OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Self-Organizing Railway Traffic Management
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2026
Year: 2026

Improving traffic management in case of perturbation is one of the main challenges in today's railway research. The great majority of the existing literature proposes approaches to make centralized decisions to minimize delay propagation. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm to the same aim: we design and implement a modular process to allow trains to self-organize. This process consists in having trains identifying their neighbors, formulating traffic management hypotheses, checking their compatibility and selecting the best ones through a consensus mechanism. Finally, these hypotheses are merged into a directly applicable traffic plan. In a thorough experimental analysis on a portion of the Italian network, we compare the results of self-organization with those of a state-of-the-art centralized approach. In particular, we make this comparison mimicking a realistic deployment thanks to a closed-loop framework including a microscopic railway simulator. The results indicate that self-organization achieves better results than the centralized algorithm, specifically thanks to the definition and exploitation of the instance decomposition allowed by the proposed approach.
Hybrid Deep Feature Extraction and ML for Construction and Demolition Debris Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

The construction industry produces significant volumes of debris, making effective sorting and classification critical for sustainable waste management and resource recovery. This study presents a hybrid vision-based pipeline that integrates deep feature extraction with classical machine learning (ML) classifiers for automated construction and demolition (C\&D) debris classification. A novel dataset comprising 1,800 balanced, high-quality images representing four material categories, Ceramic/Tile, Concrete, Trash/Waste, and Wood was collected from real construction sites in the UAE, capturing diverse real-world conditions. Deep features were extracted using a pre-trained Xception network, and multiple ML classifiers, including SVM, kNN, Bagged Trees, LDA, and Logistic Regression, were systematically evaluated. The results demonstrate that hybrid pipelines using Xception features with simple classifiers such as Linear SVM, kNN, and Bagged Trees achieve state-of-the-art performance, with up to 99.5\% accuracy and macro-F1 scores, surpassing more complex or end-to-end deep learning approaches. The analysis highlights the operational benefits of this approach for robust, field-deployable debris identification and provides pathways for future integration with robotics and onsite automation systems.
A Contrastive Pre-trained Foundation Model for Deciphering Imaging Noisomics across Modalities
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Characterizing imaging noise is notoriously data-intensive and device-dependent, as modern sensors entangle physical signals with complex algorithmic artifacts. Current paradigms struggle to disentangle these factors without massive supervised datasets, often reducing noise to mere interference rather than an information resource. Here, we introduce "Noisomics", a framework shifting the focus from suppression to systematic noise decoding via the Contrastive Pre-trained (CoP) Foundation Model. By leveraging the manifold hypothesis and synthetic noise genome, CoP employs contrastive learning to disentangle semantic signals from stochastic perturbations. Crucially, CoP breaks traditional deep learning scaling laws, achieving superior performance with only 100 training samples, outperforming supervised baselines trained on 100,000 samples, thereby reducing data and computational dependency by three orders of magnitude. Extensive benchmarking across 12 diverse out-of-domain datasets confirms its robust zero-shot generalization, demonstrating a 63.8% reduction in estimation error and an 85.1% improvement in the coefficient of determination compared to the conventional training strategy. We demonstrate CoP's utility across scales: from deciphering non-linear hardware-noise interplay in consumer photography to optimizing photon-efficient protocols for deep-tissue microscopy. By decoding noise as a multi-parametric footprint, our work redefines stochastic degradation as a vital information resource, empowering precise imaging diagnostics without prior device calibration.
SiMiC: Context-Aware Silicon Microstructure Characterization Using Attention-Based Convolutional Neural Networks for Field-Emission Tip Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Accurate characterization of silicon microstructures is essential for advancing microscale fabrication, quality control, and device performance. Traditional analysis using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) often requires labor-intensive, manual evaluation of feature geometry, limiting throughput and reproducibility. In this study, we propose SiMiC: Context-Aware Silicon Microstructure Characterization Using Attention-Based Convolutional Neural Networks for Field-Emission Tip Analysis. By leveraging deep learning, our approach efficiently extracts morphological features-such as size, shape, and apex curvature-from SEM images, significantly reducing human intervention while improving measurement consistency. A specialized dataset of silicon-based field-emitter tips was developed, and a customized CNN architecture incorporating attention mechanisms was trained for multi-class microstructure classification and dimensional prediction. Comparative analysis with classical image processing techniques demonstrates that SiMiC achieves high accuracy while maintaining interpretability. The proposed framework establishes a foundation for data-driven microstructure analysis directly linked to field-emission performance, opening avenues for correlating emitter geometry with emission behavior and guiding the design of optimized cold-cathode and SEM electron sources. The related dataset and algorithm repository that could serve as a baseline in this area can be found at https://research.jingjietan.com/?q=SIMIC
ThinkTank-ME: A Multi-Expert Framework for Middle East Event Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Event forecasting is inherently influenced by multifaceted considerations, including international relations, regional historical dynamics, and cultural contexts. However, existing LLM-based approaches employ single-model architectures that generate predictions along a singular explicit trajectory, constraining their ability to capture diverse geopolitical nuances across complex regional contexts. To address this limitation, we introduce ThinkTank-ME, a novel Think Tank framework for Middle East event forecasting that emulates collaborative expert analysis in real-world strategic decision-making. To facilitate expert specialization and rigorous evaluation, we construct POLECAT-FOR-ME, a Middle East-focused event forecasting benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of multi-expert collaboration in handling complex temporal geopolitical forecasting tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/LuminosityX/ThinkTank-ME.
SonoEdit: Null-Space Constrained Knowledge Editing for Pronunciation Correction in LLM-Based TTS
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2026
Year: 2026

Neural text-to-speech (TTS) systems systematically mispronounce low-resource proper nouns, particularly non-English names, brands, and geographic locations, due to their underrepresentation in predominantly English training corpora. Existing solutions typically rely on expensive multilingual data collection, supervised finetuning, or manual phonetic annotation, which limits the deployment of TTS systems in linguistically diverse settings. We introduce SonoEdit, a model editing technique that surgically corrects pronunciation errors in pre-trained TTS models without retraining. Instead of costly finetuning or explicit phoneme injection, we propose a parsimonious alternative based on Null-Space Pronunciation Editing, which performs a single-shot parameter update to modify the pronunciation of specific words while provably preserving all other model behavior. We first adapt Acoustic Causal Tracing to identify the Transformer layers responsible for text-to-pronunciation mapping. We then apply Null-Space Constrained Editing to compute a closed-form weight update that corrects the target pronunciation while remaining mathematically orthogonal to the subspace governing general speech generation. This constrained update steers the model's acoustic output toward a desired pronunciation exemplar while guaranteeing zero first-order change on a preserved speech corpus.
Lost in Simulation: LLM-Simulated Users are Unreliable Proxies for Human Users in Agentic Evaluations
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

Agentic benchmarks increasingly rely on LLM-simulated users to scalably evaluate agent performance, yet the robustness, validity, and fairness of this approach remain unexamined. Through a user study with participants across the United States, India, Kenya, and Nigeria, we investigate whether LLM-simulated users serve as reliable proxies for real human users in evaluating agents on τ-Bench retail tasks. We find that user simulation lacks robustness, with agent success rates varying up to 9 percentage points across different user LLMs. Furthermore, evaluations using simulated users exhibit systematic miscalibration, underestimating agent performance on challenging tasks and overestimating it on moderately difficult ones. African American Vernacular English (AAVE) speakers experience consistently worse success rates and calibration errors than Standard American English (SAE) speakers, with disparities compounding significantly with age. We also find simulated users to be a differentially effective proxy for different populations, performing worst for AAVE and Indian English speakers. Additionally, simulated users introduce conversational artifacts and surface different failure patterns than human users. These findings demonstrate that current evaluation practices risk misrepresenting agent capabilities across diverse user populations and may obscure real-world deployment challenges.
SFO: Learning PDE Operators via Spectral Filtering
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Partial differential equations (PDEs) govern complex systems, yet neural operators often struggle to efficiently capture the long-range, nonlocal interactions inherent in their solution maps. We introduce Spectral Filtering Operator (SFO), a neural operator that parameterizes integral kernels using the Universal Spectral Basis (USB), a fixed, global orthonormal basis derived from the eigenmodes of the Hilbert matrix in spectral filtering theory. Motivated by our theoretical finding that the discrete Green's functions of shift-invariant PDE discretizations exhibit spatial Linear Dynamical System (LDS) structure, we prove that these kernels admit compact approximations in the USB. By learning only the spectral coefficients of rapidly decaying eigenvalues, SFO achieves a highly efficient representation. Across six benchmarks, including reaction-diffusion, fluid dynamics, and 3D electromagnetics, SFO achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, reducing error by up to 40% relative to strong baselines while using substantially fewer parameters.
Beyond Instrumental and Substitutive Paradigms: Introducing Machine Culture as an Emergent Phenomenon in Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2026
Year: 2026

Recent scholarship typically characterizes Large Language Models (LLMs) through either an \textit{Instrumental Paradigm} (viewing models as reflections of their developers' culture) or a \textit{Substitutive Paradigm} (viewing models as bilingual proxies that switch cultural frames based on language). This study challenges these anthropomorphic frameworks by proposing \textbf{Machine Culture} as an emergent, distinct phenomenon. We employed a 2 (Model Origin: US vs. China) $\times$ 2 (Prompt Language: English vs. Chinese) factorial design across eight multimodal tasks, uniquely incorporating image generation and interpretation to extend analysis beyond textual boundaries. Results revealed inconsistencies with both dominant paradigms: Model origin did not predict cultural alignment, with US models frequently exhibiting ``holistic'' traits typically associated with East Asian data. Similarly, prompt language did not trigger stable cultural frame-switching; instead, we observed \textbf{Cultural Reversal}, where English prompts paradoxically elicited higher contextual attention than Chinese prompts. Crucially, we identified a novel phenomenon termed \textbf{Service Persona Camouflage}: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) collapsed cultural variance in affective tasks into a hyper-positive, zero-variance ``helpful assistant'' persona. We conclude that LLMs do not simulate human culture but exhibit an emergent Machine Culture -- a probabilistic phenomenon shaped by \textit{superposition} in high-dimensional space and \textit{mode collapse} from safety alignment.
Forecasting Energy Consumption using Recurrent Neural Networks: A Comparative Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2026
Year: 2026

Accurate short-term energy consumption forecasting is essential for efficient power grid management, resource allocation, and market stability. Traditional time-series models often fail to capture the complex, non-linear dependencies and external factors affecting energy demand. In this study, we propose a forecasting approach based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and their advanced variant, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. Our methodology integrates historical energy consumption data with external variables, including temperature, humidity, and time-based features. The LSTM model is trained and evaluated on a publicly available dataset, and its performance is compared against a conventional feed-forward neural network baseline. Experimental results show that the LSTM model substantially outperforms the baseline, achieving lower Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE). These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of deep learning models in providing reliable and precise short-term energy forecasts for real-world applications.
Acoustic Field Video for Multimodal Scene Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

We introduce and explore a new multimodal input representation for vision-language models: acoustic field video. Unlike conventional video (RGB with stereo/mono audio), our video stream provides a spatially grounded visualization of sound intensity across a scene, offering a new and powerful dimension of perceptual understanding. Our real-time pipeline uses low-cost beamforming microphone arrays that are already common in smart speakers and increasingly present in robotics and XR headsets, yet this sensing capability remains unutilized for scene understanding. To assess the value of spatial acoustic information, we constructed an evaluation set of 402 question-answer scenes, comparing a state-of-the-art VLM given conventional video with and without paired acoustic field video. Results show a clear and consistent improvement when incorporating spatial acoustic data; the VLM we test improves from 38.3% correct to 67.4%. Our findings highlight that many everyday scene understanding tasks remain underconstrained when relying solely on visual and audio input, and that acoustic field data provides a promising and practical direction for multimodal reasoning. A video demo is available at https://daehwakim.com/seeingsound
iFSQ: Improving FSQ for Image Generation with 1 Line of Code
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

The field of image generation is currently bifurcated into autoregressive (AR) models operating on discrete tokens and diffusion models utilizing continuous latents. This divide, rooted in the distinction between VQ-VAEs and VAEs, hinders unified modeling and fair benchmarking. Finite Scalar Quantization (FSQ) offers a theoretical bridge, yet vanilla FSQ suffers from a critical flaw: its equal-interval quantization can cause activation collapse. This mismatch forces a trade-off between reconstruction fidelity and information efficiency. In this work, we resolve this dilemma by simply replacing the activation function in original FSQ with a distribution-matching mapping to enforce a uniform prior. Termed iFSQ, this simple strategy requires just one line of code yet mathematically guarantees both optimal bin utilization and reconstruction precision. Leveraging iFSQ as a controlled benchmark, we uncover two key insights: (1) The optimal equilibrium between discrete and continuous representations lies at approximately 4 bits per dimension. (2) Under identical reconstruction constraints, AR models exhibit rapid initial convergence, whereas diffusion models achieve a superior performance ceiling, suggesting that strict sequential ordering may limit the upper bounds of generation quality. Finally, we extend our analysis by adapting Representation Alignment (REPA) to AR models, yielding LlamaGen-REPA. Codes is available at https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/iFSQ
Interpretability of the Intent Detection Problem: A New Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Intent detection, a fundamental text classification task, aims to identify and label the semantics of user queries, playing a vital role in numerous business applications. Despite the dominance of deep learning techniques in this field, the internal mechanisms enabling Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to solve intent detection tasks are poorly understood. In this work, we apply dynamical systems theory to analyze how RNN architectures address this problem, using both the balanced SNIPS and the imbalanced ATIS datasets. By interpreting sentences as trajectories in the hidden state space, we first show that on the balanced SNIPS dataset, the network learns an ideal solution: the state space, constrained to a low-dimensional manifold, is partitioned into distinct clusters corresponding to each intent. The application of this framework to the imbalanced ATIS dataset then reveals how this ideal geometric solution is distorted by class imbalance, causing the clusters for low-frequency intents to degrade. Our framework decouples geometric separation from readout alignment, providing a novel, mechanistic explanation for real world performance disparities. These findings provide new insights into RNN dynamics, offering a geometric interpretation of how dataset properties directly shape a network's computational solution.
Interpreting Agentic Systems: Beyond Model Explanations to System-Level Accountability
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Agentic systems have transformed how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be leveraged to create autonomous systems with goal-directed behaviors, consisting of multi-step planning and the ability to interact with different environments. These systems differ fundamentally from traditional machine learning models, both in architecture and deployment, introducing unique AI safety challenges, including goal misalignment, compounding decision errors, and coordination risks among interacting agents, that necessitate embedding interpretability and explainability by design to ensure traceability and accountability across their autonomous behaviors. Current interpretability techniques, developed primarily for static models, show limitations when applied to agentic systems. The temporal dynamics, compounding decisions, and context-dependent behaviors of agentic systems demand new analytical approaches. This paper assesses the suitability and limitations of existing interpretability methods in the context of agentic systems, identifying gaps in their capacity to provide meaningful insight into agent decision-making. We propose future directions for developing interpretability techniques specifically designed for agentic systems, pinpointing where interpretability is required to embed oversight mechanisms across the agent lifecycle from goal formation, through environmental interaction, to outcome evaluation. These advances are essential to ensure the safe and accountable deployment of agentic AI systems.
Conservative & Aggressive NaNs Accelerate U-Nets for Neuroimaging
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Deep learning models for neuroimaging increasingly rely on large architectures, making efficiency a persistent concern despite advances in hardware. Through an analysis of numerical uncertainty of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), we observe that many operations are applied to values dominated by numerical noise and have negligible influence on model outputs. In some models, up to two-thirds of convolution operations appear redundant. We introduce Conservative & Aggressive NaNs, two novel variants of max pooling and unpooling that identify numerically unstable voxels and replace them with NaNs, allowing subsequent layers to skip computations on irrelevant data. Both methods are implemented within PyTorch and require no architectural changes. We evaluate these approaches on four CNN models spanning neuroimaging and image classification tasks. For inputs containing at least 50% NaNs, we observe consistent runtime improvements; for data with more than two-thirds NaNs )common in several neuroimaging settings) we achieve an average inference speedup of 1.67x. Conservative NaNs reduces convolution operations by an average of 30% across models and datasets, with no measurable performance degradation, and can skip up to 64.64% of convolutions in specific layers. Aggressive NaNs can skip up to 69.30% of convolutions but may occasionally affect performance. Overall, these methods demonstrate that numerical uncertainty can be exploited to reduce redundant computation and improve inference efficiency in CNNs.
Federated Proximal Optimization for Privacy-Preserving Heart Disease Prediction: A Controlled Simulation Study on Non-IID Clinical Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Healthcare institutions have access to valuable patient data that could be of great help in the development of improved diagnostic models, but privacy regulations like HIPAA and GDPR prevent hospitals from directly sharing data with one another. Federated Learning offers a way out to this problem by facilitating collaborative model training without having the raw patient data centralized. However, clinical datasets intrinsically have non-IID (non-independent and identically distributed) features brought about by demographic disparity and diversity in disease prevalence and institutional practices. This paper presents a comprehensive simulation research of Federated Proximal Optimization (FedProx) for Heart Disease prediction based on UCI Heart Disease dataset. We generate realistic non-IID data partitions by simulating four heterogeneous hospital clients from the Cleveland Clinic dataset (303 patients), by inducing statistical heterogeneity by demographic-based stratification. Our experimental results show that FedProx with proximal parameter mu=0.05 achieves 85.00% accuracy, which is better than both centralized learning (83.33%) and isolated local models (78.45% average) without revealing patient privacy. Through generous sheer ablation studies with statistical validation on 50 independent runs we demonstrate that proximal regularization is effective in curbing client drift in heterogeneous environments. This proof-of-concept research offers algorithmic insights and practical deployment guidelines for real-world federated healthcare systems, and thus, our results are directly transferable to hospital IT-administrators, implementing privacy-preserving collaborative learning.