OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
COL-Trees: Efficient Hierarchical Object Search in Road Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2026
Year: 2026

Location-based services rely heavily on efficient methods that search for relevant points-of-interest (POIs) near a given location. A k Nearest Neighbor (kNN) query is one such example that finds the k closest POIs from an agent's location. While most existing techniques focus on retrieving nearby POIs for a single agent, these search heuristics do not translate to many other applications. For example, Aggregate k Nearest Neighbor (AkNN) queries require POIs that are close to multiple agents. k Farthest Neighbor (kFN) queries require POIs that are the antithesis of nearest. Such problems naturally benefit from a hierarchical approach, but existing methods rely on Euclidean-based heuristics, which have diminished effectiveness in graphs such as road networks. We propose a novel data structure, COL-Tree (Compacted Object-Landmark Tree), to address this gap by enabling efficient hierarchical graph traversal using a more accurate landmark-based heuristic. We then present query algorithms that utilize COL-Trees to efficiently answer AkNN, kFN, and other queries. In our experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets, we demonstrate that our techniques significantly outperform existing approaches, achieving up to 4 orders of magnitude improvement. Moreover, this comes at a small pre-processing overhead in both theory and practice.
Linux Kernel Recency Matters, CVE Severity Doesn't, and History Fades
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2026
Year: 2026

In 2024, the Linux kernel became its own Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) Numbering Authority (CNA), formalizing how kernel vulnerabilities are identified and tracked. We analyze the anatomy and dynamics of kernel CVEs using metadata, associated commits, and patch latency to understand what drives patching. Results show that severity and Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) metrics have a negligible association with patch latency, whereas kernel recency is a reasonable predictor in survival models. Kernel developers fix newer kernels sooner, while older ones retain unresolved CVEs. Commits introducing vulnerabilities are typically broader and more complex than their fixes, though often only approximate reconstructions of development history. The Linux kernel remains a unique open-source project -- its CVE process is no exception.
The Benefit of Collective Intelligence in Community-Based Content Moderation is Limited by Overt Political Signalling
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2026
Year: 2026

Social media platforms face increasing scrutiny over the rapid spread of misinformation. In response, many have adopted community-based content moderation systems, including Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch) on X (formerly Twitter), Footnotes on TikTok, and Facebook's Community Notes initiative. However, research shows that the current design of these systems can allow political biases to influence both the development of notes and the rating processes, reducing their overall effectiveness. We hypothesize that enabling users to collaborate on writing notes, rather than relying solely on individually authored notes, can enhance their overall quality. To test this idea, we conducted an online experiment in which participants jointly authored notes on political posts. Our results show that teams produce notes that are rated as more helpful than individually written notes. We also find that politically diverse teams perform better when evaluating Republican posts, while group composition does not affect perceived note quality for Democrat posts. However, the advantage of collaboration diminishes when team members are aware of one another's political affiliations. Taken together, these findings underscore the complexity of community-based content moderation and highlight the importance of understanding group dynamics and political diversity when designing more effective moderation systems.
Stalled, Biased, and Confused: Uncovering Reasoning Failures in LLMs for Cloud-Based Root Cause Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2026
Year: 2026

Root cause analysis (RCA) is essential for diagnosing failures within complex software systems to ensure system reliability. The highly distributed and interdependent nature of modern cloud-based systems often complicates RCA efforts, particularly for multi-hop fault propagation, where symptoms appear far from their true causes. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) present new opportunities to enhance automated RCA. However, their practical value for RCA depends on the fidelity of reasoning and decision-making. Existing work relies on historical incident corpora, operates directly on high-volume telemetry beyond current LLM capacity, or embeds reasoning inside complex multi-agent pipelines -- conditions that obscure whether failures arise from reasoning itself or from peripheral design choices. We present a focused empirical evaluation that isolates an LLM's reasoning behavior. We design a controlled experimental framework that foregrounds the LLM by using a simplified experimental setting. We evaluate six LLMs under two agentic workflows (ReAct and Plan-and-Execute) and a non-agentic baseline on two real-world case studies (GAIA and OpenRCA). In total, we executed 48,000 simulated failure scenarios, totaling 228 days of execution time. We measure both root-cause accuracy and the quality of intermediate reasoning traces. We produce a labeled taxonomy of 16 common RCA reasoning failures and use an LLM-as-a-Judge for annotation. Our results clarify where current open-source LLMs succeed and fail in multi-hop RCA, quantify sensitivity to input data modalities, and identify reasoning failures that predict final correctness. Together, these contributions provide transparent and reproducible empirical results and a failure taxonomy to guide future work on reasoning-driven system diagnosis.
Latent Spherical Flow Policy for Reinforcement Learning with Combinatorial Actions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Reinforcement learning (RL) with combinatorial action spaces remains challenging because feasible action sets are exponentially large and governed by complex feasibility constraints, making direct policy parameterization impractical. Existing approaches embed task-specific value functions into constrained optimization programs or learn deterministic structured policies, sacrificing generality and policy expressiveness. We propose a solver-induced \emph{latent spherical flow policy} that brings the expressiveness of modern generative policies to combinatorial RL while guaranteeing feasibility by design. Our method, LSFlow, learns a \emph{stochastic} policy in a compact continuous latent space via spherical flow matching, and delegates feasibility to a combinatorial optimization solver that maps each latent sample to a valid structured action. To improve efficiency, we train the value network directly in the latent space, avoiding repeated solver calls during policy optimization. To address the piecewise-constant and discontinuous value landscape induced by solver-based action selection, we introduce a smoothed Bellman operator that yields stable, well-defined learning targets. Empirically, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by an average of 20.6\% across a range of challenging combinatorial RL tasks.
Aligning Microscopic Vehicle and Macroscopic Traffic Statistics: Reconstructing Driving Behavior from Partial Data
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2026
Year: 2026

A driving algorithm that aligns with good human driving practices, or at the very least collaborates effectively with human drivers, is crucial for developing safe and efficient autonomous vehicles. In practice, two main approaches are commonly adopted: (i) supervised or imitation learning, which requires comprehensive naturalistic driving data capturing all states that influence a vehicle's decisions and corresponding actions, and (ii) reinforcement learning (RL), where the simulated driving environment either matches or is intentionally more challenging than real-world conditions. Both methods depend on high-quality observations of real-world driving behavior, which are often difficult and costly to obtain. State-of-the-art sensors on individual vehicles can gather microscopic data, but they lack context about the surrounding conditions. Conversely, roadside sensors can capture traffic flow and other macroscopic characteristics, but they cannot associate this information with individual vehicles on a microscopic level. Motivated by this complementarity, we propose a framework that reconstructs unobserved microscopic states from macroscopic observations, using microscopic data to anchor observed vehicle behaviors, and learns a shared policy whose behavior is microscopically consistent with the partially observed trajectories and actions and macroscopically aligned with target traffic statistics when deployed population-wide. Such constrained and regularized policies promote realistic flow patterns and safe coordination with human drivers at scale.
MirrorMark: A Distortion-Free Multi-Bit Watermark for Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2026
Year: 2026

As large language models (LLMs) become integral to applications such as question answering and content creation, reliable content attribution has become increasingly important. Watermarking is a promising approach, but existing methods either provide only binary signals or distort the sampling distribution, degrading text quality; distortion-free approaches, in turn, often suffer from weak detectability or robustness. We propose MirrorMark, a multi-bit and distortion-free watermark for LLMs. By mirroring sampling randomness in a measure-preserving manner, MirrorMark embeds multi-bit messages without altering the token probability distribution, preserving text quality by design. To improve robustness, we introduce a context-based scheduler that balances token assignments across message positions while remaining resilient to insertions and deletions. We further provide a theoretical analysis of the equal error rate to interpret empirical performance. Experiments show that MirrorMark matches the text quality of non-watermarked generation while achieving substantially stronger detectability: with 54 bits embedded in 300 tokens, it improves bit accuracy by 8-12% and correctly identifies up to 11% more watermarked texts at 1% false positive rate.
Tabular Foundation Models Can Do Survival Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

While tabular foundation models have achieved remarkable success in classification and regression, adapting them to model time-to-event outcomes for survival analysis is non-trivial due to right-censoring, where data observations may end before the event occurs. We develop a classification-based framework that reformulates both static and dynamic survival analysis as a series of binary classification problems by discretizing event times. Censored observations are naturally handled as examples with missing labels at certain time points. This classification formulation enables existing tabular foundation models to perform survival analysis through in-context learning without explicit training. We prove that under standard censoring assumptions, minimizing our binary classification loss recovers the true survival probabilities as the training set size increases. We demonstrate through evaluation across $53$ real-world datasets that off-the-shelf tabular foundation models with this classification formulation outperform classical and deep learning baselines on average over multiple survival metrics.
JAF: Judge Agent Forest
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Judge agents are fundamental to agentic AI frameworks: they provide automated evaluation, and enable iterative self-refinement of reasoning processes. We introduce JAF: Judge Agent Forest, a framework in which the judge agent conducts joint inference across a cohort of query--response pairs generated by a primary agent, rather than evaluating each in isolation. This paradigm elevates the judge from a local evaluator to a holistic learner: by simultaneously assessing related responses, the judge discerns cross-instance patterns and inconsistencies, whose aggregate feedback enables the primary agent to improve by viewing its own outputs through the judge's collective perspective. Conceptually, JAF bridges belief propagation and ensemble-learning principles: overlapping in-context neighborhoods induce a knowledge-graph structure that facilitates propagation of critique, and repeated, randomized evaluations yield a robust ensemble of context-sensitive judgments. JAF can be instantiated entirely via ICL, with the judge prompted for each query using its associated primary-agent response plus a small, possibly noisy set of peer exemplars. While kNN in embedding space is a natural starting point for exemplars, this approach overlooks categorical structure, domain metadata, or nuanced distinctions accessible to modern LLMs. To overcome these limitations, we develop a flexible locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) algorithm that learns informative binary codes by integrating semantic embeddings, LLM-driven hash predicates, supervision from categorical labels, and relevant side information. These hash codes support efficient, interpretable, and relation-aware selection of diverse exemplars, and further optimize exploration of CoT reasoning paths. We validate JAF with an empirical study on the demanding task of cloud misconfigs triage in large-scale cloud environments.
VMonarch: Efficient Video Diffusion Transformers with Structured Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

The quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism severely limits the context scalability of Video Diffusion Transformers (DiTs). We find that the highly sparse spatio-temporal attention patterns exhibited in Video DiTs can be naturally represented by the Monarch matrix. It is a class of structured matrices with flexible sparsity, enabling sub-quadratic attention via an alternating minimization algorithm. Accordingly, we propose VMonarch, a novel attention mechanism for Video DiTs that enables efficient computation over the dynamic sparse patterns with structured Monarch matrices. First, we adapt spatio-temporal Monarch factorization to explicitly capture the intra-frame and inter-frame correlations of the video data. Second, we introduce a recomputation strategy to mitigate artifacts arising from instabilities during alternating minimization of Monarch matrices. Third, we propose a novel online entropy algorithm fused into FlashAttention, enabling fast Monarch matrix updates for long sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VMonarch achieves comparable or superior generation quality to full attention on VBench after minimal tuning. It overcomes the attention bottleneck in Video DiTs, reduces attention FLOPs by a factor of 17.5, and achieves a speedup of over 5x in attention computation for long videos, surpassing state-of-the-art sparse attention methods at 90% sparsity.
SurrogateSHAP: Training-Free Contributor Attribution for Text-to-Image (T2I) Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

As Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models are increasingly used in real-world creative workflows, a principled framework for valuing contributors who provide a collection of data is essential for fair compensation and sustainable data marketplaces. While the Shapley value offers a theoretically grounded approach to attribution, it faces a dual computational bottleneck: (i) the prohibitive cost of exhaustive model retraining for each sampled subset of players (i.e., data contributors) and (ii) the combinatorial number of subsets needed to estimate marginal contributions due to contributor interactions. To this end, we propose SurrogateSHAP, a retraining-free framework that approximates the expensive retraining game through inference from a pretrained model. To further improve efficiency, we employ a gradient-boosted tree to approximate the utility function and derive Shapley values analytically from the tree-based model. We evaluate SurrogateSHAP across three diverse attribution tasks: (i) image quality for DDPM-CFG on CIFAR-20, (ii) aesthetics for Stable Diffusion on Post-Impressionist artworks, and (iii) product diversity for FLUX.1 on Fashion-Product data. Across settings, SurrogateSHAP outperforms prior methods while substantially reducing computational overhead, consistently identifying influential contributors across multiple utility metrics. Finally, we demonstrate that SurrogateSHAP effectively localizes data sources responsible for spurious correlations in clinical images, providing a scalable path toward auditing safety-critical generative models.
PersonaCite: VoC-Grounded Interviewable Agentic Synthetic AI Personas for Verifiable User and Design Research
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

LLM-based and agent-based synthetic personas are increasingly used in design and product decision-making, yet prior work shows that prompt-based personas often produce persuasive but unverifiable responses that obscure their evidentiary basis. We present PersonaCite, an agentic system that reframes AI personas as evidence-bounded research instruments through retrieval-augmented interaction. Unlike prior approaches that rely on prompt-based roleplaying, PersonaCite retrieves actual voice-of-customer artifacts during each conversation turn, constrains responses to retrieved evidence, explicitly abstains when evidence is missing, and provides response-level source attribution. Through semi-structured interviews and deployment study with 14 industry experts, we identify preliminary findings on perceived benefits, validity concerns, and design tensions, and propose Persona Provenance Cards as a documentation pattern for responsible AI persona use in human-centered design workflows.
ReloPush-BOSS: Optimization-guided Nonmonotone Rearrangement Planning for a Car-like Robot Pusher
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

We focus on multi-object rearrangement planning in densely cluttered environments using a car-like robot pusher. The combination of kinematic, geometric and physics constraints underlying this domain results in challenging nonmonotone problem instances which demand breaking each manipulation action into multiple parts to achieve a desired object rearrangement. Prior work tackles such instances by planning prerelocations, temporary object displacements that enable constraint satisfaction, but deciding where to prerelocate remains difficult due to local minima leading to infeasible or high-cost paths. Our key insight is that these minima can be avoided by steering a prerelocation optimization toward low-cost regions informed by Dubins path classification. These optimized prerelocations are integrated into an object traversability graph that encodes kinematic, geometric, and pushing constraints. Searching this graph in a depth-first fashion results in efficient, feasible rearrangement sequences. Across a series of densely cluttered scenarios with up to 13 objects, our framework, ReloPush-BOSS, exhibits consistently highest success rates and shortest pushing paths compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Hardware experiments on a 1/10 car-like pusher demonstrate the robustness of our approach. Code and footage from our experiments can be found at: https://fluentrobotics.com/relopushboss.
ParalESN: Enabling parallel information processing in Reservoir Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Reservoir Computing (RC) has established itself as an efficient paradigm for temporal processing. However, its scalability remains severely constrained by (i) the necessity of processing temporal data sequentially and (ii) the prohibitive memory footprint of high-dimensional reservoirs. In this work, we revisit RC through the lens of structured operators and state space modeling to address these limitations, introducing Parallel Echo State Network (ParalESN). ParalESN enables the construction of high-dimensional and efficient reservoirs based on diagonal linear recurrence in the complex space, enabling parallel processing of temporal data. We provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating that ParalESN preserves the Echo State Property and the universality guarantees of traditional Echo State Networks while admitting an equivalent representation of arbitrary linear reservoirs in the complex diagonal form. Empirically, ParalESN matches the predictive accuracy of traditional RC on time series benchmarks, while delivering substantial computational savings. On 1-D pixel-level classification tasks, ParalESN achieves competitive accuracy with fully trainable neural networks while reducing computational costs and energy consumption by orders of magnitude. Overall, ParalESN offers a promising, scalable, and principled pathway for integrating RC within the deep learning landscape.
ZK-HybridFL: Zero-Knowledge Proof-Enhanced Hybrid Ledger for Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training while preserving data privacy, yet both centralized and decentralized approaches face challenges in scalability, security, and update validation. We propose ZK-HybridFL, a secure decentralized FL framework that integrates a directed acyclic graph (DAG) ledger with dedicated sidechains and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) for privacy-preserving model validation. The framework uses event-driven smart contracts and an oracle-assisted sidechain to verify local model updates without exposing sensitive data. A built-in challenge mechanism efficiently detects adversarial behavior. In experiments on image classification and language modeling tasks, ZK-HybridFL achieves faster convergence, higher accuracy, lower perplexity, and reduced latency compared to Blade-FL and ChainFL. It remains robust against substantial fractions of adversarial and idle nodes, supports sub-second on-chain verification with efficient gas usage, and prevents invalid updates and orphanage-style attacks. This makes ZK-HybridFL a scalable and secure solution for decentralized FL across diverse environments.
SCALAR: Quantifying Structural Hallucination, Consistency, and Reasoning Gaps in Materials Foundation Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Large language models are increasingly applied to materials science reasoning, yet their behavior under physically structured distribution shifts remains poorly understood. We introduce SCALAR (Structural Consistency And Logic Across Regimes), a benchmark for evaluating geometric scale generalization and its connection to structural hallucination, consistency, and reasoning in materials foundation models. Given canonical crystal representations, models must reason about derived nanoparticle structures obtained through supercell expansion and geometric truncation across length scales spanning a few atoms to over 18,000 atoms, totaling $\approx$100,000 structures from DFT-validated unit cells. SCALAR defines three tasks. (i) CIF to property prediction. (ii) A Chain-of-Thought variant with explicit physics-grounded reasoning. (iii) Inverse retrieval identifying crystals from candidates given target properties. Outputs are evaluated via structured metrics capturing numeric error, hallucination, cross-prompt consistency, monotonic reasoning, output validity, and retrieval regret. Experiments across diverse foundation models reveal large, model-dependent shifts under explicit reasoning, often reducing hallucination and error, but frequently destabilizing consistency or validity. These results demonstrate that geometric scale generalization cannot be inferred from accuracy alone. Supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/KurbanIntelligenceLab/SCALAR.