tolerance with substantially lower storage overhead than full replication, but repairing lost or at-risk blocks requires intensive cross-node data transfer. Existing reactive repair schemes start only after a failure, while proactive schemes can move data before failure but commonly treat migration, reconstruction, and network aggregation as loosely coupled operations. As a result, receiver?side bottlenecks, heterogeneous available bandwidth, and limited programmable-switch state continue to constrain repair paral?lelism. This paper presents IAPRepair, an in-network aggre?gation enhanced proactive repair framework for erasure-coded storage. IAPRepair jointly constructs each repair batch, assigns reconstruction providers and replacement nodes according to normalized transmission loads, schedules migration around the remaining receive capacity, and selectively enables in-network aggregation for reconstruction blocks that would otherwise over?load healthy nodes. The selective design reduces receiver-side traffic while retaining migration parallelism and respecting a configurable switch-resource budget. We implement IAPRepair with a Tofino programmable switch and 16 storage nodes, and evaluate it using both a prototype testbed and large-scale simu?lations. Across coding parameters, block sizes, node populations, and multiple STF-node scenarios, IAPRepair reduces repair time by at least 47.83% compared with the evaluated state-of-the-art methods. The results demonstrate that coordinating proactive repair decisions with in-network processing is an effective way to improve repair efficiency under bandwidth heterogeneity.
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All authors Lei Liu, Yong Wang, Junqi Chen, Yangfan Liang, Qian He, Baokang Zhao

Computer Vision

DiscoVL: Unveiling Disentangled C ross-Modal Representation Learning via Orthogonal Adversarial Regularization for V ision-Language Models

Mengping Dong, Jinbao Li and Fei Li

Pre-trained vision-language models excel across varied perception tasks, but adapting them to novel downstream settings without sacrificing generalization remains non-trivial. Existing parameter-efficient prompt learning method often yields inconsistent representations and fails to account for semantic distribution shifts. In this work, we present DiscoVL, a disentangled cross-modal representation learning framework that couples orthogonal adversarial regularization with structured cross-modal alignment for vision-language models. To address the insufficient cross-modal interaction, our DiscoVL designs a multi-branch low-rank residual aligner that decomposes representations into subspaces and enables bidirectional cross-modal feedback between visual and textual streams at each layer. Furthermore, while conventional triplet constraints overfit features to class centroids, we design an orthogonal regularization for adversarial triplet loss, which prevents centroid collapse and substantially boosts generalization. Evaluations on 15 benchmarks demonstrate that DiscoVL delivers consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods for base-to-novel generalization, cross-dataset evaluation, and few-shot learning
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Cryptography and Security

False Claims, Credible Images: A Red-Teaming Benchmark for Commercial Image Generators

Zeyu Ye, Yanchun Li, Sibei He et al. (+8 more)

Image-generation models can now produce text-rich, natural-looking visual artifacts that are hard to distinguish from real-world evidence, such as news reports and textbook pages. Yet, the same capability introduces a new risk: these models can just as easily fabricate visual misinformation. Even commercial models (e.g., GPT-Image-2) readily produce it. Curiously, we find that these models can recognize a claim as false when asked, yet still render that very claim as credible visual evidence. This discrepancy points to a blind spot in current alignment: safeguards judge what an image shows, not what it asserts; however, existing red-teaming benchmarks target conventional harmful content, such as violent or explicit imagery, and say little about where the alignment boundaries lie for visual misinformation, especially in commercial models. To fill this gap, we introduce EpiReal-Bench, the first systematic benchmark for evaluating visual misinformation risks in commercial image generators, comprising 10k false-claim prompts and 10k corresponding generated images that span 10 real-world claim categories and 10 credible visual formats. We further introduce EpiReal-Attack, a skill-guided black-box optimization framework that uses Pareto-based selection and multimodal feedback to identify commands that bypass alignment safeguards while preserving visual realism, textual legibility, and semantic fidelity. Experiments on four commercial models reveal that more than 70% of false-claim prompts elicit images that faithfully depict the corresponding misinformation, and EpiReal-Attack pushes this rate to 95%. Most worryingly, these models are only a click away, and their outputs are cheap to spread yet hard to disbelieve, leaving this dimension of alignment largely unguarded.
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All authors Zeyu Ye, Yanchun Li, Sibei He, Meng Xie, Hangtao Zhang, Xianlong Wang, Li Zeng, Jiahao Chen, Yichen Wang, Junhui Wang, Ziqi Zhou

Computation and Language

Lapras: Latent Reasoning for Time Series Language Models

Yuliang Chen, Yu Yvonne Wu, Patrick Langer et al. (+11 more)

Time Series Language Models (TSLMs) offer a promising path toward time series understanding by reasoning over temporal signals and producing natural language answers and explanations. A common approach is Chain-of-Thought (CoT), which generates step-by-step rationales linking relevant signal patterns to final answers. Although these models learn from reference CoT traces during post-training, generating faithful descriptions of input time series at inference remains challenging. Expressing high-dimensional, continuous temporal representations in discrete language tokens may cause the model to neglect task-relevant patterns or describe them inaccurately. Because later reasoning steps build on these descriptions, early errors propagate, leading to incorrect answers with plausible explanations that are inconsistent with the input signal. We propose Lapras (Latent Post-trained Reasoning Across Series), a post-training framework that equips TSLMs with latent reasoning. A model trained with Lapras reasons through a sequence of continuous thoughts in the joint time series-language space, producing text only for the final answer. It learns this through teacher-student self-distillation, where a teacher trained on CoT reference traces reasons explicitly through text. The student aligns its hidden states with the teacher's at the answer stage, transferring the teacher's reasoning ability into its latent computation. We evaluate Lapras across four TSLM backbones on five time series question answering benchmarks. Lapras improves average F1 by up to 10.79% over explicit CoT while generating 23.9x fewer tokens. Lapras's continuous thoughts can also be decoded into readable reasoning traces via standard language decoding, preserving textual explanations. Together, these results highlight Lapras as a promising post-training paradigm for efficient, effective, and interpretable TSLM reasoning.
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All authors Yuliang Chen, Yu Yvonne Wu, Patrick Langer, Arvind Pillai, Sudarshan Regmi, Martin Maritsch, Juncheng Liu, Robert Jakob, Thomas Kaar, Tess Z. Griffin, Lisa Marsch, Michael V. Heinz, Nicholas C. Jacobson, Andrew Campbell

Machine Learning

Cova-PINN: Cross-Domain Conservation Physics-Informed Neural Network for Fluid-Solid Conjugate Heat Transfer in Complex Geometries

Weizheng Zhang, Xunjie Xie, Hao Pan et al. (+1 more)

Multi-domain physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) flexibly model medium-specific representations to solve fluid–solid conjugate heat transfer (CHT). However, standard multi-domain PINNs enforce governing equations and interface conditions on separately sampled domain supports, which can yield plausible temperature fields but inaccurate end-to-end energy transfer and outlet temperatures. We propose Cova-PINN, a multi-domain PINN framework that aligns conservation support with thermal interaction paths in complex geometries. Cova-PINN jointly optimizes cross-domain composite control-volume balances at the local scale and paired-wall closure at the global exchanger scale. We evaluate Cova-PINN on four triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) heat exchangers and a geometrically distinct DualMS design against CHT-specific, optimization-oriented, and complex-geometry PINN baselines under a common protocol. Relative to the closest baseline, MUSA-PINN-CHT, Cova-PINN reduces average outlet-temperature and device-level closure errors across the four TPMS topologies by $37.7\%$ and $60.2\%$, respectively, while also improving full-field and heat-duty accuracy, with consistent gains on DualMS.
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All authors Weizheng Zhang, Xunjie Xie, Hao Pan, Lin Lu

Cryptography and Security

Accelerating HQC for Post-Quantum TLS 1.3 on x86 IoT Gateways

Jihoon Jang, Hyunju Park, Jebin Kim et al. (+2 more)

Post-quantum TLS at an IoT gateway must protect many device connections without large increases in handshake delay, CPU cost, or network traffic. HQC provides code-based diversity beyond ML-KEM, but its computation and ciphertext sizes can increase these costs. We optimize HQC for x86 processors with AVX2, AVX-512, and the Galois Field New Instructions (GFNI), and integrate the resulting implementations into TLS 1.3. We extend branch-free Toom-Cook/Karatsuba multiplication to AVX-512, accelerate Reed-Solomon decoding with GFNI, improve Reed-Muller decoding, accelerate SHA3-512 and fixed-weight sampling, and port Frobenius additive FFT (FAFFT) multiplication to AVX-512 + GFNI for HQC-5. On an Intel Core i5-1135G7 processor, our AVX2 implementation reduces decapsulation by 11.1-21.5% over the fastest prior AVX2 results. Our AVX-512 implementation reduces key generation by 24.9-29.5%, encapsulation by 10.4-11.1%, and decapsulation by 20.6-26.1% relative to Cabral et al. across the three HQC parameter sets. We evaluate the effects of these implementations on TLS 1.3 handshake latency and server and client CPU costs, as well as the effects of round-trip time (RTT) and bandwidth. In local loopback TLS measurements, our AVX-512 HQC-5 implementation reduces handshake latency from 3.22 ms to 2.92 ms compared with Cabral et al. On a constrained path with 1 Mbit/s bandwidth and an added RTT of 50 ms, the HQC-5 handshake takes 243 ms, compared with 87 ms for ML-KEM-1024. This indicates that HQC public-key and ciphertext sizes, rather than implementation speed, determine the remaining handshake cost on constrained links.
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All authors Jihoon Jang, Hyunju Park, Jebin Kim, Seokhie Hong, Suhri Kim

Computer Vision

TKCAM: Text and Keyframe to Camera Trajectory Generation

Haozhe Yang, Zhiyang Dou, Zekai Gu et al. (+4 more)

Generating high-quality and controllable camera motion is essential for AI-assisted cinematography, video synthesis, and 3D scene understanding. We introduce TKCAM, a Text- and Keyframe-conditioned CAMera-motion synthesis framework based on generative masked modeling. We represent camera dynamics using a 12-dimensional kinematic feature comprising position, velocity, and a continuous rotation representation and discretize them into hierarchical motion tokens via a Residual Vector Quantizer (RVQ). A two-stage masked transformer architecture then learns to reconstruct and refine these tokens, utilizing explicit self- and cross-attention modules for multimodal conditioning. A central feature of our framework is sparse visual keyframe conditioning: users can provide free-form text prompts together with RGB observations at selected timestamps, which provide temporally localized visual guidance for generating coherent in-between trajectories. Furthermore, to advance evaluation standards, we curate RealEstate10K-Cap, a large-scale text-camera dataset, and establish a cross-domain benchmark with a Universal CLaTr Evaluator. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TKCAM surpasses recent state-of-the-art baselines on Fréchet distance (FID), text-motion matching scores, and retrieval metrics (R@K), while additional analyses evaluate temporal smoothness and cross-domain generalization. Code is available at https://github.com/linearalgebrayhz/TKCAM.
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All authors Haozhe Yang, Zhiyang Dou, Zekai Gu, Cheng Lin, Wenping Wang, Yuan Liu, Taku Komura

Computer Vision

Skeleton-Guided Progressive Test-Time Adaptation for Thin Curvilinear Structures

Boa Jang, JunGyu Lee, Gwanho Lee et al. (+2 more)

Accurate segmentation of thin curvilinear structures is vital for various real-world applications, from vessel analysis to road extraction. Yet their intricate geometry makes even minor pixel-wise errors enough to break the global topology, and this structural fragility turns severe domain shifts into catastrophic failures. The difficulty is most acute under cross-modality gaps, where the imaging process itself differs fundamentally between source and target. While test-time adaptation (TTA) offers a practical source-free remedy, existing methods adapt feature statistics and confidence, neither of which constrains connectivity, and thus degrade under such extreme gaps. To address this, we propose Skeleton-Guided Progressive Test-Time Adaptation (SGP-TTA). Progressive Batch Normalization (ProgBN) shifts normalization from frozen source statistics toward current target estimates under a sample-count schedule, so that the source-target balance follows the stage of adaptation rather than a fixed coefficient. Consensus Skeleton Recall (CSR) then derives a structural target from geometrically aligned multi-view predictions and updates only the BN affine parameters to preserve connected structures. Extensive experiments show that SGP-TTA consistently outperforms existing TTA methods in topological connectivity, with the largest margins under cross-modality shift. The project page is available at https://boa-jang.github.io/SGP-TTA.
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All authors Boa Jang, JunGyu Lee, Gwanho Lee, Jinwook Choi, Young-Gon Kim

Networking

Topology-Aware Cooperative Beam-Hopping Scheduling for Efficient Resource Allocation in LEO Satellite Systems

Shuang Zheng, Xing Zhang, Quan Z. Sheng et al. (+1 more)

The dynamic topology and heterogeneous traffic demands of multi-satellite systems present substantial challenges for beam-hopping (BH) resource management. This letter develops a topology-aware cooperative BH framework for multi-satellite systems under partial observability. A lightweight load-balancing scheme first determines the serving relationships, which are then exploited to construct an association-induced satellite-user graph. A two-phase graph neural network (GNN) extracts episode-level topology-aware structural identities for parameter-sharing agents, while a recurrent multi-agent proximal policy optimization (MAPPO) policy handles slot-level dynamics for joint beam scheduling and onboard power control. Simulation results demonstrate notable gains in energy efficiency, throughput, and fairness over the baselines.
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All authors Shuang Zheng, Xing Zhang, Quan Z. Sheng, Wenbo Wang

Sound

Cross-Lingual Speaker Verification with Self-Supervised Pre-Trained Models

Jinghan Peng, Yu Zheng, Weiqiang Wang et al. (+1 more)

Speaker verification (SV) performance degrades under language mismatch due to the entanglement of speaker identity with language-specific acoustic cues. To address this problem, we leverage large-scale self-supervised pre-trained models (PTMs) to learn language-agnostic speaker representations. We utilize PTMs as robust front-end feature extractors, capitalizing on their rich acoustic and linguistic knowledge acquired from vast, diverse audio data. These generalized features are then used to train a downstream speaker embedding network, effectively disentangling speaker identity from language-specific characteristics. We validate our approach on the TidyVoice2026 benchmark, which benchmarks SV under language mismatch. Our proposed system (team T02) achieves equal error rates (EERs) of 2.21% on tv26_eval-A and 2.99% on tv26_eval-U.
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All authors Jinghan Peng, Yu Zheng, Weiqiang Wang, Jian Liu

Formal Languages and Automata

An Improved Lower Bound for Separating Words by Permutation Automata

Chen Xu and Kenneth Regan

We prove that some pairs of binary words of every sufficiently large prescribed length $n$ require $\Omega(\log n\log\log n)$ states to separate by a deterministic finite automaton whose letters act as permutations. We obtain this bound by constructing distinct equal-length positive binary words that form an identity of $\mathfrak{S}_k$ of length $\exp(O(k/\log k))$. This improves the previous lower bound $(3/2-o(1))\log n$ of Bulatov, Karpova, Shur, and Startsev (arXiv:1609.03199). The proof combines a positive-word construction with a cover of permutation orders. Consecutive segments of prime powers reduce the covering problem to enumerating sets of positive integers with bounded sum. The required estimates use the central binomial coefficient and the classical asymptotic formula for partitions into distinct parts. An appendix gives sharper constants and lower-order terms using a greedy cover and a quantitative prime number theorem.
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Computer Vision

Continuous Ground-Truth Construction and a Recovery Policy for Air–Water Robotic Tracking

Jiangong Xiao, Zhe Sun, Kanzhong Yao et al. (+5 more)

Visual tracking across the air-water interface is challenged by splashes, bubbles, refraction, reflections, and abrupt appearance changes that can temporarily invalidate observations. This setting poses two coupled difficulties: first, for evaluation, image-only annotation cannot reliably describe the target's physical location during visual blindness; second, for online tracking, corrupted observations can contaminate motion estimates and appearance templates. We address the first difficulty with a construction pipeline that synchronizes camera frames with motion-capture poses, projects known target geometry, corrects underwater projection with a medium-gated residual, and subjects the annotations to manual review. This yields an evaluation-only cross-medium test set of 22,346 frames. We further introduce a Cross-Medium Recovery Policy (CMRP) centered on confidence-triggered template selection. It supplies MixFormerV2 with the fixed initial template, a window-best pre-trigger template, and a trigger-frame Kalman-guided image crop, together with their associated weights, without retraining the visual backbone. In the accuracy evaluation, CMRP achieves 49.90 Macro Success AUC, 2.95 points above MixFormerV2 Official. On selected cross-medium transition and occlusion-recovery intervals, CMRP increases MixFormerV2 tracking coverage from 47.91% to 50.43% relative to Official updating, while mean loss-to-recovery latency over successfully recovered videos decreases from 55.3 to 49.3 frames.
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All authors Jiangong Xiao, Zhe Sun, Kanzhong Yao, Yuanbo Bi, Haofei Zhao, Ruixuan Hu, Guan Huang, Xuelong Li

Computers and Society · Cross-listed from econ.GN

Risk Ceilings and Development Deadlines: Pacing AI under Uncertain Safety Productivity

Li Gan

Can a regulator promise both a risk ceiling and a development deadline when safety productivity is unknown? A ceiling below the final model's unprotected hazard requires a minimum stock of safety knowledge, so both promises hold only if weak research can be ruled out. Learning first and then replaying development, with spare compute in safety, comes close to that minimum. In a calibration with only state risk, constant safety yield, and full knowledge transfer, it needs only 3.3 percent more productivity than the necessary bound. Customer services pay for the guarantee. Rules that fix compute allocation fix dates, not risk.
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Computational Engineering

Sign-Constrained Intervention Effects for Domain-Generalizable ICU World Models

Zhen Xu, Nicholas Konz, Zhen Tan et al. (+2 more)

Predicting how a patient's vital signs respond to an intervention is a central question in intensive care. World models can do so by learning dynamics as a function of prior actions. However, such models tend to be brittle outside of training data. Clinicians choose drug dosages based on the patient's state, so the association a model learns between dose and outcome runs opposite to the drug's effect, generalizing poorly to out-of-distribution (OOD) dosing practices. Yet, pharmacological information provides the directional effects of different drugs, which are invariant to OOD shifts. To resolve the OOD sensitivity of current ICU world models, we introduce PHYSIO WORLD, which isolates an intervention's effect by evaluating a forward pass twice: once under recorded doses, and once with those doses set to zero. The difference is projected onto pharmacologically admissible effect directions stated by 70 rules over 28 drugs, leaving the magnitude to be learned from data. Across five distribution-shift parameters over cohorts from three intensive-care databases, and against forecasters, counterfactual models, and invariance objectives, PHYSIO WORLD attains the lowest OOD RMSE in every setting, improving on the strongest external baseline by 8-12%, while matching the in-distribution error of its backbone. Reversing the pharmacological directions degrades accuracy below the backbone, and data-mined directions recover almost no gain, indicating the improvement derives from the content of the pharmacological knowledge. The construction may extend to other settings where the sign of an effect is known in advance and its magnitude is confounded by treatment assignment.
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All authors Zhen Xu, Nicholas Konz, Zhen Tan, Zachary Plotkin, Tianlong Chen