OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Joint Network-and-Server Congestion in Multi-Source Traffic Allocation: A Convex Formulation and Price-Based Decentralization
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2026
Year: 2026

This paper studies an important rate allocation problem that arises in many networked and distributed systems: steady-state traffic rate allocation from multiple sources to multiple service nodes when both (i) the access-path delay on each source-node route is rate-dependent (capacity-constrained) and convex, and (ii) each service node (also capacity-constrained) experiences a load-dependent queueing delay driven by aggregate load from all sources. We show that the resulting flow-weighted end-to-end delay minimization is a convex program, yielding a global system-optimal solution characterized by KKT conditions that equalize total marginal costs (a path marginal access term plus a node congestion price) across all utilized routes. This condition admits a Wardrop-type interpretation: for each source, all utilized options equalize total marginal cost, while any option with strictly larger total marginal cost receives no flow. Building on this structure, we develop a lightweight distributed pricing-based algorithm in which each service node locally computes and broadcasts a scalar congestion price from its observed aggregate load, while each source updates its traffic split by solving a small separable convex allocation problem under the advertised prices. Numerical illustrations demonstrate convergence of the distributed iteration to the centralized optimum and highlight the trade-offs induced by jointly modeling access and service congestion.
CSR-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating the Cross-modal Safety and Reliability of MLLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) enable interaction over both text and images, but their safety behavior can be driven by unimodal shortcuts instead of true joint intent understanding. We introduce CSR-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating cross-modal reliability through four stress-testing interaction patterns spanning Safety, Over-rejection, Bias, and Hallucination, covering 61 fine-grained types. Each instance is constructed to require integrated image-text interpretation, and we additionally provide paired text-only controls to diagnose modality-induced behavior shifts. We evaluate 16 state-of-the-art MLLMs and observe systematic cross-modal alignment gaps. Models show weak safety awareness, strong language dominance under interference, and consistent performance degradation from text-only controls to multimodal inputs. We also observe a clear trade-off between reducing over-rejection and maintaining safe, non-discriminatory behavior, suggesting that some apparent safety gains may come from refusal-oriented heuristics rather than robust intent understanding. WARNING: This paper contains unsafe contents.
On the Summability Problem of Multivariate Rational Functions in the Mixed Case
Venue: arXiv cs.SC 2026
Year: 2026

Continuing previous work, this paper focuses on the summability problem of multivariate rational functions in the mixed case in which both shift and $q$-shift operators can appear. Our summability criteria rely on three ingredients including orbital decompositions, Sato's isotropy groups, and difference transformations. This work settles the rational case of the long-term project aimed at developing algorithms for symbolic summation of multivariate functions.
A3-TTA: Adaptive Anchor Alignment Test-Time Adaptation for Image Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) offers a practical solution for deploying image segmentation models under domain shift without accessing source data or retraining. Among existing TTA strategies, pseudo-label-based methods have shown promising performance. However, they often rely on perturbation-ensemble heuristics (e.g., dropout sampling, test-time augmentation, Gaussian noise), which lack distributional grounding and yield unstable training signals. This can trigger error accumulation and catastrophic forgetting during adaptation. To address this, we propose \textbf{A3-TTA}, a TTA framework that constructs reliable pseudo-labels through anchor-guided supervision. Specifically, we identify well-predicted target domain images using a class compact density metric, under the assumption that confident predictions imply distributional proximity to the source domain. These anchors serve as stable references to guide pseudo-label generation, which is further regularized via semantic consistency and boundary-aware entropy minimization. Additionally, we introduce a self-adaptive exponential moving average strategy to mitigate label noise and stabilize model update during adaptation. Evaluated on both multi-domain medical images (heart structure and prostate segmentation) and natural images, A3-TTA significantly improves average Dice scores by 10.40 to 17.68 percentage points compared to the source model, outperforming several state-of-the-art TTA methods under different segmentation model architectures. A3-TTA also excels in continual TTA, maintaining high performance across sequential target domains with strong anti-forgetting ability. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/HiLab-git/A3-TTA.
To Search or Not to Search: Aligning the Decision Boundary of Deep Search Agents via Causal Intervention
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2026
Year: 2026

Deep search agents, which autonomously iterate through multi-turn web-based reasoning, represent a promising paradigm for complex information-seeking tasks. However, current agents suffer from critical inefficiency: they conduct excessive searches as they cannot accurately judge when to stop searching and start answering. This stems from outcome-centric training that prioritize final results over the search process itself. We identify the root cause as misaligned decision boundaries, the threshold determining when accumulated information suffices to answer. This causes over-search (redundant searching despite sufficient knowledge) and under-search (premature termination yielding incorrect answers). To address these errors, we propose a comprehensive framework comprising two key components. First, we introduce causal intervention-based diagnosis that identifies boundary errors by comparing factual and counterfactual trajectories at each decision point. Second, we develop Decision Boundary Alignment for Deep Search agents (DAS), which constructs preference datasets from causal feedback and aligns policies via preference optimization. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that decision boundary errors are pervasive across state-of-the-art agents. Our DAS method effectively calibrates these boundaries, mitigating both over-search and under-search to achieve substantial gains in accuracy and efficiency. Our code and data are publicly available at: https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/WWW2026_DAS.
GuardReasoner-Omni: A Reasoning-based Multi-modal Guardrail for Text, Image, and Video
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2026
Year: 2026

We present GuardReasoner-Omni, a reasoning-based guardrail model designed to moderate text, image, and video data. First, we construct a comprehensive training corpus comprising 148k samples spanning these three modalities. Our training pipeline follows a two-stage paradigm to incentivize the model to deliberate before making decisions: (1) conducting SFT to cold-start the model with explicit reasoning capabilities and structural adherence; and (2) performing RL, incorporating an error-driven exploration reward to incentivize deeper reasoning on hard samples. We release a suite of models scaled at 2B and 4B parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GuardReasoner-Omni achieves superior performance compared to existing state-of-the-art baselines across various guardrail benchmarks. Notably, GuardReasoner-Omni (2B) significantly surpasses the runner-up by 5.3% F1 score.
Vigemers: on the number of $k$-mers sharing the same XOR-based minimizer
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2026
Year: 2026

In bioinformatics, minimizers have become an inescapable method for handling $k$-mers (words of fixed size $k$) extracted from DNA or RNA sequencing, whether for sampling, storage, querying or partitioning. According to some fixed order on $m$-mers ($m<k$), the minimizer of a $k$-mer is defined as its smallest $m$-mer -- and acts as its fingerprint. Although minimizers are widely used for partitioning purposes, there is almost no theoretical work on the quality of the resulting partitions. For instance, it has been known for decades that the lexicographic order empirically leads to highly unbalanced partitions that are unusable in practice, but it was not until very recently that this observation was theoretically substantiated. The rejection of the lexicographic order has led the community to resort to (pseudo-)random orders using hash functions. In this work, we extend the theoretical results relating to the partitions obtained by the lexicographical order, departing from it to a (exponentially) large family of hash functions, namely where the $m$-mers are XORed against a fixed key. More precisely, provided a key $γ$ and a $m$-mer $w$, we investigate the function that counts how many $k$-mers admit $w$ as their minimizer (i.e. where $w\oplusγ$ is minimal among all $m$-mers of said $k$-mers). This number, denoted by $π_k^γ(w)$, represents the maximum size of the bucket associated with $w$, if all possible $k$-mers were to be seen and partitioned. We adapt the (lexicographical order) method of the literature to our framework and propose combinatorial equations that allow to compute, using dynamic programming, $π_k^γ(w)$ in $O(km^2)$ time and $O(km)$ space.
Achieving Linear Speedup for Composite Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

This paper proposes FedNMap, a normal map-based method for composite federated learning, where the objective consists of a smooth loss and a possibly nonsmooth regularizer. FedNMap leverages a normal map-based update scheme to handle the nonsmooth term and incorporates a local correction strategy to mitigate the impact of data heterogeneity across clients. Under standard assumptions, including smooth local losses, weak convexity of the regularizer, and bounded stochastic gradient variance, FedNMap achieves linear speedup with respect to both the number of clients $n$ and the number of local updates $Q$ for nonconvex losses, both with and without the Polyak-Łojasiewicz (PL) condition. To our knowledge, this is the first result establishing linear speedup for nonconvex composite federated learning.
Z3D: Zero-Shot 3D Visual Grounding from Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

3D visual grounding (3DVG) aims to localize objects in a 3D scene based on natural language queries. In this work, we explore zero-shot 3DVG from multi-view images alone, without requiring any geometric supervision or object priors. We introduce Z3D, a universal grounding pipeline that flexibly operates on multi-view images while optionally incorporating camera poses and depth maps. We identify key bottlenecks in prior zero-shot methods causing significant performance degradation and address them with (i) a state-of-the-art zero-shot 3D instance segmentation method to generate high-quality 3D bounding box proposals and (ii) advanced reasoning via prompt-based segmentation, which utilizes full capabilities of modern VLMs. Extensive experiments on the ScanRefer and Nr3D benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance among zero-shot methods. Code is available at https://github.com/col14m/z3d .
Symbol-Aware Reasoning with Masked Discrete Diffusion for Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition (HMER) requires reasoning over diverse symbols and 2D structural layouts, yet autoregressive models struggle with exposure bias and syntactic inconsistency. We present a discrete diffusion framework that reformulates HMER as iterative symbolic refinement instead of sequential generation. Through multi-step remasking, the proposal progressively refines both symbols and structural relations, removing causal dependencies and improving structural consistency. A symbol-aware tokenization and Random-Masking Mutual Learning further enhance syntactic alignment and robustness to handwriting diversity. On the MathWriting benchmark, the proposal achieves 5.56\% CER and 60.42\% EM, outperforming strong Transformer and commercial baselines. Consistent gains on CROHME 2014--2023 demonstrate that discrete diffusion provides a new paradigm for structure-aware visual recognition beyond generative modeling.
How do people watch AI-generated videos of physical scenes?
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

The growing prevalence of realistic AI-generated videos on media platforms increasingly blurs the line between fact and fiction, eroding public trust. Understanding how people watch AI-generated videos offers a human-centered perspective for improving AI detection and guiding advancements in video generation. However, existing studies have not investigated human gaze behavior in response to AI-generated videos of physical scenes. Here, we collect and analyze the eye movements from 40 participants during video understanding and AI detection tasks involving a mix of real-world and AI-generated videos. We find that given the high realism of AI-generated videos, gaze behavior is driven less by the video's actual authenticity and more by the viewer's perception of its authenticity. Our results demonstrate that the mere awareness of potential AI generation may alter media consumption from passive viewing into an active search for anomalies.
Toward a Sustainable Federated Learning Ecosystem: A Practical Least Core Mechanism for Payoff Allocation
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2026
Year: 2026

Emerging network paradigms and applications increasingly rely on federated learning (FL) to enable collaborative intelligence while preserving privacy. However, the sustainability of such collaborative environments hinges on a fair and stable payoff allocation mechanism. Focusing on coalition stability, this paper introduces a payoff allocation framework based on the least core (LC) concept. Unlike traditional methods, the LC prioritizes the cohesion of the federation by minimizing the maximum dissatisfaction among all potential subgroups, ensuring that no participant has an incentive to break away. To adapt this game-theoretic concept to practical, large-scale networks, we propose a streamlined implementation with a stack-based pruning algorithm, effectively balancing computational efficiency with allocation precision. Case studies in federated intrusion detection demonstrate that our mechanism correctly identifies pivotal contributors and strategic alliances. The results confirm that the practical LC framework promotes stable collaboration and fosters a sustainable FL ecosystem.
Risk Awareness Injection: Calibrating Vision-Language Models for Safety without Compromising Utility
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Vision language models (VLMs) extend the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to cross-modal settings, yet remain highly vulnerable to multimodal jailbreak attacks. Existing defenses predominantly rely on safety fine-tuning or aggressive token manipulations, incurring substantial training costs or significantly degrading utility. Recent research shows that LLMs inherently recognize unsafe content in text, and the incorporation of visual inputs in VLMs frequently dilutes risk-related signals. Motivated by this, we propose Risk Awareness Injection (RAI), a lightweight and training-free framework for safety calibration that restores LLM-like risk recognition by amplifying unsafe signals in VLMs. Specifically, RAI constructs an Unsafe Prototype Subspace from language embeddings and performs targeted modulation on selected high-risk visual tokens, explicitly activating safety-critical signals within the cross-modal feature space. This modulation restores the model's LLM-like ability to detect unsafe content from visual inputs, while preserving the semantic integrity of original tokens for cross-modal reasoning. Extensive experiments across multiple jailbreak and utility benchmarks demonstrate that RAI substantially reduces attack success rate without compromising task performance.
Feasible strategies for conflict resolution within intuitionistic fuzzy preference-based conflict situations
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

In three-way conflict analysis, preference-based conflict situations characterize agents' attitudes towards issues by formally modeling their preferences over pairs of issues. However, existing preference-based conflict models rely exclusively on three qualitative relations, namely, preference, converse, and indifference, to describe agents' attitudes towards issue pairs, which significantly limits their capacity in capturing the essence of conflict. To overcome this limitation, we introduce the concept of an intuitionistic fuzzy preference-based conflict situation that captures agents' attitudes towards issue pairs with finer granularity than that afforded by classical preference-based models. Afterwards, we develop intuitionistic fuzzy preference-based conflict measures within this framework, and construct three-way conflict analysis models for trisecting the set of agent pairs, the agent set, and the issue set. Additionally, relative loss functions built on the proposed conflict functions are employed to calculate thresholds for three-way conflict analysis. Finally, we present adjustment mechanism-based feasible strategies that simultaneously account for both adjustment magnitudes and conflict degrees, together with an algorithm for constructing such feasible strategies, and provide an illustrative example to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed model.
Verified Critical Step Optimization for LLM Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

As large language model agents tackle increasingly complex long-horizon tasks, effective post-training becomes critical. Prior work faces fundamental challenges: outcome-only rewards fail to precisely attribute credit to intermediate steps, estimated step-level rewards introduce systematic noise, and Monte Carlo sampling approaches for step reward estimation incur prohibitive computational cost. Inspired by findings that only a small fraction of high-entropy tokens drive effective RL for reasoning, we propose Critical Step Optimization (CSO), which focuses preference learning on verified critical steps, decision points where alternate actions demonstrably flip task outcomes from failure to success. Crucially, our method starts from failed policy trajectories rather than expert demonstrations, directly targeting the policy model's weaknesses. We use a process reward model (PRM) to identify candidate critical steps, leverage expert models to propose high-quality alternatives, then continue execution from these alternatives using the policy model itself until task completion. Only alternatives that the policy successfully executes to correct outcomes are verified and used as DPO training data, ensuring both quality and policy reachability. This yields fine-grained, verifiable supervision at critical decisions while avoiding trajectory-level coarseness and step-level noise. Experiments on GAIA-Text-103 and XBench-DeepSearch show that CSO achieves 37% and 26% relative improvement over the SFT baseline and substantially outperforms other post-training methods, while requiring supervision at only 16% of trajectory steps. This demonstrates the effectiveness of selective verification-based learning for agent post-training.
Most Convolutional Networks Suffer from Small Adversarial Perturbations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

The existence of adversarial examples is relatively understood for random fully connected neural networks, but much less so for convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The recent work [Daniely, 2025] establishes that adversarial examples can be found in CNNs, in some non-optimal distance from the input. We extend over this work and prove that adversarial examples in random CNNs with input dimension $d$ can be found already in $\ell_2$-distance of order $\lVert x \rVert /\sqrt{d}$ from the input $x$, which is essentially the nearest possible. We also show that such adversarial small perturbations can be found using a single step of gradient descent. To derive our results we use Fourier decomposition to efficiently bound the singular values of a random linear convolutional operator, which is the main ingredient of a CNN layer. This bound might be of independent interest.
CoCoEmo: Composable and Controllable Human-Like Emotional TTS via Activation Steering
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2026
Year: 2026

Emotional expression in human speech is nuanced and compositional, often involving multiple, sometimes conflicting, affective cues that may diverge from linguistic content. In contrast, most expressive text-to-speech systems enforce a single utterance-level emotion, collapsing affective diversity and suppressing mixed or text-emotion-misaligned expression. While activation steering via latent direction vectors offers a promising solution, it remains unclear whether emotion representations are linearly steerable in TTS, where steering should be applied within hybrid TTS architectures, and how such complex emotion behaviors should be evaluated. This paper presents the first systematic analysis of activation steering for emotional control in hybrid TTS models, introducing a quantitative, controllable steering framework, and multi-rater evaluation protocols that enable composable mixed-emotion synthesis and reliable text-emotion mismatch synthesis. Our results demonstrate, for the first time, that emotional prosody and expressive variability are primarily synthesized by the TTS language module instead of the flow-matching module, and also provide a lightweight steering approach for generating natural, human-like emotional speech.
Origin Lens: A Privacy-First Mobile Framework for Cryptographic Image Provenance and AI Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2026
Year: 2026

The proliferation of generative AI poses challenges for information integrity assurance, requiring systems that connect model governance with end-user verification. We present Origin Lens, a privacy-first mobile framework that targets visual disinformation through a layered verification architecture. Unlike server-side detection systems, Origin Lens performs cryptographic image provenance verification and AI detection locally on the device via a Rust/Flutter hybrid architecture. Our system integrates multiple signals - including cryptographic provenance, generative model fingerprints, and optional retrieval-augmented verification - to provide users with graded confidence indicators at the point of consumption. We discuss the framework's alignment with regulatory requirements (EU AI Act, DSA) and its role in verification infrastructure that complements platform-level mechanisms.