OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
TA-RNN-Medical-Hybrid: A Time-Aware and Interpretable Framework for Mortality Risk Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Accurate and interpretable mortality risk prediction in intensive care units (ICUs) remains a critical challenge due to the irregular temporal structure of electronic health records (EHRs), the complexity of longitudinal disease trajectories, and the lack of clinically grounded explanations in many data-driven models. To address these challenges, we propose \textit{TA-RNN-Medical-Hybrid}, a time-aware and knowledge-enriched deep learning framework that jointly models longitudinal clinical sequences and irregular temporal dynamics through explicit continuous-time encoding, along with standardized medical concept representations. The proposed framework extends time-aware recurrent modeling by integrating explicit continuous-time embeddings that operate independently of visit indexing, SNOMED-based disease representations, and a hierarchical dual-level attention mechanism that captures both visit-level temporal importance and feature/concept-level clinical relevance. This design enables accurate mortality risk estimation while providing transparent and clinically meaningful explanations aligned with established medical knowledge. We evaluate the proposed approach on the MIMIC-III critical care dataset and compare it against strong time-aware and sequential baselines. Experimental results demonstrate that TA-RNN-Medical-Hybrid consistently improves predictive performance in terms of AUC, accuracy, and recall-oriented F$_2$-score. Moreover, qualitative analysis shows that the model effectively decomposes mortality risk across time and clinical concepts, yielding interpretable insights into disease severity, chronicity, and temporal progression. Overall, the proposed framework bridges the gap between predictive accuracy and clinical interpretability, offering a scalable and transparent solution for high-stakes ICU decision support systems.
Deconstructing Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning: Towards a Unified Perception-Alignment-Reasoning Paradigm
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning (MMR) has recently attracted increasing attention for its capability to solve mathematical problems that involve both textual and visual modalities. However, current models still face significant challenges in real-world visual math tasks. They often misinterpret diagrams, fail to align mathematical symbols with visual evidence, and produce inconsistent reasoning steps. Moreover, existing evaluations mainly focus on checking final answers rather than verifying the correctness or executability of each intermediate step. To address these limitations, a growing body of recent research addresses these issues by integrating structured perception, explicit alignment, and verifiable reasoning within unified frameworks. To establish a clear roadmap for understanding and comparing different MMR approaches, we systematically study them around four fundamental questions: (1) What to extract from multimodal inputs, (2) How to represent and align textual and visual information, (3) How to perform the reasoning, and (4) How to evaluate the correctness of the overall reasoning process. Finally, we discuss open challenges and offer perspectives on promising directions for future research.
Turn Complexity of Context-free Languages, Pushdown Automata and One-Counter Automata
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2026
Year: 2026

A turn in a computation of a pushdown automaton is a switch from a phase in which the height of the pushdown store increases to a phase in which it decreases. Given a pushdown or one-counter automaton, we consider, for each string in its language, the minimum number of turns made in accepting computations. We prove that it cannot be decided if this number is bounded by any constants. Furthermore, we obtain a non-recursive trade-off between pushdown and one-counter automata accepting in a finite number of turns and finite-turn pushdown automata, that are defined requiring that the constant bound is satisfied by each accepting computation. We prove that there are languages accepted in a sublinear but not constant number of turns, with respect to the input length. Furthermore, there exists an infinite proper hierarchy of complexity classes, with the number of turns bounded by different sublinear functions. In addition, there is a language requiring a number of turns which is not constant but grows slower than each of the functions defining the above hierarchy.
Do Language Models Know Theo Has a Wife? Investigating the Proviso Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

We investigate how language models handle the proviso problem, an unresolved issue in pragmatics where presuppositions in conditional sentences diverge between theoretical and human interpretations. We reformulate this phenomenon as a Natural Language Inference task and introduce a diagnostic dataset designed to probe presupposition projection in conditionals. We evaluate RoBERTa, DeBERTa, LLaMA, and Gemma using explainability analyses. The results show that models broadly align with human judgments but rely on shallow pattern matching rather than semantic or pragmatic reasoning. Our work provides the first computational evaluation framework for the proviso problem and highlights the need for diagnostic, multi-method approaches to assess pragmatic competence and context-dependent meaning in language models.
Designing Value-Based Platforms: Architectural Strategies Derived from the Digital Markets Act
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2026
Year: 2026

The digital markets act (DMA) regulates very large digital platforms like Meta's Facebook or Apple's iOS with the goal to promote fairness, contestability (of market power) and user choice. From a system design or broader technical perspective, the implications of the DMA have not been studied so far. Using systematic methods from qualitative coding and thematic analysis, we investigate the DMA from a technical perspective and derive eight high-level design strategies that serve as fundamental approaches towards value-based architectural goals like 'fair practice', or 'user choice' (as envisioned by the DMA). We investigate how compliance with the DMA has been achieved and derive 15 tactics that we map to our strategies. While the DMA obligations challenge existing platform designs, they also create new opportunities for designing services within these huge ecosystems. We, thus, discuss our strategies in light of both. We see this work as a first step towards filling this pressing gap in the architecture of platform ecosystems, i.e., how to incorporate abstract human values in architecture design.
AULLM++: Structural Reasoning with Large Language Models for Micro-Expression Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Micro-expression Action Unit (AU) detection identifies localized AUs from subtle facial muscle activations, providing a foundation for decoding affective cues. Previous methods face three key limitations: (1) heavy reliance on low-density visual information, rendering discriminative evidence vulnerable to background noise; (2) coarse-grained feature processing that misaligns with the demand for fine-grained representations; and (3) neglect of inter-AU correlations, restricting the parsing of complex expression patterns. We propose AULLM++, a reasoning-oriented framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs), which injects visual features into textual prompts as actionable semantic premises to guide inference. It formulates AU prediction into three stages: evidence construction, structure modeling, and deduction-based prediction. Specifically, a Multi-Granularity Evidence-Enhanced Fusion Projector (MGE-EFP) fuses mid-level texture cues with high-level semantics, distilling them into a compact Content Token (CT). Furthermore, inspired by micro- and macro-expression AU correspondence, we encode AU relationships as a sparse structural prior and learn interaction strengths via a Relation-Aware AU Graph Neural Network (R-AUGNN), producing an Instruction Token (IT). We then fuse CT and IT into a structured textual prompt and introduce Counterfactual Consistency Regularization (CCR) to construct counterfactual samples, enhancing the model's generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate AULLM++ achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks and exhibits superior cross-domain generalization.
Sandpiper: Orchestrated AI-Annotation for Educational Discourse at Scale
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

Digital educational environments are expanding toward complex AI and human discourse, providing researchers with an abundance of data that offers deep insights into learning and instructional processes. However, traditional qualitative analysis remains a labor-intensive bottleneck, severely limiting the scale at which this research can be conducted. We present Sandpiper, a mixed-initiative system designed to serve as a bridge between high-volume conversational data and human qualitative expertise. By tightly coupling interactive researcher dashboards with agentic Large Language Model (LLM) engines, the platform enables scalable analysis without sacrificing methodological rigor. Sandpiper addresses critical barriers to AI adoption in education by implementing context-aware, automated de-identification workflows supported by secure, university-housed infrastructure to ensure data privacy. Furthermore, the system employs schema-constrained orchestration to eliminate LLM hallucinations and enforces strict adherence to qualitative codebooks. An integrated evaluations engine allows for the continuous benchmarking of AI performance against human labels, fostering an iterative approach to model refinement and validation. We propose a user study to evaluate the system's efficacy in improving research efficiency, inter-rater reliability, and researcher trust in AI-assisted qualitative workflows.
Client-Cooperative Split Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2026
Year: 2026

Model training is increasingly offered as a service for resource-constrained data owners to build customized models. Split Learning (SL) enables such services by offloading training computation under privacy constraints, and evolves toward serverless and multi-client settings where model segments are distributed across training clients. This cooperative mode assumes partial trust: data owners hide labels and data from trainer clients, while trainer clients produce verifiable training artifacts and ownership proofs. We present CliCooper, a multi-client cooperative SL framework tailored for cooperative model training services in heterogeneous and partially trusted environments, where one client contributes data, while others collectively act as SL trainers. CliCooper bridges the privacy and trust gaps through two new designs. First, differential privacy-based activation protection and secret label obfuscation safeguard data owners' privacy without degrading model performance. Second, a dynamic chained watermarking scheme cryptographically links training stages on model segments across trainers, ensuring verifiable training integrity, robust model provenance, and copyright protection. Experiments show that CliCooper preserves model accuracy while enhancing resilience to privacy and ownership attacks. It reduces the success rate of clustering attacks (which infer label groups from intermediate activation) to 0%, decreases inversion-reconstruction (which recovers training data) similarity from 0.50 to 0.03, and limits model-extraction-based surrogates to about 1% accuracy, comparable to random guessing.
IronEngine: Towards General AI Assistant
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

This paper presents IronEngine, a general AI assistant platform organized around a unified orchestration core that connects a desktop user interface, REST and WebSocket APIs, Python clients, local and cloud model backends, persistent memory, task scheduling, reusable skills, 24-category tool execution, MCP-compatible extensibility, and hardware-facing integration. IronEngine introduces a three-phase pipeline -- Discussion (Planner--Reviewer collaboration), Model Switch (VRAM-aware transition), and Execution (tool-augmented action loop) -- that separates planning quality from execution capability. The system features a hierarchical memory architecture with multi-level consolidation, a vectorized skill repository backed by ChromaDB, an adaptive model management layer supporting 92 model profiles with VRAM-aware context budgeting, and an intelligent tool routing system with 130+ alias normalization and automatic error correction. We present experimental results on file operation benchmarks achieving 100\% task completion with a mean total time of 1541 seconds across four heterogeneous tasks, and provide detailed comparisons with representative AI assistant systems including ChatGPT, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, and open-source agent frameworks. Without disclosing proprietary prompts or core algorithms, this paper analyzes the platform's architectural decomposition, subsystem design, experimental performance, safety boundaries, and comparative engineering advantages. The resulting study positions IronEngine as a system-oriented foundation for general-purpose personal assistants, automation frameworks, and future human-centered agent platforms.
Grow, Assess, Compress: Adaptive Backbone Scaling for Memory-Efficient Class Incremental Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Class Incremental Learning (CIL) poses a fundamental challenge: maintaining a balance between the plasticity required to learn new tasks and the stability needed to prevent catastrophic forgetting. While expansion-based methods effectively mitigate forgetting by adding task-specific parameters, they suffer from uncontrolled architectural growth and memory overhead. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic scaling framework that adaptively manages model capacity through a cyclic "GRow, Assess, ComprEss" (GRACE) strategy. Crucially, we supplement backbone expansion with a novel saturation assessment phase that evaluates the utilization of the model's capacity. This assessment allows the framework to make informed decisions to either expand the architecture or compress the backbones into a streamlined representation, preventing parameter explosion. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple CIL benchmarks, while reducing memory footprint by up to a 73% compared to purely expansionist models.
LycheeCluster: Efficient Long-Context Inference with Structure-Aware Chunking and Hierarchical KV Indexing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

The quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism and the substantial memory footprint of the Key-Value (KV) cache present severe computational and memory challenges for Large Language Models (LLMs) processing long contexts. Existing retrieval-based methods often compromise semantic integrity through fixed-size chunking and suffer from inefficient linear scanning. In this paper, we propose LycheeCluster, a novel method for efficient KV cache management. LycheeCluster preserves local semantic coherence via boundary-aware chunking and constructs a recursive hierarchical index rooted in the triangle inequality. This design transforms cache retrieval from a linear scan into a theoretically bounded, logarithmic-time pruning process, while a lazy update strategy supports efficient streaming generation. Experiments demonstrate that LycheeCluster achieves up to a 3.6x end-to-end inference speedup with negligible degradation in model performance, outperforming state-of-the-art KV cache management methods (e.g., Quest, ClusterKV). We will release our code and kernels after publication.
Reasoning as Compression: Unifying Budget Forcing via the Conditional Information Bottleneck
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting improves LLM accuracy on complex tasks but often increases token usage and inference cost. Existing "Budget Forcing" methods reducing cost via fine-tuning with heuristic length penalties, suppress both essential reasoning and redundant filler. We recast efficient reasoning as a lossy compression problem under the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle, and identify a key theoretical gap when applying naive IB to transformers: attention violates the Markov property between prompt, reasoning trace, and response. To resolve this issue, we model CoT generation under the Conditional Information Bottleneck (CIB) principle, where the reasoning trace Z acts as a computational bridge that contains only the information about the response Y that is not directly accessible from the prompt X. This yields a general Reinforcement Learning objective: maximize task reward while compressing completions under a prior over reasoning traces, subsuming common heuristics (e.g., length penalties) as special cases (e.g., uniform priors). In contrast to naive token-counting-based approaches, we introduce a semantic prior that measures token cost by surprisal under a language model prior. Empirically, our CIB objective prunes cognitive bloat while preserving fluency and logic, improving accuracy at moderate compression and enabling aggressive compression with minimal accuracy drop.
Evolving Symbiosis, from Barricelli's Legacy to Collective Intelligence: a simulated and conceptual approach
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2026
Year: 2026

This report documents the work of our group (named SymBa) at the ALICE 2026 workshop in Copenhagen. Inspired by the pioneering work by Nils Aall Barricelli on symbiogenesis of numerical organisms (i.e., 1D cellular automata) in 1953 (70+ years ago!!), we discussed the role of symbiogenesis as mechanism contributing to the origins of life, open-endedness, and collective intelligence. We report replications of Barricelli's original work in 1D worlds, an extension to 2D symbioorganisms, and preliminary experimentation with DNA-norms. We discuss the implications of symbiogenesis for artifical life and artificial intelligence, and outline several opportunities for future works, both at the conceptual level as well as using different substrates (neural networks, neural cellular automata, etc.)
MUSA-PINN: Multi-scale Weak-form Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Fluid Flow in Complex Geometries
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

While Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) offer a mesh-free approach to solving PDEs, standard point-wise residual minimization suffers from convergence pathologies in topologically complex domains like Triply Periodic Minimal Surfaces (TPMS). The locality bias of point-wise constraints fails to propagate global information through tortuous channels, causing unstable gradients and conservation violations. To address this, we propose the Multi-scale Weak-form PINN (MUSA-PINN), which reformulates PDE constraints as integral conservation laws over hierarchical spherical control volumes. We enforce continuity and momentum conservation via flux-balance residuals on control surfaces. Our method utilizes a three-scale subdomain strategy-comprising large volumes for long-range coupling, skeleton-aware meso-scale volumes aligned with transport pathways, and small volumes for local refinement-alongside a two-stage training schedule prioritizing continuity. Experiments on steady incompressible flow in TPMS geometries show MUSA-PINN outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, reducing relative errors by up to 93% and preserving mass conservation.
R2F: Repurposing Ray Frontiers for LLM-free Object Navigation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

Zero-shot open-vocabulary object navigation has progressed rapidly with the emergence of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs), now widely used as high-level decision-makers instead of end-to-end policies. Although effective, such systems often rely on iterative large-model queries at inference time, introducing latency and computational overhead that limit real-time deployment. To address this problem, we repurpose ray frontiers (R2F), a recently proposed frontier-based exploration paradigm, to develop an LLM-free framework for indoor open-vocabulary object navigation. While ray frontiers were originally used to bias exploration using semantic cues carried along rays, we reinterpret frontier regions as explicit, direction-conditioned semantic hypotheses that serve as navigation goals. Language-aligned features accumulated along out-of-range rays are stored sparsely at frontiers, where each region maintains multiple directional embeddings encoding plausible unseen content. In this way, navigation then reduces to embedding-based frontier scoring and goal tracking within a classical mapping and planning pipeline, eliminating iterative large-model reasoning. We further introduce R2F-VLN, a lightweight extension for free-form language instructions using syntactic parsing and relational verification without additional VLM or LLM components. Experiments in Habitat-sim and on a real robotic platform demonstrate competitive state-of-the-art zero-shot performance with real-time execution, achieving up to 6 times faster runtime than VLM-based alternatives.
LAR-MoE: Latent-Aligned Routing for Mixture of Experts in Robotic Imitation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

Imitation learning enables robots to acquire manipulation skills from demonstrations, yet deploying a policy across tasks with heterogeneous dynamics remains challenging, as models tend to average over distinct behavioral modes present in the demonstrations. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures address this by activating specialized subnetworks, but requires meaningful skill decompositions for expert routing. We introduce Latent-Aligned Routing for Mixture of Experts (LAR-MoE), a two-stage framework that decouples unsupervised skill discovery from policy learning. In pre-training, we learn a joint latent representation between observations and future actions through student-teacher co-training. In a post-training stage, the expert routing is regularized to follow the structure of the learned latent space, preventing expert collapse while maintaining parameter efficiency. We evaluate LAR-MoE in simulation and on hardware. On the LIBERO benchmark, our method achieves a 95.2% average success rate with 150M parameters. On a surgical bowel grasping and retraction task, LAR-MoE matches a supervised MoE baseline without requiring any phase annotations, and transfers zero-shot to ex vivo porcine tissue. Our findings suggest that latent-aligned routing provides a principled alternative to supervised skill decomposition, enabling structured expert specialization from unlabeled demonstrations.
Visual Self-Fulfilling Alignment: Shaping Safety-Oriented Personas via Threat-Related Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) face safety misalignment, where visual inputs enable harmful outputs. To address this, existing methods require explicit safety labels or contrastive data; yet, threat-related concepts are concrete and visually depictable, while safety concepts, like helpfulness, are abstract and lack visual referents. Inspired by the Self-Fulfilling mechanism underlying emergent misalignment, we propose Visual Self-Fulfilling Alignment (VSFA). VSFA fine-tunes vision-language models (VLMs) on neutral VQA tasks constructed around threat-related images, without any safety labels. Through repeated exposure to threat-related visual content, models internalize the implicit semantics of vigilance and caution, shaping safety-oriented personas. Experiments across multiple VLMs and safety benchmarks demonstrate that VSFA reduces the attack success rate, improves response quality, and mitigates over-refusal while preserving general capabilities. Our work extends the self-fulfilling mechanism from text to visual modalities, offering a label-free approach to VLMs alignment.