Research

• Comprehensive and reliable benchmarking for AI capabilities3 papers raise it · 3 address it

  Current benchmarks often lack the depth to fully characterize model capabilities, especially for complex, real-world, or long-horizon tasks.

  • SO-Arena: Benchmarking the Capability Spectrum and Reliability of System One Modelsraises · addresses
  • Infrathon: Benchmarking Language Agents for Real-World, Long-Horizon AI Infra Optimizationraises · addresses
  • One Table, Many Queries: Benchmarking Generalist Tabular Models Across Generation, Imputation, and Predictionraises · addresses
• Effective AI agents in complex, dynamic real-world environments3 papers raise it · 3 address it

  AI agents struggle with real-world tasks requiring adaptation, learning from limited data, or debugging live systems, limiting practical deployment.

  • Where LLM Agents Get Stuck Debugging Databases: Access More Than Reasoningraises
  • World In-Context Learning for Agentic Robot Manipulationraises · addresses
  • Infrathon: Benchmarking Language Agents for Real-World, Long-Horizon AI Infra Optimizationraises · addresses
  • Sage-Taiyi: A Metacognitive Architecture for Scientific Discoveryaddresses
• Efficient and scalable generation of complex data2 papers raise it · 2 address it

  Generating high-quality, complex data like streaming video or diverse tabular data efficiently and with fewer computational resources is crucial.

  • Few-Step Streaming Video Generation via Condition Shiftingraises · addresses
  • One Table, Many Queries: Benchmarking Generalist Tabular Models Across Generation, Imputation, and Predictionraises · addresses
• Unified models for diverse data modalities and tasks2 papers raise it · 2 address it

  Creating single models that handle diverse tasks or data variations within a complex domain reduces complexity and improves generalization.

  • Prompt2Echo (P2Echo): Text-Prompted Multi-View Echocardiography Segmentation with One Modelraises · addresses
  • One Table, Many Queries: Benchmarking Generalist Tabular Models Across Generation, Imputation, and Predictionraises · addresses
• Reducing computational cost of language model attribution1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Understanding how prompt parts influence language model output is crucial for interpretability, but direct methods are computationally expensive.

  • Sketching Language Models for Context Attributionraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

• Spiking neural networks11+175.0%
• Quantum machine learning34+25.9%
• Character recognition OCR44+25.7%
• Speech emotion23+21.1%
• Voice AI76+13.4%
• Forecasting time133−2.9%
• Robotics195−3.0%
• Channel state information18−5.3%

• arXiv cs.CVSep 18

  PrismAlign: Prior-Steered Multi-View VLM Alignment for Hallucination-Robust Table OCR

  Guangyi Liu, Qianjun Huang, Boyu Hou

  Table extraction suffers from frequent structural errors and semantic hallucinations. We propose PrismAlign, a multi-VLM framework aligning diverse visual perspectives to resolve ambiguity. It integrates priors of table logic to assess output plausibility, decoupling structural alignment from cell content alignment. A Bayesian decision strategy maximizes alignment accuracy by exploiting the correlation between extraction errors and computable rule violations. Evaluated on open-source and custom VLMs, PrismAlign reduces hallucinations and achieves state-of-the-art performance on OmniDocBench 1.5, as well as on the table category of CC-OCR and PureDocBench.

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• arXiv cs.CLSep 18

  From Memory to Behavior: A Behavior-Aware Role-Playing Framework for Social Media Influencers

  Ji-Lun Peng, Yi-Zhen Zhang, Chun-Nan Chou, Yun-Nung Chen

  Large language models have shown strong potential as role-playing agents for real individuals, yet faithful impersonating remains challenging. Existing in-context learning-based methods fail to capture how individuals react under different situations. In addition, LLM-based evaluation is difficult for obscure individuals. To address these challenges, we propose Situation--Internal state--Behavior Persona method to incorporate situation-dependent behavioral strategies. We further design an evaluation protocol that provides LLM evaluators with references about the impersonated individual. We evaluate our approach on a newly constructed dataset for the task of generating replies on social media. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art ICL-based baselines, while our evaluation protocol achieves moderate correlation with human judgment. Besides, experiments on fictional-character benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method is applicable beyond the social media setting. These findings suggest that incorporating behavioral information broadly improves the fidelity of role-playing for real individuals on social media or fictional characters.

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• arXiv cs.CVSep 18

  Cube-Splat: High-Fidelity 360° Gaussian Splatting SLAM via Cubemap Factorization and Adjoint-Consistent Optimization

  Xiangfei Guo, Hao Shi, Yufan Zhang, Zhonghua Yi, Yongqi Mao +2

  Recent progress in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has enabled dense visual SLAM with pinhole cameras, yet most pipelines are not designed for panoramic imagery. We present Cube-Splat, the first panoramic GS-SLAM framework that factorizes each 360° frame into a cubemap of four fixed-orientation virtual pinhole views sharing a single optical center. By designating the front face as the primary pose state, we accumulate gradients from all faces via an adjoint mapping, thereby enabling multi-face observations to coherently update a single state while strictly preserving cross-view geometric consistency. Concurrently, our mapping module densifies and optimizes anisotropic Gaussians using aggregated cubemap rays for high-fidelity, dense reconstruction. Furthermore, to rigorously evaluate panoramic SLAM under diverse and challenging conditions, we introduce SynPano, a highly scalable, photorealistic synthetic dataset featuring parameterized complex trajectories and multi-modal ground truth. Extensive evaluations on two public benchmarks (PALVIO and OmniBlender) and our SynPano dataset, collectively encompassing both indoor and outdoor scenes, demonstrate that Cube-Splat achieves…

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• arXiv cs.LGSep 18

  IntBMoE: Integrating Block-Level Conditioning into Expert Composition for Full-Participation Mixture-of-Experts

  Ran Cheng, Longfei Xu, Zheng Liu, Kaikui Liu, Xiangxiang Chu

  Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) scales capacity, but existing designs cannot set three quantities independently. For a single token, participation is how many experts contribute knowledge to its output, execution is how many are actually computed (compute cost), and materialization is how many expert-sized parameter sets must be built and stored (memory cost). Sparse routing keeps execution and materialization low, but shrinks participation: for each token, only a few experts contribute. Dense output-mixing restores full participation, but its execution grows with the number of experts. Parameter-merging keeps execution at one expert, but its materialization grows with the number of routing decisions. We propose IntBMoE, a block-conditioned MoE that decouples all three by pairing dense expert composition with sparse block execution. Its blocks come from a small learned codebook, one per entry. At each internal layer, a lightweight hypernetwork merges all expert bases in that layer's pool into one composed expert. Participation is full, because every composed expert draws on the entire pool. Execution stays sparse, because a router sends each token to only a few blocks. Materialization…

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• arXiv cs.CRSep 18

  CESBench: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Cryptographic Engineering Security for IoT Devices

  Wenquan Zhou, An Wang, Jing Liang, Peien Feng, Jingqi Zhang +2

  For Internet of Things (IoT) devices, a secure algorithm alone is not enough: an attacker with physical access can attack the implementation directly, and its flaws are hard to fix once deployed. Large language models (LLMs) are now used to build and analyze such implementations. LLM benchmarks exist for cryptography and general cybersecurity, but none covers cryptographic engineering. In this paper, we present CESBench, 380 expert-written items across six sub-domains of cryptographic engineering security for IoT devices: side-channel, fault injection, implementation, countermeasures, evaluation, and integration. Four task types target different competences: 209 multiple-choice items test recall, 67 judgment items require a security verdict and its justification, 63 scenario items require an engineering diagnosis, and 41 code tasks are graded by 572 test cases. To validate the benchmark, 11 open-weight and proprietary LLMs answer every item. Multiple-choice and code responses are scored automatically, and judgment and scenario responses by an LLM judge, whose scores are checked against a second judge from another model family and human re-scoring. Composite scores range from…

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• arXiv cs.LGSep 18

  A Moving-Horizon Approximate Branch-and-Reduce Method for Deep Classification Trees

  Chenxuanyin Zou, Jiayang Ren, Qiangqiang Mao, Jing Liu, Marcus Lai +1

  Despite the importance for interpretability, decision trees face severe scalability challenges. Existing global optimal methods are often limited by binary feature selection and shallow tree depths, whereas traditional heuristic approaches frequently sacrifice predictive accuracy. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a moving-horizon approximate branch-and-reduce method to train near-optimal deep classification trees on large-scale datasets with continuous features. Built on a hierarchical root-subtree optimization framework, the method solves the root-level problem via branch-and-reduce while approximating the induced subtree problem using greedy heuristics. Although the underlying framework is capable of guaranteeing global optimality, the approximation, which functions as a lookahead rollout in a reinforcement learning context, significantly boosts efficiency for deeper structures. A low-cost moving-horizon strategy is then employed to iteratively refine model accuracy. Extensive numerical results demonstrate that our method exceeds the testing accuracy of existing heuristic baselines while offering significantly greater scalability, in terms of both dataset size…

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• arXiv cs.CRSep 18

  Conformal Privacy Auditing: Calibrated Re-identification Attacks with Statistical Guarantees

  Shuo Huang, Gholamreza Haffari, Xingliang Yuan, Ting Yu, Lizhen Qu

  Empirical identity leakage from released text is increasingly driven by attackers that combine large language models (LLMs) with auxiliary knowledge to link documents to individuals. Existing audits typically report success rates for specific attack pipelines but lack finite-sample statistical guarantees, while training-time protections such as differential privacy are difficult to translate into release-time decisions for individual natural-language documents. We introduce Conformal Privacy Auditing(CPA), a distribution-free calibration framework that provides a statistical certificate of re-identification risk for each released document against LLM-empowered adversaries. CPA outputs a conformal ambiguity set of candidate identities that is guaranteed to contain the true identity with user-chosen confidence under exchangeability, together with an interpretable leakage proxy derived from set size. CPA supports both logit-access and sampling-only attackers, enabling audits of open-source models and proprietary API models in a unified framework. Across multiple release benchmarks and attacker configurations, CPA achieves calibrated coverage and reveals sharp shifts in certified…

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• arXiv cs.ITSep 18

  Co-Evolving Zero-Day Jamming: Adaptive Attack Synthesis and Graph Attention-Based Online Detection

  Ghilas Aissou, Rémi A. Chou, Taejoon Kim

  Effective evaluation of zero-day jamming detectors requires robust adversarial models. However, existing attack models often assume prior knowledge of the target receiver, limiting their utility as evaluation benchmarks. On the detection side, existing detectors fail to capture the global temporal-spectral structure of jamming behavior and cannot differentiate zero-day strategies as they emerge. This paper addresses these limitations through a two-pronged framework. First, an online detection framework is introduced that combines a graph attention network (GAT) for temporal-spectral representation learning with Dirichlet process (DP)-means clustering. This framework jointly classifies known and discovers zero-day strategies within a unified learning objective. Second, an inference-driven reinforcement learning (RL) jammer is proposed as an adversarial benchmark. The jammer treats the target receiver as a black-box, infers the detector state via hypothesis testing, and optimizes the trade-off between attack impact and stealth. Simulation results show that the proposed RL jammer outperforms benchmarks, achieving 33% higher attack efficacy and 67% higher stealth. The proposed…

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• arXiv cs.LGSep 18

  Routine Blood Tests Outperform CRP for Distinguishing Bacterial From Viral Infection in Children

  Mihaela Demireva, Zhecho Mitev, Djuna Chinareva-Klimentova, Svetoslav Ivanov, Georgi Nalbantov +1

  Acute infectious diseases are among the leading causes of medical consultations and hospitalizations in children worldwide. These infections are predominantly caused by viruses or bacteria, yet differentiating between the two remains a common clinical challenge. As a result, pediatricians often default to the safer option of prescribing antibiotics contributing to the growing problem of antimicrobial resistance. The objective is to assess the additional predictive value of CBC towards determining the current infection. This retrospective study used data from 906 pediatric patients aged between 2 and 14 years who were tested positive either for viral or bacterial infection between 2022 and 2026. Inclusion criteria further required availability of CBC results and CRP level measurements. These laboratory parameters as well as age were used as input features for several supervised classification models. Model performance was evaluated using AUC, sensitivity and specificity. The best performing model is XGBoost, which included all features, achieving out of-sample performance of AUC of 81.7% and sensitivity of 70.8%, specificity of 79.2%. All trained models outperform a CRP-based only…

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• arXiv cs.LGSep 18

  Deep Reinforcement Learning with Buffered Quantile Objectives

  Mohammad Alipour-vaezi, Sajad Khodadadian

  Quantile-based reinforcement learning provides an interpretable approach to risk-sensitive decision-making by optimizing a prescribed quantile of the cumulative-return distribution. Despite this appeal, learning under a point quantile objective is challenging: quantiles can change abruptly under small perturbations of the return distribution, and exact quantile-sensitive planning requires computationally demanding distributional optimization. Lower-buffered quantiles alleviate the former difficulty by averaging neighboring quantiles immediately below the target level, providing a smoother surrogate while preserving the underlying point-quantile objective. Existing methods based on this principle, however, remain model-based and rely on explicit return-law planning, limiting their applicability beyond small tabular problems. We develop Deep-BQRL, a model-free distributional reinforcement-learning framework that extends buffered-quantile learning to neural function approximation. The method learns conditional return quantiles directly from sampled transitions, constructs buffered action scores from the relevant region of the learned quantile function, and uses ensemble disagreement…

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• arXiv cs.AISep 18

  LEGIT: Credentialing Protocol for Trustworthy AI Agent Marketplaces

  Steve Drew, Jiayu Zhou

  Agentic marketplaces are emerging where AI agents with varying capabilities autonomously complete specialized tasks for buyers. A major challenge of such marketplaces is that buyers cannot easily determine which agent will perform best on their tasks. Reported benchmark scores may be difficult to verify or compare across tasks, software, and budgets. We introduce LEGIT, a credentialing protocol connecting certification, reputation, and proposed marketplace allocation. Certification binds measured quality and cost per solved task to an agent configuration, task domain, evaluation budget, and evidence through a signed record. Reputation links records of past task outcomes to the same identity, subject to the reliability of the reported feedback. Buyers and agents can verify credential records and inspect optional visual profiles. Evaluations reveal cost differences between agent configurations with similar observed task success, and show that comparisons depend on the evaluation budget. These results support binding performance measurements to the tested configuration and resource limits. A complementary analysis quantifies the deposits and fees required for reputation manipulation…

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• arXiv cs.CVSep 18

  VeriFuse: Bounded Vision-Language Arbitration and Reason-Guided Refinement for Cooperative 3D Perception

  Hongyi Lin, Yiyao Liu, Qi Kang, Heye Huang, Yang Liu +2

  Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong scene understanding and semantic judgment across diverse tasks, but their appropriate role in cooperative perception remains unclear. Directly asking a VLM to regress 3D detections is unreliable and computationally expensive, whereas using it to select the output of a single source discards useful information from other agents. We introduce VeriFuse, a bounded arbitration framework for vehicle-infrastructure cooperative 3D detection. Each agent first produces detections independently. Around each vehicle and roadside proposal, VeriFuse generates source-conditioned geometric candidates and combines the original detections, their perturbations, and cross-source hypotheses into a unified candidate pool. A frozen VLM then chooses among three admissible actions: SELECT an adequate candidate; REFINE an existing anchor when an object is supported but all candidates are geometrically inadequate; or REJECT an unsupported infrastructure-only proposal. Experiments on the DAIR-V2X dataset show that VeriFuse achieves 0.494/0.357 cooperative 3D AP50/AP70 and limits the relative vehicle-side BEV AP50 drop under a 300 ms delay to 1.7%.…

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• arXiv cs.CVSep 18

  S3VD: Semantic-Guidance Spatio-Temporal Scanning for Video Deraining

  Kui Jiang, Yiang Chen, Yan Luo, Zhaocheng Yu, Junjun Jiang +1

  Heavy rainfall severely degrades outdoor videos by corrupting high-frequency details and introducing motion blur, critically undermining the reliability of visual tasks. Recently, State Space Models (SSMs), particularly Mamba, have emerged as efficient alternatives for vision tasks with their linear complexity and ability to model long-range dependencies. However, when confronted with the poor visual representations in rainy videos, Mamba still faces difficulties in preserving the integrity of 2D spatial semantics and modeling 3D spatio-temporal correlations. To break these limitations, we introduce S3VD, a Semantic-Guidance Spatio-Temporal Scanning framework for video deraining, featuring two key innovations: Multi-Scale Semantic Fusion (MSSF) Module and Spatio-Temporal Scanning Fusion (STSF) Module. The former integrates temporal semantic priors from DINOv2 to guide precise feature representation and counteract the loss of local semantic context inherent to Mamba's 1D flatten operation, enhancing robustness against extreme degradation. The latter introduces a spatio-temporal scanning mechanism and devises a Decoupled-Gating Mamba (DG-Mamba) layer, which employs two independent…

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• arXiv stat.MLSep 18

  Sparse Identification for Automatic Large-Scale Screening: A Constraint-Aware Framework with Ultra Fast Decoding Algorithm

  Jianing Li, Li Chai, Yingcheng Lai

  In the early stages of a pandemic, identification of a small number of infected individuals through large-scale screening is critical for pandemic control, yet remains challenging under limited reagents and testing capacity. Existing group testing methods suffer from either high computational complexity or low identification accuracy. Even worse, no available methods provide theoretically rigorous analysis for sparse identification with hard constraints caused by the sample usage constraint and the dilution effect existing ubiquitously in practical applications. In this article, we propose the Logic Screening method (LoSc), an ultra fast, accurate, and theoretically grounded framework for large-scale screening. LoSc introduces a novel decoding algorithm with a very simple selection strategy, achieving identification of all positives with only O(klogn) pooled tests. The decoding relies only on logical operations, enabling direct hardware implementation and yielding ultra fast computational implementation. Moreover, LoSc explicitly incorporates dilution and sample usage constraints into pooling designs, and establishes theoretical guarantees to guide optimal pooling configurations.…

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• arXiv stat.MLSep 18

  Diagonalized Attention for Individualized Regression: Latent-Row Localization and Prediction

  Borui Peng, Liwei Lin, Feifei Wang, Long Feng

  Modern text and image representations are often matrix-valued, with rows corresponding to tokens, patches, or other local feature vectors. Predictive information is often sparse but sample-specific, making classical sparse regression methods with a common support poorly suited to this heterogeneity. This paper formalizes an individualized sparse regression framework for matrix-valued covariates in which each observation has its own rows of interest, while the associated regression effects are shared across the population. To estimate this model, we introduce a diagonalized attention mechanism that uses query--key scores to localize sample-specific signal rows and a value matrix for downstream regression. The proposed method has a parameter dimension independent of sample size and can identify rows of interest for new observations without their responses. We establish existence theorems showing that, under suitable score-separation and concentration conditions, single-head and multi-head diagonalized attention models recover the latent rows with high probability, yielding prediction risk bounds. Our theory therefore provides a statistical explanation of how attention-based scoring…

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• arXiv cs.LGSep 18

  An Introduction to Compression-Based Machine Learning

  John Hurwitz, Edward Raff, Charles K. Nicholas

  Any lossless compression algorithm (like gzip) may be converted into a machine learning method, via either Normalized Compression Distance or the Minimum Description Length principle. Any auto-regressive model may be converted into a lossless compression method via entropy coding. This seemingly circular dependence has unrealized potential in modern artificial intelligence and machine learning, and we survey and formalize the various strategies that have been used to leverage compression for machine learning. We introduce and empirically validate a design framework for compression-based ML, finding compression-based methods competitive with conventional baselines and decisively stronger on malware. We find that varying these design choices yields accuracy gains of up to 0.62.

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• arXiv cs.LGSep 18

  Fast And Accurate Text Content File Type Identification

  Manu Nandan, Michael Brautbar, Edward Raff

  A common requirement across organizations is to have a tool that can identify file types based on their contents, particularly in the cybersecurity domain where magic numbers and file extensions can not be trusted. While existing tools work well in practice, there is plenty of room for improvement either in terms of computational load and time for detection in the case of model based tools like Magika or in terms of accuracy of detection in the case of file parsing tools that use programming language constructs. In this study, we propose a neural network model for identification of types of text content files, especially source code, that is more accurate and faster than other available tools. Our experiments on open-source files indicate that it is not only more accurate on average for text-content file-type identification, but also approximately four times faster than Magika, while being 28% smaller in size.

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• arXiv cs.CVSep 18

  Combining Object Detection with Geometry-Aware Clustering to Distinguish Overlapping Plants in UAV Imagery

  Ik Jae Lee, Hieu D. Nguyen, Mahbubur Meenar, Carlos Morrison Martinez, Cameron Connelly

  Reliable plant-level information from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery is important for automated crop monitoring. However, in dense crop canopies, adjacent plants frequently overlap and are detected as a single object, reducing the reliability of plant-level measurements. This study presents a geometry-aware post-detection framework for resolving overlapping plant instances using standard RGB UAV imagery. The framework combines object detection with geometric clustering of plant components. Leaves or branches detected within each bush-level region are represented using two complementary geometric features: component centroids and radial intersection points (RIPs) derived from detected plant structures. K-means and Gaussian mixture models determine whether a detected region contains a single plant or two overlapping plants. Density filtering suppresses spurious radial intersections, and a post-pipeline ensemble combines spatial and directional geometric information. The framework was evaluated using UAV imagery of eggplant and tomato crops under field conditions. Centroid-based clustering achieved an F1-score of 0.89 for eggplant, while the combined centroid-RIP approach…

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• arXiv cs.CRSep 18

  Identifying Security Platform Product Abuse with Machine Learning

  Shaefer Drew, Michael Brautbar, Paul Knight, Edward Raff, Lana Peric-McDermott +4

  Product abuse is an individually rare, but growing, problem across the SaaS industry. Highly sophisticated threat actors can misuse security platforms within customer environments or conduct bypass experiments on the product itself. Threat actors can leverage living-off-the-land (LOTL) attacks to avoid using cumbersome, frequently detected malware. Remediating this threat requires collecting multiple data modalities across different types of databases, addressing a cold-start problem in the intrinsic rarity of such sophisticated but dangerous events, and designing within the constraints of real-world deployment (e.g., cost, user behavior, performance, etc). To wit, we provide the first study of such a whole-system defense, especially with respect to a deployed and operational capability. Our results show an increase in product abuse coverage by 35\%, a 30\% reduction in monthly alerts, and adaptability to changes in malicious actors' behavior. We review both the constraints we considered in designing the system to meet operational requirements and a retrospective evaluation of the value of explainable features and counterfactual performance on previously identified attacks.

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• arXiv cs.CVSep 18

  Architecture-aware Robustness Evaluation of Explainable Deep Learning for Breast Cancer Diagnosis

  Balenthira Thanusanth, Selvarajah Thuseethan, Roshan G. Ragel, Bimali S. Weerakoon, Ayesh Jayasinghe +1

  Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has become essential in medical image analysis to ensure transparency of deep learning (DL)-based diagnostic systems. However, selecting appropriate XAI techniques for breast cancer recognition remains largely ad hoc, with limited systematic evaluation across different DL architectures. This study presents a systematic architecture-aware evaluation protocol to assess the effectiveness of nine widely used XAI techniques across four categories of DL models: very deep, lightweight, transformer-based and hybrid neural networks. The evaluation is conducted on a breast ultrasound dataset comprising 780 images using clinically aligned spatial metrics, including Pointing Game, Intersection over Union and Mean Coverage, to quantify agreement between generated explanations and expert-annotated lesion regions. Results indicate that explanation quality is primarily influenced by the interaction between model architecture and XAI method, rather than any single technique consistently outperforming others. Hybrid architectures produce more spatially coherent explanations, while lightweight and transformer-based models exhibit greater variability across…

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