OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Chronos: Learning Temporal Dynamics of Reasoning Chains for Test-Time Scaling
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Test-Time Scaling (TTS) has emerged as an effective paradigm for improving the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods -- most notably majority voting and heuristic token-level scoring -- treat reasoning traces or tokens equally, thereby being susceptible to substantial variations in trajectory quality and localized logical failures. In this work, we introduce \textbf{Chronos}, a lightweight and plug-and-play chronological reasoning scorer that models each trajectory as a time series. Specifically, Chronos learns to capture trajectory features of token probabilities, assigns quality scores accordingly, and employs a weighted voting mechanism. Extensive evaluations on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks demonstrate that Chronos consistently delivers substantial gains across a variety of models, with negligible computational overhead. Notably, Chronos@128 achieves relative improvements of 34.21\% over Pass@1 and 22.70\% over Maj@128 on HMMT25 using Qwen3-4B-Thinking-2507, highlighting its effectiveness.
SimpleGPT: Improving GPT via A Simple Normalization Strategy
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

In this work, we revisit Transformer optimization through the lens of second-order geometry and establish a direct connection between architectural design, activation scale, the Hessian matrix, and the maximum tolerable learning rate. We introduce a simple normalization strategy, termed SimpleNorm, which stabilizes intermediate activation scales by construction. Then, by analyzing the Hessian of the loss with respect to network activations, we theoretically show that SimpleNorm significantly reduces the spectral norm of the Hessian, thereby permitting larger stable learning rates. We validate our theoretical findings through extensive experiments on large GPT models at parameter scales 1B, 1.4B, 7B and 8B. Empirically, SimpleGPT, our SimpleNorm-based network, tolerates learning rates 3$\times$-10$\times$ larger than standard convention, consistently demonstrates strong optimization stability, and achieves substantially better performance than well-established baselines. Specifically, when training 7B-scale models for 60K steps, SimpleGPT achieves a training loss that is 0.08 lower than that of LLaMA2 with QKNorm, reducing the loss from 2.290 to 2.208. Our source code will be released at https://github.com/Ocram7/SimpleGPT.
Does Ad-Free Mean Less Data Collection? An Empirical Study of Platform Data Practices and User Expectations
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2026
Year: 2026

Online platforms increasingly offer "paid" ad-free subscriptions as an alternative to the traditional "free" ad-based model. The transition to ad-free models ostensibly removes advertising as a key justification for data processing under the GDPR. So, normatively, platforms should collect less user data. However, platforms may justify continued data collection as a means to provide an improved, personalized experience. This tension between privacy principles and platform incentives raises a critical underexplored question: do data collection practices vary between ad-free and ad-based subscription models? In this paper, we shed light on this important privacy issue by investigating the alignment between platform data collection practices and related user expectations. With respect to data collection process, our analyses of data exports from three major online platforms - Instagram, Facebook, and X - reveal that these platforms continue to retain or collect some ad-related data, even in ad-free subscriptions. With respect to user expectations, our survey among 255 participants on Prolific reveals that 69% of the participants normatively expect data collection to be reduced, indicating their expectation of improved digital privacy in an ad-free model. However, when asked what they think actually happens, 63% of these participants believed that platforms would still collect about the same amount of data, highlighting skepticism about platform practices. Our findings not only indicate a significant disconnect between data practices and normative user expectations, but also raise serious questions about platform compliance with core GDPR principles, such as purpose limitation, data minimization, and transparency.
Boosting Point-supervised Temporal Action Localization via Text Refinement and Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Recently, point-supervised temporal action localization has gained significant attention for its effective balance between labeling costs and localization accuracy. However, current methods only consider features from visual inputs, neglecting helpful semantic information from the text side. To address this issue, we propose a Text Refinement and Alignment (TRA) framework that effectively utilizes textual features from visual descriptions to complement the visual features as they are semantically rich. This is achieved by designing two new modules for the original point-supervised framework: a Point-based Text Refinement module (PTR) and a Point-based Multimodal Alignment module (PMA). Specifically, we first generate descriptions for video frames using a pre-trained multimodal model. Next, PTR refines the initial descriptions by leveraging point annotations together with multiple pre-trained models. PMA then projects all features into a unified semantic space and leverages a point-level multimodal feature contrastive learning to reduce the gap between visual and linguistic modalities. Last, the enhanced multi-modal features are fed into the action detector for precise localization. Extensive experimental results on five widely used benchmarks demonstrate the favorable performance of our proposed framework compared to several state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, our computational overhead analysis shows that the framework can run on a single 24 GB RTX 3090 GPU, indicating its practicality and scalability.
OASIS-DC: Generalizable Depth Completion via Output-level Alignment of Sparse-Integrated Monocular Pseudo Depth
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Recent monocular foundation models excel at zero-shot depth estimation, yet their outputs are inherently relative rather than metric, limiting direct use in robotics and autonomous driving. We leverage the fact that relative depth preserves global layout and boundaries: by calibrating it with sparse range measurements, we transform it into a pseudo metric depth prior. Building on this prior, we design a refinement network that follows the prior where reliable and deviates where necessary, enabling accurate metric predictions from very few labeled samples. The resulting system is particularly effective when curated validation data are unavailable, sustaining stable scale and sharp edges across few-shot regimes. These findings suggest that coupling foundation priors with sparse anchors is a practical route to robust, deployment-ready depth completion under real-world label scarcity.
LLM-Driven Ontology Construction for Enterprise Knowledge Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Enterprise Knowledge Graphs have become essential for unifying heterogeneous data and enforcing semantic governance. However, the construction of their underlying ontologies remains a resource-intensive, manual process that relies heavily on domain expertise. This paper introduces OntoEKG, a LLM-driven pipeline designed to accelerate the generation of domain-specific ontologies from unstructured enterprise data. Our approach decomposes the modelling task into two distinct phases: an extraction module that identifies core classes and properties, and an entailment module that logically structures these elements into a hierarchy before serialising them into standard RDF. Addressing the significant lack of comprehensive benchmarks for end-to-end ontology construction, we adopt a new evaluation dataset derived from documents across the Data, Finance, and Logistics sectors. Experimental results highlight both the potential and the challenges of this approach, achieving a fuzzy-match F1-score of 0.724 in the Data domain while revealing limitations in scope definition and hierarchical reasoning.
DSFC-Net: A Dual-Encoder Spatial and Frequency Co-Awareness Network for Rural Road Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Accurate extraction of rural roads from high-resolution remote sensing imagery is essential for infrastructure planning and sustainable development. However, this task presents unique challenges in rural settings due to several factors. These include high intra-class variability and low inter-class separability from diverse surface materials, frequent vegetation occlusions that disrupt spatial continuity, and narrow road widths that exacerbate detection difficulties. Existing methods, primarily optimized for structured urban environments, often underperform in these scenarios as they overlook such distinctive characteristics. To address these challenges, we propose DSFC-Net, a dual-encoder framework that synergistically fuses spatial and frequency-domain information. Specifically, a CNN branch is employed to capture fine-grained local road boundaries and short-range continuity, while a novel Spatial-Frequency Hybrid Transformer (SFT) is introduced to robustly model global topological dependencies against vegetation occlusions. Distinct from standard attention mechanisms that suffer from frequency bias, the SFT incorporates a Cross-Frequency Interaction Attention (CFIA) module that explicitly decouples high- and low-frequency information via a Laplacian Pyramid strategy. This design enables the dynamic interaction between spatial details and frequency-aware global contexts, effectively preserving the connectivity of narrow roads. Furthermore, a Channel Feature Fusion Module (CFFM) is proposed to bridge the two branches by adaptively recalibrating channel-wise feature responses, seamlessly integrating local textures with global semantics for accurate segmentation. Comprehensive experiments on the WHU-RuR+, DeepGlobe, and Massachusetts datasets validate the superiority of DSFC-Net over state-of-the-art approaches.
Richer Bayesian Last Layers with Subsampled NTK Features
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Bayesian Last Layers (BLLs) provide a convenient and computationally efficient way to estimate uncertainty in neural networks. However, they underestimate epistemic uncertainty because they apply a Bayesian treatment only to the final layer, ignoring uncertainty induced by earlier layers. We propose a method that improves BLLs by leveraging a projection of Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) features onto the space spanned by the last-layer features. This enables posterior inference that accounts for variability of the full network while retaining the low computational cost of inference of a standard BLL. We show that our method yields posterior variances that are provably greater or equal to those of a standard BLL, correcting its tendency to underestimate epistemic uncertainty. To further reduce computational cost, we introduce a uniform subsampling scheme for estimating the projection matrix and for posterior inference. We derive approximation bounds for both types of sub-sampling. Empirical evaluations on UCI regression, contextual bandits, image classification, and out-of-distribution detection tasks in image and tabular datasets, demonstrate improved calibration and uncertainty estimates compared to standard BLLs and competitive baselines, while reducing computational cost.
Seeing, Hearing, and Knowing Together: Multimodal Strategies in Deepfake Videos Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2026
Year: 2026

As deepfake videos become increasingly difficult for people to recognise, understanding the strategies humans use is key to designing effective media literacy interventions. We conducted a study with 195 participants between the ages of 21 and 40, who judged real and deepfake videos, rated their confidence, and reported the cues they relied on across visual, audio, and knowledge strategies. Participants were more accurate with real videos than with deepfakes and showed lower expected calibration error for real content. Through association rule mining, we identified cue combinations that shaped performance. Visual appearance, vocal, and intuition often co-occurred for successful identifications, which highlights the importance of multimodal approaches in human detection. Our findings show which cues help or hinder detection and suggest directions for designing media literacy tools that guide effective cue use. Building on these insights can help people improve their identification skills and become more resilient to deceptive digital media.
EDIS: Diagnosing LLM Reasoning via Entropy Dynamics
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Entropy-based confidence signals are increasingly leveraged to improve reasoning in large language models (LLMs), yet existing approaches treat confidence as a static quantity -- typically aggregated over tokens. We show that the \emph{temporal evolution} of confidence during generation carries richer information than aggregate statistics alone. Analyzing token-level entropy trajectories, we identify characteristic patterns distinguishing correct from incorrect reasoning: erroneous solutions exhibit unstable dynamics, including burst spikes (sustained uncertainty growth) and peak-valley spikes (sharp rebounds following transient confidence). These patterns persist across models and training stages, suggesting they reflect intrinsic properties of reasoning failure rather than superficial noise. To formalize this observation, we introduce the Entropy Dynamics Instability Score (\textbf{EDIS}), a trajectory-level metric quantifying instability in entropy evolution. EDIS serves as an effective diagnostic signal for inference-time selection, substantially improving reasoning accuracy, and offers a promising direction for training-time sample curation. Our findings establish entropy dynamics as an underexplored yet informative lens for understanding and improving LLM reasoning.
Construction-Verification: A Benchmark for Applied Mathematics in Lean 4
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2026
Year: 2026

Recent advances in large language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in mathematical formalization. However, existing benchmarks focus on logical verification of declarative propositions, often neglecting the task of explicitly synthesizing solutions. This limitation is particularly acute in applied mathematics domains, where the goal is frequently to derive concrete values or executable algorithms rather than solely proving theorems. To address this, we introduce a Lean 4 framework that enforces a construction-verification workflow, compelling the agent to define explicit solutions before proving their correctness. We curate a comprehensive benchmark AMBER (Applied Mathematics BEnchmark for Reasoning) spanning core domains of applied mathematics, including convex analysis, optimization, numerical algebra, and high-dimensional probability. Aside from theorem proving, our benchmark features complex tasks such as evaluation, algorithm design, and representation transformation. Experiments reveal that current models face significant difficulties with these constructive tasks. Notably, we observe that general-purpose reasoning models consistently outperform specialized theorem provers. We attribute this to a degradation of instruction following capabilities in specialized models. Fine-tuning on proof corpora appears to induce ``tactical overfitting", compromising the ability to adhere to complex constructive requirements, whereas general models retain the versatility needed for multi-task formal reasoning.
Protocol Agent: What If Agents Could Use Cryptography In Everyday Life?
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2026
Year: 2026

We often assume that agent-to-agent interaction will mirror human conversation. However, agents operate fundamentally differently. What if they could develop communication patterns that are more efficient and better aligned with their capabilities? While cryptographic primitives that could profoundly improve everyday interactions already exist, humans can't use them because they are too complex and the math can't be done in one's head. Examples range from proving your age (or other attributes) without showing your ID, to filing an anonymous report within a group while proving you are a legitimate member, to splitting a dinner bill fairly without revealing salaries. What if agents could create protocols "on the fly" by recognizing which primitive fits an everyday situation, proposing it to an agentic counterpart, persuading them to participate, and then executing the protocol correctly using appropriate computation tools? Protocol Agent frames this problem by introducing a benchmark that spans: (1) cryptographic primitive recognition, (2) negotiation skills, (3) implementation correctness, (4) correct computation and (5) security strength. We evaluate current open-weight and state-of-the-art models on this benchmark, propose a dataset-generation approach to improve these capabilities, and measure the impact of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on benchmark performance, with tuned models outperforming base models by a wide margin.
Dispelling the Curse of Singularities in Neural Network Optimizations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

This work investigates the optimization instability of deep neural networks from a less-explored yet insightful perspective: the emergence and amplification of singularities in the parametric space. Our analysis reveals that parametric singularities inevitably grow with gradient updates and further intensify alignment with representations, leading to increased singularities in the representation space. We show that the gradient Frobenius norms are bounded by the top singular values of the weight matrices, and as training progresses, the mutually reinforcing growth of weight and representation singularities, termed the curse of singularities, relaxes these bounds, escalating the risk of sharp loss explosions. To counter this, we propose Parametric Singularity Smoothing (PSS), a lightweight, flexible, and effective method for smoothing the singular spectra of weight matrices. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets, architectures, and optimizers demonstrate that PSS mitigates instability, restores trainability even after failure, and improves both training efficiency and generalization.
Evaluating Long-Horizon Memory for Multi-Party Collaborative Dialogues
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Long-term conversational memory in practical LLM applications is inherently collaborative: information is produced by multiple participants, scattered across groups and channels, revised over time, and implicitly grounded in roles and social context. Yet there is currently no established benchmark that evaluates memory under interaction patterns resembling real-world deployment, as existing benchmarks largely focus on dyadic or single-topic dialogues. In this paper, we introduce EverMemBench, the first benchmark designed for long-horizon collaborative memory, built from multi-party, multi-group conversations spanning over one million tokens with dense cross-topic interleaving, temporally evolving decisions, and role-conditioned personas. EverMemBench evaluates memory systems using 2400 QA pairs across three dimensions essential for real applications: fine-grained recall, memory awareness, and user profile understanding. Our evaluation reveals fundamental limitations of current systems: multi-hop reasoning collapses under multi-party attribution even with oracle evidence (26% accuracy), temporal reasoning fails without explicit version semantics beyond timestamps, and memory awareness is bottlenecked by retrieval, as similarity-based methods miss implicitly relevant information. EverMemBench thus represents a concrete step toward realistic evaluation of LLM memory and a cornerstone benchmark for developing next-generation LLMs that reason over time, roles, and collaborative interaction structure. Our benchmark and code are publicly available at https://github.com/EverMind-AI/EverMemBench.
High-accuracy sampling for diffusion models and log-concave distributions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

We present algorithms for diffusion model sampling which obtain $δ$-error in $\mathrm{polylog}(1/δ)$ steps, given access to $\widetilde O(δ)$-accurate score estimates in $L^2$. This is an exponential improvement over all previous results. Specifically, under minimal data assumptions, the complexity is $\widetilde O(d\,\mathrm{polylog}(1/δ))$ where $d$ is the dimension of the data; under a non-uniform $L$-Lipschitz condition, the complexity is $\widetilde O(\sqrt{dL}\,\mathrm{polylog}(1/δ))$; and if the data distribution has intrinsic dimension $d_\star$, then the complexity reduces to $\widetilde O(d_\star\,\mathrm{polylog}(1/δ))$. Our approach also yields the first $\mathrm{polylog}(1/δ)$ complexity sampler for general log-concave distributions using only gradient evaluations.
Benchmarking of algorithms for set partitions
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2026
Year: 2026

Set partitions are arrangements of distinct objects into groups. The problem of listing all set partitions arises in a variety of settings, in particular in combinatorial optimization tasks. After a brief review, we give practical approximate formulas for determining the number of set partitions, both for small and large set sizes. Several algorithms for enumerating all set partitions are reviewed, and benchmarking tests were conducted. The algorithm of Djokic et al. is recommended for practical use.
Context Dependence and Reliability in Autoregressive Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Large language models (LLMs) generate outputs by utilizing extensive context, which often includes redundant information from prompts, retrieved passages, and interaction history. In critical applications, it is vital to identify which context elements actually influence the output, as standard explanation methods struggle with redundancy and overlapping context. Minor changes in input can lead to unpredictable shifts in attribution scores, undermining interpretability and raising concerns about risks like prompt injection. This work addresses the challenge of distinguishing essential context elements from correlated ones. We introduce RISE (Redundancy-Insensitive Scoring of Explanation), a method that quantifies the unique influence of each input relative to others, minimizing the impact of redundancies and providing clearer, stable attributions. Experiments demonstrate that RISE offers more robust explanations than traditional methods, emphasizing the importance of conditional information for trustworthy LLM explanations and monitoring.
MDS matrices from skew polynomials with automorphisms and derivations
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2026
Year: 2026

Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) matrices play a central role in coding theory and symmetric-key cryptography due to their optimal diffusion properties. In this paper, we present a construction of MDS matrices using skew polynomial rings \( \mathbb{F}_q[X;θ,δ] \), where \( θ\) is an automorphism and \( δ\) is a \( θ\)-derivation on \( \mathbb{F}_q \). We introduce the notion of \( δ_θ \)-circulant matrices and study their structural properties. Necessary and sufficient conditions are derived under which these matrices are involutory and satisfy the MDS property. The resulting $δ_θ$-circulant matrix can be viewed as a generalization of classical constructions obtained in the absence of $θ$-derivations. One of the main contribution of this work is the construction of quasi recursive MDS matrices. In the setting of the skew polynomial ring $\mathbb{F}_q[X;θ]$, we construct quasi recursive MDS matrices associated with companion matrices. These matrices are shown to be involutory, yielding a strict improvement over the quasi-involutory constructions previously reported in the literature. Several illustrative results and examples are also provided.