OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
SHED Light on Segmentation for Dense Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Dense prediction infers per-pixel values from a single image and is fundamental to 3D perception and robotics. Although real-world scenes exhibit strong structure, existing methods treat it as an independent pixel-wise prediction, often resulting in structural inconsistencies. We propose SHED, a novel encoder-decoder architecture that enforces geometric prior explicitly by incorporating segmentation into dense prediction. By bidirectional hierarchical reasoning, segment tokens are hierarchically pooled in the encoder and unpooled in the decoder to reverse the hierarchy. The model is supervised only at the final output, allowing the segment hierarchy to emerge without explicit segmentation supervision. SHED improves depth boundary sharpness and segment coherence, while demonstrating strong cross-domain generalization from synthetic to the real-world environments. Its hierarchy-aware decoder better captures global 3D scene layouts, leading to improved semantic segmentation performance. Moreover, SHED enhances 3D reconstruction quality and reveals interpretable part-level structures that are often missed by conventional pixel-wise methods.
High Rate Efficient Local List Decoding from HDX
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2026
Year: 2026

We construct the first (locally computable, approximately) locally list decodable codes with rate, efficiency, and error tolerance approaching the information theoretic limit, a core regime of interest for the complexity theoretic task of hardness amplification. Our algorithms run in polylogarithmic time and sub-logarithmic depth, which together with classic constructions in the unique decoding (low-noise) regime leads to the resolution of several long-standing problems in coding and complexity theory: 1. Near-optimally input-preserving hardness amplification (and corresponding fast PRGs) 2. Constant rate codes with $\log(N)$-depth list decoding (RNC$^1$) 3. Complexity-preserving distance amplification Our codes are built on the powerful theory of (local-spectral) high dimensional expanders (HDX). At a technical level, we make two key contributions. First, we introduce a new framework for ($\mathrm{polylog(N)}$-round) belief propagation on HDX that leverages a mix of local correction and global expansion to control error build-up while maintaining high rate. Second, we introduce the notion of strongly explicit local routing on HDX, local algorithms that given any two target vertices, output a random path between them in only polylogarithmic time (and, preferably, sub-logarithmic depth). Constructing such schemes on certain coset HDX allows us to instantiate our otherwise combinatorial framework in polylogarithmic time and low depth, completing the result.
PersonaAct: Simulating Short-Video Users with Personalized Agents for Counterfactual Filter Bubble Auditing
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2026
Year: 2026

Short-video platforms rely on personalized recommendation, raising concerns about filter bubbles that narrow content exposure. Auditing such phenomena at scale is challenging because real user studies are costly and privacy-sensitive, and existing simulators fail to reproduce realistic behaviors due to their reliance on textual signals and weak personalization. We propose PersonaAct, a framework for simulating short-video users with persona-conditioned multimodal agents trained on real behavioral traces for auditing filter bubbles in breadth and depth. PersonaAct synthesizes interpretable personas through automated interviews combining behavioral analysis with structured questioning, then trains agents on multimodal observations using supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. We deploy trained agents for filter bubble auditing and evaluate bubble breadth via content diversity and bubble depth via escape potential. The evaluation demonstrates substantial improvements in fidelity over generic LLM baselines, enabling realistic behavior reproduction. Results reveal significant content narrowing over interaction. However, we find that Bilibili demonstrates the strongest escape potential. We release the first open multimodal short-video dataset and code to support reproducible auditing of recommender systems.
Are LLM Evaluators Really Narcissists? Sanity Checking Self-Preference Evaluations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Recent research has shown that large language models (LLMs) favor their own outputs when acting as judges, undermining the integrity of automated post-training and evaluation workflows. However, it is difficult to disentangle which evaluation biases are explained by narcissism versus general experimental confounds, distorting measurements of self-preference bias. We discover a core methodological confound which could reduce measurement error by 89.6%. Specifically, LLM evaluators may deliver self-preferring verdicts when the judge responds to queries which they completed incorrectly themselves; this would be true regardless of whether one of their responses is their own. To decouple self-preference signals from noisy outputs on hard problems, we introduce an Evaluator Quality Baseline, which compares the probability that a judge incorrectly votes for itself against the probability that it votes for an incorrect response from another model. Evaluating this simple baseline on 37,448 queries, only 51% of initial findings retain statistical significance. Finally, we turn towards characterizing the entropy of "easy" versus "hard" evaluation votes from LLM judges. Our corrective baseline enables future research on self-preference by eliminating noisy data from potential solutions. More widely, this work contributes to the growing body of work on cataloging and isolating judge-bias effects.
Hybrid Cross-Device Localization via Neural Metric Learning and Feature Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

We present a hybrid cross-device localization pipeline developed for the CroCoDL 2025 Challenge. Our approach integrates a shared retrieval encoder and two complementary localization branches: a classical geometric branch using feature fusion and PnP, and a neural feed-forward branch (MapAnything) for metric localization conditioned on geometric inputs. A neural-guided candidate pruning strategy further filters unreliable map frames based on translation consistency, while depth-conditioned localization refines metric scale and translation precision on Spot scenes. These components jointly lead to significant improvements in recall and accuracy across both HYDRO and SUCCU benchmarks. Our method achieved a final score of 92.62 (R@0.5m, 5°) during the challenge.
Quantum $(r,δ)$-Locally Recoverable BCH and Homothetic-BCH Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2026
Year: 2026

Quantum $(r,δ)$-locally recoverable codes ($(r,δ)$-LRCs) are the quantum version of classical $(r,δ)$-LRCs designed to recover multiple failures in large-scale distributed and cloud storage systems. A quantum $(r,δ)$-LRC, $Q(C)$, can be constructed from an $(r,δ)$-LRC, $C$, which is Euclidean or Hermitian dual-containing. This article is devoted to studying how to get quantum $(r,δ)$-LRCs from BCH and homothetic-BCH codes. As a consequence, we give pure quantum $(r,δ)$-LRCs which are optimal for the Singleton-like bound.
DELNet: Continuous All-in-One Weather Removal via Dynamic Expert Library
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

All-in-one weather image restoration methods are valuable in practice but depend on pre-collected data and require retraining for unseen degradations, leading to high cost. We propose DELNet, a continual learning framework for weather image restoration. DELNet integrates a judging valve that measures task similarity to distinguish new from known tasks, and a dynamic expert library that stores experts trained on different degradations. For new tasks, the valve selects top-k experts for knowledge transfer while adding new experts to capture task-specific features; for known tasks, the corresponding experts are directly reused. This design enables continuous optimization without retraining existing models. Experiments on OTS, Rain100H, and Snow100K demonstrate that DELNet surpasses state-of-the-art continual learning methods, achieving PSNR gains of 16\%, 11\%, and 12\%, respectively. These results highlight the effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency of DELNet, which reduces retraining cost and enables practical deployment in real-world scenarios.
Mitigating Hallucinations in Video Large Language Models via Spatiotemporal-Semantic Contrastive Decoding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Although Video Large Language Models perform remarkably well across tasks such as video understanding, question answering, and reasoning, they still suffer from the problem of hallucination, which refers to generating outputs that are inconsistent with explicit video content or factual evidence. However, existing decoding methods for mitigating video hallucinations, while considering the spatiotemporal characteristics of videos, mostly rely on heuristic designs. As a result, they fail to precisely capture the root causes of hallucinations and their fine-grained temporal and semantic correlations, leading to limited robustness and generalization in complex scenarios. To more effectively mitigate video hallucinations, we propose a novel decoding strategy termed Spatiotemporal-Semantic Contrastive Decoding. This strategy constructs negative features by deliberately disrupting the spatiotemporal consistency and semantic associations of video features, and suppresses video hallucinations through contrastive decoding against the original video features during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method not only effectively mitigates the occurrence of hallucinations, but also preserves the general video understanding and reasoning capabilities of the model.
PhoStream: Benchmarking Real-World Streaming for Omnimodal Assistants in Mobile Scenarios
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Multimodal Large Language Models excel at offline audio-visual understanding, but their ability to serve as mobile assistants in continuous real-world streams remains underexplored. In daily phone use, mobile assistants must track streaming audio-visual inputs and respond at the right time, yet existing benchmarks are often restricted to multiple-choice questions or use shorter videos. In this paper, we introduce PhoStream, the first mobile-centric streaming benchmark that unifies on-screen and off-screen scenarios to evaluate video, audio, and temporal reasoning. PhoStream contains 5,572 open-ended QA pairs from 578 videos across 4 scenarios and 10 capabilities. We build it with an Automated Generative Pipeline backed by rigorous human verification, and evaluate models using a realistic Online Inference Pipeline and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation for open-ended responses. Experiments reveal a temporal asymmetry in LLM-judged scores (0-100): models perform well on Instant and Backward tasks (Gemini 3 Pro exceeds 80), but drop sharply on Forward tasks (16.40), largely due to early responses before the required visual and audio cues appear. This highlights a fundamental limitation: current MLLMs struggle to decide when to speak, not just what to say. Code and datasets used in this work will be made publicly accessible at https://github.com/Lucky-Lance/PhoStream.
SpanNorm: Reconciling Training Stability and Performance in Deep Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) hinges on the stable training of deep Transformer architectures. A critical design choice is the placement of normalization layers, leading to a fundamental trade-off: the ``PreNorm'' architecture ensures training stability at the cost of potential performance degradation in deep models, while the ``PostNorm'' architecture offers strong performance but suffers from severe training instability. In this work, we propose SpanNorm, a novel technique designed to resolve this dilemma by integrating the strengths of both paradigms. Structurally, SpanNorm establishes a clean residual connection that spans the entire transformer block to stabilize signal propagation, while employing a PostNorm-style computation that normalizes the aggregated output to enhance model performance. We provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating that SpanNorm, combined with a principled scaling strategy, maintains bounded signal variance throughout the network, preventing the gradient issues that plague PostNorm models, and also alleviating the representation collapse of PreNorm. Empirically, SpanNorm consistently outperforms standard normalization schemes in both dense and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) scenarios, paving the way for more powerful and stable Transformer architectures.
Rethinking LLM-as-a-Judge: Representation-as-a-Judge with Small Language Models via Semantic Capacity Asymmetry
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used as reference-free evaluators via prompting, but this "LLM-as-a-Judge" paradigm is costly, opaque, and sensitive to prompt design. In this work, we investigate whether smaller models can serve as efficient evaluators by leveraging internal representations instead of surface generation. We uncover a consistent empirical pattern: small LMs, despite with weak generative ability, encode rich evaluative signals in their hidden states. This motivates us to propose the Semantic Capacity Asymmetry Hypothesis: evaluation requires significantly less semantic capacity than generation and can be grounded in intermediate representations, suggesting that evaluation does not necessarily need to rely on large-scale generative models but can instead leverage latent features from smaller ones. Our findings motivate a paradigm shift from LLM-as-a-Judge to Representation-as-a-Judge, a decoding-free evaluation strategy that probes internal model structure rather than relying on prompted output. We instantiate this paradigm through INSPECTOR, a probing-based framework that predicts aspect-level evaluation scores from small model representations. Experiments on reasoning benchmarks (GSM8K, MATH, GPQA) show that INSPECTOR substantially outperforms prompting-based small LMs and closely approximates full LLM judges, while offering a more efficient, reliable, and interpretable alternative for scalable evaluation.
A Semantically Consistent Dataset for Data-Efficient Query-Based Universal Sound Separation
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2026
Year: 2026

Query-based universal sound separation is fundamental to intelligent auditory systems, aiming to isolate specific sources from mixtures. Despite recent advances, existing methods continue to suffer from residual interference in complex acoustic scenes. This performance limitation stems largely from a data bottleneck: in-the-wild datasets contain weak labels and severe co-occurrence of events. These flaws induce models to learn spurious correlations between background noise and target categories instead of robust acoustic features. To address this, we propose an automated pipeline that eliminates co-occurrence of events by mining high-purity single-event segments from in-the-wild datasets via a semantically consistent synthesis protocol. Utilizing this pipeline, we constructed Hive, a high-quality synthetic dataset comprising 2.4k hours of raw audio. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with the state-of-the-art model SAM-Audio which was trained on a huge dataset $\sim$500 times larger than Hive, certain open-source models trained on Hive achieve competitive separation accuracy and perceptual quality. Moreover, these models exhibited remarkable zero-shot generalization on out-of-distribution evaluation benchmarks. These findings highlight that prioritizing purity of supervised signals enables significant data efficiency, offering a new paradigm for training robust auditory foundation models with reduced computational costs. Code and dataset are available at https://shandaai.github.io/Hive.
Ethical Risks of Large Language Models in Medical Consultation: An Assessment Based on Reproductive Ethics
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2026
Year: 2026

Background: As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in healthcare and medical consultation settings, a growing concern is whether these models can respond to medical inquiries in a manner that is ethically compliant--particularly in accordance with local ethical standards. To address the pressing need for comprehensive research on reliability and safety, this study systematically evaluates LLM performance in answering questions related to reproductive ethics, specifically assessing their alignment with Chinese ethical regulations. Methods: We evaluated eight prominent LLMs (e.g., GPT-4, Claude-3.7) on a custom test set of 986 questions (906 subjective, 80 objective) derived from 168 articles within Chinese reproductive ethics regulations. Subjective responses were evaluated using a novel six-dimensional scoring rubric assessing Safety (Normative Compliance, Guidance Safety) and Quality of the Answer (Problem Identification, Citation, Suggestion, Empathy). Results: Significant safety issues were prevalent, with risk rates for unsafe or misleading advice reaching 29.91%. A systemic weakness was observed across all models: universally poor performance in citing normative sources and expressing empathy. We also identified instances of anomalous moral reasoning, including logical self-contradictions and responses violating fundamental moral intuitions. Conclusions: Current LLMs are unreliable and unsafe for autonomous reproductive ethics counseling. Despite knowledge recall, they exhibit critical deficiencies in safety, logical consistency, and essential humanistic skills. These findings serve as a critical cautionary note against premature deployment, urging future development to prioritize robust reasoning, regulatory justification, and empathy.
MCP-Diag: A Deterministic, Protocol-Driven Architecture for AI-Native Network Diagnostics
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2026
Year: 2026

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into network operations (AIOps) is hindered by two fundamental challenges: the stochastic grounding problem, where LLMs struggle to reliably parse unstructured, vendor-specific CLI output, and the security gap of granting autonomous agents shell access. This paper introduces MCP-Diag, a hybrid neuro-symbolic architecture built upon the Model Context Protocol (MCP). We propose a deterministic translation layer that converts raw stdout from canonical utilities (dig, ping, traceroute) into rigorous JSON schemas before AI ingestion. We further introduce a mandatory "Elicitation Loop" that enforces Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) authorization at the protocol level. Our preliminary evaluation demonstrates that MCP-Diag achieving 100% entity extraction accuracy with less than 0.9% execution latency overhead and 3.7x increase in context token usage.
ScholarPeer: A Context-Aware Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Peer Review
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2026
Year: 2026

Automated peer review has evolved from simple text classification to structured feedback generation. However, current state-of-the-art systems still struggle with "surface-level" critiques: they excel at summarizing content but often fail to accurately assess novelty and significance or identify deep methodological flaws because they evaluate papers in a vacuum, lacking the external context a human expert possesses. In this paper, we introduce ScholarPeer, a search-enabled multi-agent framework designed to emulate the cognitive processes of a senior researcher. ScholarPeer employs a dual-stream process of context acquisition and active verification. It dynamically constructs a domain narrative using a historian agent, identifies missing comparisons via a baseline scout, and verifies claims through a multi-aspect Q&A engine, grounding the critique in live web-scale literature. We evaluate ScholarPeer on DeepReview-13K and the results demonstrate that ScholarPeer achieves significant win-rates against state-of-the-art approaches in side-by-side evaluations and reduces the gap to human-level diversity.
Evaluating and Rewarding LALMs for Expressive Role-Play TTS via Mean Continuation Log-Probability
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2026
Year: 2026

Recent advances in Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) have extended Text-to-Speech (TTS) to interactive role-play scenarios, which demand high expressiveness and strict adherence to role-play instructions. However, existing models struggle to maintain stylistic consistency with character profiles and scene descriptions across multi-turn dialogues. A critical bottleneck is the lack of objective metrics for quantifying speaking style. To bridge this gap, we propose Mean Continuation Log-Probability (MCLP) as both an evaluation metric and a reward signal, validated on LALM-based Role-Play TTS (RP-TTS) tasks. Critically, we leverage the In-Context Learning capability of pre-trained LALMs to formulate MCLP via a continuation log-probability prediction. This metric quantifies stylistic consistency by measuring the likelihood of the ground-truth speech conditioned on the generated speech. Furthermore, we employ MCLP as a reinforcement learning reward to enhance the style alignment between generated speech and Role-Play instructions. To facilitate evaluation, we construct an RP-TTS dataset with rich scene and character annotations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms strong LALM baselines on both objective and subjective metrics.
Beyond Fixed Rounds: Data-Free Early Stopping for Practical Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Federated Learning (FL) facilitates decentralized collaborative learning without transmitting raw data. However, reliance on fixed global rounds or validation data for hyperparameter tuning hinders practical deployment by incurring high computational costs and privacy risks. To address this, we propose a data-free early stopping framework that determines the optimal stopping point by monitoring the task vector's growth rate using solely server-side parameters. The numerical results on skin lesion/blood cell classification demonstrate that our approach is comparable to validation-based early stopping across various state-of-the-art FL methods. In particular, the proposed framework requires an average of 45/12 (skin lesion/blood cell) additional rounds to achieve over 12.3%/8.9% higher performance than early stopping based on validation data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to propose an data-free early stopping framework for FL methods.