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All fields3611Multimodal586Agents562Frontier LLMs491Inference & serving286Image segmentation205Graph learning1813D scene173Learning verifiable rewards172Voice AI103Classifier & causal discovery96Forecasting time88Flow matching77Evals60Teacher policy distillation57Federated learning54All 32 fields

Open problems across fields

  • General in-context learning for embodied agents1 paper raises it · 0 address it

    Improving adaptability of models to new tasks and environments without task-specific fine-tuning is critical for scalable embodied intelligence.

    • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
  • Cost and latency in agentic systems2 papers raise it · 1 addresses it

    High computational and time costs limit practical deployment of agentic systems for real-world tasks.

    • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
    • PremiseCheck: Efficient Fact-Checking of Human and AI Peer Reviewsraises · addresses
  • Physical-state verification and failure recovery1 paper raises it · 0 address it

    Robustness to irreversible failures and accurate state tracking are essential for reliable embodied control.

    • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
  • Evidence-grounded multimodal reasoning benchmarks1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

    Current benchmarks often fail to ensure models use necessary audio-visual evidence, weakening evaluation reliability.

    • EvaOmni: An Evidence-Grounded Benchmark for Audio-Visual Reasoningraises · addresses
  • Length generalization in sequential state tracking1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

    Models struggle to maintain performance on problems much longer than their training data, limiting scalability.

    • PAR: Progress-Aligned Recurrence for Length Generalization in State Trackingraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

Papers

  • arXiv cs.CLOct 15

    Evidence-Gated Bilingual RAG for Reliable Consumer Banking Search

    Ahmed Mohamed Mahmoud Rayyan, Rana Mahmoud Mohammed, Aya Abdallah Abdelmonem, Mohamed Khaled Goda Othman, Rahatara Ferdousi

    Consumers often describe what they need rather than use the terminology found on a banking website. For example, a natural-language request ("a card for travel") may not share the keywords of the relevant product page, and the problem is harder in bilingual services, where the same intent may be expressed in Arabic or English. This paper presents an evidence-gated bilingual retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for consumer banking search that operates entirely on local infrastructure. The framework combines structured web-content refinement, hybrid dense-lexical retrieval, intent-aware evidence selection, cross-encoder reranking, and a three-outcome Answer / Related Mismatch / No Answer decision mechanism. On 210 URL-labeled Arabic and English queries, the proposed approach improves Top-1 hit rate from 50.48% to 79.05% and MRR@5 from 0.571 to 0.797 over a hybrid baseline. A separate 26-case end-to-end evaluation achieved 69.2% strict success, with 72.7% of generated answers classified as supported by an automated faithfulness judge. These results are preliminary: the retrieval queries are paraphrases of a small reference set, and the end-to-end test is small and uses an…

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  • arXiv cs.LGOct 15

    The Ephemeral Cost of Switching Optimizers Across LLM Training Stages

    Xinyu Zhao, Davis Wertheimer, Ashutosh Sharma, Rameswar Panda, Paul Pu Liang

    Recent work suggests that switching optimizers between pretraining and subsequent training stages incurs a performance cost, but systematic investigation of this phenomenon is lacking. We study the mismatch between AdamW and Muon optimizers by pretraining 1.2B Llama-3 models from scratch while varying the proportion of updates taken with each optimizer, and similarly interpolating between the two optimizers during continued pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Surprisingly, we find little evidence of a meaningful optimizer mismatch penalty: final performance is largely explained by the independent effects of the pretraining and post-training optimizers, with downstream performance generally improving as the proportion of Muon updates during SFT increases. Although matching the pretraining optimizer can reduce forgetting during SFT, this does not translate into improved final benchmark performance. We further evaluate AdamW and Muon for task-general SFT of open-weight models, across the Llama and Qwen families up to 14B parameters, where Muon remains competitive with AdamW, despite these models having been pretrained with AdamW. Together, our results suggest that the…

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  • arXiv eess.IVOct 15

    LGGS: Longitudinal MRI Reconstruction via Guided Group Sparsity

    Nikola Janjušević, Hersh Chandarana, Yao Wang, Li Feng

    Serial MRI is routinely performed in current clinical practice for disease surveillance and applications such as MR-guided radiotherapy. However, long MRI scan times increase costs and limit patient access, making accelerated image reconstruction of broad clinical importance. Previous scans of the same patient contain image information highly correlated with the current exam, yet existing reconstruction methods rarely exploit this information. Major challenges in the effective use of prior scans include inter-visit misregistration, pathological changes, and image phase variation. In this work, we propose Longitudinal Guided Group Sparsity (LGGS), an interpretable deep-learning framework for longitudinally informed MRI reconstruction derived from classical group sparsity. The prior scan is incorporated into the reconstruction regularizer through learned phase-invariant circulant attention that identifies corresponding features across exams. This formulation provides robustness to local in-plane and through-plane misregistration as well as inter-visit phase variation. Across acceleration rates, LGGS achieves state-of-the-art performance on longitudinal T1-weighted multi-coil brain…

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  • arXiv cs.CLOct 15

    SAFETYEDIT: Sparse Internal Targets with Prompt-Wide Control for LLM Jailbreak Backdoors

    Yutong Ke, Yansu Wang, Zeyu Zhang, Xihao Guo, Chongwen Zhao +1

    Model-editing backdoors aim to induce harmful responses under a trigger while preserving ordinary behavior on untriggered input. Recent model-editing approaches target affirmative response prefixes through rank-one updates to a small subset of model weights. Yet when this prefix-level target is satisfied, the model may still revert to refusal or produce a coherent, apparently compliant response that does not address the request. To overcome this limitation, existing internal-representation approaches shift focus from output tokens to dense, high-dimensional compliance directions in latent space. Existing representation-level approaches rely on preservation constraints to maintain conditionality, motivating us to ask whether a smaller internal target can offer a different effectiveness-preservation trade-off. Motivated by the comparable control capability of single-coordinate interventions, we investigate a sparse refusal-related MLP coordinate as this target. We propose SAFETYEDIT, which optimizes a single refusal-related coordinate and uses KV-cache marking in early attention layers to propagate a prefix-trigger signal across subsequent instruction positions. On some checkpoints…

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  • arXiv cs.CLOct 15

    Inductive Learning of Concept Embeddings from Cross-Linguistic Colexification Patterns with Textual Attributes

    Arne Rubehn

    The advent of distributional semantics as a framework for computational semantics marked a paradigm shift in the nature of representations, by which meanings are represented as dense vectors commonly known as word embeddings. Computational approaches to historical or typological language comparison, on the other hand, still mostly rely on discrete representations, while the potential of embedding-based methods remains largely untapped in this context. Recent studies have proposed concept embeddings as a language-independent, onomasiological counterpart to word embeddings, based on networks of cross-linguistic colexification patterns. While the resulting concept embeddings reflect meaningful semantic properties and relations, they suffer from a lack of scalability, since they rely on transductive embedding approaches which only learn embeddings for nodes present in the training data. In this study, we present an inductive framework for learning concept embeddings, combining the structural properties of full and partial colexification networks with semantic information from short concept descriptions. This framework allows the embedding of unseen concepts based on a short…

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  • arXiv cs.DSOct 15

    Hard Instances on Demand

    Jamie Fravel, Martin Koutecký, Pavlo Tsitsei

    The conclusions of an experimental study of algorithms are only as good as the instances they are run on. Benchmark libraries for well-studied problems took decades to curate, while evaluations of new problems often fall back on random instances, which are known to be misleading: they may say more about the random generator than about the algorithmic question at hand. We treat instance generation as an optimization problem: parameterize the instance space, take the solver's running time as the objective, and let a black-box optimizer search for hard instances. We develop a widely applicable workflow built on the Nevergrad optimization platform and demonstrate it on four NP-hard problems: satisfiability, traveling salesperson, Hamiltonian cycle, and non-permutation flow-shop scheduling. The search needs only the solver, an instance encoder, and a compute budget. Our evolved instances beat the hardest instance of a budget-matched random draw in all four case studies, by an order of magnitude or more in three. They are often competitive with long-curated benchmark sets: our SAT champion is harder (for a three-solver portfolio) than 78% of the 498 SAT Competition formulas in its size…

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  • arXiv cs.CLOct 15▲ 2

    Measuring Mechanistic Uncertainty in Large Language Models via Causal Robustness

    Aneesh Komanduri, Majid Afshar, Timothy A. Miller, Yanjun Gao

    Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in critical domains, where their susceptibility to hallucinations makes reliable and interpretable uncertainty quantification essential. We introduce the concept of mechanistic uncertainty, which characterizes uncertainty through the stability of the internal mechanisms supporting a model's response. We propose the causal robustness margin, defined as the minimum internal intervention required to deviate the model's output, and operationalize it using Jacobian Lens (Jlens) concept steering vectors. Across three open-source models and five question-answering datasets, we show incorrect and uncertain responses exhibit smaller margins, indicating greater sensitivity to internal interventions, and the causal robustness margin complements conventional output-based uncertainty methods. Finally, in a controlled knowledge injection experiment, correctly learned facts show increased margins after training, suggesting that causal robustness provides a mechanistically grounded signal of uncertainty.

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  • arXiv cs.LGOct 15

    Alert-List Concordance for Evaluating Imputation Strategies in ICU Sepsis Prediction

    Priyanka Siddappa, Muntaqim Ahmed Raju, Shifat Haider Al Amin, Ruizhe Ma

    Preprocessing is an under-measured reliability risk in clinical prediction: a model can keep a similar AUROC and still change who receives an alert. Imputation quality is commonly evaluated using reconstruction error or aggregate discrimination, neither of which directly measures agreement on which patients are flagged. At a matched alert rate, pipelines with similar aggregate performance can produce different patient lists. This question is especially relevant under the frequent, structured missingness of real ICU records. We therefore introduce alert-list concordance, which asks whether two pipelines identify the same high-risk patients, measured by the Jaccard similarity of their top-k% alert sets with patient-level bootstrap confidence intervals. On PhysioNet/CinC 2019 (40,336 patients, 71.9% missingness), we compare nine imputation strategies and a native-missingness baseline using a fixed XGBoost configuration, fitted and Platt-calibrated separately for each strategy. After Bonferroni correction, 22 of the 28 reconstruction-method pairs showed no statistically significant difference in patient-level AUROC, yet their alert lists overlap at Jaccard 0.518 to 0.750. Similar…

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  • arXiv cs.CLOct 15

    ToMStories: Interpreting Theory-of-Mind in Synthetic Narratives

    Melanie Subbiah, Chia-En Jacklyn Tsai, Kathleen McKeown

    Understanding people often requires inferring what they feel or want from how they behave rather than from what they state outright. We ask whether language models can make these inferences, and how they do so. We introduce Theory-of-Mind Stories (ToMStories), an evaluation dataset of ~6,000 short synthetically generated narrative vignettes, each paired with a multiple-choice or open-ended question about a character's emotion, fear, motivation, or emotional wound. These psychological states are conveyed implicitly (showing), explicitly (telling), or with conflict between dialogue and description. Evaluating thirteen open-weight models (1B-72B parameters), we find that the largest models match humans on multiple choice but not open-ended questions. Our analyses point to simplifications models make in both interpretation and generation of implicit psychological states, indicating that synthetic data can help us understand how models perform interpretation, but likely overestimates how well models interpret humans.

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  • arXiv cs.CLOct 15

    A Plausible Explanation Is Enough to Mislead Multimodal Judges

    Anglin Cai, Zhiqi Wang, Xiaozhi Yang, Yurun Lin, Dongwon Lee +1

    Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) increasingly serve as judges in training and evaluation pipelines, often assessing answers together with explanations. Although AI judges are sensitive to textual factors, it remains unclear whether ordinary plausible explanations can sway judgments requiring visual verification. We introduce JUPE, a visual-question-answering (VQA)-style benchmark that fixes answers while varying explanations. Across 14 MLLM judges, ordinary explanations that sound plausible mislead judges, with effects comparable on average to deliberately persuasive arguments. Plain justifications and chain-of-thought rationales reduce rejection of incorrect answers by 12.7 and 13.8 percentage points, respectively. We call this failure plausibility capture. Using signal detection theory, we find a significant mean shift in decision criterion toward acceptance, without a clear change in mean discriminability. Explanations sway judgments across domains, explanation generators, and judging protocols, while tested mitigations offer limited, model-dependent protection. Such shifts can inflate performance estimates when judges evaluate answers with explanations.

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  • arXiv cs.LGOct 15

    Network-Wide Freeway Speed Nowcasting and Forecasting from Sparse Fixed Sensors with a Probe-Supervised Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network

    Ran Tu, Zihao Li, Arash Mirzaei

    Traffic agencies need current and near-future speeds on every link of their network, but their fixed sensors cover only part of it. We study joint nowcasting and next-hour forecasting of hourly speeds on all 4{,}127 directional freeway links of the Dallas--Fort Worth region from sensors on 643 links (15.6%). Historical probe-vehicle data supervise every link in training; only sensor readings are used at inference. We call this setting probe-supervised sparse sensing. We propose GCRN+, a graph convolutional recurrent network that predicts deviations from a historical speed profile. It combines a parameter-free, direction-aware kernel interpolation of sensor anomalies, used as input features and as an output baseline, with a diffusion-convolutional GRU on the directed road graph, a low-rank adaptive graph and learnable link embeddings. It scales linearly with network size and trains on a CPU. Sensor readings are emulated from probe speeds, which isolates spatio-temporal inference from detector calibration. On four held-out test days, GCRN+ attains an RMSE of 2.21~mph for the current hour and 2.39~mph for the next hour on unsensored links, against 3.23~mph for the historical…

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  • arXiv cs.CROct 15

    StratFL: Countering Covert Model Poisoning Attacks with Strategic Federated Learning

    Manoj Twarakavi, Venkata Sriram Siddhardh Nadendla

    Advanced persistent threats (APTs) are a major concern in federated learning (FL) deployments in critical sectors such as healthcare, and finance. Traditional defense mechanisms fail to contain APTs due to their intermittent attacking behavior. This paper addresses a specific type of APT called covert model poisoning (CMP) where the attacker intermittently injects poisoned model updates in a covert manner. The interaction between the FL server and a CMP attacker is modeled as an imperfect repeated game where both players cannot observe each other's actions. A novel adversarial search algorithm called StratFL is designed alongside novel belief update algorithms at both the server and adversary. Experiments are designed using MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets to evaluate and compare StratFL's performance against state-of-the-art methods. Empirical convergence of belief update algorithms is demonstrated across various security vignettes. At the same time, StratFL is found to exhibit an improved accuracy of 10% compared to state-of-the-art methods.

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  • arXiv cs.LGOct 15

    Understanding Stability of Outer Nesterov Momentum on Stochastic Pseudo-Gradients

    Nishant Sharma, Laura Gomezjurado Gonzalez, Ganesh Talluri, Sarath Chandar, Hiroki Naganuma

    Large neural networks are commonly trained across many workers, and communication between them is a major cost. Workers therefore take several local optimization steps before sending their net parameter displacements, or pseudo-gradients, to an outer optimizer, which often applies Nesterov momentum. We study how the outer momentum, the number of local steps and the averaging over workers control the training dynamics, and in particular their stability. For random quadratics, we derive an exact mean-square stability criterion in any dimension, which reveals that the inner batch size determines whether increasing the number of local steps eventually stabilizes or destabilizes the outer iteration. Moreover, while averaging the pseudo-gradients of independent workers can make larger outer momentum values admissible, the number of workers required for stability can grow exponentially with the number of local steps. Finally, we show that the mean-square dynamics governing stability can be probed directly at intermediate neural-network checkpoints using shared-minibatch perturbations. We test our theoretical findings across networks, and measure their consequences for training loss.

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  • arXiv cs.LGOct 15

    Noise-shaped Sampling and Annealing for Scalable On-the-edge Training of Binary and Ternary AI Models

    Zihao Chen, Zhili Xiao, Rui-Jie Zhu, Yipeng Wang, Jason Eshraghian +1

    The training loss of binary and ternary neural networks, expanded as a multilinear polynomial over the discrete weights, is structurally equivalent to the energy of a hierarchical high-order Ising model. We exploit this equivalence to apply Ising solvers to discrete-weight network training, while accounting for a fundamental difference in objectives: an Ising solver seeks the ground state of a fixed energy function, whereas training seeks solutions that generalize to unseen data. Our key contribution is $ΣΔ$-Sampler, an optimizer that reconciles these objectives by embedding a stochastic sampling-and-annealing step as a noisy quantizer inside a first-order $ΣΔ$ noise-shaping loop. The loop pushes noise from weight quantization, high-order frustration, and mini-batch sampling out of the low-frequency adaptation band, so that discrete weight updates follow the smooth descent trajectories embedded in the rugged loss landscape. We validate the framework on a planted quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) benchmark with a known minimizer; on CIFAR-10, where a $13$M-parameter ternary model comes within $1\%$ of full-precision accuracy; on ImageNet-1k, where a ternary…

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  • arXiv cs.CLOct 15

    Trajectory-Guided Steering: Mitigating Spurious Feature Bias in Clinical Classification

    Fardin Ahsan Sakib, Ziwei Zhu, Ozlem Uzuner

    Large language models rely on spurious features in clinical classification: swapping a single gender token in clinical notes alters gender-irrelevant diagnoses in up to 53.5% of cases. Existing inference-time corrections either need counterfactual data built around the specific spurious feature or behave unpredictably. We observe that how a model's preference between answers evolves across layers, its prediction trajectory, indicates for each document whether a correction is likely to help. We propose Trajectory-Guided Steering (TGS), which decides from the trajectory alone whether to correct each prediction and in which direction, with no counterfactual data and no knowledge of the spurious feature. On 16 clinical classification tasks from i2b2, TGS fixes 17.7% of errors while breaking only 1.3% of correct predictions and stays net-positive across all tested hyperparameter settings; all baselines are net-negative or near zero. The same corrections reduce reliance on the spurious feature: on the most affected diseases, gender-swap inconsistency falls sharply (hypertension 53.5% -> 38.0%, diabetes 35.1% -> 21.5%). Applying the correction to every document instead raises breaks on…

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  • arXiv cs.CLOct 15

    When Does Uncertainty Measure RAG Hallucination Risk?

    Rajeel Ahmad Ansari, Tautik Agrahari

    Uncertainty can measure hallucination risk in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), but only when retrieved evidence constrains the answer. When evidence is present, unsupported factual claims become less likely; when retrieval coverage is poor, the model can answer from internal knowledge and assign high probability to unsupported claims. We test this across four instruction-tuned models on HotpotQA and SQuAD. After matching faithful and hallucinated answers within word-count bins, length-only classifiers fall near chance, while perplexity reaches 0.81--0.91 AUROC on targeted unsupported edits. Varying retrieval depth shows why the score changes meaning: detection can weaken with only the top-ranked passage, then recover after adding a second passage. A combined uncertainty and semantic-drift score improves calibration, and measurements remain above chance on RAGTruth QA. Results support a conditional view of uncertainty as a useful measure of RAG hallucination risk.

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  • arXiv cs.CVOct 15

    Shift-Reliance Alignment: Ranking Vision-Language Models by the Cues They Trust

    Faisal Mohammad, Mohamed Younis

    Vision-language models (VLMs) are usually chosen from leaderboards, which give one ranking for every application. On questions about objects that a scene suggests but does not contain, however, the model with the lowest error on the POPE hallucination benchmark is not the one with the lowest error on such questions. For yes/no questions about object presence, we show that the best model for a target domain can be predicted without running any candidate on that domain, given 650 to 1,200 labeled target items that calibrate a detector. We measure each model's reliance on a cue, a feature such as scene context or text in the image, by editing 100 labeled source images so that the cue suggests the wrong answer, and comparing with a matched control edit. Reliance predicts which VLMs are misled by physical sticker attacks (Spearman .93 on nine models not used to design the score) and which hallucinate on unedited COCO photographs, beyond what their tendency to answer yes explains. Shift-Reliance Alignment (SRA) scores a model by its source error on the labeled source questions plus its reliance multiplied by the shift. The shift is the proportion of target questions on which the cue…

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  • arXiv cs.CVOct 15

    ProactGen: Learning Proactive Clarification for Video Generation

    Zhixiao Wang, Yang Chen, Yifan Xu, Chenbin Li, Yue Chang +3

    Recent advances in video generation let users create high-quality videos from natural language descriptions, yet obtaining results that match user intent remains time-consuming: individual generations are computationally expensive, and underspecified prompts force repeated cycles of generation, inspection, and revision. Existing video prompt optimization methods improve generation through automatic rewriting, but cannot supply the ideas and preferences that were not in the initial description. We propose ProactGen, a video generation framework that learns proactive clarification, eliciting user intent through questions grounded in generated video drafts. Specifically, we train a vision-language model as a questioning policy with reinforcement learning: observing the initial prompt and a video draft, it learns to ask the questions most valuable to downstream generation, rewarded by the alignment between the final generated video and a target reference. We further find that effective questioning does not require drafts of final-output quality, and exploit this property by generating drafts with fewer denoising steps, keeping the added cost of clarification low. Experiments show…

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  • arXiv cs.CVOct 15

    Three LiDARs, Twenty-Five Datasets: Cross-Source Generalization in Tree-Species Recognition

    Jae Joong Lee, Bedrich Benes

    FOR-species20K is the largest public LiDAR benchmark for tree-species classification, pooling 25 independently collected terrestrial, mobile, and airborne laser-scanning datasets across 33 species. We introduce a multi-resolution, multi-view ConvNeXtV2 model that improves official hidden-test accuracy from 79.5% to 85.0%, ranking first at the time of submission. We then examine what this score measures. Because the hidden test is species-balanced, its overall accuracy is more comparable to a macro metric than to accuracy under the public set's long-tailed distribution. Moreover, the official random split places every source dataset in both training and evaluation. A logistic probe recovers source identity from out-of-fold model probabilities with 69% accuracy, while geometric features identify the source above 90% within two widely shared species; 18 of the 33 species occur in only one source. Under a source-species-cell holdout, evaluated on 5,566 trees from eight eligible species that retain the same LiDAR-type training support in other sources, the unweighted species mean falls from 82% to 36%, and tree-weighted accuracy falls from 95% to 60%. Count-matched retraining and…

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  • arXiv cs.AIOct 15

    Beyond Explicit Intent: Discovering and Shaping Artistic Intent through Human-AI Co-Creation

    Renye Yan, Jialun Zhong, Jikang Cheng, Yi Gao, Yanzeng Li +1

    Generative AI is becoming an important medium for artistic creation, yet existing interactions often assume that creators can specify intentions in advance and accurately communicate them through text prompts. Artistic intentions, however, may be vague, latent, or recognizable only after seeing concrete visual possibilities. We propose a human-AI co-creation paradigm beyond explicit intent expression. By expanding model exploration, we expose artists to diverse visual possibilities, allowing them to identify previously unarticulated preferences through observation, comparison, and selection. We then integrate artists' curatorial judgments into reinforcement learning, assigning different learning strengths based on preferences over generation trajectories, so recognized directions are more strongly reinforced and the model gradually adapts to individual aesthetics. This creates a continuous "explore-identify-shape-re-explore" loop in which artistic intent is progressively discovered, externalized, and shaped. Through three user studies, we examine latent-preference discovery, personalized preference alignment, and the externalization of vague, difficult-to-express creative…

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Rising research topics

  • Training & fine-tuning42+90.9%
  • AI safety29+61.1%
  • Federated learning54+42.1%
  • Quantum machine learning29+38.1%
  • Computer vision29+31.8%
  • Evals60+25.0%
  • Code models13+18.2%
  • Image & video generation20+5.3%