OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Uncovering Residual Factors in Financial Time Series via PCA and MTP2-constrained Gaussian Graphical Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2026
Year: 2026

Financial time series are commonly decomposed into market factors, which capture shared price movements across assets, and residual factors, which reflect asset-specific deviations. To hedge the market-wide risks, such as the COVID-19 shock, trading strategies that exploit residual factors have been shown to be effective. However, financial time series often exhibit near-singular eigenstructures, which hinder the stable and accurate estimation of residual factors. This paper proposes a method for extracting residual factors from financial time series that hierarchically applies principal component analysis (PCA) and Gaussian graphical model (GGM). Our hierarchical approach balances stable estimation with elimination of factors that PCA alone cannot fully remove, enabling efficient extraction of residual factors. We use multivariate totally positive of order 2 (MTP2)-constrained GGM to capture the predominance of positive correlations in financial data. Our analysis proves that the resulting residual factors exhibit stronger orthogonality than those obtained with PCA alone. Across multiple experiments with varying test periods and training set lengths, the proposed method consistently achieved superior orthogonality of the residual factors. Backtests on the S&P 500 and TOPIX 500 constituents further indicate improved trading performance, including higher Sharpe ratios.
Deep Learning for Contextualized NetFlow-Based Network Intrusion Detection: Methods, Data, Evaluation and Deployment
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2026
Year: 2026

Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) have progressively shifted from signature-based techniques toward machine learning and, more recently, deep learning methods. Meanwhile, the widespread adoption of encryption has reduced payload visibility, weakening inspection pipelines that depend on plaintext content and increasing reliance on flow-level telemetry such as NetFlow and IPFIX. Many current learning-based detectors still frame intrusion detection as per-flow classification, implicitly treating each flow record as an independent sample. This assumption is often violated in realistic attack campaigns, where evidence is distributed across multiple flows and hosts, spanning minutes to days through staged execution, beaconing, lateral movement, and exfiltration. This paper synthesizes recent research on context-aware deep learning for flow-based intrusion detection. We organize existing methods into a four-dimensional taxonomy covering temporal context, graph or relational context, multimodal context, and multi-resolution context. Beyond modeling, we emphasize rigorous evaluation and operational realism. We review common failure modes that can inflate reported results, including temporal leakage, data splitting, dataset design flaws, limited dataset diversity, and weak cross-dataset generalization. We also analyze practical constraints that shape deployability, such as streaming state management, memory growth, latency budgets, and model compression choices. Overall, the literature suggests that context can meaningfully improve detection when attacks induce measurable temporal or relational structure, but the magnitude and reliability of these gains depend strongly on rigorous, causal evaluation and on datasets that capture realistic diversity.
On the Superlinear Relationship between SGD Noise Covariance and Loss Landscape Curvature
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) introduces anisotropic noise that is correlated with the local curvature of the loss landscape, thereby biasing optimization toward flat minima. Prior work often assumes an equivalence between the Fisher Information Matrix and the Hessian for negative log-likelihood losses, leading to the claim that the SGD noise covariance $\mathbf{C}$ is proportional to the Hessian $\mathbf{H}$. We show that this assumption holds only under restrictive conditions that are typically violated in deep neural networks. Using the recently discovered Activity--Weight Duality, we find a more general relationship agnostic to the specific loss formulation, showing that $\mathbf{C} \propto \mathbb{E}_p[\mathbf{h}_p^2]$, where $\mathbf{h}_p$ denotes the per-sample Hessian with $\mathbf{H} = \mathbb{E}_p[\mathbf{h}_p]$. As a consequence, $\mathbf{C}$ and $\mathbf{H}$ commute approximately rather than coincide exactly, and their diagonal elements follow an approximate power-law relation $C_{ii} \propto H_{ii}^γ$ with a theoretically bounded exponent $1 \leq γ\leq 2$, determined by per-sample Hessian spectra. Experiments across datasets, architectures, and loss functions validate these bounds, providing a unified characterization of the noise-curvature relationship in deep learning.
CASTLE: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Student-Tailored Personalized Safety in Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced the development of personalized learning in education. However, their inherent generation mechanisms often produce homogeneous responses to identical prompts. This one-size-fits-all mechanism overlooks the substantial heterogeneity in students cognitive and psychological, thereby posing potential safety risks to vulnerable groups. Existing safety evaluations primarily rely on context-independent metrics such as factual accuracy, bias, or toxicity, which fail to capture the divergent harms that the same response might cause across different student attributes. To address this gap, we propose the concept of Student-Tailored Personalized Safety and construct CASTLE based on educational theories. This benchmark covers 15 educational safety risks and 14 student attributes, comprising 92,908 bilingual scenarios. We further design three evaluation metrics: Risk Sensitivity, measuring the model ability to detect risks; Emotional Empathy, evaluating the model capacity to recognize student states; and Student Alignment, assessing the match between model responses and student attributes. Experiments on 18 SOTA LLMs demonstrate that CASTLE poses a significant challenge: all models scored below an average safety rating of 2.3 out of 5, indicating substantial deficiencies in personalized safety assurance.
Time-Complexity Characterization of NIST Lightweight Cryptography Finalists
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2026
Year: 2026

Lightweight cryptography is becoming essential as emerging technologies in digital identity systems and Internet of Things verification continue to demand strong cryptographic assurance on devices with limited processing power, memory, and energy resources. As these technologies move into routine use, they demand cryptographic primitives that maintain strong security and deliver predictable performance through clear theoretical models of time complexity. Although NIST's lightweight cryptography project provides empirical evaluations of the ten finalist algorithms, a unified theoretical understanding of their time-complexity behavior remains absent. This work introduces a symbolic model that decomposes each scheme into initialization, data-processing, and finalization phases, enabling formal time-complexity derivation for all ten finalists. The results clarify how design parameters shape computational scaling on constrained mobile and embedded environments. The framework provides a foundation needed to distinguish algorithmic efficiency and guides the choice of primitives capable of supporting security systems in constrained environments.
Probabilistic Multi-Regional Solar Power Forecasting with Any-Quantile Recurrent Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

The increasing penetration of photovoltaic (PV) generation introduces significant uncertainty into power system operation, necessitating forecasting approaches that extend beyond deterministic point predictions. This paper proposes an any-quantile probabilistic forecasting framework for multi-regional PV power generation based on the Any-Quantile Recurrent Neural Network (AQ-RNN). The model integrates an any-quantile forecasting paradigm with a dual-track recurrent architecture that jointly processes series-specific and cross-regional contextual information, supported by dilated recurrent cells, patch-based temporal modeling, and a dynamic ensemble mechanism. The proposed framework enables the estimation of calibrated conditional quantiles at arbitrary probability levels within a single trained model and effectively exploits spatial dependencies to enhance robustness at the system level. The approach is evaluated using 30 years of hourly PV generation data from 259 European regions and compared against established statistical and neural probabilistic baselines. The results demonstrate consistent improvements in forecast accuracy, calibration, and prediction interval quality, underscoring the suitability of the proposed method for uncertainty-aware energy management and operational decision-making in renewable-dominated power systems.
Making AI Agents Evaluate Misleading Charts without Nudging
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

AI agents are increasingly used as low-cost proxies for early visualization evaluation. In an initial study of deliberately flawed charts, we test whether agents spontaneously penalise chart junk and misleading encodings without being prompted to look for errors. Using established scales (BeauVis and PREVis), the agent evaluated visualizations containing decorative clutter, manipulated axes, and distorted proportional cues. The ratings of aesthetic appeal and perceived readability often remained relatively high even when graphical integrity was compromised. These results suggest that un-nudged AI agent evaluation may underweight integrity-related defects unless such checks are explicitly elicited.
Accelerating Benchmarking of Functional Connectivity Modeling via Structure-aware Core-set Selection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Benchmarking the hundreds of functional connectivity (FC) modeling methods on large-scale fMRI datasets is critical for reproducible neuroscience. However, the combinatorial explosion of model-data pairings makes exhaustive evaluation computationally prohibitive, preventing such assessments from becoming a routine pre-analysis step. To break this bottleneck, we reframe the challenge of FC benchmarking by selecting a small, representative core-set whose sole purpose is to preserve the relative performance ranking of FC operators. We formalize this as a ranking-preserving subset selection problem and propose Structure-aware Contrastive Learning for Core-set Selection (SCLCS), a self-supervised framework to select these core-sets. SCLCS first uses an adaptive Transformer to learn each sample's unique FC structure. It then introduces a novel Structural Perturbation Score (SPS) to quantify the stability of these learned structures during training, identifying samples that represent foundational connectivity archetypes. Finally, while SCLCS identifies stable samples via a top-k ranking, we further introduce a density-balanced sampling strategy as a necessary correction to promote diversity, ensuring the final core-set is both structurally robust and distributionally representative. On the large-scale REST-meta-MDD dataset, SCLCS preserves the ground-truth model ranking with just 10% of the data, outperforming state-of-the-art (SOTA) core-set selection methods by up to 23.2% in ranking consistency (nDCG@k). To our knowledge, this is the first work to formalize core-set selection for FC operator benchmarking, thereby making large-scale operators comparisons a feasible and integral part of computational neuroscience. Code is publicly available on https://github.com/lzhan94swu/SCLCS
Stable but Wrong: When More Data Degrades Scientific Conclusions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Modern science increasingly relies on ever-growing observational datasets and automated inference pipelines, under the implicit belief that accumulating more data makes scientific conclusions more reliable. Here we show that this belief can fail in a fundamental and irreversible way. We identify a structural regime in which standard inference procedures converge smoothly, remain well calibrated, and pass conventional diagnostic checks, yet systematically converge to incorrect conclusions. This failure arises when the reliability of observations degrades in a manner that is intrinsically unobservable to the inference process itself. Using minimal synthetic experiments, we demonstrate that in this regime additional data do not correct error but instead amplify it, while residual-based and goodness-of-fit diagnostics remain misleadingly normal. These results reveal an intrinsic limit of data-driven science: stability, convergence, and confidence are not sufficient indicators of epistemic validity. We argue that inference cannot be treated as an unconditional consequence of data availability, but must instead be governed by explicit constraints on the integrity of the observational process.
HyperPotter: Spell the Charm of High-Order Interactions in Audio Deepfake Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2026
Year: 2026

Advances in AIGC technologies have enabled the synthesis of highly realistic audio deepfakes capable of deceiving human auditory perception. Although numerous audio deepfake detection (ADD) methods have been developed, most rely on local temporal/spectral features or pairwise relations, overlooking high-order interactions (HOIs). HOIs capture discriminative patterns that emerge from multiple feature components beyond their individual contributions. We propose HyperPotter, a hypergraph-based framework that explicitly models these synergistic HOIs through clustering-based hyperedges with class-aware prototype initialization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HyperPotter surpasses its baseline by an average relative gain of 22.15% across 11 datasets and outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 13.96% on 4 challenging cross-domain datasets, demonstrating superior generalization to diverse attacks and speakers.
ShapeUP: Scalable Image-Conditioned 3D Editing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Recent advancements in 3D foundation models have enabled the generation of high-fidelity assets, yet precise 3D manipulation remains a significant challenge. Existing 3D editing frameworks often face a difficult trade-off between visual controllability, geometric consistency, and scalability. Specifically, optimization-based methods are prohibitively slow, multi-view 2D propagation techniques suffer from visual drift, and training-free latent manipulation methods are inherently bound by frozen priors and cannot directly benefit from scaling. In this work, we present ShapeUP, a scalable, image-conditioned 3D editing framework that formulates editing as a supervised latent-to-latent translation within a native 3D representation. This formulation allows ShapeUP to build on a pretrained 3D foundation model, leveraging its strong generative prior while adapting it to editing through supervised training. In practice, ShapeUP is trained on triplets consisting of a source 3D shape, an edited 2D image, and the corresponding edited 3D shape, and learns a direct mapping using a 3D Diffusion Transformer (DiT). This image-as-prompt approach enables fine-grained visual control over both local and global edits and achieves implicit, mask-free localization, while maintaining strict structural consistency with the original asset. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that ShapeUP consistently outperforms current trained and training-free baselines in both identity preservation and edit fidelity, offering a robust and scalable paradigm for native 3D content creation.
A Stronger Benchmark for Online Bilateral Trade: From Fixed Prices to Distributions
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2026
Year: 2026

We study online bilateral trade, where a learner facilitates repeated exchanges between a buyer and a seller to maximize the Gain From Trade (GFT), i.e., the social welfare. In doing so, the learner must guarantee not to subsidize the market. This constraint is usually imposed per round through Weak Budget Balance (WBB). Despite that, Bernasconi et al. [2024] show that a Global Budget Balance (GBB) constraint on the profit -- enforced over the entire time horizon -- can improve the GFT by a multiplicative factor of two. While this might appear to be a marginal relaxation, this implies that all existing WBB-focused algorithms suffer linear regret when measured against the GBB optimum. In this work, we provide the first algorithm to achieve sublinear regret against the GBB benchmark in stochastic environments under one-bit feedback. In particular, we show that when the joint distribution of valuations has a bounded density, our algorithm achieves $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{3/4})$ regret. Our result shows that there is no separation between the one-dimensional problem of learning the optimal WBB price and the two-dimensional problem of learning the optimal GBB distribution over pairs of prices.
Cost-Efficient RAG for Entity Matching with LLMs: A Blocking-based Exploration
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2026
Year: 2026

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances LLM reasoning in knowledge-intensive tasks, but existing RAG pipelines incur substantial retrieval and generation overhead when applied to large-scale entity matching. To address this limitation, we introduce CE-RAG4EM, a cost-efficient RAG architecture that reduces computation through blocking-based batch retrieval and generation. We also present a unified framework for analyzing and evaluating RAG systems for entity matching, focusing on blocking-aware optimizations and retrieval granularity. Extensive experiments suggest that CE-RAG4EM can achieve comparable or improved matching quality while substantially reducing end-to-end runtime relative to strong baselines. Our analysis further reveals that key configuration parameters introduce an inherent trade-off between performance and overhead, offering practical guidance for designing efficient and scalable RAG systems for entity matching and data integration.
Ethology of Latent Spaces
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2026
Year: 2026

This study challenges the presumed neutrality of latent spaces in vision language models (VLMs) by adopting an ethological perspective on their algorithmic behaviors. Rather than constituting spaces of homogeneous indeterminacy, latent spaces exhibit model-specific algorithmic sensitivities, understood as differential regimes of perceptual salience shaped by training data and architectural choices. Through a comparative analysis of three models (OpenAI CLIP, OpenCLIP LAION, SigLIP) applied to a corpus of 301 artworks (15th to 20th), we reveal substantial divergences in the attribution of political and cultural categories. Using bipolar semantic axes derived from vector analogies (Mikolov et al., 2013), we show that SigLIP classifies 59.4% of the artworks as politically engaged, compared to only 4% for OpenCLIP. African masks receive the highest political scores in SigLIP while remaining apolitical in OpenAI CLIP. On an aesthetic colonial axis, inter-model discrepancies reach 72.6 percentage points. We introduce three operational concepts: computational latent politicization, describing the emergence of political categories without intentional encoding; emergent bias, irreducible to statistical or normative bias and detectable only through contrastive analysis; and three algorithmic scopic regimes: entropic (LAION), institutional (OpenAI), and semiotic (SigLIP), which structure distinct modes of visibility. Drawing on Foucault's notion of the archive, Jameson's ideologeme, and Simondon's theory of individuation, we argue that training datasets function as quasi-archives whose discursive formations crystallize within latent space. This work contributes to a critical reassessment of the conditions under which VLMs are applied to digital art history and calls for methodologies that integrate learning architectures into any delegation of cultural interpretation to algorithmic agents.
Projected Boosting with Fairness Constraints: Quantifying the Cost of Fair Training Distributions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Boosting algorithms enjoy strong theoretical guarantees: when weak learners maintain positive edge, AdaBoost achieves geometric decrease of exponential loss. We study how to incorporate group fairness constraints into boosting while preserving analyzable training dynamics. Our approach, FairBoost, projects the ensemble-induced exponential-weights distribution onto a convex set of distributions satisfying fairness constraints (as a reweighting surrogate), then trains weak learners on this fair distribution. The key theoretical insight is that projecting the training distribution reduces the effective edge of weak learners by a quantity controlled by the KL-divergence of the projection. We prove an exponential-loss bound where the convergence rate depends on weak learner edge minus a "fairness cost" term $δ_t = \sqrt{\mathrm{KL}(w^t \| q^t)/2}$. This directly quantifies the accuracy-fairness tradeoff in boosting dynamics. Experiments on standard benchmarks validate the theoretical predictions and demonstrate competitive fairness-accuracy tradeoffs with stable training curves.
A Bayesian Optimization-Based AutoML Framework for Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2026
Year: 2026

Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM), commonly known as energy disaggregation, aims to estimate the power consumption of individual appliances by analyzing a home's total electricity usage. This method provides a cost-effective alternative to installing dedicated smart meters for each appliance. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework that incorporates Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) into the NILM domain, utilizing Bayesian Optimization for automated model selection and hyperparameter tuning. This framework empowers domain practitioners to effectively apply machine learning techniques without requiring advanced expertise in data science or machine learning. To support further research and industry adoption, we present AutoML4NILM, a flexible and extensible open-source toolkit designed to streamline the deployment of AutoML solutions for energy disaggregation. Currently, this framework supports 11 algorithms, each with different hyperparameters; however, its flexible design allows for the extension of both the algorithms and their hyperparameters.
Generalized Pinsker Inequality for Bregman Divergences of Negative Tsallis Entropies
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2026
Year: 2026

The Pinsker inequality lower bounds the Kullback--Leibler divergence $D_{\textrm{KL}}$ in terms of total variation and provides a canonical way to convert $D_{\textrm{KL}}$ control into $\lVert \cdot \rVert_1$-control. Motivated by applications to probabilistic prediction with Tsallis losses and online learning, we establish a generalized Pinsker inequality for the Bregman divergences $D_α$ generated by the negative $α$-Tsallis entropies -- also known as $β$-divergences. Specifically, for any $p$, $q$ in the relative interior of the probability simplex $Δ^K$, we prove the sharp bound \[ D_α(p\Vert q) \ge \frac{C_{α,K}}{2}\cdot \|p-q\|_1^2, \] and we determine the optimal constant $C_{α,K}$ explicitly for every choice of $(α,K)$.