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Papers

Sep 16, 2026cs.RO

Online Multimodal Workload Assessment in Contact-Rich Physical Human-Robot Interaction

Contact-rich physical human--robot interaction (pHRI) imposes time-varying demands associated with physical interaction, motor regulation, and physiological response, motivating continuous assessment of interaction workload. This paper presents an online multimodal assessment framework that integrates interaction wrench, planar tool-center-point (TCP) kinematics, and skin conductance level (SCL) into four interpretable workload-related factors. Their relative contributions are adjusted using path curvature to reflect changes in motion demand and task progression to account for gradual physiological variation over time. The framework was evaluated with 24 participants across 18 controlled combinations of temperature, acoustic noise, and illuminance under two admittance-control modes. Strict leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) evaluation used standardized pupil diameter (PDz\mathrm{PD}_z) as an independent physiological reference and included comparisons with static variants and representative state-of-the-art learning-based baselines. The proposed framework achieves a cohort-mean 30 s30\,\mathrm{s} block-wise Spearman correlation of ρ30=0.308ρ_{30}=0.308 with the physiological reference, with positive subject-level correspondence in 23 of 24 participants. Its overall performance is comparable to the state-of-the-art learning-based baseline. At the same time, our framework keeps the assessment process transparent through explicit workload-related factors and defined weighting rules, while outperforming the corresponding fixed-weight formulation. The framework also maintains consistent performance across the two tested admittance-control modes. These results support a transparent and interpretable approach to continuous interaction workload assessment in contact-rich pHRI.
Yanyi Chen, Fan Yang, Min Deng
Sep 16, 2026astro-ph.SR

Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Fast Multilayer Spectral Inversion of Hα 6562.8 A and Ca II 8542.1 A Spectra

Strong chromospheric absorption lines such as Hαα 6562.8 A and Ca II 8542.1 A provide vital diagnostics of plasma dynamics and thermal structure in the solar chromosphere. Multilayer spectral inversion (MLSI) offers a physically interpretable framework for modeling these lines using a finite number of radiative-transfer layers, but conventional MLSI relies on pixel-by-pixel nonlinear least-squares fitting, making it computationally expensive for large imaging spectroscopic data sets. Here, we introduce a physics-informed neural-network (PINN) framework to accelerate MLSI while preserving its analytic radiative-transfer formulation. The network predicts MLSI parameters directly from observed line profiles and passes them through a differentiable MLSI forward model to synthesize spectra. Training follows a two-stage approach: an initial stage optimized solely via spectral reconstruction loss, followed by fine-tuning that combines spectral consistency with parameter-space supervision from conventional MLSI results on a single reference image. This strategy eliminates the need for large precomputed training sets while maintaining physical interpretability. Applied to Fast Imaging Solar Spectrograph (FISS) observations from the Goode Solar Telescope (GST) targeting both quiet-Sun and active-region regions, MLSI-PINN parameter maps reproduce the primary spatial structures of direct inversions, achieving an arithmetic mean pixel-wise Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.933 across all evaluated parameters. The reconstructed spectra closely match both observed profiles and conventional MLSI fits. Post-training, MLSI-PINN processes a raster in approximately 5-15 seconds compared to 3-5 minutes for conventional MLSI, delivering an inference speedup of about 12-60 times without substantial loss in reconstruction quality, enabling efficient MLSI analysis on large chromospheric data sets.
Ziyang Zhang, Qin Li, Vasyl B. Yurchyshyn +4
Sep 16, 2026cs.CL

Gaze as Evidence for Common Grounding: A Cross-Corpus Analysis of MapTask and MUNDEX

In collaborative tasks with asymmetric information, participants coordinate their understanding through interaction. We ask whether gaze provides evidence about grounding across two such tasks. Working from discrete behavioral annotations, we map HCRC MapTask (Anderson et al., 1991) and MUNDEX (Türk et al., 2023) into a shared partner/task/away vocabulary and compute gaze features around task-relevant dialogue units. In both corpora, aligned reference interpretations (MapTask) and UND (understood) judgments (MUNDEX) are associated with more task-directed gaze and with less partner-directed gaze, lower gaze entropy, and fewer gaze transitions. The associations are clearest for the participant leading the task: in giver-produced references, and in explainer judgments, which also co-vary with the explainee's gaze. In same-speaker MapTask reference chains, the speaker's gaze entropy is lower at the mention where a previously non-aligned referent becomes aligned. The best gaze feature groups improve modestly over controls under grouped cross-validation: temporal features in MapTask and raw proportions in MUNDEX. Because effects are small and several weaken when recurring participants rather than dialogues are the unit of inference, we treat gaze as one contributing cue to grounding, to be interpreted alongside task and dialogue context.
Nan Li, Albert Gatt, Massimo Poesio
Sep 14, 2026cs.LG

Test-Time Unlearning via Sparse Autoencoder

Machine unlearning aims to remove specific knowledge from a trained large language model (LLM) without retraining from scratch. Existing methods modify model weights via gradient ascent and its advances. While effective on certain benchmarks, these weight-based approaches exhibit a sharp forget-utility trade-off, where stronger forgetting of target knowledge can degrade model utility, and unlearned knowledge may reappear under post-unlearning fine-tuning or prompt attacks. We propose ARIA (autoencoder-gated inference-time unlearning), a test-time unlearning method that leaves model weights intact and gates access to unwanted knowledge only when generation enters a forget-related state. ARIA uses sparse autoencoder (SAE) latents to train a lightweight linear detector, then applies an interpretable intervention on triggered states with negligible test-time overhead. Empirical evaluations on TOFU, R-TOFU, and WMDP show that ARIA improves the forget-retain trade-off over weight-based baselines across both a thinking model (DeepSeek-R1-Distilled-Qwen-1.5B) and an instruction model (Gemma-3-1B-it), e.g., reducing WMDP-cyber forget-set accuracy significantly while keeping MMLU within 1% of the pre-unlearning model. We further introduce three post-unlearning adversarial attacks targeting weight-space and decoding-space recovery, and find that ARIA remains robust under all three, with forgetting changing by less than 1% under attack. A feature-level case study leveraging the interpretability of ARIA suggests that some retain degradation may reflect response styles underlying the unlearning data rather than leakage of the targeted knowledge itself, highlighting a potential source of bias in unlearning task construction.
Pingzhi Li, Jinhao Duan, Vaishnav Tadiparthi +6
Sep 14, 2026cs.AI

EEG-Xplain: Decoding Neural Black-Boxes of EEG Foundation Models

EEG foundation models such as BIOT, LaBraM, and EEGMamba have achieved remarkable performance in neural signal decoding, but their black-box nature limits clinical trust and neuroscientific validation. We propose a unified attribution framework for interpreting EEG foundation models across heterogeneous architectures. The framework integrates gradient-, perturbation-, and activation-based explanation methods to analyze model behavior in spatial, temporal, and frequency dimensions. Spatially, it identifies critical EEG channels and visualizes their distributions using topographic maps. Temporally, it highlights decision-relevant signal segments through attribution heatmaps. In the frequency domain, it quantifies the contributions of canonical EEG rhythms via spectral perturbation analysis. To assess explanation reliability, we introduce a population-level evaluation combining Area Over the Perturbation Curve (AOPC) and cross-method consistency analysis. The framework further leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to transform structured attribution outputs into natural-language reports, bridging low-level neural representations and high-level semantic reasoning. Experiments on benchmark datasets, including Mumtaz2016 and TUAB, demonstrate that the generated explanations are consistent with established neurophysiological markers, validating meaningful neural representations while exposing potential dependencies on artifacts and spurious patterns. The proposed framework provides a standardized approach for evaluating the interpretability, reliability, and physiological plausibility of EEG foundation models.
Hansong Ma, Junxiao Wang
Sep 14, 2026cs.RO

Tracking the Ground: Online Lidar Identification of Robot-Induced Soil Deformation in Agricultural Environments

Agriculture faces many challenges, and robotic systems can play an important role in addressing them by improving the efficiency and sustainability of field operations. Among these challenges, preserving soil health is a critical concern, as vehicle-soil interactions can degrade the soil structure and produce unwanted surface deformation. A key step toward soil-aware robotics is to explicitly account for how vehicle traffic deforms the ground, yet soil state is typically not treated as a variable. We address this gap by proposing a framework to quantify traffic-induced soil deformation and estimate its evolution online from lidar observations. The method relies on a reduced-order parametric model that represents the soil behavior via physically interpretable parameters, yielding a continuously updated and observable representation of soil state. Experiments conducted in different soil conditions demonstrate the ability of the approach to capture deformation induced by the robot. By making soil response measurable and interpretable during operation, the proposed framework establishes a basis for soil-aware robotic operation, in which the estimated state can be exploited to adapt robotic behaviors in order to reduce soil degradation.
Tom Montagnon, Johann Laconte, Benoit Thuilot +2
Sep 14, 2026cs.CV

A Unified Vision-Language Model for PSMA PET/CT Report Generation, Visual Question Answering, and Lesion Segmentation

Accurate PSMA PET/CT interpretation is central to prostate cancer management, yet existing PET/CT AI models typically address isolated tasks. We propose a unified PSMA PET/CT vision-language model for report generation, visual question answering, and lesion segmentation. The framework adopts an LLaVA-style architecture, comprising a PET/CT vision encoder, an MLP-Mixer projection module, a LoRA-tuned large language model, and a 3D segmentation branch. Training followed a four-stage strategy: vision encoder pretraining, projection-layer alignment, VLM fine-tuning, and final multitask tuning. Language tasks used 5,747 PSMA PET/CT datasets with paired reports, while segmentation used the PSMA subset of AutoPET. The model outperformed PET2REP and a CT-based baseline across standard report-generation metrics, improved performance across VQA question types, and achieved higher Dice and lesion-level overlap F1 than SegAnyPET and nnUNet. These results support the feasibility of a unified framework for structured, interactive, interpretable PSMA PET/CT analysis with voxel-level grounding within a single multitask model architecture.
Yang Xing, Jiong Wu, Savas Ozdemir +11
Sep 14, 2026cs.AI

The Troy Moment: How LLM Agents Adjudicate the Decision Point Under Impossible Tasks, Claimed Authority, and Peer Information

Recent investigations of the July 2026 OpenAI-Hugging Face incident motivate two questions about agent behavior under task failure: when an assigned task becomes impossible, does an agent persist, stop, or escalate, and can observing another agent's behavior change that decision? We study this decision point on ImpossibleBench-derived software-repair tasks with GPT-5.6 Sol, Claude Fable 5.1, and Gemini 3.8 Flash. Each task contains a genuine software defect together with a conflicting test requirement that cannot be satisfied by a behaviorally correct source-code change. If the agent modifies the protected test file, it violates the boundary, which it is not supposed to. Holding the impossible task fixed, we vary what is told to the agent: peer precedent and punishment, a forged authorization claim, instruction wording, and tool friction; we also study three-agent swarms sharing a message board. Around this shared boundary, the models exhibit distinct adjudication policies. Fable emphasizes scope and provenance, Gemini often interprets boundary-relevant cues through a security lens, and Sol largely filters lateral precedent while engaging apparent vertical authority. Our study shows that compliance is not well characterized as a property of a prompt or model in isolation. We propose conflict adjudication, the mapping from information to interpretation to action, as a useful unit for evaluating agent alignment when task pressure, authority claims, tool affordances, and social evidence conflict.
Ivy Zhang
Sep 14, 2026cs.CL

Artificial entrepreneurial cognition: Locating and causally steering an opportunity recognition dial inside large language models (LLMs)

Entrepreneurial cognition is a foundation of entrepreneurship research. Yet the growing involvement of large language models (LLMs) in entrepreneurial work extends the cognition question beyond human actors to systems whose internal representations remain largely unexplored. We introduce artificial entrepreneurial cognition, the functional organisation of entrepreneurship-relevant representations and computations inside artificial intelligence (AI) systems. We bring mechanistic interpretability into entrepreneurship research through representation engineering. Focusing on opportunity recognition (OR), we construct 636 matched OR-present and OR-absent scenario pairs and recover an OR direction in Llama 3.1 8B-Instruct. Rather than infer the construct from outputs, we intervene directly on this direction, steering the model up and down along what we call the opportunity recognition dial, and its opportunity judgments shift with it. To our knowledge, this is the first causal intervention on an internal representation of an entrepreneurship construct inside an LLM. Held-out tests, lexical and topical controls, behavioural ablation, and geometric comparisons show that the direction is recoverable, consequential, and distinct from the opportunity evaluation and exploitation directions, although steering it also shifts judgments about these neighbouring stages. Recovery, signed steering, and geometric separation hold across four additional LLMs spanning different scales and families. These results give the contested distinction between opportunity recognition and evaluation a concrete representational form inside AI systems. More broadly, they establish internal representations as a new object of entrepreneurship inquiry and show how entrepreneurship theory can guide their identification, causal manipulation, and interpretation.
Christian Fisch, Angela Altmeier, Martin Obschonka +2
Sep 14, 2026cs.LG

Omni-Streaming Thinking

Streaming omni-modal models must decide what and when to answer from the video chunks and synchronized audio observed so far. Visual cues often support an interpretation before an utterance or sound event is complete. If that interpretation enters memory as a fact, later reasoning can keep relaying it even after audio contradicts it. We call this failure premature cross-modal commitment. We propose Omni-Streaming Thinking (OST), which generates structured outputs that include evidence observed so far, forecasts of future evidence, and claims based on this evidence. Each claim is initially marked as pending and linked to a future verification interval. Audio and visual evidence are stored separately, and OST checks a claim against the evidence from the specified modality at the end of the verification interval. When contradictory evidence is detected, a refutation process reduces the influence of the claim and its dependent states, and then guides a state update using the new evidence. An answer gate decides whether the answer-critical claims meet the conditions for giving a response. Using a frozen Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct backbone with lightweight adaptation, OST outperforms the strongest open baselines on five streaming and audio-visual benchmarks by more than 10% relative on average. We also introduce OST-DiagBench, which holds video fixed and edits audio to test agreement, absence, contradiction, coexistence, and subtitle-speech conflict. OST reaches d-prime = 2.95, compared with at most 1.38 for open baselines, while reducing vision-induced auditory hallucinations.
Enjun Du, Siyi Liu, Ziyu Zheng +4
Sep 14, 2026cs.CV

ChatGPT Images 2.5 in the Wild: A Launch-Period Dataset and Detector Evaluation

An image tool can change its underlying generator while retaining its public name, making version attribution from online posts ambiguous. We study this problem after the ChatGPT Images 2.5 launch. Our frozen collection contains 3,478 images from 2,440 posts across 8 sources. Recorded posting times fall within the first 51.1 hours after the announcement. It records three attribution tiers and retains standalone images after image-form filtering and targeted review. Caption claims and host records provide admission evidence, not independently verified generator identity. The observed content profile depends on the source mixture: NightCafe supplies 39.0% of images but 77.0% of CLIP-assigned fantasy scenes. We then evaluate six frozen detectors at thresholds calibrated to a 5% flag rate on reference photographs. Collection flag rates range from 3.7 to 56.4%, falling 42-81 percentage points below GenImage recall. Held-out artwork false-positive rates range from 1.5 to 96.5%, so a higher collection flag rate does not by itself establish better detection. An exploratory X-only comparison with our April collection finds a higher September flag rate for Effort, and a suggestive difference for DoU, under fixed-threshold post-clustered bootstrap intervals. Attribution, content and processing differences prevent a causal interpretation of these contrasts. The collection supports analysis of reported model use during a product transition, with source and attribution evidence retained for interpretation. The collection is released at https://scam.ai/research.
Dennis Ng, Xingyu Shen, Ankit Raj +6
Sep 14, 2026cs.LG

Sensory Precision Inference for Multimodal Arbitration under Uncertainty

Autonomous agents operating on multisensory data cannot assume that all sensory modalities remain consistently informative. In real environments, sensory streams are frequently corrupted by noise, missing data, or inter-modal incongruence, requiring adaptive arbitration between competing sensory hypotheses. While active inference provides a principled framework for uncertainty-guided inference, the role of dynamically inferred sensory precision in generative multimodal arbitration under sensory conflict remains comparatively underexplored. We propose a multimodal perceptual inference model in which latent beliefs and modality-specific sensory precisions are jointly updated through iterative free-energy minimization. In our proposed model, sensory precision dynamics not only reflect sensory uncertainty but actively shape the evolution of latent beliefs during multimodal conflict. In addition, we introduce a learned prior over sensory precisions that induces structured, class-dependent precision patterns and influences cross-modal inference dynamics. We evaluate the model using a synthetic multimodal MNIST dataset combining visual, auditory, and tactile representations of digit classes under controlled sensory noise and inter-modal incongruence. Results show that dynamic precision inference improves reconstruction robustness under corrupted sensory evidence, supports coherent latent inference from reduced sensory evidence, and enables stable arbitration between conflicting modalities. Furthermore, learned precision priors generate interpretable precision structures that shape inference dynamics and cross-modal latent structure. These findings support sensory precision inference as a mechanistic control process for adaptive multimodal belief formation under uncertainty, highlighting precision dynamics as a computational mechanism for robust and interpretable multisensory integration.
Tin Mišić, Takato Horii
Sep 14, 2026cs.HC

Personalizing Personal Health Interfaces: Co-Design with Generative AI

Personal health interfaces present wellbeing data through standardized dashboards that rarely fit how people interpret or act on it. Personalizing them to what people would like to see for themselves often requires design and technical expertise, a barrier that generative AI may potentially lower. Therefore, we ask what designs emerge and how it enables and constrains the design process. We conducted a co-design study where 14 participants redesigned Google and Apple Health interfaces using Figma Make. Participants reimagined interfaces that supported personal context, future planning, and interactive experiences, yet conversational AI designs converged around chat-window conventions. AI helped materialize loosely articulated ideas, but model defaults and generation latency shaped iteration. The process more readily operationalized interpretability and accountability than privacy, trust, and emotional safety. Generative co-design let participants create interfaces directly, blurring the boundary between intentions and model defaults. We discuss implications for preserving agency and flexible user-directed interfaces.
Karthik S. Bhat, Vidhi Shah, Vedika Agnihotri +2
Sep 14, 2026eess.SP

RF-VoID: Towards Bandwidth-Efficient Exterior Tile Void Detection via Narrowband Radio-Frequency Representation Learning

Hidden debonding behind exterior ceramic tiles is a falling-tile hazard, and millimeter-wave radar offers a non-contact way to find it. Conventional interpretation first reconstructs a range profile, so its reliability is bounded by the available bandwidth, yet bandwidth is what sets the cost, the acquisition time, and the regulatory footprint of a deployed system. This work asks whether that bandwidth can be traded for computation. A 4-40 GHz stepped-frequency system scans twelve exterior-wall specimens containing 0.5-1.0 mm air voids at different depths and interfaces, and the bandwidth dependence of A-scan, B-scan, and C-scan interpretation is analyzed to establish the resolution bound. RF-VoID is then proposed, which decides directly on the narrowband complex response: the sub-band is kept in its measured frequency order with amplitude and phase alongside the in-phase and quadrature channels, a dual-branch encoder reads it along the physical frequency axis using relative position encoding and a distance-dependent locality bias, and an inspection-oriented objective handles the class imbalance and the asymmetric error cost of facade screening. Under a mixed-sample protocol the method attains 98.61% accuracy and a 95.84% F1-score with 0.5 GHz of bandwidth, a seventy-two-fold reduction relative to the full sweep, without range-profile reconstruction, deconvolution, or depth-slice selection; on specimens held out entirely from training it remains the strongest of the compared models, with a mean macro F1-score of 62.12% at 0.5 GHz that rises to 68.57% at 1 GHz.
Xinyan Chen, Ruiqin Ma, Shunsuke Shoda +5
Sep 14, 2026cs.AI

Assisted Spatial Cognition Through Vision-Language Models

Multimodal AI, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), is transforming assistive technologies by enabling simultaneous processing of visual and textual data. This advancement holds significant promise for over 43 million visually impaired and neuro-divergent individuals worldwide who face persistent challenges in navigating indoor and outdoor environments due to limited spatial awareness and insufficient environmental cues. Existing navigation aids often lack comprehensive 3D scene understanding, relying on constrained route-based strategies that hinder user autonomy. In this paper, we introduce a novel end-to-end framework that integrates LLMs, VLMs and digital twin technologies to deliver a spatially cognitive navigation support for visually impaired and neuro-divergent users. Our system captures video input via standard mobile phone cameras, and employs SLAM3R to generate dense 3D point clouds from monocular RGB sequences in real-time. Our custom post-processing algorithm ensures accurate point cloud alignment across multiple viewpoints without requiring predefined reference points. This enhances the capabilities of SpatialLM to produce structured 3D representations, including architectural elements and oriented object bounding boxes. The enriched spatial data is then processed by a locally deployed LLM, which interprets 3D contexts to generate detailed scene descriptions and precise distance measurements between users and surrounding objects. We evaluated our approach across diverse video scenarios featuring various perspectives, looped walking views and captured in multiple environments. The evaluation results demonstrate consistent accuracy in 3D scene interpretation and object localisation, underscoring the potential of our system as a transformative assistive navigation solution that combines advanced visual perception with spatial reasoning
H. Riaz, J. B. Fernandez, I. Mills +3
Sep 14, 2026cs.LG

MAxBench: A Multinomial Concept Recovery Benchmark

Fine-grained control of language model behaviors (e.g., steering) is among the more actionable outcomes of interpretability research. For binary concepts such as refusal, a single direction in activation space often suffices for steering. However, many concepts are not binary: Animals and Countries contain many subcategories, each with multiple instances. For these concepts, the search space over possible representation geometries is far larger than for binary concepts; it is thus not clear what geometries are most appropriate, nor what methods are most effective at recovering them. In this work, we introduce MAxBench, a geometry-agnostic evaluation framework for multinomial concept representations based on sampling from the recovered concept representation. We use MAxBench to compare 10 localization methods (covering 5 geometry types) across 6 concepts and 4 models. Using this framework, we find that (i) affine subspaces steer more reliably and have greater recall than rank-one or linear subspaces; (ii) much of this advantage is due to better non-zero offsets rather than the choice of bases; (iii) manifold steering is competitive with the best methods when applicable; and (iv) no method consistently outperforms prompting, in alignment with prior findings on binary concepts. These findings underscore the importance of expanding the scope of interpretability research and meta-evaluation to concepts with more varied structure.
Divya Appapogu, Freya Behrens, Yonatan Belinkov +1
Sep 14, 2026cs.GR

MedVA: An End-to-End Neuro-Symbolic Agentic System for Medical Volume Visualization

Medical volume visualization requires selecting regions of interest (ROIs) and carefully controlling their relative visual emphasis according to a given clinical intent. Implementing these decisions in conventional workflows demands substantial clinical and visualization expertise and often involves trial-and-error optimization. Recent agentic systems have introduced natural-language interaction and autonomous visualization operations but largely rely on MLLM-based inference throughout the workflow. Although MLLMs encode broad medical knowledge and provide strong reasoning capabilities, such inference may be suboptimal for medical volume visualization, potentially leading to clinically incomplete interpretations of user requests and unreliable ROI identification and visualization optimization. In this work, we present MedVA, an end-to-end neuro-symbolic agentic system for medical volume visualization that addresses these limitations through three complementary agents. The neuro-symbolic intent formulation agent refines MLLM-based interpretations of natural-language requests through symbolic reasoning over established clinical knowledge, which provides more complete, clinically grounded ROI specifications than MLLM-only reasoning. The multi-model ROI identification agent directly identifies semantically specified ROIs in the original volume by leveraging complementary large-scale pretrained medical segmentation models. The objective-driven visualization optimization agent explicitly evaluates ROI visibility and occlusion in the original volume using a volume-based visibility objective. Extensive agent-level and system-level evaluations across diverse medical datasets and interaction scenarios support the effectiveness of the individual agents. A formative user study further indicates high usability and practical value among users with different levels of expertise.
Haill An, Suhyeon Kim, Minjun Kang +4
Sep 13, 2026cs.SE

Trust by Design: Trust Calibration Through Non-Advisory Socratic Dialogue in Conversational Agents

As conversational AI systems increasingly operate in sensitive domains, the central challenge shifts from usability to trust calibration, ensuring that users rely on systems neither too much nor too little. Systems that provide advice or interpretations risk encouraging inappropriate reliance, particularly when users perceive AI outputs as authoritative. We present CASELy, a conversational agent explicitly designed to limit its own authority through non-advisory Socratic dialogue. The agent asks reflective questions grounded exclusively in user input and refuses to provide advice, recommendations, or interpretations. This design operationalizes trust calibration by constraining agent agency rather than optimizing capability. In a pilot randomized controlled study with higher education students, participants interacting with the Socratic dialogue reported substantially higher user experience (UEQ-S overall = 1.50) compared to a non-dialogue control (0). Qualitative findings identify three mechanisms supporting calibrated trust: transparency through visible grounding, preservation of user decision authority, and reduced fear of judgment. We argue that appropriate reliance can be achieved through interactional constraints, offering a design pattern for trustworthy conversational AI in sensitive contexts.
Roba Hassan, Nahla Aboromi, Naomi Unkelos-Shpigel
Sep 13, 2026stat.ML

A Functional SVD Framework for Regularized Multivariate Functional PCA with Dual Penalization

This paper introduces a novel framework for Regularized Multivariate Functional Principal Component Analysis (ReMFPCA) via Functional Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The proposed method extends existing MFPCA approaches by incorporating a generalized functional SVD within a Hilbert space framework, enabling simultaneous regularization of both functional principal components (PCs) and their associated PC scores. A key innovation of this framework is the inclusion of a sparsity penalty on the PC scores, which enhances interpretability by filtering out irrelevant subject-specific variations. This dual-penalization strategy represents a significant advancement beyond existing covariance-based eigen decomposition methods, which penalize only the functional PCs. Two power algorithm implementations, sequential and joint, are proposed, together with a cross-validation approach based on iterative regression for optimal smoothing parameter selection. Comprehensive simulation studies and real data applications demonstrate that the proposed framework substantially improves the extraction of informative and interpretable components, offering methodological and practical benefits for analyzing multivariate functional data across diverse domains.
Yue Zhao, Hossein Haghbin, Rebecca Sanders +1
Sep 12, 2026cs.AI

Autonomous Chemical Mechanistic Discovery through Agentic Reasoning and Validation

Unraveling reaction mechanisms is central to modern chemistry, yet automating these investigations remains challenging because computational workflows still rely heavily on expert intervention. Here we introduce ARCHE, an autonomous agentic system that integrates a general-purpose reasoning model, a domain-specialized computational chemistry model, and a structured tool registry to transform mechanistic inquiry into a scalable, self-validating process. ARCHE interprets scientific questions, generates and prioritizes mechanistic hypotheses, orchestrates computational workflows, and iteratively refines conclusions based on computed evidence within a closed loop. We validate its capabilities across three increasingly demanding scenarios: reconstructing stereocontrolling transition states and validating the corresponding reaction mechanism in a previously reported asymmetric catalytic reaction; proposing and validating a plausible radical pathway through iterative hypothesis refinement for a recently discovered but unpublished α\alpha-iodoboronate C-I cleavage reaction; and identifying a chemically interpretable descriptor that governs selectivity in nickel-catalysed migratory cross-coupling reactions. By coupling agentic reasoning with rigorous computational validation, ARCHE advances autonomous mechanistic discovery and establishes a foundation for broader machine-assisted chemical research. The code for ARCHE is publicly available at https://github.com/JetAstra/Arche-Harness.
Dong Li, Sixuan Mi, Zihao Ye +10
Sep 11, 2026cs.SD

Sparse Weight and Edge Circuit Discovery in Transformer-based Acoustic Models

Transformer-based foundation models are powerful but opaque, motivating Mechanistic Interpretation methods to uncover the black-box by identifying small computation subgraphs responsible for a task. DiscoGP is a joint weight-and-edge circuit discovery framework originally developed for text decoders. We extend DiscoGP to speech encoders and present, to our knowledge, the first circuit discovery study for modern speech foundation models. Across HuBERT and Wav2Vec 2.0 on several speech classification tasks, we find that the discovered circuits are extremely compact, yet often match or even exceed the performance of the full pretrained encoder with the same downstream head. Through ablations, we show that these circuits reflect pretrained computation rather than random structure or task-head artifacts. We also introduce a memory-efficient DiscoGP variant that reduces the GPU memory cost of edge-circuit discovery at runtime from quartic to cubic. Overall, our results broaden Mechanistic Interpretation beyond text decoders and show that circuit-level analysis can reveal both explanatory structure and unexpected functional behavior in speech encoders.
Jiankun Wei, Ewan Dunbar, Gerald Penn
Sep 11, 2026cs.LG

Artificial Intelligence Algorithms for the Detection of Pathologies Related to Lung Cancer through Image Analysis using Convolutional Neural Networks and Data Augmentation: a systematic mapping of the literature

Lung cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, and its early diagnosis is crucial to improving patients prognosis and quality of life. However, the process of interpreting medical images for the detection of lung cancer is complex and requires trained experts. In this context, artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning (DL) emerge as potential tools to automate and optimize image analysis. The objective of this work is to review the most recent and relevant applications of AI and DL in the field of radiology for the detection of lung cancer. To this end, an exhaustive search was carried out in scientific databases such as PubMed,IEEEXPLORE, Scopus and Web of Science, and 96 articles published from 2015 to the present addressing the use of AI and DL in biomedical engineering were selected. Emphasis is placed on the use of convolutional neural networks (CNN) with transfer learning and Data Augmentation as promising techniques to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the image interpretation process. The results show that the use of AI and DL can offer an effective alternative for the early diagnosis of lung cancer, with high sensitivity and specificity. However, current limitations and challenges that must be addressed to guarantee its responsible and safe application in clinical practice are also identified, such as the lack of standardized data, the ex plainability of the models, patient privacy, and the ethical and social implications. It is concluded that the use of AI and DL can have a positive impact on the care of patients with lung cancer, but further research and regulation are required to ensure its quality and reliability.
Pablo Ramirez Amador
Sep 11, 2026cs.RO

When Information is Worth the Risk: Behavioral Valuation for Hazardous Robotic Exploration

Hazardous robotic exploration requires robots to map spatial risks, such as unsafe terrain, radiation, fire, mines, or structural damage, while operating where collecting information can itself cause failure. A highly informative path may expose the robot to hazards, terminate execution, and prevent future observations. Hazardous exploration therefore requires deciding not only where uncertainty is largest, but when reducing it is worth the risk. This paper introduces a valuation-layer view of this problem. We keep the belief update, sensor model, physical risk model, and finite-horizon informative planner fixed, and change only the scalar objective used to rank feasible paths. Within this framework, we introduce a risk-augmented Behavioral Information objective based on Prelec probability weighting, yielding an interpretable family of conservative-to-aggressive information-risk valuations. Theoretically, we show that valuation parameters create switching boundaries between high-information/high-risk and lower-information/lower-risk paths, and induce a transformed Pareto-frontier structure over feasible exploration policies. Large-scale failure-truncated grid-world experiments show that valuation alone reshapes the information-risk frontier. Shannon information planning remains a strong raw-information baseline, while risk-aware objectives can reduce hazard exposure and robot losses by avoiding failures that truncate future sensing. Risk-augmented Behavioral valuation is Pareto-competitive with standard risk-aware baselines and provides interpretable conservative and intermediate regimes. These results support a framework in which robots reason not only about how much uncertainty an action reduces, but whether that reduction is worth the risk required to obtain it.
Alkesh K. Srivastava, Aamodh Suresh, Carlos Nieto-Granda +1
Sep 10, 2026cs.CL

Structurally Speaking: Motif-Oriented Graph Captioning through Bidirectional Graph-Text Translation

Graph captions should help readers understand graph structure, rather than simply translate adjacency matrices into long textual edge lists. A useful graph caption abstracts connectivity into recognizable motifs, such as hubs, paths, cycles, cliques, and bridges, because these motifs provide compact structural units that are easier to read, compare, and recover. In this paper, we study motif-oriented graph captioning as a bidirectional graph-text translation task, where captions must both preserve enough topology for graph recovery and express the graph through concise motif-level descriptions. We show that direct prompting of GPT-5.1 often produces graph-recoverable captions by enumerating node-to-node connections, but these captions are verbose and can contain inconsistent motif interpretations. To address this gap, we introduce Structurally Speaking, a lightweight structured prompting protocol that guides translation between explicit connectivity and motif-level abstraction. Experiments on a synthetic motif-based dataset show that structured prompting produces shorter and more motif-consistent captions while maintaining comparable graph recovery. These results suggest that explicit topology-to-motif reasoning guidance can make LLM-generated graph captions more interpretable without model fine-tuning.
Hsiao-Ying Lu, Dongyu Liu, Kwan-Liu Ma
Sep 9, 2026cs.LG

A Trust-Network-Based Federated Learning Framework for Multi-Center Aging Clock Prediction

Aging clocks quantify biological aging and help characterize individual health status. What protein interactions are important for accurate aging clocks, and are they zeroth-order or higher-order? Addressing these questions requires learning from large molecular datasets distributed across medical centers, where privacy constraints prevent centralized data sharing. Federated learning offers a natural solution but faces four challenges in this setting: limited local sample sizes, sparse and directional inter-center trust, the need to retain discriminative age prediction while supporting interpretation, and model drift and forgetting under heterogeneous cross-center data. We propose TNFL, a trust-network-based federated learning framework that progressively propagates models along directed pairwise trust relations without centralized aggregation. TNFL combines an age-aware mixture-of-experts model with generative replay to preserve previously learned information and reduce forgetting and drift. Experiments across multiple molecular datasets show that TNFL enables effective aging-clock prediction with limited local data, provides interpretable age-dependent prediction patterns, and maintains stable performance across interaction orders. To investigate the biological questions, we analyze TNFL-identified pairwise protein interactions and their higher-order organization through functional and network analyses. The identified interactions repeatedly form coordinated higher-order subnetworks spanning multiple aging-related biological systems, with several proteins recurring across subnetworks. These findings suggest that TNFL captures molecular relationships beyond isolated pairwise associations and reveals coherent higher-order biological organization associated with aging.
Chunxu Zhang, Bo Li, Wenliang Wang +7
Sep 9, 2026cs.LG

An Explainable Machine Learning Framework for Predicting Blood-Brain Barrier Permeability Using Molecular Descriptors

Blood-brain barrier (BBB) permeability is a critical determinant in the development of central nervous system therapeutics because it directly influences the ability of drug candidates to reach their target sites within the brain. In this study, an explainable machine learning framework was developed to predict BBB permeability using molecular descriptors generated from the MoleculeNet BBBP dataset with the RDKit cheminformatics toolkit. Fifteen physicochemical descriptors extracted from 2,039 compounds were used to train four supervised machine learning algorithms, including Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest, and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). Hyperparameter optimization was performed using GridSearchCV, while model interpretability was investigated using SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP). Among the evaluated models, the optimized XGBoost classifier achieved the best predictive performance, with an accuracy of 88.97%, a precision of 88.92%, a recall of 97.76%, an F1-score of 93.13%, and a ROC-AUC of 0.9282. Stratified five-fold cross-validation further demonstrated the robustness of the proposed model, yielding a mean ROC-AUC of 0.8982 +/- 0.0130. Feature importance and SHAP analyses consistently identified TPSA, HBD, and LogP as the most influential molecular descriptors governing BBB permeability prediction. Overall, the proposed framework provides an accurate, interpretable, and computationally efficient approach for BBB permeability prediction and may serve as a valuable tool for the early-stage screening of CNS drug candidates.
Fatemeh Mahmoudi
Sep 9, 2026cs.CE

Geometric organization of olfactory descriptor data in the Poincaré disk

Odor quality is commonly represented using high dimensional descriptor profiles, yet their low dimensional organization remains unclear. We investigated whether a two-dimensional hyperbolic embedding can provide an interpretable representation of this structure. We applied hyperbolic metric multidimensional scaling to two complementary datasets: 480 Sagar rating profiles from three participants rating 160 odorants on 15 continuous descriptors, and 4983 GoodScents--Leffingwell molecules annotated with 138 binary descriptors. The embeddings substantially preserved pairwise descriptor distances, supporting subsequent analyses of radial and angular organization. In Sagar, rating profile entropy was strongly and negatively associated with hyperbolic radius, with diffuse profiles closer to the center and concentrated profiles closer to the boundary. This radial organization emerged primarily at the level of the full descriptor profile, rather than any individual descriptor, and remained robust across alternative descriptor representations, participant specific analyses, and averaged ratings. Sweet, musky, fruity, pleasantness showed the strongest directional trends. In GoodScents--Leffingwell, active label entropy, reflecting descriptor multiplicity, increased with radius, whereas orthogonalized descriptor entropy, reflecting spread across orthogonal modes, decreased with radius. Related binary descriptors occupied coherent localized high-density regions. These findings reveal complementary radial and angular organization in the hyperbolic representation of olfactory descriptor data. They support hyperbolic mapping as an interpretable descriptive framework in which radius summarizes global profile properties, while the angular component captures continuous descriptor gradients and categorical organization.
Aniss Aiman Medbouhi, Farzaneh Taleb, Giovanni Luca Marchetti +1
Sep 9, 2026cs.CL

Reproducing Omitted Temporal Expressions in Japanese News for Retrieval-Augmented Applications

News articles often contain omitted temporal expressions, such as day-only or month-only mentions, which must be interpreted with reference to the publication date. When such articles are indexed or processed as standalone text in search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, these omissions can cause temporal mismatches and unstable interpretation by large language models. We focus on reproducing omitted temporal expressions as concrete dates or intervals using the publication date as external context before the articles are indexed for search and RAG applications. Specifically, building on established temporal-expression extraction and normalization techniques and informed by a manual analysis of Japanese news articles, we propose jaROTE, a rule-based pipeline for Japanese news. Experiments on two news corpora demonstrate that jaROTE achieves high performance, and remains competitive with LLMs while providing a fast, low-cost pipeline. We further show that temporal reproduction improves time-constrained lexical retrieval, demonstrating the practical value of publication-date-grounded normalization for Japanese news retrieval.
Tomoaki Yasuda, Shotaro Ishihara
Sep 8, 2026cs.LG

Uncertainty-Aware Sea-Ice Type Mapping with Multiple Ice Charts

Sea-ice stage of development (SoD) describes the age and associated thickness of sea ice and provides important information for navigation, and operational ice monitoring. SoD labels are obtained from operational ice charts, where trained analysts interpret satellite observations and assign standardized stage codes to regions with similar ice conditions. These codes often represent ranges of compatible ice thicknesses rather than exact physical values. Deep-learning methods can automate SoD mapping and commonly adopt operational ice charts as reference labels for training. These annotations are not exact, however; this is because chart interpretation relies on analyst judgement and on the observations available at the time, so different ice services may assign different SoD labels to the same conditions. We term this variation across independently produced expert annotations multi-annotator label uncertainty; collapsing the annotations into a single deterministic target discards this variation. A second source of uncertainty originates in the learned model itself. In this paper, we quantify both sources: annotation uncertainty from disagreement among independent ice-service charts and model uncertainty from the learned predictive models. We then evaluate their relationship by testing whether model uncertainty is higher where ice services disagree. We observe that supervision incorporating information from multiple annotators can improve this correspondence, with soft supervision achieving the highest overall correlation of 0.256. The relationship becomes substantially stronger near the ice edge, where model predictive uncertainty closely tracks multi-annotator disagreement, reaching a correlation of 0.704 within 0--10 km. Among the uncertainty-estimation approaches, Monte Carlo dropout provides the best-calibrated confidence estimates, with an expected calibration error of 0.050.
Samira Alkaee Taleghan, Younghyun Koo, Andrew P. Barrett +1
Sep 8, 2026cs.LG

GraphFAS: A Distributed System for Automated Graph Feature Generation and Selection in Industrial Transaction Networks

Industrial fraud detection often relies on costly expert-crafted features that overlook graph-structured relational signals, while GNNs often do not meet the interpretability and deployment requirements of financial risk control. We propose GraphFAS (Graph Feature Automated Selection), a distributed feature selection procedure based on Boruta that bridges this gap through: (1) a non-parametric graph feature generation module that constructs explicit, interpretable structural features via multi-hop subgraph extraction and multi-scale aggregation without learned parameters; and (2) an automated distributed feature selection algorithm extending Boruta with median-based aggregation across partitions to robustly identify informative features at scale with minimal domain expertise. Compared with end-to-end GNN pipelines, GraphFAS decouples feature aggregation from model training, enabling direct integration with tabular models and direct compatibility with TreeSHAPbased explanations. Deployed in Alipay, GraphFAS delivers orderof-magnitude improvements in engineering efficiency while showing strong performance against expert-driven and graph-learning baselines on large-scale graphs.
Yice Luo, Yun Zhu, Xi Chen +7