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199 papers in cs.AI
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cs.CLcs.AIcs.PL Ezequiel Lopez-Rubio, Mario Pascual-Gonzalez · Mar 23, 2026

Symbolic regression search spaces suffer from structural redundancy: expression DAGs with $k$ internal nodes admit $\Theta(k!)$ distinct node-numberings that encode the same mathematical expression. This paper proposes IsalSR, a representation framework that computes a pruned canonical string—a complete labeled-DAG isomorphism invariant—to collapse all equivalent forms into a single canonical representation. The approach promises to reduce effective search space size by $O(k!)$ and can be integrated into any existing SR algorithm as a preprocessing step.

A fundamental but largely unaddressed obstacle in Symbolic regression (SR) is structural redundancy: every expression DAG with admits many distinct node-numbering schemes that all encode the same expression, each occupying a separate point in the search space and consuming fitness evaluations without adding diversity. We present IsalSR (Instruction Set and Language for Symbolic Regression), a representation framework that encodes expression DAGs as strings over a compact two-tier alphabet and computes a pruned canonical string -- a complete labeled-DAG isomorphism invariant -- that collapses all the equivalent representations into a single canonical form.
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cs.AI Xiao Han, Yuzheng Fan, Sendong Zhao et al. · Mar 23, 2026

GSEM addresses the challenge of building structured experience memory for clinical LLM agents. Unlike flat memory banks storing isolated records, it organizes clinical decisions into a dual-layer graph capturing both internal decision structure (entity layer) and inter-experience relational dependencies (experience layer), supporting applicability-aware retrieval and online feedback-driven calibration of node quality and edge weights. Experiments on medical benchmarks report strong improvements over RAG and memory-augmented baselines, achieving 70.90% average accuracy with DeepSeek-V3.2.

Clinical decision-making agents can benefit from reusing prior decision experience. However, many memory-augmented methods store experiences as independent records without explicit relational structure, which may introduce noisy retrieval, unreliable reuse, and in some cases even hurt performance compared to direct LLM inference. We propose GSEM (Graph-based Self-Evolving Memory), a clinical memory framework that organizes clinical experiences into a dual-layer memory graph, capturing both the decision structure within each experience and the relational dependencies across experiences, and supporting applicability-aware retrieval and online feedback-driven calibration of node quality and edge weights. Across MedR-Bench and MedAgentsBench with two LLM backbones, GSEM achieves the highest average accuracy among all baselines, reaching 70.90\% and 69.24\% with DeepSeek-V3.2 and Qwen3.5-35B, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/xhan1022/gsem.
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cs.AIcs.CL Andreas Sauter, Yuyue Zhao, Jacopo Urbani et al. · Mar 23, 2026

EvoIdeator addresses the challenge of iteratively refining scientific research ideas using LLMs by bridging the gap between scalar RL rewards and coarse language feedback. The core innovation is a dual-signal approach combining lexicographic rewards with checklist-grounded, span-level language feedback integrated directly into the RL training loop using Dr. GRPO. This allows a 4B parameter model to outperform larger frontier models like Gemini 3 Flash and DeepSeek-V3.2 on scientific rigor criteria.

Scientific idea generation is a cornerstone of autonomous knowledge discovery, yet the iterative evolution required to transform initial concepts into high-quality research proposals remains a formidable challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigms often rely on rubric-based scalar rewards that provide global quality scores but lack actionable granularity. Conversely, language-based refinement methods are typically confined to inference-time prompting, targeting models that are not explicitly optimized to internalize such critiques. To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{EvoIdeator}, a framework that facilitates the evolution of scientific ideas by aligning the RL training objective with \textbf{checklist-grounded feedback}. EvoIdeator leverages a structured judge model to generate two synergistic signals: (1) \emph{lexicographic rewards} for multi-dimensional optimization, and (2) \emph{fine-grained language feedback} that offers span-level critiques regarding grounding, feasibility, and methodological rigor. By integrating these signals into the RL loop, we condition the policy to systematically utilize precise feedback during both optimization and inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EvoIdeator, built on Qwen3-4B, significantly outperforms much larger frontier models across key scientific metrics. Crucially, the learned policy exhibits strong generalization to diverse external feedback sources without further fine-tuning, offering a scalable and rigorous path toward self-refining autonomous ideation.
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cs.LGcs.AIcs.GT Yurong Chen, Zhiyi Huang, Michael I. Jordan et al. · Mar 23, 2026

The paper studies calibeating—post-processing external forecasts online to minimize cumulative losses while matching an informativeness-based benchmark. Unlike prior work that used loss-specific arguments, the authors reduce calibeating to standard online learning primitives, showing it is minimax-equivalent to regret minimization. This yields optimal rates for general proper losses and improves bounds for simultaneous calibration and calibeating.

We study calibeating, the problem of post-processing external forecasts online to minimize cumulative losses and match an informativeness-based benchmark. Unlike prior work, which analyzed calibeating for specific losses with specific arguments, we reduce calibeating to existing online learning techniques and obtain results for general proper losses. More concretely, we first show that calibeating is minimax-equivalent to regret minimization. This recovers the $O(\log T)$ calibeating rate of Foster and Hart [FH23] for the Brier and log losses and its optimality, and yields new optimal calibeating rates for mixable losses and general bounded losses. Second, we prove that multi-calibeating is minimax-equivalent to the combination of calibeating and the classical expert problem. This yields new optimal multi-calibeating rates for mixable losses, including Brier and log losses, and general bounded losses. Finally, we obtain new bounds for achieving calibeating and calibration simultaneously for the Brier loss. For binary predictions, our result gives the first calibrated algorithm that at the same time also achieves the optimal $O(\log T)$ calibeating rate.
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cs.AI Xi Yang, Aurelie Lozano, Naoki Abe et al. · Mar 23, 2026

Enterprise AI agents face a fundamental dilemma: complex reasoning demands large-scale training data, yet enterprise domains offer limited, noisy trajectories and prohibit online self-play. This paper proposes Context Engineering via DT-MDP (DT-MDP-CE), a framework that abstracts LLM agent behavior into a finite Digital-Twin Markov Decision Process, learns per-step rewards via contrastive inverse RL (T-REX) from ranked offline trajectories, and deploys the resulting policy to guide context engineering—enabling performance gains without fine-tuning the base model or interacting with the environment during training.

Despite rapid progress in AI agents for enterprise automation and decision-making, their real-world deployment and further performance gains remain constrained by limited data quality and quantity, complex real-world reasoning demands, difficulties with self-play, and the lack of reliable feedback signals. To address these challenges, we propose a lightweight, model-agnostic framework for improving LLM-based enterprise agents via offline reinforcement learning (RL). The proposed Context Engineering via DT-MDP (DT-MDP-CE) framework comprises three key components: (1) A Digital-Twin Markov Decision Process (DT-MDP), which abstracts the agent's reasoning behavior as a finite MDP; (2) A robust contrastive inverse RL, which, armed with the DT-MDP, to efficiently estimate a well-founded reward function and induces policies from mixed-quality offline trajectories; and (3) RL-guided context engineering, which uses the policy obtained from the integrated process of (1) and (2), to improve the agent's decision-making behavior. As a case study, we apply the framework to a representative task in the enterprise-oriented domain of IT automation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate consistent and significant improvements over baseline agents across a wide range of evaluation settings, suggesting that the framework can generalize to other agents sharing similar characteristics in enterprise environments.
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cs.CLcs.AI Ulugbek Shernazarov, Rostislav Svitsov, Bin Shi · Mar 23, 2026

Medical text summarization helps clinicians process millions of biomedical articles, but fine-tuning large language models demands prohibitive resources. This paper compares Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), Prompt Tuning, and full fine-tuning across Flan-T5-Small, Base, and Large on PubMed summarization. The counter-intuitive finding is that updating fewer than 1% of parameters via LoRA consistently outperforms full fine-tuning, suggesting that low-rank constraints provide effective regularization.

Fine-tuning large language models for domain-specific tasks such as medical text summarization demands substantial computational resources. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods offer promising alternatives by updating only a small fraction of parameters. This paper compares three adaptation approaches-Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), Prompt Tuning, and Full Fine-Tuning-across the Flan-T5 model family on the PubMed medical summarization dataset. Through experiments with multiple random seeds, we demonstrate that LoRA consistently outperforms full fine-tuning, achieving 43.52 +/- 0.18 ROUGE-1 on Flan-T5-Large with only 0.6% trainable parameters compared to 40.67 +/- 0.21 for full fine-tuning. Sensitivity analyses examine the impact of LoRA rank and prompt token count. Our findings suggest the low-rank constraint provides beneficial regularization, challenging assumptions about the necessity of full parameter updates. Code is available at https://github.com/eracoding/llm-medical-summarization
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cs.LGcs.AI Hanyin Cheng, Xingjian Wu, Yang Shu et al. · Mar 23, 2026

Most Time Series Foundation Models treat channels independently and ignore cross-channel correlations, which limits their performance on multivariate forecasting. This paper proposes CoRA (CoRrelation-aware Adapter), a lightweight plug-in that learns three correlation types—dynamic (time-varying), heterogeneous (positive/negative), and partial (sparse)—through a low-rank decomposition and dual contrastive learning. The key insight is that these correlations can be captured during fine-tuning without re-pretraining the foundation model, and with only linear complexity at inference time.

Most existing Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) use channel independent modeling and focus on capturing and generalizing temporal dependencies, while neglecting the correlations among channels or overlooking the different aspects of correlations. However, these correlations play a vital role in Multivariate time series forecasting. To address this, we propose a CoRrelation-aware Adapter (CoRA), a lightweight plug-and-play method that requires only fine-tuning with TSFMs and is able to capture different types of correlations, so as to improve forecast performance. Specifically, to reduce complexity, we innovatively decompose the correlation matrix into low-rank Time-Varying and Time-Invariant components. For the Time-Varying component, we further design learnable polynomials to learn dynamic correlations by capturing trends or periodic patterns. To learn positive and negative correlations that appear only among some channels, we introduce a novel dual contrastive learning method that identifies correlations through projection layers, regulated by a Heterogeneous-Partial contrastive loss during training, without introducing additional complexity in the inference stage. Extensive experiments on 10 real-world datasets demonstrate that CoRA can improve TSFMs in multivariate forecasting performance.
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cs.LGcs.AI Nikolas Stavrou, Siamak Mehrkanoon · Mar 23, 2026

This paper tackles precipitation nowcasting by enhancing the lightweight SmaAT-UNet architecture with two modifications: a vector-quantization (VQ) bottleneck that discretizes latent representations into a learned codebook, and Mixed Convolution (MixConv) blocks that blend multiple kernel sizes to reduce parameters. The goal is to cut model size for edge deployment while preserving forecast skill at a 30-minute lead time.

Weather forecasting supports critical socioeconomic activities and complements environmental protection, yet operational Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) systems remain computationally intensive, thus being inefficient for certain applications. Meanwhile, recent advances in deep data-driven models have demonstrated promising results in nowcasting tasks. This paper presents SmaAT-QMix-UNet, an enhanced variant of SmaAT-UNet that introduces two key innovations: a vector quantization (VQ) bottleneck at the encoder-decoder bridge, and mixed kernel depth-wise convolutions (MixConv) replacing selected encoder and decoder blocks. These enhancements both reduce the model's size and improve its nowcasting performance. We train and evaluate SmaAT-QMix-UNet on a Dutch radar precipitation dataset (2016-2019), predicting precipitation 30 minutes ahead. Three configurations are benchmarked: using only VQ, only MixConv, and the full SmaAT-QMix-UNet. Grad-CAM saliency maps highlight the regions influencing each nowcast, while a UMAP embedding of the codewords illustrates how the VQ layer clusters encoder outputs. The source code for SmaAT-QMix-UNet is publicly available on GitHub \footnote{\href{https://github.com/nstavr04/MasterThesisSnellius}{https://github.com/nstavr04/MasterThesisSnellius}}.
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physics.chem-phcs.AI Junyi An, Xinyu Lu, Yun-Fei Shi et al. · Mar 23, 2026

Suiren-1.0 introduces a family of molecular foundation models designed to bridge the gap between microscopic 3D quantum-mechanical conformations and macroscopic 2D molecular property prediction. The framework comprises Suiren-Base (a 1.8B-parameter SE(3)-equivariant GNN pre-trained on 70M DFT samples), Suiren-Dimer (continued pre-training on intermolecular interactions), and Suiren-ConfAvg (a lightweight 2D model distilled via a novel Conformation Compression Distillation diffusion framework). This work matters because it attempts to unify quantum-accurate representations with practical cheminformatics workflows where only SMILES or graph inputs are available.

We introduce Suiren-1.0, a family of molecular foundation models for the accurate modeling of diverse organic systems. Suiren-1.0 comprising three specialized variants (Suiren-Base, Suiren-Dimer, and Suiren-ConfAvg) is integrated within an algorithmic framework that bridges the gap between 3D conformational geometry and 2D statistical ensemble spaces. We first pre-train Suiren-Base (1.8B parameters) on a 70M-sample Density Functional Theory dataset using spatial self-supervision and SE(3)-equivariant architectures, achieving robust performance in quantum property prediction. Suiren-Dimer extends this capability through continued pre-training on 13.5M intermolecular interaction samples. To enable efficient downstream application, we propose Conformation Compression Distillation (CCD), a diffusion-based framework that distills complex 3D structural representations into 2D conformation-averaged representations. This yields the lightweight Suiren-ConfAvg, which generates high-fidelity representations from SMILES or molecular graphs. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that Suiren-1.0 establishes state-of-the-art results across a range of tasks. All models and benchmarks are open-sourced.
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cs.LGcs.AI Valentin Petrov · Mar 23, 2026

Directional abliteration removes refusal behavior from language models by projecting refusal-mediating directions out of weight matrices, where these directions are extracted by contrasting harmful against harmless prompt activations. This paper investigates whether topically matching the harmless baseline to harmful prompts — using, for example, defensive cybersecurity prompts to contrast against hacking prompts — yields cleaner refusal directions than the standard practice of using general-purpose harmless prompts. The central finding is that topic-matched contrast completely fails to produce functional refusal directions while unmatched baselines succeed, because matched subtraction cancels the dominant topic component shared between prompts of the same subject, leaving residue too small to perturb the residual stream.

Inasmuch as the removal of refusal behavior from instruction-tuned language models by directional abliteration requires the extraction of refusal-mediating directions from the residual stream activation space, and inasmuch as the construction of the contrast baseline against which harmful prompt activations are compared has been treated in the existing literature as an implementation detail rather than a methodological concern, the present work investigates whether a topically matched contrast baseline yields superior refusal directions. The investigation is carried out on the Qwen~3.5 2B model using per-category matched prompt pairs, per-class Self-Organizing Map extraction, and Singular Value Decomposition orthogonalization. It was found that topic-matched contrast produces no functional refusal directions at any tested weight level on any tested layer, while unmatched contrast on the same model, same extraction code, and same evaluation protocol achieves complete refusal elimination on six layers. The geometric analysis of the failure establishes that topic-matched subtraction cancels the dominant activation component shared between harmful and harmless prompts of the same subject, reducing the extracted direction magnitude below the threshold at which weight-matrix projection perturbs the residual stream. The implications for the design of contrast baselines in abliteration research are discussed.
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cs.LGcs.AI Moritz G\"ogl, Christopher Yau · Mar 23, 2026

This paper addresses multimodal survival analysis for clinical data, integrating pathology text, tabular covariates, and gene expression using locally deployable LLMs. The core innovation is a teacher-student distillation framework that trains a compact 1.5B parameter causal LLM to jointly produce calibrated survival curves and concise prognosis explanations. This matters because cloud-hosted medical AI raises privacy concerns, yet heavyweight local models are impractical for many institutions.

We study multimodal survival analysis integrating clinical text, tabular covariates, and genomic profiles using locally deployable large language models (LLMs). As many institutions face tight computational and privacy constraints, this setting motivates the use of lightweight, on-premises models. Our approach jointly estimates calibrated survival probabilities and generates concise, evidence-grounded prognosis text via teacher-student distillation and principled multimodal fusion. On a TCGA cohort, it outperforms standard baselines, avoids reliance on cloud services and associated privacy concerns, and reduces the risk of hallucinated or miscalibrated estimates that can be observed in base LLMs.
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cs.LGcs.AI Xinyu Lu, Kaiqi Zhang, Jinglin Yang et al. · Mar 23, 2026

P^2O tackles a critical bottleneck in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR): hard samples with near-zero success rates yield vanishing gradients, effectively starving the model of supervision signals. The solution synergizes policy optimization with evolutionary prompt optimization (GEPA), using optimized prompts to discover successful trajectories for hard samples, then distilling these capabilities into model parameters via context distillation to avoid inference-time dependencies. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate significant gains over GRPO baselines, particularly on challenging AIME problems (+12.3% avg.).

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, vanilla RLVR suffers from inefficient exploration, particularly when confronting "hard samples" that yield nearzero success rates. In such scenarios, the reliance on sparse outcome rewards typically results in zero-advantage estimates, effectively starving the model of supervision signals despite the high informational value of these instances. To address this, we propose P^2O, a novel framework that synergizes Prompt Optimization with Policy Optimization. P^2O identifies hard samples during training iterations and leverages the GeneticPareto (GEPA) prompt optimization algorithm to evolve prompt templates that guide the model toward discovering successful trajectories. Crucially, unlike traditional prompt engineering methods that rely on input augmentation, P^2O distills the reasoning gains induced by these optimized prompts directly into the model parameters. This mechanism provides denser positive supervision signals for hard samples and accelerates convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that P^2O not only achieves superior performance on in-distribution datasets but also exhibits strong generalization, yielding substantial improvements on out-of-distribution benchmarks (+4.7% avg.).
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cs.LGcs.AIcs.IT Changxiao Cai, Gen Li · Mar 23, 2026

Diffusion language models (DLMs) enable parallel token generation, but their efficiency depends critically on the decoding strategy that determines which tokens to unmask and when. This paper investigates confidence-based decoding—specifically an entropy sum strategy that adaptively batches tokens until cumulative prediction uncertainty exceeds a threshold—and proves it achieves $\varepsilon$-accurate sampling in KL divergence with expected iteration complexity $\widetilde{O}(H(X_0)/\varepsilon)$. When the data distribution has low entropy ($H(X_0) \ll L$), this yields sublinear complexity in sequence length, providing the first theoretical foundation for why confidence-based methods accelerate sampling without sacrificing fidelity.

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) models for language modeling, allowing flexible generation order and parallel generation of multiple tokens. However, this flexibility introduces a challenge absent in AR models: the \emph{decoding strategy} -- which determines the order and number of tokens generated at each iteration -- critically affects sampling efficiency. Among decoding strategies explored in practice, confidence-based methods, which adaptively select which and how many tokens to unmask based on prediction confidence, have shown strong empirical performance. Despite this success, our theoretical understanding of confidence-based decoding remains limited. In this work, we develop the first theoretical analysis framework for confidence-based decoding in DLMs. We focus on an entropy sum-based strategy that continues unmasking tokens within each iteration until the cumulative entropy exceeds a threshold, and show that it achieves $\varepsilon$-accurate sampling in KL divergence with an expected number of iterations $\widetilde O(H(X_0)/\varepsilon)$, where $H(X_0)$ denotes the entropy of the target data distribution. Notably, this strategy yields substantial sampling acceleration when the data distribution has low entropy relative to the sequence length, while automatically adapting to the intrinsic complexity of data without requiring prior knowledge or hyperparameter tuning. Overall, our results provide a theoretical foundation for confidence-based decoding and may inform the design of more efficient decoding strategies for DLMs.
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cs.AIcs.LG Shuo Wang, Ziyu Chen, Ming Tang · Mar 23, 2026

CurvZO tackles the memory wall problem in LLM fine-tuning by proposing a zeroth-order optimization method that tracks curvature signals online from scalar feedback instead of requiring pre-computed statistics. The core idea uses curvature-aware importance sampling to select which parameters to perturb in sparse ZO updates, coupled with an adaptive budget mechanism that adjusts sparsity based on the evolving curvature distribution. This matters because existing sparse ZO methods either rely on costly pre-computed Fisher information or use static/random sparsity patterns that may be suboptimal.

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with backpropagation achieves high performance but incurs substantial memory overhead, limiting scalability on resource-constrained hardware. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a memory-efficient alternative by relying solely on forward passes, yet it typically suffers from slow or unstable convergence due to high-variance gradient estimates. Sparse ZO updates partially address this issue by perturbing only a subset of parameters, but their effectiveness hinges on selecting informative parameters, which is challenging in ZO optimization because each query yields only scalar feedback. We propose \textbf{Adaptive Curvature-Guided Sparse Zeroth-Order Optimization (CurvZO)}, which tracks curvature signals online from scalar ZO feedback and leverages these signals to construct a parameter-wise sampling distribution for selecting coordinates at each update, reducing the variance of the sparse ZO gradient estimator. Moreover, CurvZO dynamically adapts the perturbation budget to the evolving curvature signal distribution, yielding sparse ZO updates that remain both focused and sufficiently exploratory. Extensive experiments on OPT and Llama across diverse NLP tasks show that CurvZO consistently improves fine-tuning performance and reduces training time over ZO baselines. It improves accuracy by up to 4.4 points and achieves up to a $2\times$ speedup, while preserving memory efficiency.
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cs.CVcs.AI Kejia Liu, Haoyang Zhou, Ruoyu Xu et al. · Mar 23, 2026

This paper addresses vision-only UAV navigation in GNSS-denied environments by moving beyond the standard "matching-to-tile" (M2T) paradigm. Instead of retrieving discrete satellite tiles, the proposed Bearing-UAV method jointly regresses continuous position and heading from four neighboring satellite tiles and a UAV view patch, enabling sub-tile localization accuracy while maintaining a lightweight model. The work also introduces Bearing-UAV-90K, a multi-city dataset with heading annotations designed for unaligned cross-view scenarios.

Recent advances in cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) methods have shown strong potential for supporting unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) navigation in GNSS-denied environments. However, existing work predominantly focuses on matching UAV views to onboard map tiles, which introduces an inherent trade-off between accuracy and storage overhead, and overlooks the importance of the UAV's heading during navigation. Moreover, the substantial discrepancies and varying overlaps in cross-view scenarios have been insufficiently considered, limiting their generalization to real-world scenarios. In this paper, we present Bearing-UAV, a purely vision-driven cross-view navigation method that jointly predicts UAV absolute location and heading from neighboring features, enabling accurate, lightweight, and robust navigation in the wild. Our method leverages global and local structural features and explicitly encodes relative spatial relationships, making it robust to cross-view variations, misalignment, and feature-sparse conditions. We also present Bearing-UAV-90k, a multi-city benchmark for evaluating cross-view localization and navigation. Extensive experiments show encouraging results that Bearing-UAV yields lower localization error than previous matching/retrieval paradigm across diverse terrains. Our code and dataset will be made publicly available.
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cs.CVcs.AI Clemens Watzenb\"ock, Daniel Aletaha, Micha\"el Deman et al. · Mar 23, 2026

This paper introduces ChronoCon, a self-supervised method that repurposes Rank-N-Contrast learning to use temporal ordering of longitudinal medical scans instead of expert severity labels. By assuming monotonic progression in irreversible diseases, the method learns progression-aware representations from routinely archived clinical metadata. The core finding is that under few-shot scenarios—using labels from only 5 patients—the model achieves an ICC of 86% for disease severity prediction on rheumatoid arthritis radiographs, potentially reducing reliance on costly expert annotations.

Quantitative disease severity scoring in medical imaging is costly, time-consuming, and subject to inter-reader variability. At the same time, clinical archives contain far more longitudinal imaging data than expert-annotated severity scores. Existing self-supervised methods typically ignore this chronological structure. We introduce ChronoCon, a contrastive learning approach that replaces label-based ranking losses with rankings derived solely from the visitation order of a patient's longitudinal scans. Under the clinically plausible assumption of monotonic progression in irreversible diseases, the method learns disease-relevant representations without using any expert labels. This generalizes the idea of Rank-N-Contrast from label distances to temporal ordering. Evaluated on rheumatoid arthritis radiographs for severity assessment, the learned representations substantially improve label efficiency. In low-label settings, ChronoCon significantly outperforms a fully supervised baseline initialized from ImageNet weights. In a few-shot learning experiment, fine-tuning ChronoCon on expert scores from only five patients yields an intraclass correlation coefficient of 86% for severity score prediction. These results demonstrate the potential of chronological contrastive learning to exploit routinely available imaging metadata to reduce annotation requirements in the irreversible disease domain. Code is available at https://github.com/cirmuw/ChronoCon.
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cs.HCcs.AI Taizhou Chen, Kai Chen, Xingyu Liu et al. · Mar 23, 2026

BadminSense is a smartwatch-based system for fine-grained badminton stroke evaluation that aims to provide amateur players with professional-quality coaching feedback without requiring expensive external equipment. The system uses a single commercial smartwatch on the dominant wrist to segment and classify four stroke types, predict stroke quality on a 5-point Likert scale, and estimate shuttle impact location on the racket string area. The key innovation is enabling fine-grained quality assessment beyond simple activity recognition, targeting the gap between basic fitness tracking and professional coaching.

Evaluating badminton performance often requires expert coaching, which is rarely accessible for amateur players. We present adminSense, a smartwatch-based system for fine-grained badminton performance analysis using wearable sensing. Through interviews with experienced badminton players, we identified four system design requirements with three implementation insights that guide the development of BadminSense. We then collected a badminton strokes dataset on 12 experienced badminton amateurs and annotated it with fine-grained labels, including stroke type, expert-assessed stroke rating, and shuttle impact location. Built on this dataset, BadminSense segments and classifies strokes, predicts stroke quality, and estimates shuttle impact location using vibration signal from an off-the-shelf smartwatch. Our evaluations show that
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cs.CVcs.AI Mingzhe Zheng, Weijie Kong, Yue Wu et al. · Mar 23, 2026

This paper tackles the instability of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) when applied to video generation. The core problem is that converting deterministic ODE samplers to SDE for exploration injects excess noise in high-noise regimes, causing off-manifold drift that degrades rollout quality and destabilizes reward updates. SAGE-GRPO introduces a precise SDE with logarithmic curvature correction to keep exploration closer to the flow trajectory, plus a Dual Trust Region mechanism combining periodic moving anchors with stepwise KL constraints to prevent long-horizon drift. The method is evaluated on HunyuanVideo1.5 using VideoAlign rewards, showing improvements over DanceGRPO, FlowGRPO, and CPS.

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) methods for video generation like FlowGRPO remain far less reliable than their counterparts for language models and images. This gap arises because video generation has a complex solution space, and the ODE-to-SDE conversion used for exploration can inject excess noise, lowering rollout quality and making reward estimates less reliable, which destabilizes post-training alignment. To address this problem, we view the pre-trained model as defining a valid video data manifold and formulate the core problem as constraining exploration within the vicinity of this manifold, ensuring that rollout quality is preserved and reward estimates remain reliable. We propose SAGE-GRPO (Stable Alignment via Exploration), which applies constraints at both micro and macro levels. At the micro level, we derive a precise manifold-aware SDE with a logarithmic curvature correction and introduce a gradient norm equalizer to stabilize sampling and updates across timesteps. At the macro level, we use a dual trust region with a periodic moving anchor and stepwise constraints so that the trust region tracks checkpoints that are closer to the manifold and limits long-horizon drift. We evaluate SAGE-GRPO on HunyuanVideo1.5 using the original VideoAlign as the reward model and observe consistent gains over previous methods in VQ, MQ, TA, and visual metrics (CLIPScore, PickScore), demonstrating superior performance in both reward maximization and overall video quality. The code and visual gallery are available at https://dungeonmassster.github.io/SAGE-GRPO-Page/.
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cs.IRcs.AIcs.GT Yanchen Jiang, Zhe Feng, Christopher P. Mah et al. · Mar 23, 2026

Generative recommender systems like TIGER excel at semantic retrieval but ignore the economic realities of monetization via sponsored content. This paper proposes GEM-Rec, a unified framework that augments semantic IDs with control tokens (<ORG>, <AD>) to factorize slot allocation from item generation, and introduces Bid-Aware Decoding to inject real-time auction bids into inference. The work bridges the gap between generative recommendation and computational advertising, offering theoretical guarantees like allocative monotonicity while allowing dynamic trade-offs between user relevance and platform revenue.

Generative Recommender Systems using semantic ids, such as TIGER (Rajput et al., 2023), have emerged as a widely adopted competitive paradigm in sequential recommendation. However, existing architectures are designed solely for semantic retrieval and do not address concerns such as monetization via ad revenue and incorporation of bids for commercial retrieval. We propose GEM-Rec, a unified framework that integrates commercial relevance and monetization objectives directly into the generative sequence. We introduce control tokens to decouple the decision of whether to show an ad from which item to show. This allows the model to learn valid placement patterns directly from interaction logs, which inherently reflect past successful ad placements. Complementing this, we devise a Bid-Aware Decoding mechanism that handles real-time pricing, injecting bids directly into the inference process to steer the generation toward high-value items. We prove that this approach guarantees allocation monotonicity, ensuring that higher bids weakly increase an ad's likelihood of being shown without requiring model retraining. Experiments demonstrate that GEM-Rec allows platforms to dynamically optimize for semantic relevance and platform revenue.
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cs.CVcs.AI Hayeon Kim, Ji Ha Jang, Junghun James Kim et al. · Mar 23, 2026

Hyperbolic Vision-Language Models (VLMs) improve hierarchical structure preservation over Euclidean counterparts, yet existing approaches treat all part-whole relationships as equally informative. This paper proposes UNCHA (UNcertainty-guided Compositional Hyperbolic Alignment), which leverages the hyperbolic radius as an uncertainty measure to quantify the varying semantic representativeness of image parts to the whole scene. By incorporating this uncertainty into adaptive temperature scaling for contrastive learning and an entropy-regularized entailment loss, UNCHA achieves state-of-the-art performance on zero-shot classification, retrieval, and fine-grained compositional benchmarks, demonstrating that modeling heterogeneous part-whole strength is critical for complex multi-object understanding.

While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable performance, their Euclidean embeddings remain limited in capturing hierarchical relationships such as part-to-whole or parent-child structures, and often face challenges in multi-object compositional scenarios. Hyperbolic VLMs mitigate this issue by better preserving hierarchical structures and modeling part-whole relations (i.e., whole scene and its part images) through entailment. However, existing approaches do not model that each part has a different level of semantic representativeness to the whole. We propose UNcertainty-guided Compositional Hyperbolic Alignment (UNCHA) for enhancing hyperbolic VLMs. UNCHA models part-to-whole semantic representativeness with hyperbolic uncertainty, by assigning lower uncertainty to more representative parts and higher uncertainty to less representative ones for the whole scene. This representativeness is then incorporated into the contrastive objective with uncertainty-guided weights. Finally, the uncertainty is further calibrated with an entailment loss regularized by entropy-based term. With the proposed losses, UNCHA learns hyperbolic embeddings with more accurate part-whole ordering, capturing the underlying compositional structure in an image and improving its understanding of complex multi-object scenes. UNCHA achieves state-of-the-art performance on zero-shot classification, retrieval, and multi-label classification benchmarks. Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/jeeit17/UNCHA.git.