The paper introduces FRESH‑GEORANGE, a semantic‑spatial range retrieval system that separates source‑watermark freshness from optional record age. It uses geographic cells and semantic microblocks for pruning, and offers an exact mode that guarantees 100% recall and a certified mode that can stop early while providing a deterministic recall lower bound. A CPU pilot on 2,500 OpenFlights airport records demonstrates the system’s correctness, achieving high recall with a modest latency overhead compared to a spatial‑first exact baseline.
By Taimoor Ahmad
The paper examines how deliberative (System 2) reasoning affects a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model’s vulnerability to knowledge‑poisoning attacks. Using two metrics—Cordon Rate and Leakage Rate—it evaluates six model configurations on 200 SciFact questions. Results show that enabling reasoning lowers both Cordon and Leakage Rates for DeepSeek‑V4‑Flash, indicating reduced behavioral impact from poisoned evidence, though overall attack success increases.
By Mehrdad Ghassabi, Audrina Ebrahimi, Sadra Hakim, Hamidreza Baradaran Kashani
The paper introduces a new active learning signal for object detection that relies on a supervised contrastive term added to the training objective. This term shapes an embedding space where distance reflects class membership, allowing an unlabeled detection to be scored by its distance from the predicted category’s region weighted by confidence—all from a single forward pass of one network. Experiments on PASCAL VOC and MS‑COCO show that this criterion outperforms the standard posterior and remains competitive with ensemble‑based methods while incurring only a modest 8.3% increase in parameters.
By Licheng Zhang, Zheng Gong
GeoAAC introduces a geometry-based adaptive action chunking technique for Vision‑Language‑Action policies, dynamically adjusting the action horizon based on the reliability of current action predictions. By leveraging the geometric variation in Flow Matching denoising trajectories, GeoAAC constructs a horizon‑wise geometric profile that determines the action horizon during a single generation without extra training. Experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO‑Pro, RoboCasa365, and real‑world manipulation tasks demonstrate consistent gains over fixed‑horizon baselines, achieving up to 8.7 percentage points improvement in simulation and raising real‑world success rates from 53.3% to 74.4%.
By Xin Chen, Sen Chen, Yujuan Ding, Jian Liu, Guoqing Wang, Wei Ye, Heng Tao Shen, Yi Bin
MERIT‑Rank is a reranking framework that integrates multiple reasoning trajectories to enhance text ranking robustness. It introduces a Multi‑Trajectory Reasoning Space (MTRS) to evaluate query‑document relevance from diverse perspectives and a joint reranker that consolidates these paths into a single ranking decision. The Progressive Rank Policy Optimization (PRPO) training scheme stabilizes reasoning trajectories and progressively improves ranking quality, yielding superior performance on both reasoning‑intensive and traditional retrieval benchmarks, with a 4B model outperforming larger 7B and 32B rerankers on BRIGHT.
By Lijun Liu, Zhengzong Chen, Wenyan Li, Yuanyuan Zhao, Fei Huang
The study investigates whether pretrained transformer models encode functional words—such as pronouns and adverbs—in a way that mirrors human usage. By comparing embeddings of nouns with those of their functional counterparts in both isolated and parallel sentences, the authors find that functional words occupy a central yet distinct position in embedding space and that parallel lexicalized and functional sentences reside in different subspaces. Experiments show that only a mixed training set of functional and lexicalized sentences reveals shared syntactic and semantic structure, whereas training on either type alone fails to capture this parallelism.
By Giuseppe Samo, Vivi Nastase, Paola Merlo
The paper introduces a new benchmark for assessing out-of-distribution robustness in graph-based Android malware classifiers, highlighting that current models drop up to 45% accuracy on unseen malware variants. It presents two scenarios—MalNet-Tiny-Common for covariate shift and MalNet-Tiny-Distinct for domain shift—and identifies a limitation in existing benchmarks that rely solely on structure-only function call graphs. To address this, the authors propose a semantic enrichment framework that augments graph topology with function-level attributes and LLM-based code embeddings, demonstrating that this data-centric approach improves robustness under distribution shift and complements model-based methods.
By Ngoc N. Tran, Anwar Said, Waseem Abbas, Tyler Derr, Xenofon D. Koutsoukos
The paper proposes methods for estimating many high‑dimensional mean vectors from independent samples by forming convex combinations of empirical means. Two data‑dependent weighting strategies are introduced: one uses a testing procedure to pick low‑variance neighbouring means, yielding a closed‑form plug‑in formula; the other minimizes an upper confidence bound on quadratic risk. Theoretical results show these approaches asymptotically achieve oracle (minimax) risk improvements as the effective dimension grows, and experiments confirm their effectiveness on simulated and real kernel mean embedding tasks.
By Gilles Blanchard (LMO, DATASHAPE), Jean-Baptiste Fermanian (LMO), Hannah Marienwald (TUB)
The paper proposes a new framework that uses semantic cell annotation to split spreadsheets into interpretable chunks for large language model (LLM)-driven Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. This approach improves answer generation by providing richer context rather than merely enhancing retrieval accuracy. However, the authors argue that the inherent two‑dimensional, unstructured nature of spreadsheets imposes a hard ceiling on classification‑based methods, suggesting that future work should focus on dimensionality‑reduction techniques to flatten spreadsheets into one‑dimensional text for easier processing by RAG.
The paper investigates whether language‑grounded explanations improve trust in automated sheep pain detection from facial expressions. It finds that attention‑based explanations tied to the Sheep Pain Facial Expression Scale (SPFES) are largely ineffective, prompting the authors to replace the appearance bypass with a concept bottleneck that uses SPFES concept scores supervised by per‑region annotations. This new architecture slightly reduces performance but yields more semantically meaningful concepts, recovering minority pain states and revealing ear‑and‑eye severity orderings without explicit severity supervision, and highlights the pitfalls of pooled concept accuracy under clinical imbalance.
MERIT‑Rank introduces a multi‑trajectory reasoning framework for text reranking, combining complementary reasoning paths to enhance robustness against errors. It defines a Multi‑Trajectory Reasoning Space (MTRS) and a joint reranker that merges these perspectives into a single ranking decision. The Progressive Rank Policy Optimization (PRPO) training scheme stabilizes reasoning trajectories and progressively improves ranking quality, yielding superior performance on both reasoning‑intensive and traditional retrieval benchmarks, with a 4B model outperforming larger rerankers on BRIGHT.
I built four AI retrieval architectures on a laptop and benchmarked them against the same set of documents and questions. Here’s what the results taught me about the trade-offs between plain RAG, grap...
By Arijit Ghoshal
The study reproduces a prior work on recommender systems that use generated natural‑language user profiles to enhance transparency and user control. It confirms that the User Profile Recommendation (UPR) model performs competitively and that altering these profiles uniformly shifts predicted ratings without changing ranking order. Additional experiments include context ablation, multi‑seed stability, and mechanistic interpretability analysis with the nnsight framework.
SurgRAW introduces a multi‑agent, chain‑of‑thought workflow for robotic surgical video analysis, leveraging a new SurgCoTBench benchmark with 14,256 QA pairs across five surgical tasks. The system uses an orchestrator to split scene understanding into two reasoning streams, panel‑discussion‑style collaboration among task‑specific agents, and retrieval‑augmented generation to incorporate surgical knowledge. Experiments show SurgRAW outperforms mainstream vision‑language models and a supervised baseline by 14.61% accuracy.
By Chang Han Low, Ziyue Wang, Tianyi Zhang, Zhu Zhuo, Zhitao Zeng, Evangelos B. Mazomenos, Yueming Jin
The paper introduces MVLGeo, a unified framework for cross-view object geo-localization that combines multiple viewpoints into a single model. It employs Vision‑Language Reranking to use contextual text from the query view, a multi‑view Mixture‑of‑Experts architecture to share knowledge and reduce redundancy, and an adaptive elliptical prior for positional encoding. Experiments on CVOGL benchmarks show that MVLGeo achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance and robustness to input degradation.
By Xuyu Fan, Qi Ming, Zhu Han, Liuqian Wang, Siyuan Cao, Xiaohan Zhang, Xudong Zhao, Mingjing Zhao, Yuhan Zhang
The paper presents a lightweight CNN‑integrated Compact Convolutional Transformer (CCT) designed for multi‑scale feature learning in breast cancer mammography. With only 250,435 parameters, the model achieved 99‑100% accuracy across three datasets using 5‑fold cross‑validation, demonstrating robust generalization. Explainable AI components were added to clarify the classification process, aiming to increase clinical trust in resource‑constrained settings.
By Md Taimur Ahad (Department of Management North South University, Dhaka, Bangladesh), Ainuddin Ahmed (Department of Management North South University, Dhaka, Bangladesh)
MoRE: Mixture of Reused Experts is a hybrid architecture that combines Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) with weight‑sharing techniques. It shares expert pools across adjacent layers while each layer keeps its own router, and introduces lightweight depth embeddings to help shared experts differentiate layer contexts. Experiments on models ranging from 114 M to 1.15 B parameters show MoRE achieves lower perplexity and better downstream performance than standard MoEs and other weight‑sharing models, with only minimal changes to existing MoE implementations.
By Eric S. Qiu, Utku Umur Acikalin, Justin Lovelace, Christian Belardi, Arjun B. Mulchandani, Carla P. Gomes, Kilian Q. Weinberger
TACTICS is a method for selecting evaluation samples in machine translation that explicitly optimizes for coverage of rare linguistic categories, document-level coherence, and distributional fidelity to the full corpus. It builds a hierarchical taxonomy from a locale style guide, classifies segments, and chooses a fixed-budget subset that better represents the full range of phenomena a system must handle. Compared to random, lexical, or embedding-based selection, TACTICS improves coverage of rare categories and yields more accurate system rankings with fewer segments.
By Prasanth Bathala, Anubhav Shrimal, Sukhdeep Singh Kharbhanda, Pradyumna Lanka, Rohit Dhaipule
The paper re‑examines the impact of removing the encoder from Action Chunking Transformers (ACT), a model used for robot manipulation learning. Contrary to the original claim that encoder removal drops success rates from 35% to 2%, the authors find no such dramatic decline in their re‑runs, though minor variations remain uncertain. They attribute the discrepancy to factors like training length and checkpoint selection, and note that the encoder’s latent variable offers little reconstruction benefit on the tested benchmark, while its removal speeds up training.
By Bo Kang
The paper investigates which historical examples are most useful for time‑series forecasting by defining predictive relevance as the expected future utility conditioned on inference‑time information. It introduces a two‑stage approach: a normalized‑pattern retriever generates a coarse candidate set, and a lightweight MLP reranks these candidates using future‑supervised relevance while keeping inference strictly past‑only. Experiments on six benchmarks show that this reranker improves pattern retrieval and outperforms a matched‑protocol baseline, revealing that historical relevance is structured, domain‑dependent, and not governed by a single universal retrieval rule.
By Yong-Hoon Choi, Kwang-Hyun Park, Youngjin Cho