OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Flow-Aware Diffusion for Real-Time VR Restoration: Enhancing Spatiotemporal Coherence and Efficiency
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

Cybersickness remains a critical barrier to the widespread adoption of Virtual Reality (VR), particularly in scenarios involving intense or artificial motion cues. Among the key contributors is excessive optical flow-perceived visual motion that, when unmatched by vestibular input, leads to sensory conflict and discomfort. While previous efforts have explored geometric or hardware based mitigation strategies, such methods often rely on predefined scene structures, manual tuning, or intrusive equipment. In this work, we propose U-MAD, a lightweight, real-time, AI-based solution that suppresses perceptually disruptive optical flow directly at the image level. Unlike prior handcrafted approaches, this method learns to attenuate high-intensity motion patterns from rendered frames without requiring mesh-level editing or scene specific adaptation. Designed as a plug and play module, U-MAD integrates seamlessly into existing VR pipelines and generalizes well to procedurally generated environments. The experiments show that U-MAD consistently reduces average optical flow and enhances temporal stability across diverse scenes. A user study further confirms that reducing visual motion leads to improved perceptual comfort and alleviated cybersickness symptoms. These findings demonstrate that perceptually guided modulation of optical flow provides an effective and scalable approach to creating more user-friendly immersive experiences. The code will be released at https://github.com/XXXXX (upon publication).
Temporal Regularization Training: Unleashing the Potential of Spiking Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2026
Year: 2026

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have received widespread attention due to their event-driven and low-power characteristics, making them particularly effective for processing neuromorphic data. Recent studies have shown that directly trained SNNs suffer from severe temporal gradient vanishing and overfitting issues, which fundamentally constrain their performance and generalizability. This paper unveils a temporal regularization training (TRT) memthod, designed to unleash the generalization and performance potential of SNNs through a time-decaying regularization mechanism that prioritizes early timesteps with stronger constraints. We perform theoretical analysis to reveal TRT's ability on mitigating the temporal gradient vanishment. To validate the effectiveness of TRT, we conduct experiments on both static image datasets and dynamic neuromorphic datasets, perform analysis of their results, demonstrating that TRT can effectively mitigate overfitting and help SNNs converge into flatter local minima with better generalizability. Furthermore, we establish a theoretical interpretation of TRT's temporal regularization mechanism by analyzing the temporal information dynamics inside SNNs. We track the Fisher information of SNNs during training process, showing that Fisher information progressively concentrates in early timesteps. The time-decaying regularization mechanism implemented in TRT effectively guides the network to learn robust features in early timesteps with rich information, thereby leading to significant improvements in model generalization.
PALM: Path-aware LLM-based Test Generation with Comprehension
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2026
Year: 2026

Symbolic execution is a widely used technique for test generation, offering systematic exploration of program paths through constraint solving. However, it is fundamentally constrained by the capability to model the target code, including library functions, in terms of symbolic constraints and by the capability of underlying constraint solvers. As a result, many paths involving complex features remain unanalyzed or insufficiently modeled. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in generating diverse and valid test inputs. Yet, LLMs lack mechanisms for systematically enumerating program paths and often fail to cover subtle corner cases. We observe that directly prompting an LLM with the full program leads to missed coverage of interesting paths. In this paper, we present PALM, a test generation system that combines symbolic path enumeration with LLM-assisted test generation. PALM statically enumerates possible paths through AST-level analysis and transforms each into an executable variant with embedded assertions that specify the target path. This avoids the need to translate path constraints into SMT formulas, by instead constructing program variants that the LLM can interpret. Importantly, PALM provides an interactive frontend that visualizes path coverage alongside generated tests, assembling tests based on the specific paths they exercise. A user study with 12 participants demonstrates that PALM's frontend helps users better understand path coverage and identify which paths are actually exercised by PALM-generated tests through verification and visualization of their path profiles.
Consistency-Driven Calibration and Matching for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning (FSCIL) is crucial for adapting to the complex open-world environments. Contemporary prospective learning-based space construction methods struggle to balance old and new knowledge, as prototype bias and rigid structures limit the expressive capacity of the embedding space. Different from these strategies, we rethink the optimization dilemma from the perspective of feature-structure dual consistency, and propose a Consistency-driven Calibration and Matching (ConCM) framework that systematically mitigates the knowledge conflict inherent in FSCIL. Specifically, inspired by hippocampal associative memory, we design a memory-aware prototype calibration that extracts generalized semantic attributes from base classes and reintegrates them into novel classes to enhance the conceptual center consistency of features. Further, to consolidate memory associations, we propose dynamic structure matching, which adaptively aligns the calibrated features to a session-specific optimal manifold space, ensuring cross-session structure consistency. This process requires no class-number priors and is theoretically guaranteed to achieve geometric optimality and maximum matching. On large-scale FSCIL benchmarks including mini-ImageNet, CIFAR100 and CUB200, ConCM achieves state-of-the-art performance, with harmonic accuracy gains of up to 3.41% in incremental sessions. Code is available at: https://github.com/wire-wqz/ConCM
LZBE: an LZ-style compressor supporting $O(\log n)$-time random access
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2026
Year: 2026

An LZ-like factorization of a string divides it into factors, each being either a single character or a copy of a preceding substring. While grammar-based compression schemes support efficient random access with space linear in the compressed size, no comparable guarantees are known for general LZ-like factorizations. This limitation motivated restricted variants such as LZ-End [Kreft and Navarro, 2013] and height-bounded LZ (LZHB) [Bannai et al., 2024], which trade off some compression efficiency for faster access. In this paper, we introduce LZ-Begin-End (LZBE), a new LZ-like variant in which every copy factor must refer to a contiguous sequence of preceding factors. This structural restriction ensures that any context-free grammar can be transformed into an LZBE factorization of the same size. We further study the greedy LZBE factorization, which selects each copy factor to be as long as possible while processing the input from left to right, and show that it can be computed in linear time. Moreover, we exhibit a family of strings for which the greedy LZBE factorization is asymptotically smaller than the smallest grammar. These results demonstrate that the LZBE scheme is strictly more expressive than grammar-based compression in the worst case. To support fast queries, we propose a data structure for LZBE-compressed strings that permits O(log n)-time random access within space linear in the compressed size, where n is the length of the input string.
Revisiting Graph Analytics Benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2026
Year: 2026

The rise of graph analytics platforms has led to the development of various benchmarks for evaluating and comparing platform performance. However, existing benchmarks often fall short of fully assessing performance due to limitations in core algorithm selection, data generation processes (and the corresponding synthetic datasets), as well as the neglect of API usability evaluation. To address these shortcomings, we propose a novel graph analytics benchmark. First, we select eight core algorithms by extensively reviewing both academic and industrial settings. Second, we design an efficient and flexible data generator and produce eight new synthetic datasets as the default datasets for our benchmark. Lastly, we introduce a multi-level large language model (LLM)-based framework for API usability evaluation-the first of its kind in graph analytics benchmarks. We conduct comprehensive experimental evaluations on existing platforms (GraphX, PowerGraph, Flash, Grape, Pregel+, Ligra and G-thinker). The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed benchmark.
AlphaBeta is not as good as you think: a simple class of synthetic games for a better analysis of deterministic game-solving algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Deterministic game-solving algorithms are conventionally analyzed in the light of their average-case complexity against a distribution of random game-trees, where leaf values are independently sampled from a fixed distribution. This simplified model enables uncluttered mathematical analysis, revealing two key properties: root value distributions asymptotically collapse to a single fixed value for finite-valued trees, and all reasonable algorithms achieve global optimality. However, these findings are artifacts of the model's design: its long criticized independence assumption strips games of structural complexity, producing trivial instances where no algorithm faces meaningful challenges. To address this limitation, we introduce a class of synthetic games generated by a probabilistic model that incrementally constructs game-trees using a fixed level-wise conditional distribution. By enforcing ancestor dependencies, a critical structural feature of real-world games, our framework generates problems with adjustable difficulty while retaining some form of analytical tractability. For several algorithms, including AlphaBeta and Scout, we derive recursive formulas characterizing their average-case complexities under this model. These allow us to rigorously compare algorithms on deep game-trees, where Monte-Carlo simulations are no longer feasible. While asymptotically, all algorithms seem to converge to identical branching factor (a result analogous to that of independence-based models), deep finite trees reveal stark differences: AlphaBeta incurs a significantly larger constant multiplicative factor compared to algorithms like Scout, leading to a substantial practical slowdown. Our framework sheds new light on classical game-solving algorithms, offering rigorous evidence and analytical tools to advance the understanding of these methods under a richer, more challenging, and yet tractable model.
WaLi: Can Pressure Sensors in HVAC Systems Capture Human Speech?
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2026
Year: 2026

Pressure sensors are an integrated component of modern Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems. As these pressure sensors operate within the 0-10 Pa range, support high sampling frequencies of 0.5-2 kHz, and are often placed close to human proximity, they can be used to eavesdrop on confidential speech, since human speech has a similar audible range of 0-10 Pa and a bandwidth of 4 kHz for intelligible quality. This paper presents WaLi, which reconstructs intelligible speech from the low-resolution and noisy pressure sensor data with the following technical contributions: (i) WaLi reconstructs intelligible speech from a minimum of 0.5 kHz sampling frequency of pressure sensors, whereas previous work can only detect hot words/phrases. WaLi uses a complex-valued conformer and Complex Global Attention Block (CGAB) to capture inter-phoneme and intra-phoneme dependencies that exist in the low-resolution pressure sensor data. (ii) WaLi handles the transient noise injected from HVAC fans and duct vibrations by reconstructing both the clean magnitude and phase of the missing frequencies of the low-frequency aliased components. We evaluate our attack on practical HVAC systems located in two anonymous industrial facilities. Extensive studies on real-world pressure sensors show an LSD of 1.24 and an NISQA-MOS of 1.78 for 0.5 kHz to 8 kHz upsampling. We believe that such levels of accuracy pose a significant threat when viewed from a privacy perspective that has not been addressed before for pressure sensors. We also provide defenses for the attack.
A Quantum Framework for Protein Binding-Site Structure Prediction on Utility-Level Quantum Processors
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2026
Year: 2026

Accurate prediction of protein active-site structures remains a central challenge in structural biology, particularly for short and flexible peptide fragments where conventional and simulation-based methods often fail. Here, we present a quantum computing framework specifically developed for utility-level quantum processors to address this problem. Starting from an amino acid sequence, we formulate structure prediction as a ground-state energy minimization problem using the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE). Amino acid connectivity is encoded on a tetrahedral lattice model, and structural constraints-including steric, geometric, and chirality terms-are mapped into a problem-specific Hamiltonian represented as sparse Pauli operators. Optimization is performed with a two-stage architecture that separates energy estimation from measurement decoding, enabling noise mitigation under realistic device conditions. We evaluate the framework on 23 randomly selected protein fragments from the PDBbind dataset and 7 fragments from therapeutically relevant proteins, and execute experiments on the IBM-Cleveland Clinic quantum processor. Predictions are benchmarked against AlphaFold 3 (AF3) and classical simulation-based approaches using identical postprocessing and docking procedures. Our method outperforms both AF3 and classical baselines in RMSD (root-mean-square deviation) and docking efficacy. These results demonstrate an end-to-end, hardware-executable pipeline for biologically relevant structure prediction on real quantum processors, highlighting its engineering feasibility and practical advantages over existing classical and deep learning approaches.
Neural Cellular Automata: From Cells to Pixels
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs) are bio-inspired dynamical systems in which identical cells iteratively apply a learned local update rule to self-organize into complex patterns, exhibiting regeneration, robustness, and spontaneous dynamics. Despite their success in texture synthesis and morphogenesis, NCAs remain largely confined to low-resolution outputs. This limitation stems from (1) training time and memory requirements that grow quadratically with grid size, (2) the strictly local propagation of information that impedes long-range cell communication, and (3) the heavy compute demands of real-time inference at high resolution. In this work, we overcome this limitation by pairing an NCA that evolves on a coarse grid with a lightweight implicit decoder that maps cell states and local coordinates to appearance attributes, enabling the same model to render outputs at arbitrary resolution. Moreover, because both the decoder and NCA updates are local, inference remains highly parallelizable. To supervise high-resolution outputs efficiently, we introduce task-specific losses for morphogenesis (growth from a seed) and texture synthesis with minimal additional memory and computation overhead. Our experiments across 2D/3D grids and mesh domains demonstrate that our hybrid models produce high-resolution outputs in real-time, and preserve the characteristic self-organizing behavior of NCAs.
Proteus-ID: ID-Consistent and Motion-Coherent Video Customization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Video identity customization seeks to synthesize realistic, temporally coherent videos of a specific subject, given a single reference image and a text prompt. This task presents two core challenges: (1) maintaining identity consistency while aligning with the described appearance and actions, and (2) generating natural, fluid motion without unrealistic stiffness. To address these challenges, we introduce Proteus-ID, a novel diffusion-based framework for identity-consistent and motion-coherent video customization. First, we propose a Multimodal Identity Fusion (MIF) module that unifies visual and textual cues into a joint identity representation using a Q-Former, providing coherent guidance to the diffusion model and eliminating modality imbalance. Second, we present a Time-Aware Identity Injection (TAII) mechanism that dynamically modulates identity conditioning across denoising steps, improving fine-detail reconstruction. Third, we propose Adaptive Motion Learning (AML), a self-supervised strategy that reweights the training loss based on optical-flow-derived motion heatmaps, enhancing motion realism without requiring additional inputs. To support this task, we construct Proteus-Bench, a high-quality dataset comprising 200K curated clips for training and 150 individuals from diverse professions and ethnicities for evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Proteus-ID outperforms prior methods in identity preservation, text alignment, and motion quality, establishing a new benchmark for video identity customization. Codes and data are publicly available at https://grenoble-zhang.github.io/Proteus-ID/.
Agent.xpu: Efficient Scheduling of Agentic LLM Workloads on Heterogeneous SoC
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2026
Year: 2026

Personal LLM agents increasingly combine foreground reactive interactions with background proactive monitoring, forming long-lived, stateful LLM flows that interleave prefill and token-by-token decode. While modern heterogeneous SoCs integrate CPUs, iGPUs, and NPUs to support on-device intelligence, existing LLM engines assume static, single-shot inference and lack mechanisms for flow-level concurrency, prioritization, and efficient accelerator coordination. As a result, commodity SoCs remain poorly matched to the dynamic, mixed-criticality execution patterns of personal agents. This paper presents Agent$.$xpu, the first LLM engine that orchestrates concurrent reactive and proactive LLM flows on commodity SoCs. Extensive profiling uncovers unique SoC characteristics of operator-accelerator affinity, asymmetric DDR contention, and stage-divergent batching behaviors distinct from cloud-serving assumptions. Agent$.$xpu introduces three key techniques: a heterogeneous execution graph (HEG) capturing NPU/iGPU affinity and elastic operator binding; flow-aware NPU-iGPU coordination with stage elasticity, decoupling prefill and decode to reduce bandwidth contention and enforce priorities; and fine-grained preemption with slack-aware piggybacking to guarantee reactive responsiveness without starving proactive work. Across realistic personal-agent workloads, Agent$.$xpu delivers 1.2-4.9$\times$ proactive throughput and reduces reactive latency by at least 91%, compared with both industrial iGPU-only serving engine and NPU-iGPU static inference with optimal tensor-partitioning schemes. Agent$.$xpu also minimizes energy consumption and graphics interference via controlled iGPU usage.
STACK: Adversarial Attacks on LLM Safeguard Pipelines
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Frontier AI developers are relying on layers of safeguards to protect against catastrophic misuse of AI systems. Anthropic and OpenAI guard their latest Opus 4 model and GPT-5 models using such defense pipelines, and other frontier developers including Google DeepMind pledge to soon deploy similar defenses. However, the security of such pipelines is unclear, with limited prior work evaluating or attacking these pipelines. We address this gap by developing and red-teaming an open-source defense pipeline. First, we find that a novel few-shot-prompted input and output classifier outperforms state-of-the-art open-weight safeguard model ShieldGemma across three attacks and two datasets, reducing the attack success rate (ASR) to 0% on the catastrophic misuse dataset ClearHarm. Second, we introduce a STaged AttaCK (STACK) procedure that achieves 71% ASR on ClearHarm in a black-box attack against the few-shot-prompted classifier pipeline. Finally, we also evaluate STACK in a transfer setting, achieving 33% ASR, providing initial evidence that it is feasible to design attacks with no access to the target pipeline. We conclude by suggesting specific mitigations that developers could use to thwart staged attacks.
On the rank weight hierarchy of $M$-codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2026
Year: 2026

We study the rank weight hierarchy of linear codes which are stable under a linear endomorphism defined over the base field, in particular when the endomorphism is cyclic. In this last case, we give a necessary and sufficient condition for such a code to have first rank weight equal to $1$ in terms of its generator polynomial, as well as an explicit formula for its last rank weight.
Echoes of AI: Investigating the Downstream Effects of AI Assistants on Software Maintainability
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2026
Year: 2026

[Context] AI assistants, like GitHub Copilot and Cursor, are transforming software engineering. While several studies highlight productivity improvements, their impact on maintainability requires further investigation. [Objective] This study investigates whether co-development with AI assistants affects software maintainability, specifically how easily other developers can evolve the resulting source code. [Method] We conducted a two-phase controlled experiment involving 151 participants, 95% of whom were professional developers. In Phase 1, participants added a new feature to a Java web application, with or without AI assistance. In Phase 2, a randomized controlled trial, new participants evolved these solutions without AI assistance. [Results] Phase 2 revealed no significant differences in subsequent evolution with respect to completion time or code quality. Bayesian analysis suggests that any speed or quality improvements from AI use were at most small and highly uncertain. Observational results from Phase 1 corroborate prior research: using an AI assistant yielded a 30.7% median reduction in completion time, and habitual AI users showed an estimated 55.9% speedup. [Conclusions] Overall, we did not detect systematic maintainability advantages or disadvantages when other developers evolved code co-developed with AI assistants. Within the scope of our tasks and measures, we observed no consistent warning signs of degraded code-level maintainability. Future work should examine risks such as code bloat from excessive code generation and cognitive debt as developers offload more mental effort to assistants.