Research

New papers ranked by attention, with their code, models and discussion linked. Pick a field on the left.

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Research

New papers ranked by attention, with their code, models and discussion linked. Pick a field on the left.

Week Month Quarter All

Newest Most relevant

Papers

arXiv cs.CVSep 25
Double-stream registration with pyramid fusion for HDR video with alternating exposures
Onofre Martorell, Ivan Pereira-Sánchez, Antoni Fuentes, Antoni Buades
High dynamic range (HDR) video reconstruction from al\-ter\-na\-ting-exposure sequences remains challenging, especially in regions with extreme luminance variation. We propose a novel HDR reconstruction framework based on dual-stream registration and accurate pyramid fusion. Given three consecutive frames, our method computes optical flow directly with the central frame, while introducing a complementary midpoint displacement strategy to handle cases with severe overexposition. A pyramid fusion stage then merges the resulting radiance and LDR images into a final HDR output. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 25
Bayesian Optimization with Fisher Information Geometry: Gradient Bounds and Trust-Region Methods
Saksham Kiroriwal, Julius Pfrommer, Jürgen Beyerer
We study Bayesian optimization (BO) through the lens of information geometry. Pulling back the Fisher information metric through the surrogate posterior map yields a local sensitivity tensor on the input space, which leads to an upper bound on the gradient of reparameterizable acquisition functions. This view explains vanishing-gradient behavior in high-dimensional BO and provides a common interpretation of heuristics such as RAASP and dimension-scaled lengthscales. Building on this analysis, we propose FITR, a trust-region-based BO method that replaces lengthscale-based scaling by local pullback-Fisher weights. FITR is not restricted to GP kernels with explicit lengthscales. On GP benchmarks with an SE kernel, experiments show competitive performance using FITR. The proposed method also easily generalizes to non-isotropic surrogates, although the gains are more task-dependent in that setting.
PDF
arXiv cs.CVSep 25
DepthEvidence: Unifying Metric Depth Prediction and Geometric Reasoning in Multimodal Language Models
Jiangning Wei, Yuan Yao, Miaomiao Cui, Mingsheng Li, Humen Zhong +2
Spatial reasoning with metric constraints requires linking objects to geometric measurements and preserving their numerical content during language reasoning. We present DepthEvidence, a 4B model that uses its own dense metric predictions as object-grounded evidence for language generation. A camera-conditioned decoder predicts full-resolution metric depth using multi-scale visual features and high-resolution RGB refinement. A dense-to-language interface converts predicted depths and decoder features into object-aligned continuous geometry tokens anchored to object identifiers. Geometric supervision encourages metric information to remain recoverable before and after language-context interaction, while instruction tuning supports object measurement and compositional reasoning. We introduce a Depth-VQA benchmark evaluating object-depth queries, relative comparisons, and decisions combining spatial and numerical constraints. Across nine datasets, DepthEvidence achieves the highest average dense $δ_1$ among evaluated methods, competitive with specialized estimators. It also leads the evaluated methods in instance-level metric depth estimation and overall accuracy on both relative…
PDF
arXiv cond-mat.dis-nnSep 25
A Flatness-Generalization Relation in the Teacher-Student Tree-Committee Machine
Brandon Livio Annesi, Davide Straziota, Enrico Maria Malatesta
The flatness of the loss landscape at a minimizer is a widely used heuristic for reasoning about neural-network generalization, yet evidence for this relation is mostly empirical and controversial. We study this relation in a teacher-student tree committee machine, where both the ERM estimator and the Hessian spectrum are analytically tractable in the proportional high-dimensional limit. First, we use a zero-temperature Gibbs formulation to obtain predictions for the observables of the typical minimizers of the empirical loss. Secondly, we use Edwards-Jones formalism to derive the limiting Hessian resolvent around these typical minimizers. All predictions agree with finite-size gradient-descent simulations. Finally, we study three measures of flatness, namely the left and right edges and the spectral mean, and check if a decrease in generalization error as the dataset size is increased corresponds to an increase in flatness. We find that the answer strongly depends on the learning task and on the ratio of the number of parameters to the number of data points. In regression, the spectral mean and right edge correlate with the generalization error, while the left edge does so only…
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 25
The Residual Stream's Effective Depth
Barak Gahtan, Ido Galil, Alex M. Bronstein
We introduce \emph{effective depth} ($\Deff$), a scalar diagnostic that treats the layer-wise residual stream of a transformer as a discrete-time process, measures how representation similarity decays with layer distance, and aggregates that profile into one number. Across sixteen decoder-only language models, $\Deff$ separates a structural consequence of residual accumulation from an empirical one: even maximally diverse orthogonal updates have the closed-form reference $F_L = 2L/(L+1)<2$, yet fifteen of sixteen default measurements lie below $F_L$ (Qwen3.5: 32--44\%, OLMo-2: 40--41\%, Pythia: 23--28\%). Matched references show that the gap is not caused by the persistent initial state or update-size imbalance, but is largely a calibrated signature of correlated residual updates rather than evidence that depth is unused. Symmetric position-0, token-normalisation, and top-PC controls show the regime is not reducible to BOS or top-PC artefacts: the lone above-reference default outlier joins the same regime, and all sixteen models are sub-reference after token-normalisation or top-1-PC removal. Intermediate checkpoints show that the regime is established early in OLMo-2 and stable…
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 25
seq2cause: One Autoregressive Backbone, Four Causal Discovery Tasks in Event Sequences
Hugo Math
Complex systems such as vehicles, patients, or genomes emit discrete event sequences whose operative question is causal, not predictive: which events cause which other events, and which cause higher-level outcomes such as failures or diseases? This question decomposes along two axes -- dependency type (event $\to$ event vs.\ event $\to$ outcome) and causal scope (single sequence vs.\ population) -- yielding four structurally distinct regimes with different identifiability conditions. No existing method addresses more than one, because all assume multi-stream structure with low vocabulary, and none scales beyond a few hundred event types. We present \textsc{Seq2Cause}, a unified framework that resolves all four regimes through a single shared primitive: a pretrained autoregressive model repurposed as an amortized conditional independence testing engine requiring no task-specific retraining. We establish a prediction--causality duality: the model's excess cross-entropy simultaneously bounds causal identification error across all four regimes, so that every improvement in next-token prediction tightens causal guarantees for free. On nonlinear SCMs (vocabularies up to $8{,}000$…
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 25
Block Sparse Attention with Log-Linear Complexity
Bohao Tang, Zhen Qin, Yuqi Pan, Zheng Li, Pengfei Liu
Scaling language models to long contexts is limited by the quadratic cost of self-attention. Block sparse attention offers an efficient alternative, but selecting the retained blocks remains a bottleneck. Conventional block selection requires scoring all query-block pairs and therefore remains quadratic in sequence length. To address this issue, we propose PISA, a block-sparse attention mechanism that employs a pyramid Top-$K$ selection strategy. The main idea is to gradually narrow down the candidates across different levels, making it more efficient to find the most relevant keys. Specifically, we construct a coarse-to-fine hierarchy of keys and perform selection from the coarsest level. At each level, LogSumExp scoring is applied to a bounded candidate set to select candidates for the next finer level, continuing until the finest level is reached. Through pooling, we construct $O(\log N)$ levels of keys, yielding an overall complexity of $O(N\log N)$, where $N$ denotes the sequence length. We develop hardware-aware Triton kernels for both training and inference, fusing hierarchical routing and LogSumExp scoring without materializing the query-key score matrix. We further…
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 25
SAGE: A sampling-aware global evaluation benchmark for species distribution modeling
Emilia Arens, Nina van Tiel, Robin Zbinden, Damien Robert, Lukas Drees +6
Knowing where species occur is fundamental for biodiversity research and conservation. Species distribution models (SDMs) link species observations to environmental conditions to estimate their spatial distribution. However, accuracy varies with the underlying data and models, making it essential to know for which species models can be trusted. Deep-learning-based SDMs ("DeepSDMs") now jointly model thousands of species, drawing on hundreds of millions of community-science records. At this scale, averaging performance hides substantial species-level variability, particularly for rare species, often of greatest conservation concern. Records are also strongly biased, making occurrence counts misleading. Accounting for these factors is essential for a reliable and informative evaluation of multi-species SDMs. Here, we introduce a Sampling-Aware Global Evaluation (SAGE) benchmark, combining GBIF records for training with sPlotOpen vegetation plots for presence-absence evaluation across 5771 plant species. We propose an evaluation framework that groups species based on two properties, sampling effort and relative prevalence, which describe how densely a species' range is sampled and…
PDF
arXiv cs.AISep 25
OmouAI: Argumentative Human-AI Policy Deliberation with Simulated Personas
Stylianos Loukas Vasileiou, Antonio Rago, William Yeoh, Georgina Curto
Debates amongst agents driven by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated vast potential in various applications, but when these interactions include humans and take place in high-stakes environments, e.g., in public policy deliberations, they are beset with issues such as sycophancy and a lack of faithful explanations. To tackle these issues, we present OmouAI, an interactive and inclusive deliberation system that uses LLMs in combination with computational argumentation, a field which excels in representing and reasoning within debates. OmouAI allows a human user to deliberate policy claims for real-world challenges with simulated personas, e.g., representing stakeholders, domain experts or devil's advocates, towards reducing sycophancy. Each persona generates its own arguments, and the arguments of all parties form a shared argumentation framework. Users can then contest, add and revise arguments, providing crucial human oversight. Then, arguments are evaluated using deterministic argumentative semantics against external goals, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals, guaranteeing faithful explanations. The advancement or worsening of the goals thus serve as…
PDF
arXiv cs.AISep 25
Up and Down the Abstraction Ladder: Code-Based Skills for Language Agents
Bartłomiej Cupiał, Jens Tuyls, Maciej Wołczyk, Davide Paglieri, Martin Klissarov +3
Language agents struggle to act and learn in environments that require long sequences of low-level actions. Code-based abstractions can make these agents more productive by letting them invoke reusable skills instead of repeatedly selecting individual actions. The code handles recurring local decisions, while the language model decides which skills to use and how to combine them. Yet abstractions are leaky, and situations beyond a skill's capabilities may require a return to primitive actions. Motivated by this tradeoff between productivity and flexibility, we systematically study how code-based action abstraction affects the performance, inference cost, and learning of language agents. We study this in NetHack, a challenging, long-horizon game environment, using CodeHack, our library of code-based skills with natural-language descriptions. We use this library to compare agents restricted to primitives with those using semantic skills alone or in combination with primitives. We evaluate these agents in three settings: zero-shot prompting, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. Across a broad zero-shot evaluation on NetHack, we find that compared with primitives,…
PDF
arXiv cs.CVSep 25
Band-Selection Stability and Semantic Segmentation Performance: A Study on Hyperspectral City
Jiarong Li, Imad Ali Shah, Enda Ward, Martin Glavin, Edward Jones +1
Resource constraints make high-dimensional hyperspectral imaging challenging in autonomous perception, motivating the use of band selection methods. However, the sensitivity of band-selection methods to sampled data and their relationship to semantic segmentation models (SSMs) remain underexplored. This study evaluates six band selection methods on ten independently sampled, class-balanced region-of-interest (ROI) sets, yielding 60 top-25 band subsets from the Hyperspectral City V2 (128 bands: 450-950nm) dataset. Top-$K$ bands ($K\in\{3,5, ... 13\}$) from the first three ROI sets are evaluated with three SSMs against the corresponding 128-band baseline. Experiments show that intra-method stability is method-dependent: Sim-LP shows the highest stability (pairwise Jaccard similarity) and, together with JMIM+CSNR, yields the best segmentation results. Top-$K$ based SSMs remain competitive with baselines, with gains of up to 2.01 mIoU and 1.72 mF1 points, and 18-22x faster CPU inference for $K=9$. However, performance does not improve monotonically with $K$, and stability shows no consistent association with SSM performance. These findings suggest that intra-method stability is…
AI20PDF
arXiv cs.AISep 25
Externalized CPDAG Summaries Improve LLM Causal Deduction
Wentao Sun, João Paulo Nogueira, Dominique Verchere, Mathieu Acher, Alonso Silva
Corr2Cause asks whether a causal claim holds in every DAG compatible with observed correlations and conditional independencies. We frame this as latent-object reasoning: the label is defined by a CPDAG query, but free-form chain-of-thought often collapses the Markov-equivalence-class problem into local pattern matching. We propose Structured Thinking, a two-turn pipeline that first externalizes a typed, schema-constrained CPDAG summary and then answers against that graph state. On the Corr2Cause full test, Structured Thinking raises Qwen3.5-27B from $73.0$ to $86.4$ $F_1$(Yes) over a strong PC-instruction baseline in the primary paired run ($+13.4$ pp; McNemar $p=2.4\times 10^{-6}$; bootstrap $95\%$ CI [$+8.4$, $+18.6$]); across three full-ID seeds, the mean gain is $+8.1 \pm 5.3$ pp. A PC-scaffolded two-turn prose control reaches only $67.6$ $F_1$, indicating that a detailed PC scaffold plus a schema-free prose intermediate is not sufficient. The same pattern holds on Qwen3.6-27B, Paraphrase-OOD, and GPT-5.4-mini. Scrambling the emitted CPDAG costs $12.0$ pp $F_1$, and a full-split audit shows close agreement with the reference CPDAG (ID skeleton $F_1$ $0.960$; exact match…
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arXiv eess.IVSep 25
Quantum Diffusion Models for Medical Image Analysis
Francesco Aldo Venturelli, Stefano Martina, Marco Parigi, Filippo Caruso, Alba Cervera-Lierta +1
Quantum Machine Learning is a novel field of research aimed at devising machine learning approaches exploiting principles of quantum mechanics, such as superposition, entanglement and interference. In this context, we present a scalable hybrid Quantum Diffusion Model, and evaluate its use for medical image analysis. Specifically, our method is based on a Discrete-Time Quantum Walk algorithm, executed on a real quantum device, to model the forward dynamics of the diffusion model. For the backward step of the diffusion model, we devise and evaluate a classical learning model, which is used to reversely denoise the data. In contrast with other existing attempts at applying quantum machine learning for image analysis tasks, severely limited by the size of existing quantum devices, our method allows to process real-world large size medical data. In particular, we present results on grayscale and RGB images, as well as 3D volumes of moderate sizes. We benchmark our results by reproducing an alternative classical counterpart model, based on diffusion models on discrete state spaces. By doing so, we compare the generation capabilities of both models in terms of three distinct…
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arXiv cs.CLAI safetySep 25
CG-Probes: Recovering Guardrail Directions from Patient Query Embeddings
Marko Řeháček, Vítězslav Dušek, Martin Rusinko, Vít Nováček
Patient-facing AI assistants promise valuable support to patients, but incoming queries can pose medical risks. To create guardrails, we work with oncologists to define three ordinal risk axes: Medical Urgency, Psychological Urgency, and Topic Sensitivity. We propose Clinical Guardrail Probes (CG-Probes) to measure the risks from query embeddings. We probe for each axis in the normalized embedding space of frozen embedders via the difference-in-means method, treating each axis as a potential linear direction. To train the probes, we cluster 79,658 Czech oncology search queries with BERTopic and use these clusters to generate pairs of queries with contrastive risk levels via few-shot prompting. We evaluate the approach on 200 queries (90 real, 110 synthetic), each graded by two oncologists, against two open-weight LLMs and a frontier LLM. We find that urgency-based axes are recoverable as linear directions, and the probes are competitive with open-weight LLMs (no significant differences in quadratic-weighted kappa) at a fraction of the latency. Each axis yields a scalar score that clinicians can inspect and use to set escalation thresholds. The pipeline requires only search logs,…
AI70PDF
arXiv cs.LGTraining & fine-tuningSep 25
Distributed Learning as a Service: The Developer's Perspective
Tianyue Chu, Filippo Vannella, Dimitra Tsigkari, Paula Delgado-Santos, Fernando López +3
Application developers of distributed learning services face challenges that a typical federated learning loop does not address. Specifically, the model updates can still leak private data, devices might not be able to participate in the training due to limited resources, a single aggregator might not be able to scale, and the transmissions of model weights induce a considerable bandwidth cost. This paper demonstrates DLaaS (Distributed Learning as a Service) from the developer's vantage point. Using a single admin dashboard, the developer initiates a distributed/federated learning job and is able to activate Differential Privacy (DP), Split Learning (SL), Hierarchical Aggregation (HA), and Knowledge Distillation (KD) as declarative options, with no change to the clients' code. We demonstrate the complete service lifecycle on an industrial smart-home Wake-up Word (WuW) task, using the "Ok Aura" dataset. Once the developer initiates a distributed learning job by toggling DP, SL, HA, and KD in the admin dashboard, the system dispatches the job to a set of Android clients and Dockerized helper aggregators. In the demonstration, these mechanisms run live across configurations. Then,…
AIAI safety60PDF
arXiv cs.AIAI safetySep 25
Neuralyzing the Trace: Selective Representation-Level Unlearning with Contrastive Sparse Autoencoders
Itai Zehavi, Fanny Jourdan, Ulrich Aivodji
Machine unlearning aims to remove targeted information while preserving a model's other abilities. In realistic settings, such as privacy requests under the EU GDPR, the target may be narrow, for example information associated with a single person. Behavioral forgetting alone may be insufficient, motivating interventions directly on internal representations. However, standard mechanistic-interpretability extractors are poorly selective for such targets. We identify an energy bias in reconstruction-based extraction, which favors dominant background structure over low-energy target-specific components. We introduce SCALPEL, a contrastive sparse autoencoder designed to learn more selective forget features. We show theoretically that contrastive training promotes target-selective features and that our selection score controls expected background knowledge perturbation. We validate SCALPEL experimentally on TOFU across Qwen, Llama, and Gemma, where it substantially improves over NMF and standard SAE interventions and is competitive with Gradient Difference and RMU, bridging mechanistic interpretability and fine-grained unlearning.
AI80PDF
arXiv cs.AISep 25
Cheap, open agents make LLM pollution harder to mitigate
Raluca Rilla, Anne-Marie Nussberger, Rui Mata, Dirk U. Wulff
Large Language Model (LLM) pollution occurs when synthetic responses contaminate data intended to capture human behavior. High deployment costs have so far limited the risk posed by autonomous survey agents. However, open-weight models paired with open-source agentic frameworks may have removed this barrier. We compared the performance and detectability of nine agent configurations, ranging from fully open variants to closed commercial ones. Each agent autonomously completed a survey containing multiple response types yielding various detection checks. Fully open agents ran locally without usage fees and performed competitively with commercial alternatives. Open and commercial agents failed different sets of checks, and no single check reliably detected all agents, but open-text responses discriminated best between agents and humans. These findings identify fully open agents as a distinct risk for LLM pollution and support multilayered detection strategies emphasizing open-text analysis.
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arXiv cs.CVSep 25
Where Compute Matters: Heterogeneous Attention for Efficient Video Diffusion
Olga Zatsarynna, Denis Korzhenkov, Juergen Gall, Amir Habibian, Mohsen Ghafoorian
Efficient video generation requires reducing the quadratic cost of self-attention over long spatio-temporal token sequences. Existing efficient-attention methods typically apply the same computation pattern to every token, even though denoising difficulty varies substantially across video regions and evolves throughout the generation process. We introduce HetA-DiT, a heterogeneous attention mechanism that adaptively allocates computation according to token difficulty. A lightweight uncertainty branch predicts a token-wise estimate of denoising difficulty, which is used to route uncertain tokens through dense global attention while processing more reliable tokens with efficient local attention. The resulting routing is content- and timestep-adaptive, retains global context where it matters most, and provides a single parameter for controlling the quality-efficiency trade-off. HetA-DiT is compatible with few-step distribution-matching distillation and introduces no additional Transformer evaluation at inference time by reusing uncertainty estimates from the preceding denoising step. We evaluate the method on DMD-distilled Wan2.2-5B and Wan2.1-1.3B models. Across VBench, VBench-2.0,…
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arXiv cs.DCSep 25
DynBranch: Speculative Subgraph Reuse for Dynamic Agentic LLM Serving
Junyi Shen, Noppanat Wadlom, Zhengyuan Su, Yao Lu
Agentic LLM workflows decide their execution paths at runtime. Downstream computation may be predictable, or may have run before, yet it cannot begin until the model or the user resolves the branch. We call this serialization the branch-resolution barrier. Caching alone does not hide it: the key that identifies a reusable result is not known until then. In this paper, we propose DynBranch, which makes an unresolved branch addressable before it resolves. Its stable coordinate lets candidate subgraphs run during resolution and completed subgraph results be reused across later requests. A two-level controller admits this work when its expected benefit exceeds the load price. DynBranch sits at the model-API boundary and requires no changes to agent harnesses or model execution engines. Across four agentic workloads with Qwen3-32B on 4x H200 GPUs, DynBranch reduces mean latency by up to 32% over each workload's strongest prior system and by 46-66% against a no-reuse floor, while preserving workflow results. The benefit persists across backbone families and on a commodity Qwen3-8B/RTX 4090 deployment.
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arXiv cs.CLSep 25
Modeling Student Sensemaking with LLMs and Knowledge-Graph-Guided Inference
Özge Alacam, Zübeyde Demet Kirbulut Güneş, Funda Ekici, Nurcan Turan-Oluk, Dilay Dinçdemir +5
Collaborative science learning requires nuanced interpretation of student dialogue to characterize how learners identify knowledge gaps, build explanations, and work toward resolution - a theory-driven analysis that is labor-intensive and difficult to scale. We investigate whether instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) can support multidimensional analysis of collaborative sensemaking without task-specific training, and whether structured knowledge-state information improves model inference. We evaluate two mid-size LLMs on 23 richly annotated, expert-labeled episodes across prompting conditions that vary definitional scaffolding, reasoning mode, and turn structure. Without reasoning, models tend to overpredict successful sensemaking; reasoning-enabled prompting improves identification of unsuccessful cases. Knowledge-state diagnostics provide additional grounding, improving detection of unsuccessful sensemaking and increasing agreement with expert annotations. No single configuration performs best across all sensemaking dimensions, underscoring the multidimensional nature of the task.
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Papers

arXiv cs.CVSep 25
Double-stream registration with pyramid fusion for HDR video with alternating exposures
Onofre Martorell, Ivan Pereira-Sánchez, Antoni Fuentes, Antoni Buades
High dynamic range (HDR) video reconstruction from al\-ter\-na\-ting-exposure sequences remains challenging, especially in regions with extreme luminance variation. We propose a novel HDR reconstruction framework based on dual-stream registration and accurate pyramid fusion. Given three consecutive frames, our method computes optical flow directly with the central frame, while introducing a complementary midpoint displacement strategy to handle cases with severe overexposition. A pyramid fusion stage then merges the resulting radiance and LDR images into a final HDR output. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 25
Bayesian Optimization with Fisher Information Geometry: Gradient Bounds and Trust-Region Methods
Saksham Kiroriwal, Julius Pfrommer, Jürgen Beyerer
We study Bayesian optimization (BO) through the lens of information geometry. Pulling back the Fisher information metric through the surrogate posterior map yields a local sensitivity tensor on the input space, which leads to an upper bound on the gradient of reparameterizable acquisition functions. This view explains vanishing-gradient behavior in high-dimensional BO and provides a common interpretation of heuristics such as RAASP and dimension-scaled lengthscales. Building on this analysis, we propose FITR, a trust-region-based BO method that replaces lengthscale-based scaling by local pullback-Fisher weights. FITR is not restricted to GP kernels with explicit lengthscales. On GP benchmarks with an SE kernel, experiments show competitive performance using FITR. The proposed method also easily generalizes to non-isotropic surrogates, although the gains are more task-dependent in that setting.
PDF
arXiv cs.CVSep 25
DepthEvidence: Unifying Metric Depth Prediction and Geometric Reasoning in Multimodal Language Models
Jiangning Wei, Yuan Yao, Miaomiao Cui, Mingsheng Li, Humen Zhong +2
Spatial reasoning with metric constraints requires linking objects to geometric measurements and preserving their numerical content during language reasoning. We present DepthEvidence, a 4B model that uses its own dense metric predictions as object-grounded evidence for language generation. A camera-conditioned decoder predicts full-resolution metric depth using multi-scale visual features and high-resolution RGB refinement. A dense-to-language interface converts predicted depths and decoder features into object-aligned continuous geometry tokens anchored to object identifiers. Geometric supervision encourages metric information to remain recoverable before and after language-context interaction, while instruction tuning supports object measurement and compositional reasoning. We introduce a Depth-VQA benchmark evaluating object-depth queries, relative comparisons, and decisions combining spatial and numerical constraints. Across nine datasets, DepthEvidence achieves the highest average dense $δ_1$ among evaluated methods, competitive with specialized estimators. It also leads the evaluated methods in instance-level metric depth estimation and overall accuracy on both relative…
PDF
arXiv cond-mat.dis-nnSep 25
A Flatness-Generalization Relation in the Teacher-Student Tree-Committee Machine
Brandon Livio Annesi, Davide Straziota, Enrico Maria Malatesta
The flatness of the loss landscape at a minimizer is a widely used heuristic for reasoning about neural-network generalization, yet evidence for this relation is mostly empirical and controversial. We study this relation in a teacher-student tree committee machine, where both the ERM estimator and the Hessian spectrum are analytically tractable in the proportional high-dimensional limit. First, we use a zero-temperature Gibbs formulation to obtain predictions for the observables of the typical minimizers of the empirical loss. Secondly, we use Edwards-Jones formalism to derive the limiting Hessian resolvent around these typical minimizers. All predictions agree with finite-size gradient-descent simulations. Finally, we study three measures of flatness, namely the left and right edges and the spectral mean, and check if a decrease in generalization error as the dataset size is increased corresponds to an increase in flatness. We find that the answer strongly depends on the learning task and on the ratio of the number of parameters to the number of data points. In regression, the spectral mean and right edge correlate with the generalization error, while the left edge does so only…
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 25
The Residual Stream's Effective Depth
Barak Gahtan, Ido Galil, Alex M. Bronstein
We introduce \emph{effective depth} ($\Deff$), a scalar diagnostic that treats the layer-wise residual stream of a transformer as a discrete-time process, measures how representation similarity decays with layer distance, and aggregates that profile into one number. Across sixteen decoder-only language models, $\Deff$ separates a structural consequence of residual accumulation from an empirical one: even maximally diverse orthogonal updates have the closed-form reference $F_L = 2L/(L+1)<2$, yet fifteen of sixteen default measurements lie below $F_L$ (Qwen3.5: 32--44\%, OLMo-2: 40--41\%, Pythia: 23--28\%). Matched references show that the gap is not caused by the persistent initial state or update-size imbalance, but is largely a calibrated signature of correlated residual updates rather than evidence that depth is unused. Symmetric position-0, token-normalisation, and top-PC controls show the regime is not reducible to BOS or top-PC artefacts: the lone above-reference default outlier joins the same regime, and all sixteen models are sub-reference after token-normalisation or top-1-PC removal. Intermediate checkpoints show that the regime is established early in OLMo-2 and stable…
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 25
seq2cause: One Autoregressive Backbone, Four Causal Discovery Tasks in Event Sequences
Hugo Math
Complex systems such as vehicles, patients, or genomes emit discrete event sequences whose operative question is causal, not predictive: which events cause which other events, and which cause higher-level outcomes such as failures or diseases? This question decomposes along two axes -- dependency type (event $\to$ event vs.\ event $\to$ outcome) and causal scope (single sequence vs.\ population) -- yielding four structurally distinct regimes with different identifiability conditions. No existing method addresses more than one, because all assume multi-stream structure with low vocabulary, and none scales beyond a few hundred event types. We present \textsc{Seq2Cause}, a unified framework that resolves all four regimes through a single shared primitive: a pretrained autoregressive model repurposed as an amortized conditional independence testing engine requiring no task-specific retraining. We establish a prediction--causality duality: the model's excess cross-entropy simultaneously bounds causal identification error across all four regimes, so that every improvement in next-token prediction tightens causal guarantees for free. On nonlinear SCMs (vocabularies up to $8{,}000$…
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 25
Block Sparse Attention with Log-Linear Complexity
Bohao Tang, Zhen Qin, Yuqi Pan, Zheng Li, Pengfei Liu
Scaling language models to long contexts is limited by the quadratic cost of self-attention. Block sparse attention offers an efficient alternative, but selecting the retained blocks remains a bottleneck. Conventional block selection requires scoring all query-block pairs and therefore remains quadratic in sequence length. To address this issue, we propose PISA, a block-sparse attention mechanism that employs a pyramid Top-$K$ selection strategy. The main idea is to gradually narrow down the candidates across different levels, making it more efficient to find the most relevant keys. Specifically, we construct a coarse-to-fine hierarchy of keys and perform selection from the coarsest level. At each level, LogSumExp scoring is applied to a bounded candidate set to select candidates for the next finer level, continuing until the finest level is reached. Through pooling, we construct $O(\log N)$ levels of keys, yielding an overall complexity of $O(N\log N)$, where $N$ denotes the sequence length. We develop hardware-aware Triton kernels for both training and inference, fusing hierarchical routing and LogSumExp scoring without materializing the query-key score matrix. We further…
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 25
SAGE: A sampling-aware global evaluation benchmark for species distribution modeling
Emilia Arens, Nina van Tiel, Robin Zbinden, Damien Robert, Lukas Drees +6
Knowing where species occur is fundamental for biodiversity research and conservation. Species distribution models (SDMs) link species observations to environmental conditions to estimate their spatial distribution. However, accuracy varies with the underlying data and models, making it essential to know for which species models can be trusted. Deep-learning-based SDMs ("DeepSDMs") now jointly model thousands of species, drawing on hundreds of millions of community-science records. At this scale, averaging performance hides substantial species-level variability, particularly for rare species, often of greatest conservation concern. Records are also strongly biased, making occurrence counts misleading. Accounting for these factors is essential for a reliable and informative evaluation of multi-species SDMs. Here, we introduce a Sampling-Aware Global Evaluation (SAGE) benchmark, combining GBIF records for training with sPlotOpen vegetation plots for presence-absence evaluation across 5771 plant species. We propose an evaluation framework that groups species based on two properties, sampling effort and relative prevalence, which describe how densely a species' range is sampled and…
PDF
arXiv cs.AISep 25
OmouAI: Argumentative Human-AI Policy Deliberation with Simulated Personas
Stylianos Loukas Vasileiou, Antonio Rago, William Yeoh, Georgina Curto
Debates amongst agents driven by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated vast potential in various applications, but when these interactions include humans and take place in high-stakes environments, e.g., in public policy deliberations, they are beset with issues such as sycophancy and a lack of faithful explanations. To tackle these issues, we present OmouAI, an interactive and inclusive deliberation system that uses LLMs in combination with computational argumentation, a field which excels in representing and reasoning within debates. OmouAI allows a human user to deliberate policy claims for real-world challenges with simulated personas, e.g., representing stakeholders, domain experts or devil's advocates, towards reducing sycophancy. Each persona generates its own arguments, and the arguments of all parties form a shared argumentation framework. Users can then contest, add and revise arguments, providing crucial human oversight. Then, arguments are evaluated using deterministic argumentative semantics against external goals, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals, guaranteeing faithful explanations. The advancement or worsening of the goals thus serve as…
PDF
arXiv cs.AISep 25
Up and Down the Abstraction Ladder: Code-Based Skills for Language Agents
Bartłomiej Cupiał, Jens Tuyls, Maciej Wołczyk, Davide Paglieri, Martin Klissarov +3
Language agents struggle to act and learn in environments that require long sequences of low-level actions. Code-based abstractions can make these agents more productive by letting them invoke reusable skills instead of repeatedly selecting individual actions. The code handles recurring local decisions, while the language model decides which skills to use and how to combine them. Yet abstractions are leaky, and situations beyond a skill's capabilities may require a return to primitive actions. Motivated by this tradeoff between productivity and flexibility, we systematically study how code-based action abstraction affects the performance, inference cost, and learning of language agents. We study this in NetHack, a challenging, long-horizon game environment, using CodeHack, our library of code-based skills with natural-language descriptions. We use this library to compare agents restricted to primitives with those using semantic skills alone or in combination with primitives. We evaluate these agents in three settings: zero-shot prompting, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. Across a broad zero-shot evaluation on NetHack, we find that compared with primitives,…
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arXiv cs.CVSep 25
Band-Selection Stability and Semantic Segmentation Performance: A Study on Hyperspectral City
Jiarong Li, Imad Ali Shah, Enda Ward, Martin Glavin, Edward Jones +1
Resource constraints make high-dimensional hyperspectral imaging challenging in autonomous perception, motivating the use of band selection methods. However, the sensitivity of band-selection methods to sampled data and their relationship to semantic segmentation models (SSMs) remain underexplored. This study evaluates six band selection methods on ten independently sampled, class-balanced region-of-interest (ROI) sets, yielding 60 top-25 band subsets from the Hyperspectral City V2 (128 bands: 450-950nm) dataset. Top-$K$ bands ($K\in\{3,5, ... 13\}$) from the first three ROI sets are evaluated with three SSMs against the corresponding 128-band baseline. Experiments show that intra-method stability is method-dependent: Sim-LP shows the highest stability (pairwise Jaccard similarity) and, together with JMIM+CSNR, yields the best segmentation results. Top-$K$ based SSMs remain competitive with baselines, with gains of up to 2.01 mIoU and 1.72 mF1 points, and 18-22x faster CPU inference for $K=9$. However, performance does not improve monotonically with $K$, and stability shows no consistent association with SSM performance. These findings suggest that intra-method stability is…
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arXiv cs.AISep 25
Externalized CPDAG Summaries Improve LLM Causal Deduction
Wentao Sun, João Paulo Nogueira, Dominique Verchere, Mathieu Acher, Alonso Silva
Corr2Cause asks whether a causal claim holds in every DAG compatible with observed correlations and conditional independencies. We frame this as latent-object reasoning: the label is defined by a CPDAG query, but free-form chain-of-thought often collapses the Markov-equivalence-class problem into local pattern matching. We propose Structured Thinking, a two-turn pipeline that first externalizes a typed, schema-constrained CPDAG summary and then answers against that graph state. On the Corr2Cause full test, Structured Thinking raises Qwen3.5-27B from $73.0$ to $86.4$ $F_1$(Yes) over a strong PC-instruction baseline in the primary paired run ($+13.4$ pp; McNemar $p=2.4\times 10^{-6}$; bootstrap $95\%$ CI [$+8.4$, $+18.6$]); across three full-ID seeds, the mean gain is $+8.1 \pm 5.3$ pp. A PC-scaffolded two-turn prose control reaches only $67.6$ $F_1$, indicating that a detailed PC scaffold plus a schema-free prose intermediate is not sufficient. The same pattern holds on Qwen3.6-27B, Paraphrase-OOD, and GPT-5.4-mini. Scrambling the emitted CPDAG costs $12.0$ pp $F_1$, and a full-split audit shows close agreement with the reference CPDAG (ID skeleton $F_1$ $0.960$; exact match…
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arXiv eess.IVSep 25
Quantum Diffusion Models for Medical Image Analysis
Francesco Aldo Venturelli, Stefano Martina, Marco Parigi, Filippo Caruso, Alba Cervera-Lierta +1
Quantum Machine Learning is a novel field of research aimed at devising machine learning approaches exploiting principles of quantum mechanics, such as superposition, entanglement and interference. In this context, we present a scalable hybrid Quantum Diffusion Model, and evaluate its use for medical image analysis. Specifically, our method is based on a Discrete-Time Quantum Walk algorithm, executed on a real quantum device, to model the forward dynamics of the diffusion model. For the backward step of the diffusion model, we devise and evaluate a classical learning model, which is used to reversely denoise the data. In contrast with other existing attempts at applying quantum machine learning for image analysis tasks, severely limited by the size of existing quantum devices, our method allows to process real-world large size medical data. In particular, we present results on grayscale and RGB images, as well as 3D volumes of moderate sizes. We benchmark our results by reproducing an alternative classical counterpart model, based on diffusion models on discrete state spaces. By doing so, we compare the generation capabilities of both models in terms of three distinct…
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arXiv cs.CLAI safetySep 25
CG-Probes: Recovering Guardrail Directions from Patient Query Embeddings
Marko Řeháček, Vítězslav Dušek, Martin Rusinko, Vít Nováček
Patient-facing AI assistants promise valuable support to patients, but incoming queries can pose medical risks. To create guardrails, we work with oncologists to define three ordinal risk axes: Medical Urgency, Psychological Urgency, and Topic Sensitivity. We propose Clinical Guardrail Probes (CG-Probes) to measure the risks from query embeddings. We probe for each axis in the normalized embedding space of frozen embedders via the difference-in-means method, treating each axis as a potential linear direction. To train the probes, we cluster 79,658 Czech oncology search queries with BERTopic and use these clusters to generate pairs of queries with contrastive risk levels via few-shot prompting. We evaluate the approach on 200 queries (90 real, 110 synthetic), each graded by two oncologists, against two open-weight LLMs and a frontier LLM. We find that urgency-based axes are recoverable as linear directions, and the probes are competitive with open-weight LLMs (no significant differences in quadratic-weighted kappa) at a fraction of the latency. Each axis yields a scalar score that clinicians can inspect and use to set escalation thresholds. The pipeline requires only search logs,…
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arXiv cs.LGTraining & fine-tuningSep 25
Distributed Learning as a Service: The Developer's Perspective
Tianyue Chu, Filippo Vannella, Dimitra Tsigkari, Paula Delgado-Santos, Fernando López +3
Application developers of distributed learning services face challenges that a typical federated learning loop does not address. Specifically, the model updates can still leak private data, devices might not be able to participate in the training due to limited resources, a single aggregator might not be able to scale, and the transmissions of model weights induce a considerable bandwidth cost. This paper demonstrates DLaaS (Distributed Learning as a Service) from the developer's vantage point. Using a single admin dashboard, the developer initiates a distributed/federated learning job and is able to activate Differential Privacy (DP), Split Learning (SL), Hierarchical Aggregation (HA), and Knowledge Distillation (KD) as declarative options, with no change to the clients' code. We demonstrate the complete service lifecycle on an industrial smart-home Wake-up Word (WuW) task, using the "Ok Aura" dataset. Once the developer initiates a distributed learning job by toggling DP, SL, HA, and KD in the admin dashboard, the system dispatches the job to a set of Android clients and Dockerized helper aggregators. In the demonstration, these mechanisms run live across configurations. Then,…
AIAI safety60PDF
arXiv cs.AIAI safetySep 25
Neuralyzing the Trace: Selective Representation-Level Unlearning with Contrastive Sparse Autoencoders
Itai Zehavi, Fanny Jourdan, Ulrich Aivodji
Machine unlearning aims to remove targeted information while preserving a model's other abilities. In realistic settings, such as privacy requests under the EU GDPR, the target may be narrow, for example information associated with a single person. Behavioral forgetting alone may be insufficient, motivating interventions directly on internal representations. However, standard mechanistic-interpretability extractors are poorly selective for such targets. We identify an energy bias in reconstruction-based extraction, which favors dominant background structure over low-energy target-specific components. We introduce SCALPEL, a contrastive sparse autoencoder designed to learn more selective forget features. We show theoretically that contrastive training promotes target-selective features and that our selection score controls expected background knowledge perturbation. We validate SCALPEL experimentally on TOFU across Qwen, Llama, and Gemma, where it substantially improves over NMF and standard SAE interventions and is competitive with Gradient Difference and RMU, bridging mechanistic interpretability and fine-grained unlearning.
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arXiv cs.AISep 25
Cheap, open agents make LLM pollution harder to mitigate
Raluca Rilla, Anne-Marie Nussberger, Rui Mata, Dirk U. Wulff
Large Language Model (LLM) pollution occurs when synthetic responses contaminate data intended to capture human behavior. High deployment costs have so far limited the risk posed by autonomous survey agents. However, open-weight models paired with open-source agentic frameworks may have removed this barrier. We compared the performance and detectability of nine agent configurations, ranging from fully open variants to closed commercial ones. Each agent autonomously completed a survey containing multiple response types yielding various detection checks. Fully open agents ran locally without usage fees and performed competitively with commercial alternatives. Open and commercial agents failed different sets of checks, and no single check reliably detected all agents, but open-text responses discriminated best between agents and humans. These findings identify fully open agents as a distinct risk for LLM pollution and support multilayered detection strategies emphasizing open-text analysis.
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arXiv cs.CVSep 25
Where Compute Matters: Heterogeneous Attention for Efficient Video Diffusion
Olga Zatsarynna, Denis Korzhenkov, Juergen Gall, Amir Habibian, Mohsen Ghafoorian
Efficient video generation requires reducing the quadratic cost of self-attention over long spatio-temporal token sequences. Existing efficient-attention methods typically apply the same computation pattern to every token, even though denoising difficulty varies substantially across video regions and evolves throughout the generation process. We introduce HetA-DiT, a heterogeneous attention mechanism that adaptively allocates computation according to token difficulty. A lightweight uncertainty branch predicts a token-wise estimate of denoising difficulty, which is used to route uncertain tokens through dense global attention while processing more reliable tokens with efficient local attention. The resulting routing is content- and timestep-adaptive, retains global context where it matters most, and provides a single parameter for controlling the quality-efficiency trade-off. HetA-DiT is compatible with few-step distribution-matching distillation and introduces no additional Transformer evaluation at inference time by reusing uncertainty estimates from the preceding denoising step. We evaluate the method on DMD-distilled Wan2.2-5B and Wan2.1-1.3B models. Across VBench, VBench-2.0,…
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arXiv cs.DCSep 25
DynBranch: Speculative Subgraph Reuse for Dynamic Agentic LLM Serving
Junyi Shen, Noppanat Wadlom, Zhengyuan Su, Yao Lu
Agentic LLM workflows decide their execution paths at runtime. Downstream computation may be predictable, or may have run before, yet it cannot begin until the model or the user resolves the branch. We call this serialization the branch-resolution barrier. Caching alone does not hide it: the key that identifies a reusable result is not known until then. In this paper, we propose DynBranch, which makes an unresolved branch addressable before it resolves. Its stable coordinate lets candidate subgraphs run during resolution and completed subgraph results be reused across later requests. A two-level controller admits this work when its expected benefit exceeds the load price. DynBranch sits at the model-API boundary and requires no changes to agent harnesses or model execution engines. Across four agentic workloads with Qwen3-32B on 4x H200 GPUs, DynBranch reduces mean latency by up to 32% over each workload's strongest prior system and by 46-66% against a no-reuse floor, while preserving workflow results. The benefit persists across backbone families and on a commodity Qwen3-8B/RTX 4090 deployment.
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arXiv cs.CLSep 25
Modeling Student Sensemaking with LLMs and Knowledge-Graph-Guided Inference
Özge Alacam, Zübeyde Demet Kirbulut Güneş, Funda Ekici, Nurcan Turan-Oluk, Dilay Dinçdemir +5
Collaborative science learning requires nuanced interpretation of student dialogue to characterize how learners identify knowledge gaps, build explanations, and work toward resolution - a theory-driven analysis that is labor-intensive and difficult to scale. We investigate whether instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) can support multidimensional analysis of collaborative sensemaking without task-specific training, and whether structured knowledge-state information improves model inference. We evaluate two mid-size LLMs on 23 richly annotated, expert-labeled episodes across prompting conditions that vary definitional scaffolding, reasoning mode, and turn structure. Without reasoning, models tend to overpredict successful sensemaking; reasoning-enabled prompting improves identification of unsuccessful cases. Knowledge-state diagnostics provide additional grounding, improving detection of unsuccessful sensemaking and increasing agreement with expert annotations. No single configuration performs best across all sensemaking dimensions, underscoring the multidimensional nature of the task.
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