OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Faster Parallel Batch-Dynamic Algorithms for Low Out-Degree Orientation
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2026
Year: 2026

A low out-degree orientation directs each edge of an undirected graph with the goal of minimizing the maximum out-degree of a vertex. In the parallel batch-dynamic setting, one can insert or delete batches of edges, and the goal is to process the entire batch in parallel with work per edge similar to that of a single sequential update and with span (or depth) for the entire batch that is polylogarithmic. In this paper we present faster parallel batch-dynamic algorithms for maintaining a low out-degree orientation of an undirected graph. All results herein achieve polylogarithmic depth, with high probability (whp); the focus of this paper is on minimizing the work, which varies across results. Our first result is the first parallel batch-dynamic algorithm to maintain an asymptotically optimal orientation with asymptotically optimal expected work bounds, in an amortized sense, improving over the prior best work bounds of Liu et al.~[SPAA~'22] by a logarithmic factor. Our second result is a $O(c \log n)$ orientation algorithm with expected worst-case $O(\sqrt{\log n})$ work per edge update, where $c$ is a known upper-bound on the arboricity of the graph. This matches the best-known sequential worst-case $O(c \log n)$ orientation algorithm given by Berglin and Brodal ~[Algorithmica~'18], albeit in expectation. Our final result is a $O(c + \log n)$-orientation algorithm with $O(\log^2 n)$ expected worst-case work per edge update. This algorithm significantly improves upon the recent result of Ghaffari and Koo~[SPAA~'25], which maintains a $O(c)$-orientation with $O(\log^9 n)$ worst-case work per edge whp.
Ontology-Guided Neuro-Symbolic Inference: Grounding Language Models with Mathematical Domain Knowledge
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Language models exhibit fundamental limitations -- hallucination, brittleness, and lack of formal grounding -- that are particularly problematic in high-stakes specialist fields requiring verifiable reasoning. I investigate whether formal domain ontologies can enhance language model reliability through retrieval-augmented generation. Using mathematics as proof of concept, I implement a neuro-symbolic pipeline leveraging the OpenMath ontology with hybrid retrieval and cross-encoder reranking to inject relevant definitions into model prompts. Evaluation on the MATH benchmark with three open-source models reveals that ontology-guided context improves performance when retrieval quality is high, but irrelevant context actively degrades it -- highlighting both the promise and challenges of neuro-symbolic approaches.
Breaking the Correlation Plateau: On the Optimization and Capacity Limits of Attention-Based Regressors
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Attention-based regression models are often trained by jointly optimizing Mean Squared Error (MSE) loss and Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) loss, emphasizing the magnitude of errors and the order or shape of targets, respectively. A common but poorly understood phenomenon during training is the PCC plateau: PCC stops improving early in training, even as MSE continues to decrease. We provide the first rigorous theoretical analysis of this behavior, revealing fundamental limitations in both optimization dynamics and model capacity. First, in regard to the flattened PCC curve, we uncover a critical conflict where lowering MSE (magnitude matching) can paradoxically suppress the PCC gradient (shape matching). This issue is exacerbated by the softmax attention mechanism, particularly when the data to be aggregated is highly homogeneous. Second, we identify a limitation in the model capacity: we derived a PCC improvement limit for any convex aggregator (including the softmax attention), showing that the convex hull of the inputs strictly bounds the achievable PCC gain. We demonstrate that data homogeneity intensifies both limitations. Motivated by these insights, we propose the Extrapolative Correlation Attention (ECA), which incorporates novel, theoretically-motivated mechanisms to improve the PCC optimization and extrapolate beyond the convex hull. Across diverse benchmarks, including challenging homogeneous data setting, ECA consistently breaks the PCC plateau, achieving significant improvements in correlation without compromising MSE performance.
Symfrog-512: High-Capacity Sponge-Based AEAD Cipher (1024-bit State)
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2026
Year: 2026

This submission includes a complete reference implementation together with deterministic test vectors and a reproducible benchmark suite. All source code, build instructions, and regression artifacts are publicly available in the project repository, enabling independent verification and reimplementation of the scheme. The AEAD construction is fully specified, including domain separation, rate and capacity choices, tag generation, and the exact file format used by the reference CLI. Reported performance numbers are produced by the built in benchmark tool under documented hardware and compiler settings. All security claims are made strictly within the ideal permutation model following standard sponge and duplex bounds, and no stronger guarantees are asserted for the concrete permutation beyond the documented analysis and empirical behavior. The implementation aims for constant time behavior with respect to secret dependent operations, although no formal side channel proof is provided. The project is released under the MIT license, and external cryptanalysis, feedback, and reproducibility checks are explicitly encouraged.
El Agente Gráfico: Structured Execution Graphs for Scientific Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to automate scientific workflows, yet their integration with heterogeneous computational tools remains ad hoc and fragile. Current agentic approaches often rely on unstructured text to manage context and coordinate execution, generating often overwhelming volumes of information that may obscure decision provenance and hinder auditability. In this work, we present El Agente Gráfico, a single-agent framework that embeds LLM-driven decision-making within a type-safe execution environment and dynamic knowledge graphs for external persistence. Central to our approach is a structured abstraction of scientific concepts and an object-graph mapper that represents computational state as typed Python objects, stored either in memory or persisted in an external knowledge graph. This design enables context management through typed symbolic identifiers rather than raw text, thereby ensuring consistency, supporting provenance tracking, and enabling efficient tool orchestration. We evaluate the system by developing an automated benchmarking framework across a suite of university-level quantum chemistry tasks previously evaluated on a multi-agent system, demonstrating that a single agent, when coupled to a reliable execution engine, can robustly perform complex, multi-step, and parallel computations. We further extend this paradigm to two other large classes of applications: conformer ensemble generation and metal-organic framework design, where knowledge graphs serve as both memory and reasoning substrates. Together, these results illustrate how abstraction and type safety can provide a scalable foundation for agentic scientific automation beyond prompt-centric designs.
Games That Teach, Chats That Convince: Comparing Interactive and Static Formats for Persuasive Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

Interactive systems such as chatbots and games are increasingly used to persuade and educate on sustainability-related topics, yet it remains unclear how different delivery formats shape learning and persuasive outcomes when content is held constant. Grounding on identical arguments and factual content across conditions, we present a controlled user study comparing three modes of information delivery: static essays, conversational chatbots, and narrative text-based games. Across subjective measures, the chatbot condition consistently outperformed the other modes and increased perceived importance of the topic. However, perceived learning did not reliably align with objective outcomes: participants in the text-based game condition reported learning less than those reading essays, yet achieved higher scores on a delayed (24-hour) knowledge quiz. Additional exploratory analyses further suggest that common engagement proxies, such as verbosity and interaction length, are more closely related to subjective experience than to actual learning. These findings highlight a dissociation between how persuasive experiences feel and what participants retain, and point to important design trade-offs between interactivity, realism, and learning in persuasive systems and serious games.
Visual Anthropomorphism Shifts Evaluations of Gendered AI Managers
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2026
Year: 2026

This research examines whether competence cues can reduce gender bias in evaluations of AI managers and whether these effects depend on how the AI is represented. Across two preregistered experiments (N = 2,505), each employing a 2 x 2 x 3 design manipulating AI gender, competence, and decision outcome, we compared text-based descriptions of AI managers with visually generated AI faces created using a reverse-correlation paradigm. In the text condition, evaluations were driven by competence rather than gender. When participants received unfavourable decisions, high-competence AI managers were judged as fairer, more competent, and better leaders than low-competence managers, regardless of AI gender. In contrast, when the AI manager was visually represented, competence cues had attenuated influence once facial information was present. Instead, participants showed systematic gender-differentiated responses to AI faces, with feminine-appearing managers evaluated as more competent and more trustworthy than masculine-appearing managers, particularly when delivering favourable outcomes. These gender effects were largely absent when outcomes were unfavourable, suggesting that negative feedback attenuates the influence of both competence information and facial cues. Taken together, these findings show that competence information can mitigate negative reactions to AI managers in text-based interactions, whereas facial anthropomorphism elicits gendered perceptual biases not observed in text-only settings. The results highlight that representational modality plays a critical role in determining when gender stereotypes are activated in evaluations of AI systems and underscore that design choices are consequential for AI governance in evaluative contexts.
MIRA: Memory-Integrated Reinforcement Learning Agent with Limited LLM Guidance
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents often suffer from high sample complexity in sparse or delayed reward settings due to limited prior structure. Large language models (LLMs) can provide subgoal decompositions, plausible trajectories, and abstract priors that facilitate early learning. However, heavy reliance on LLM supervision introduces scalability constraints and dependence on potentially unreliable signals. We propose MIRA (Memory-Integrated Reinforcement Learning Agent), which incorporates a structured, evolving memory graph to guide early training. The graph stores decision-relevant information, including trajectory segments and subgoal structures, and is constructed from both the agent's high-return experiences and LLM outputs. This design amortizes LLM queries into a persistent memory rather than requiring continuous real-time supervision. From this memory graph, we derive a utility signal that softly adjusts advantage estimation to influence policy updates without modifying the underlying reward function. As training progresses, the agent's policy gradually surpasses the initial LLM-derived priors, and the utility term decays, preserving standard convergence guarantees. We provide theoretical analysis showing that utility-based shaping improves early-stage learning in sparse-reward environments. Empirically, MIRA outperforms RL baselines and achieves returns comparable to approaches that rely on frequent LLM supervision, while requiring substantially fewer online LLM queries. Project webpage: https://narjesno.github.io/MIRA/
Causal Neighbourhood Learning for Invariant Graph Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Graph data often contain noisy and spurious correlations that mask the true causal relationships, which are essential for enabling graph models to make predictions based on the underlying causal structure of the data. Dependence on spurious connections makes it challenging for traditional Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to generalize effectively across different graphs. Furthermore, traditional aggregation methods tend to amplify these spurious patterns, limiting model robustness under distribution shifts. To address these issues, we propose Causal Neighbourhood Learning with Graph Neural Networks (CNL-GNN), a novel framework that performs causal interventions on graph structure. CNL-GNN effectively identifies and preserves causally relevant connections and reduces spurious influences through the generation of counterfactual neighbourhoods and adaptive edge perturbation guided by learnable importance masking and an attention-based mechanism. In addition, by combining structural-level interventions with the disentanglement of causal features from confounding factors, the model learns invariant node representations that are robust and generalize well across different graph structures. Our approach improves causal graph learning beyond traditional feature-based methods, resulting in a robust classification model. Extensive experiments on four publicly available datasets, including multiple domain variants of one dataset, demonstrate that CNL-GNN outperforms state-of-the-art GNN models.
Understanding the Generalization of Bilevel Programming in Hyperparameter Optimization: A Tale of Bias-Variance Decomposition
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Gradient-based hyperparameter optimization (HPO) have emerged recently, leveraging bilevel programming techniques to optimize hyperparameter by estimating hypergradient w.r.t. validation loss. Nevertheless, previous theoretical works mainly focus on reducing the gap between the estimation and ground-truth (i.e., the bias), while ignoring the error due to data distribution (i.e., the variance), which degrades performance. To address this issue, we conduct a bias-variance decomposition for hypergradient estimation error and provide a supplemental detailed analysis of the variance term ignored by previous works. We also present a comprehensive analysis of the error bounds for hypergradient estimation. This facilitates an easy explanation of some phenomena commonly observed in practice, like overfitting to the validation set. Inspired by the derived theories, we propose an ensemble hypergradient strategy to reduce the variance in HPO algorithms effectively. Experimental results on tasks including regularization hyperparameter learning, data hyper-cleaning, and few-shot learning demonstrate that our variance reduction strategy improves hypergradient estimation. To explain the improved performance, we establish a connection between excess error and hypergradient estimation, offering some understanding of empirical observations.
WorkflowPerturb: Calibrated Stress Tests for Evaluating Multi-Agent Workflow Metrics
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

LLM-based systems increasingly generate structured workflows for complex tasks. In practice, automatic evaluation of these workflows is difficult, because metric scores are often not calibrated, and score changes do not directly communicate the severity of workflow degradation. We introduce WorkflowPerturb, a controlled benchmark for studying workflow evaluation metrics. It works by applying realistic, controlled perturbations to golden workflows. WorkflowPerturb contains 4,973 golden workflows and 44,757 perturbed variants across three perturbation types (Missing Steps, Compressed Steps, and Description Changes), each applied at severity levels of 10%, 30%, and 50%. We benchmark multiple metric families and analyze their sensitivity and calibration using expected score trajectories and residuals. Our results characterize systematic differences across metric families and support severity-aware interpretation of workflow evaluation scores. Our dataset will be released upon acceptance.
Aurora: Neuro-Symbolic AI Driven Advising Agent
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

Academic advising in higher education is under severe strain, with advisor-to-student ratios commonly exceeding 300:1. These structural bottlenecks limit timely access to guidance, increase the risk of delayed graduation, and contribute to inequities in student support. We introduce Aurora, a modular neuro-symbolic advising agent that unifies retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), symbolic reasoning, and normalized curricular databases to deliver policy-compliant, verifiable recommendations at scale. Aurora integrates three components: (i) a Boyce-Codd Normal Form (BCNF) catalog schema for consistent program rules, (ii) a Prolog engine for prerequisite and credit enforcement, and (iii) an instruction-tuned large language model for natural-language explanations of its recommendations. To assess performance, we design a structured evaluation suite spanning common and edge-case advising scenarios, including short-term scheduling, long-term roadmapping, skill-aligned pathways, and out-of-scope requests. Across this diverse set, Aurora improves semantic alignment with expert-crafted answers from 0.68 (Raw LLM baseline) to 0.93 (+36%), achieves perfect precision and recall in nearly half of in-scope cases, and consistently produces correct fallbacks for unanswerable prompts. On commodity hardware, Aurora delivers sub-second mean latency (0.71s across 20 queries), approximately 83X faster than a Raw LLM baseline (59.2s). By combining symbolic rigor with neural fluency, Aurora advances a paradigm for accurate, explainable, and scalable AI-driven advising.
DeepSVU: Towards In-depth Security-oriented Video Understanding via Unified Physical-world Regularized MoE
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

In the literature, prior research on Security-oriented Video Understanding (SVU) has predominantly focused on detecting and localize the threats (e.g., shootings, robberies) in videos, while largely lacking the effective capability to generate and evaluate the threat causes. Motivated by these gaps, this paper introduces a new chat paradigm SVU task, i.e., In-depth Security-oriented Video Understanding (DeepSVU), which aims to not only identify and locate the threats but also attribute and evaluate the causes threatening segments. Furthermore, this paper reveals two key challenges in the proposed task: 1) how to effectively model the coarse-to-fine physical-world information (e.g., human behavior, object interactions and background context) to boost the DeepSVU task; and 2) how to adaptively trade off these factors. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes a new Unified Physical-world Regularized MoE (UPRM) approach. Specifically, UPRM incorporates two key components: the Unified Physical-world Enhanced MoE (UPE) Block and the Physical-world Trade-off Regularizer (PTR), to address the above two challenges, respectively. Extensive experiments conduct on our DeepSVU instructions datasets (i.e., UCF-C instructions and CUVA instructions) demonstrate that UPRM outperforms several advanced Video-LLMs as well as non-VLM approaches. Such information.These justify the importance of the coarse-to-fine physical-world information in the DeepSVU task and demonstrate the effectiveness of our UPRM in capturing such information.
Dual-Channel Attention Guidance for Training-Free Image Editing Control in Diffusion Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Training-free control over editing intensity is a critical requirement for diffusion-based image editing models built on the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture. Existing attention manipulation methods focus exclusively on the Key space to modulate attention routing, leaving the Value space -- which governs feature aggregation -- entirely unexploited. In this paper, we first reveal that both Key and Value projections in DiT's multi-modal attention layers exhibit a pronounced bias-delta structure, where token embeddings cluster tightly around a layer-specific bias vector. Building on this observation, we propose Dual-Channel Attention Guidance (DCAG), a training-free framework that simultaneously manipulates both the Key channel (controlling where to attend) and the Value channel (controlling what to aggregate). We provide a theoretical analysis showing that the Key channel operates through the nonlinear softmax function, acting as a coarse control knob, while the Value channel operates through linear weighted summation, serving as a fine-grained complement. Together, the two-dimensional parameter space $(δ_k, δ_v)$ enables more precise editing-fidelity trade-offs than any single-channel method. Extensive experiments on the PIE-Bench benchmark (700 images, 10 editing categories) demonstrate that DCAG consistently outperforms Key-only guidance across all fidelity metrics, with the most significant improvements observed in localized editing tasks such as object deletion (4.9% LPIPS reduction) and object addition (3.2% LPIPS reduction).
Gradient Regularization Prevents Reward Hacking in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback and Verifiable Rewards
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) or Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) are two key steps in the post-training of modern Language Models (LMs). A common problem is reward hacking, where the policy may exploit inaccuracies of the reward and learn an unintended behavior. Most previous works address this by limiting the policy update with a Kullback-Leibler (KL) penalty towards a reference model. We propose a different framing: Train the LM in a way that biases policy updates towards regions in which the reward is more accurate. First, we derive a theoretical connection between the accuracy of a reward model and the flatness of an optimum at convergence. Gradient regularization (GR) can then be used to bias training to flatter regions and thereby maintain reward model accuracy. We confirm these results by showing that the gradient norm and reward accuracy are empirically correlated in RLHF. We then show that Reference Resets of the KL penalty implicitly use GR to find flatter regions with higher reward accuracy. We further improve on this by proposing to use explicit GR with an efficient finite-difference estimate. Empirically, GR performs better than a KL penalty across a diverse set of RL experiments with LMs. GR achieves a higher GPT-judged win-rate in RLHF, avoids overly focusing on the format in rule-based math rewards, and prevents hacking the judge in LLM-as-a-Judge math tasks.