Showing 1–50 of 485 results for author: Cho, S

TriFit: Trimodal Fusion with Protein Dynamics for Mutation Fitness Prediction

Authors: Seungik Cho

Abstract: Predicting the functional impact of single amino acid substitutions (SAVs) is central to understanding genetic disease and engineering therapeutic proteins. While protein language models and structure-based methods have achieved strong performance on this task, they systematically neglect protein dynamics; residue flexibility, correlated motions, and allosteric coupling are well-established determ… ▽ More Predicting the functional impact of single amino acid substitutions (SAVs) is central to understanding genetic disease and engineering therapeutic proteins. While protein language models and structure-based methods have achieved strong performance on this task, they systematically neglect protein dynamics; residue flexibility, correlated motions, and allosteric coupling are well-established determinants of mutational tolerance in structural biology, yet have not been incorporated into supervised variant effect predictors. We present TriFit, a multimodal framework that integrates sequence, structure, and protein dynamics through a four-expert Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) fusion module with trimodal cross-modal contrastive learning. Sequence embeddings are extracted via masked marginal scoring with ESM-2 (650M); structural embeddings from AlphaFold2-predicted C-alpha geometries; and dynamics embeddings from Gaussian Network Model (GNM) B-factors, mode shapes, and residue-residue cross-correlations. The MoE router adaptively weights modality combinations conditioned on the input, enabling protein-specific fusion without fixed modality assumptions. On the ProteinGym substitution benchmark (217 DMS assays, 696k SAVs), TriFit achieves AUROC 0.897 +/- 0.0002, outperforming all supervised baselines including Kermut (0.864) and ProteinNPT (0.844), and the best zero-shot model ESM3 (0.769). Ablation studies confirm that dynamics provides the largest marginal contribution over pairwise modality combinations, and TriFit achieves well-calibrated probabilistic outputs (ECE = 0.044) without post-hoc correction. △ Less

Submitted 13 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

POS-ISP: Pipeline Optimization at the Sequence Level for Task-aware ISP

Authors: Jiyun Won, Heemin Yang, Woohyeok Kim, Jungseul Ok, Sunghyun Cho

Abstract: Recent work has explored optimizing image signal processing (ISP) pipelines for various tasks by composing predefined modules and adapting them to task-specific objectives. However, jointly optimizing module sequences and parameters remains challenging. Existing approaches rely on neural architecture search (NAS) or step-wise reinforcement learning (RL), but NAS suffers from a training-inference m… ▽ More Recent work has explored optimizing image signal processing (ISP) pipelines for various tasks by composing predefined modules and adapting them to task-specific objectives. However, jointly optimizing module sequences and parameters remains challenging. Existing approaches rely on neural architecture search (NAS) or step-wise reinforcement learning (RL), but NAS suffers from a training-inference mismatch, while step-wise RL leads to unstable training and high computational overhead due to stage-wise decision-making. We propose POS-ISP, a sequence-level RL framework that formulates modular ISP optimization as a global sequence prediction problem. Our method predicts the entire module sequence and its parameters in a single forward pass and optimizes the pipeline using a terminal task reward, eliminating the need for intermediate supervision and redundant executions. Experiments across multiple downstream tasks show that POS-ISP improves task performance while reducing computational cost, highlighting sequence-level optimization as a stable and efficient paradigm for task-aware ISP. The project page is available at https://w1jyun.github.io/POS-ISP △ Less

Submitted 8 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

A Theory-guided Weighted $L^2$ Loss for solving the BGK model via Physics-informed neural networks

Authors: Gyounghun Ko, Sung-Jun Son, Seung Yeon Cho, Myeong-Su Lee

Abstract: While Physics-Informed Neural Networks offer a promising framework for solving partial differential equations, the standard $L^2$ loss formulation is fundamentally insufficient when applied to the Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (BGK) model. Specifically, simply minimizing the standard loss does not guarantee accurate predictions of the macroscopic moments, causing the approximate solutions to fail in captu… ▽ More While Physics-Informed Neural Networks offer a promising framework for solving partial differential equations, the standard $L^2$ loss formulation is fundamentally insufficient when applied to the Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (BGK) model. Specifically, simply minimizing the standard loss does not guarantee accurate predictions of the macroscopic moments, causing the approximate solutions to fail in capturing the true physical solution. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a velocity-weighted $L^2$ loss function designed to effectively penalize errors in the high-velocity regions. By establishing a stability estimate for the proposed approach, we shows that minimizing the proposed weighted loss guarantees the convergence of the approximate solution. Also, numerical experiments demonstrate that employing this weighted PINN loss leads to superior accuracy and robustness across various benchmarks compared to the standard approach. △ Less

Submitted 4 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Comments: 26 pages, 9 figures

MSC Class: 68T07 (Primary) 82C40; 65M12; 65M70; 65M99 (Secondary)

DynaVid: Learning to Generate Highly Dynamic Videos using Synthetic Motion Data

Authors: Wonjoon Jin, Jiyun Won, Janghyeok Han, Qi Dai, Chong Luo, Seung-Hwan Baek, Sunghyun Cho

Abstract: Despite recent progress, video diffusion models still struggle to synthesize realistic videos involving highly dynamic motions or requiring fine-grained motion controllability. A central limitation lies in the scarcity of such examples in commonly used training datasets. To address this, we introduce DynaVid, a video synthesis framework that leverages synthetic motion data in training, which is re… ▽ More Despite recent progress, video diffusion models still struggle to synthesize realistic videos involving highly dynamic motions or requiring fine-grained motion controllability. A central limitation lies in the scarcity of such examples in commonly used training datasets. To address this, we introduce DynaVid, a video synthesis framework that leverages synthetic motion data in training, which is represented as optical flow and rendered using computer graphics pipelines. This approach offers two key advantages. First, synthetic motion offers diverse motion patterns and precise control signals that are difficult to obtain from real data. Second, unlike rendered videos with artificial appearances, rendered optical flow encodes only motion and is decoupled from appearance, thereby preventing models from reproducing the unnatural look of synthetic videos. Building on this idea, DynaVid adopts a two-stage generation framework: a motion generator first synthesizes motion, and then a motion-guided video generator produces video frames conditioned on that motion. This decoupled formulation enables the model to learn dynamic motion patterns from synthetic data while preserving visual realism from real-world videos. We validate our framework on two challenging scenarios, vigorous human motion generation and extreme camera motion control, where existing datasets are particularly limited. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DynaVid improves the realism and controllability in dynamic motion generation and camera motion control. △ Less

Submitted 2 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Comments: Accepted to CVPR 2026. Website: https://jinwonjoon.github.io/DynaVid/

Test-Time Scaling Makes Overtraining Compute-Optimal

Authors: Nicholas Roberts, Sungjun Cho, Zhiqi Gao, Tzu-Heng Huang, Albert Wu, Gabriel Orlanski, Avi Trost, Kelly Buchanan, Aws Albarghouthi, Frederic Sala

Abstract: Modern LLMs scale at test-time, e.g. via repeated sampling, where inference cost grows with model size and the number of samples. This creates a trade-off that pretraining scaling laws, such as Chinchilla, do not address. We present Train-to-Test ($T^2$) scaling laws that jointly optimize model size, training tokens, and number of inference samples under fixed end-to-end budgets. $T^2$ modernizes… ▽ More Modern LLMs scale at test-time, e.g. via repeated sampling, where inference cost grows with model size and the number of samples. This creates a trade-off that pretraining scaling laws, such as Chinchilla, do not address. We present Train-to-Test ($T^2$) scaling laws that jointly optimize model size, training tokens, and number of inference samples under fixed end-to-end budgets. $T^2$ modernizes pretraining scaling laws with pass@$k$ modeling used for test-time scaling, then jointly optimizes pretraining and test-time decisions. Forecasts from $T^2$ are robust over distinct modeling approaches: measuring joint scaling effect on the task loss and modeling impact on task accuracy. Across eight downstream tasks, we find that when accounting for inference cost, optimal pretraining decisions shift radically into the overtraining regime, well-outside of the range of standard pretraining scaling suites. We validate our results by pretraining heavily overtrained models in the optimal region that $T^2$ scaling forecasts, confirming their substantially stronger performance compared to pretraining scaling alone. Finally, as frontier LLMs are post-trained, we show that our findings survive the post-training stage, making $T^2$ scaling meaningful in modern deployments. △ Less

Submitted 1 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

MEDIC-AD: Towards Medical Vision-Language Model's Clinical Intelligence

Authors: Woohyeon Park, Jaeik Kim, Sunghwan Steve Cho, Pa Hong, Wookyoung Jeong, Yoojin Nam, Namjoon Kim, Ginny Y. Wong, Ka Chun Cheung, Jaeyoung Do

Abstract: Lesion detection, symptom tracking, and visual explainability are central to real-world medical image analysis, yet current medical Vision-Language Models (VLMs) still lack mechanisms that translate their broad knowledge into clinically actionable outputs. To bridge this gap, we present MEDIC-AD, a clinically oriented VLM that strengthens these three capabilities through a stage-wise framework. Fi… ▽ More Lesion detection, symptom tracking, and visual explainability are central to real-world medical image analysis, yet current medical Vision-Language Models (VLMs) still lack mechanisms that translate their broad knowledge into clinically actionable outputs. To bridge this gap, we present MEDIC-AD, a clinically oriented VLM that strengthens these three capabilities through a stage-wise framework. First, learnable anomaly-aware tokens (<Ano>) encourage the model to focus on abnormal regions and build more discriminative lesion centered representations. Second, inter image difference tokens (<Diff>) explicitly encode temporal changes between studies, allowing the model to distinguish worsening, improvement, and stability in disease burden. Finally, a dedicated explainability stage trains the model to generate heatmaps that highlight lesion-related regions, offering clear visual evidence that is consistent with the model's reasoning. Through our staged design, MEDIC-AD steadily boosts performance across anomaly detection, symptom tracking, and anomaly segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art results compared with both closed source and medical-specialized baselines. Evaluations on real longitudinal clinical data collected from real hospital workflows further show that MEDIC-AD delivers stable predictions and clinically faithful explanations in practical patient-monitoring and decision-support workflows △ Less

Submitted 28 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Journal ref: CVPR 2026

LLMORPH: Automated Metamorphic Testing of Large Language Models

Authors: Steven Cho, Stefano Ruberto, Valerio Terragni

Abstract: Automated testing is essential for evaluating and improving the reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the lack of automated oracles for verifying output correctness remains a key challenge. We present LLMORPH, an automated testing tool specifically designed for LLMs performing NLP tasks, which leverages Metamorphic Testing (MT) to uncover faulty behaviors without relying on human-labele… ▽ More Automated testing is essential for evaluating and improving the reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the lack of automated oracles for verifying output correctness remains a key challenge. We present LLMORPH, an automated testing tool specifically designed for LLMs performing NLP tasks, which leverages Metamorphic Testing (MT) to uncover faulty behaviors without relying on human-labeled data. MT uses Metamorphic Relations (MRs) to generate follow-up inputs from source test input, enabling detection of inconsistencies in model outputs without the need of expensive labelled data. LLMORPH is aimed at researchers and developers who want to evaluate the robustness of LLM-based NLP systems. In this paper, we detail the design, implementation, and practical usage of LLMORPH, demonstrating how it can be easily extended to any LLM, NLP task, and set of MRs. In our evaluation, we applied 36 MRs across four NLP benchmarks, testing three state-of-the-art LLMs: GPT-4, LLAMA3, and HERMES 2. This produced over 561,000 test executions. Results demonstrate LLMORPH's effectiveness in automatically exposing inconsistencies. △ Less

Submitted 24 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: Accepted for publication in the 40th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2025). This arXiv version is the authors' accepted manuscript. DOI: 10.1109/ASE63991.2025.00385 Code: github.com/steven-b-cho/llmorph

ACM Class: D.2.5; I.2.7

Journal ref: 40th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2025)

DALDALL: Data Augmentation for Lexical and Semantic Diverse in Legal Domain by leveraging LLM-Persona

Authors: Janghyeok Choi, Jaewon Lee, Sungzoon Cho

Abstract: Data scarcity remains a persistent challenge in low-resource domains. While existing data augmentation methods leverage the generative capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to produce large volumes of synthetic data, these approaches often prioritize quantity over quality and lack domain-specific strategies. In this work, we introduce DALDALL, a persona-based data augmentation framework tai… ▽ More Data scarcity remains a persistent challenge in low-resource domains. While existing data augmentation methods leverage the generative capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to produce large volumes of synthetic data, these approaches often prioritize quantity over quality and lack domain-specific strategies. In this work, we introduce DALDALL, a persona-based data augmentation framework tailored for legal information retrieval (IR). Our method employs domain-specific professional personas--such as attorneys, prosecutors, and judges--to generate synthetic queries that exhibit substantially greater lexical and semantic diversity than vanilla prompting approaches. Experiments on the CLERC and COLIEE benchmarks demonstrate that persona-based augmentation achieves improvement in lexical diversity as measured by Self-BLEU scores, while preserving semantic fidelity to the original queries. Furthermore, dense retrievers fine-tuned on persona-augmented data consistently achieve competitive or superior recall performance compared to those trained on original data or generic augmentations. These findings establish persona-based prompting as an effective strategy for generating high-quality training data in specialized, low-resource domains. △ Less

Submitted 23 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Dynamic Exposure Burst Image Restoration

Authors: Woohyeok Kim, Jaesung Rim, Daeyeon Kim, Sunghyun Cho

Abstract: Burst image restoration aims to reconstruct a high-quality image from burst images, which are typically captured using manually designed exposure settings. Although these exposure settings significantly influence the final restoration performance, the problem of finding optimal exposure settings has been overlooked. In this paper, we present Dynamic Exposure Burst Image Restoration (DEBIR), a nove… ▽ More Burst image restoration aims to reconstruct a high-quality image from burst images, which are typically captured using manually designed exposure settings. Although these exposure settings significantly influence the final restoration performance, the problem of finding optimal exposure settings has been overlooked. In this paper, we present Dynamic Exposure Burst Image Restoration (DEBIR), a novel burst image restoration pipeline that enhances restoration quality by dynamically predicting exposure times tailored to the shooting environment. In our pipeline, Burst Auto-Exposure Network (BAENet) estimates the optimal exposure time for each burst image based on a preview image, as well as motion magnitude and gain. Subsequently, a burst image restoration network reconstructs a high-quality image from burst images captured using these optimal exposure times. For training, we introduce a differentiable burst simulator and a three-stage training strategy. Our experiments demonstrate that our pipeline achieves state-of-the-art restoration quality. Furthermore, we validate the effectiveness of our approach on a real-world camera system, demonstrating its practicality. △ Less

Submitted 23 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

GateANN: I/O-Efficient Filtered Vector Search on SSDs

Authors: Nakyung Lee, Soobin Cho, Jiwoong Park, Gyuyeong Kim

Abstract: We present GateANN, an I/O-efficient SSD-based graph ANNS system that supports filtered vector search on an unmodified graph index. Existing SSD-based systems either waste I/O by post-filtering, or require expensive filter-aware index rebuilds. GateANN avoids both by decoupling graph traversal from vector retrieval. Our key insight is that traversing a node requires only its neighbor list and an a… ▽ More We present GateANN, an I/O-efficient SSD-based graph ANNS system that supports filtered vector search on an unmodified graph index. Existing SSD-based systems either waste I/O by post-filtering, or require expensive filter-aware index rebuilds. GateANN avoids both by decoupling graph traversal from vector retrieval. Our key insight is that traversing a node requires only its neighbor list and an approximate distance, neither of which needs the full-precision vector on SSD. Based on this, GateANN introduces graph tunneling. It checks each node's filter predicate in memory before issuing I/O and routes through non-matching nodes entirely in memory, preserving graph connectivity without any SSD read for non-matching nodes. Our experimental results show that it reduces SSD reads by up to 10x and improves throughput by up to 7.6x. △ Less

Submitted 26 March, 2026; v1 submitted 22 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Diabetic Retinopathy Grading with CLIP-based Ranking-Aware Adaptation:A Comparative Study on Fundus Image

Authors: Sungjun Cho

Abstract: Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of preventable blindness, and automated fundus image grading can play an important role in large-scale screening. In this work, we investigate three CLIP-based approaches for five-class DR severity grading: (1) a zero-shot baseline using prompt engineering, (2) a hybrid FCN-CLIP model augmented with CBAM attention, and (3) a ranking-aware prompting mode… ▽ More Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of preventable blindness, and automated fundus image grading can play an important role in large-scale screening. In this work, we investigate three CLIP-based approaches for five-class DR severity grading: (1) a zero-shot baseline using prompt engineering, (2) a hybrid FCN-CLIP model augmented with CBAM attention, and (3) a ranking-aware prompting model that encodes the ordinal structure of DR progression. We train and evaluate on a combined dataset of APTOS 2019 and Messidor-2 (n=5,406), addressing class imbalance through resampling and class-specific optimal thresholding. Our experiments show that the ranking-aware model achieves the highest overall accuracy (93.42%, AUROC 0.9845) and strong recall on clinically critical severe cases, while the hybrid FCN-CLIP model (92.49%, AUROC 0.99) excels at detecting proliferative DR. Both substantially outperform the zero-shot baseline (55.17%, AUROC 0.75). We analyze the complementary strengths of each approach and discuss their practical implications for screening contexts. △ Less

Submitted 12 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

System-Technology Co-Optimization of Bitline Routing and Bonding Pathways in Monolithic 3D DRAM Architectures

Authors: Kiseok Lee, Sungwon Cho, Seongkwang Lim, Suman Datta, Shimeng Yu

Abstract: 3D DRAM has emerged as a promising approach for continued density scaling, but its viability is limited by routing and hybrid bonding constraints to periphery, which may degrade sensing margin, latency, and array efficiency. With device characteristics and array parasitics extracted from TCAD, SPICE simulations are performed with peri logic in a CMOS-Bonded-Array (CBA). The analysis shows that the… ▽ More 3D DRAM has emerged as a promising approach for continued density scaling, but its viability is limited by routing and hybrid bonding constraints to periphery, which may degrade sensing margin, latency, and array efficiency. With device characteristics and array parasitics extracted from TCAD, SPICE simulations are performed with peri logic in a CMOS-Bonded-Array (CBA). The analysis shows that the bitline strap architecture with amorphous oxide semiconductor (AOS) selectors is essential to manage routing congestion and parasitics. The optimized design achieves a bit density of 2.6 Gb/mm^2 (137 layers with Si access transistors or 87 layers with AOS), representing ~6x density scaling over D1b 2D DRAM. The design further demonstrates a nominal row cycle time (tRC) of 10.5 ns, compared to 21.3 ns in D1b, and a 60% reduction in read/write energy. △ Less

Submitted 12 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: 4 pages, 9 figures, 1 table

Transductive Generalization via Optimal Transport and Its Application to Graph Node Classification

Authors: MoonJeong Park, Seungbeom Lee, Kyungmin Kim, Jaeseung Heo, Seunghyuk Cho, Shouheng Li, Sangdon Park, Dongwoo Kim

Abstract: Many existing transductive bounds rely on classical complexity measures that are computationally intractable and often misaligned with empirical behavior. In this work, we establish new representation-based generalization bounds in a distribution-free transductive setting, where learned representations are dependent, and test features are accessible during training. We derive global and class-wise… ▽ More Many existing transductive bounds rely on classical complexity measures that are computationally intractable and often misaligned with empirical behavior. In this work, we establish new representation-based generalization bounds in a distribution-free transductive setting, where learned representations are dependent, and test features are accessible during training. We derive global and class-wise bounds via optimal transport, expressed in terms of Wasserstein distances between encoded feature distributions. We demonstrate that our bounds are efficiently computable and strongly correlate with empirical generalization in graph node classification, improving upon classical complexity measures. Additionally, our analysis reveals how the GNN aggregation process transforms the representation distributions, inducing a trade-off between intra-class concentration and inter-class separation. This yields depth-dependent characterizations that capture the non-monotonic relationship between depth and generalization error observed in practice. The code is available at https://github.com/ml-postech/Transductive-OT-Gen-Bound. △ Less

Submitted 10 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Physics-informed AI Accelerated Retention Analysis of Ferroelectric Vertical NAND: From Day-Scale TCAD to Second-Scale Surrogate Model

Authors: Gyujun Jeong, Sungwon Cho, Minji Shon, Namhoon Kim, Woohyun Hwang, Kwangyou Seo, Suhwan Lim, Wanki Kim, Daewon Ha, Prasanna Venkatesan, Kihang Youn, Ram Cherukuri, Yiyi Wang, Suman Datta, Asif Khan, Shimeng Yu

Abstract: Ferroelectric field-effect transistors (FeFET)-based vertical NAND (Fe-VNAND) has emerged as a promising candidate to overcome z-scaling limitations with lower programming voltages. However, the data retention of 3D Fe-VNAND is hindered by the complex interaction between charge detrapping and ferroelectric depolarization. Developing optimized device designs requires exploring an extensive paramete… ▽ More Ferroelectric field-effect transistors (FeFET)-based vertical NAND (Fe-VNAND) has emerged as a promising candidate to overcome z-scaling limitations with lower programming voltages. However, the data retention of 3D Fe-VNAND is hindered by the complex interaction between charge detrapping and ferroelectric depolarization. Developing optimized device designs requires exploring an extensive parameter space, but the high computational cost of conventional Technology Computer-Aided Design (TCAD) tools makes such wide-scale optimization impractical. To overcome these simulation barriers, we present a Physics-Informed Neural Operator (PINO)-based AI surrogate model designed for high-efficiency prediction of threshold voltage (Vth) shifts and retention behavior. By embedding fundamental physical principles into the learning architecture, our PINO framework achieves a speedup exceeding 10000x compared to TCAD while maintaining physical accuracy. This study demonstrates the model's effectiveness on a single FeFET configuration, serving as a pathway toward modeling the retention loss mechanisms. △ Less

Submitted 13 April, 2026; v1 submitted 6 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: 4 pages, 6 figures, to be published in ICMC (International Compact Modeling Conference)

An Interpretable Local Editing Model for Counterfactual Medical Image Generation

Authors: Hyungi Min, Taeseung You, Hangyeul Lee, Yeongjae Cho, Sungzoon Cho

Abstract: Counterfactual medical image generation have emerged as a critical tool for enhancing AI-driven systems in medical domain by answering "what-if" questions. However, existing approaches face two fundamental limitations: First, they fail to prevent unintended modifications, resulting collateral changes in demographic attributes when only disease features should be affected. Second, they lack interpr… ▽ More Counterfactual medical image generation have emerged as a critical tool for enhancing AI-driven systems in medical domain by answering "what-if" questions. However, existing approaches face two fundamental limitations: First, they fail to prevent unintended modifications, resulting collateral changes in demographic attributes when only disease features should be affected. Second, they lack interpretability in their editing process, which significantly limits their utility in real-world medical applications. To address these limitations, we present InstructX2X, a novel interpretable local editing model for counterfactual medical image generation featuring Region-Specific Editing. This approach restricts modifications to specific regions, effectively preventing unintended changes while simultaneously providing a Guidance Map that offers inherently interpretable visual explanations of the editing process. Additionally, we introduce MIMIC-EDIT-INSTRUCTION, a dataset for counterfactual medical image generation derived from expert-verified medical VQA pairs. Through extensive experiments, InstructX2X achieve state-of-the-art performance across all major evaluation metrics. Our model successfully generates high-quality counterfactual chest X-ray images along with interpretable explanations. △ Less

Submitted 27 February, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Humanoid Robots as First Assistants in Endoscopic Surgery

Authors: Sue Min Cho, Jan Emily Mangulabnan, Han Zhang, Zhekai Mao, Yufan He, Pengfei Guo, Daguang Xu, Gregory Hager, Masaru Ishii, Mathias Unberath

Abstract: Humanoid robots have become a focal point of technological ambition, with claims of surgical capability within years in mainstream discourse. These projections are aspirational yet lack empirical grounding. To date, no humanoid has assisted a surgeon through an actual procedure, let alone performed one. The work described here breaks this new ground. Here we report a proof of concept in which a te… ▽ More Humanoid robots have become a focal point of technological ambition, with claims of surgical capability within years in mainstream discourse. These projections are aspirational yet lack empirical grounding. To date, no humanoid has assisted a surgeon through an actual procedure, let alone performed one. The work described here breaks this new ground. Here we report a proof of concept in which a teleoperated Unitree G1 provided endoscopic visualization while an attending otolaryngologist performed a cadaveric sphenoidectomy. The procedure was completed successfully, with stable visualization maintained throughout. Teleoperation allowed assessment of whether the humanoid form factor could meet the physical demands of surgical assistance in terms of sustenance and precision; the cognitive demands were satisfied -- for now -- by the operator. Post-procedure analysis identified engineering targets for clinical translation, alongside near-term opportunities such as autonomous diagnostic scoping. This work establishes form-factor feasibility for humanoid surgical assistance while identifying challenges for continued development. △ Less

Submitted 27 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

Accelerating Diffusion via Hybrid Data-Pipeline Parallelism Based on Conditional Guidance Scheduling

Authors: Euisoo Jung, Byunghyun Kim, Hyunjin Kim, Seonghye Cho, Jae-Gil Lee

Abstract: Diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in high-fidelity image, video, and audio generation, yet inference remains computationally expensive. Nevertheless, current diffusion acceleration methods based on distributed parallelism suffer from noticeable generation artifacts and fail to achieve substantial acceleration proportional to the number of GPUs. Therefore, we propose a hybrid paral… ▽ More Diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in high-fidelity image, video, and audio generation, yet inference remains computationally expensive. Nevertheless, current diffusion acceleration methods based on distributed parallelism suffer from noticeable generation artifacts and fail to achieve substantial acceleration proportional to the number of GPUs. Therefore, we propose a hybrid parallelism framework that combines a novel data parallel strategy, condition-based partitioning, with an optimal pipeline scheduling method, adaptive parallelism switching, to reduce generation latency and achieve high generation quality in conditional diffusion models. The key ideas are to (i) leverage the conditional and unconditional denoising paths as a new data-partitioning perspective and (ii) adaptively enable optimal pipeline parallelism according to the denoising discrepancy between these two paths. Our framework achieves $2.31\times$ and $2.07\times$ latency reductions on SDXL and SD3, respectively, using two NVIDIA RTX~3090 GPUs, while preserving image quality. This result confirms the generality of our approach across U-Net-based diffusion models and DiT-based flow-matching architectures. Our approach also outperforms existing methods in acceleration under high-resolution synthesis settings. Code is available at https://github.com/kaist-dmlab/Hybridiff. △ Less

Submitted 25 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

Training-free Composition of Pre-trained GFlowNets for Multi-Objective Generation

Authors: Seokwon Yoon, Youngbin Choi, Seunghyuk Cho, Seungbeom Lee, MoonJeong Park, Dongwoo Kim

Abstract: Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) learn to sample diverse candidates in proportion to a reward function, making them well-suited for scientific discovery, where exploring multiple promising solutions is crucial. Further extending GFlowNets to multi-objective settings has attracted growing interest since real-world applications often involve multiple, conflicting objectives. However, existing ap… ▽ More Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) learn to sample diverse candidates in proportion to a reward function, making them well-suited for scientific discovery, where exploring multiple promising solutions is crucial. Further extending GFlowNets to multi-objective settings has attracted growing interest since real-world applications often involve multiple, conflicting objectives. However, existing approaches require additional training for each set of objectives, limiting their applicability and incurring substantial computational overhead. We propose a training-free mixing policy that composes pre-trained GFlowNets at inference time, enabling rapid adaptation without finetuning or retraining. Importantly, our framework is flexible, capable of handling diverse reward combinations ranging from linear scalarization to complex non-linear logical operators, which are often handled separately in previous literature. We prove that our method exactly recovers the target distribution for linear scalarization and quantify the approximation quality for nonlinear operators through a distortion factor. Experiments on a synthetic 2D grid and real-world molecule-generation tasks demonstrate that our approach achieves performance comparable to baselines that require additional training. △ Less

Submitted 24 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

Comments: 22 pages, 12 figures, 12 tables

Dark and Bright Side of Participatory Red-Teaming with Targets of Stereotyping for Eliciting Harmful Behaviors from Large Language Models

Authors: Sieun Kim, Yeeun Jo, Sungmin Na, Hyunseung Lim, Eunchae Lee, Yu Min Choi, Soohyun Cho, Hwajung Hong

Abstract: Red-teaming, where adversarial prompts are crafted to expose harmful behaviors and assess risks, offers a dynamic approach to surfacing underlying stereotypical bias in large language models. Because such subtle harms are best recognized by those with lived experience, involving targets of stereotyping as red-teamers is essential. However, critical challenges remain in leveraging their lived exper… ▽ More Red-teaming, where adversarial prompts are crafted to expose harmful behaviors and assess risks, offers a dynamic approach to surfacing underlying stereotypical bias in large language models. Because such subtle harms are best recognized by those with lived experience, involving targets of stereotyping as red-teamers is essential. However, critical challenges remain in leveraging their lived experience for red-teaming while safeguarding psychological well-being. We conducted an empirical study of participatory red-teaming with 20 individuals stigmatized by stereotypes against nonprestigious college graduates in South Korea. Through mixed methods analysis, we found participants transformed experienced discrimination into strategic expertise for identifying biases, while facing psychological costs such as stress and negative reflections on group identity. Notably, red-team participation enhanced their sense of agency and empowerment through their role as guardians of the AI ecosystem. We discuss implications for designing participatory red-teaming that prioritizes both the ethical treatment and empowerment of stigmatized groups. △ Less

Submitted 22 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

Comments: 20 pages, 4 tables, 3 figures. Accepted to CHI 2026, April 13-17, 2026, Barcelona, Spain

Value Entanglement: Conflation Between Different Kinds of Good In (Some) Large Language Models

Authors: Seong Hah Cho, Junyi Li, Anna Leshinskaya

Abstract: Value alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) requires us to empirically measure these models' actual, acquired representation of value. Among the characteristics of value representation in humans is that they distinguish among value of different kinds. We investigate whether LLMs likewise distinguish three different kinds of good: moral, grammatical, and economic. By probing model behavior, emb… ▽ More Value alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) requires us to empirically measure these models' actual, acquired representation of value. Among the characteristics of value representation in humans is that they distinguish among value of different kinds. We investigate whether LLMs likewise distinguish three different kinds of good: moral, grammatical, and economic. By probing model behavior, embeddings, and residual stream activations, we report pervasive cases of value entanglement: a conflation between these distinct representations of value. Specifically, both grammatical and economic valuation was found to be overly influenced by moral value, relative to human norms. This conflation was repaired by selective ablation of the activation vectors associated with morality. △ Less

Submitted 22 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

Habilis-$β$: A Fast-Motion and Long-Lasting On-Device Vision-Language-Action Model

Authors: Tommoro Robotics, :, Jesoon Kang, Taegeon Park, Jisu An, Soo Min Kimm, Jaejoon Kim, Jinu Pahk, Byungju Kim, Junseok Lee, Namheon Baek, Sungwan Ha, Hojun Baek, Eduardo Ayerve Cruz, Wontae Kim, Junghyeon Choi, Yousuk Lee, Joonmo Han, Sunghyun Cho, Sunghyun Kwon, Soyoung Lee, Jun Ki Lee, Seung-Joon Yi, Byoung-Tak Zhang, Theo Taeyeong Kim

Abstract: We introduce Habilis-$β$, a fast-motion and long-lasting on-device vision-language-action (VLA) model designed for real-world deployment. Current VLA evaluation remains largely confined to single-trial success rates under curated resets, which fails to capture the fast-motion and long-lasting capabilities essential for practical operation. To address this, we introduce the Productivity-Reliability… ▽ More We introduce Habilis-$β$, a fast-motion and long-lasting on-device vision-language-action (VLA) model designed for real-world deployment. Current VLA evaluation remains largely confined to single-trial success rates under curated resets, which fails to capture the fast-motion and long-lasting capabilities essential for practical operation. To address this, we introduce the Productivity-Reliability Plane (PRP), which evaluates performance through Tasks per Hour (TPH) and Mean Time Between Intervention (MTBI) under a continuous-run protocol that demands both high-speed execution and sustained robustness. Habilis-$β$ achieves high performance by integrating language-free pre-training on large-scale play data for robust interaction priors with post-training on cyclic task demonstrations that capture state drift across consecutive task iterations. The system further employs ESPADA for phase-adaptive motion shaping to accelerate free-space transit, utilizes rectified-flow distillation to enable high-frequency control on edge devices, and incorporates classifier-free guidance (CFG) as a deployment-time knob to dynamically balance instruction adherence and learned interaction priors. In 1-hour continuous-run evaluations, Habilis-$β$ achieves strong performance under the PRP metrics, compared to $π_{0.5}$ in both simulation and real-world environments. In simulation, Habilis-$β$ achieves 572.6 TPH and 39.2 s MTBI (vs. 120.5 TPH and 30.5 s for $π_{0.5}$), while in a real-world humanoid logistics workflow it achieves 124 TPH and 137.4 s MTBI (vs. 19 TPH and 46.1 s for $π_{0.5}$). Finally, Habilis-$β$ achieves the highest reported performance on the standard RoboTwin 2.0 leaderboard across representative tasks, validating its effectiveness in complex manipulation scenarios. △ Less

Submitted 21 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

ReHear: Iterative Pseudo-Label Refinement for Semi-Supervised Speech Recognition via Audio Large Language Models

Authors: Zefang Liu, Chenyang Zhu, Sangwoo Cho, Shi-Xiong Zhang

Abstract: Semi-supervised learning in automatic speech recognition (ASR) typically relies on pseudo-labeling, which often suffers from confirmation bias and error accumulation due to noisy supervision. To address this limitation, we propose ReHear, a framework for iterative pseudo-label refinement that integrates an instruction-tuned, audio-aware large language model (LLM) into the self-training loop. Unlik… ▽ More Semi-supervised learning in automatic speech recognition (ASR) typically relies on pseudo-labeling, which often suffers from confirmation bias and error accumulation due to noisy supervision. To address this limitation, we propose ReHear, a framework for iterative pseudo-label refinement that integrates an instruction-tuned, audio-aware large language model (LLM) into the self-training loop. Unlike conventional text-based correctors, our approach conditions the LLM on both the ASR hypothesis and the source audio, allowing it to recover phonetically accurate transcripts even from severe recognition errors. These refined pseudo-labels serve as high-fidelity targets for fine-tuning the ASR model in an iterative cycle. Experimental results across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that ReHear effectively mitigates error propagation, consistently outperforming both supervised and pseudo-labeling baselines. △ Less

Submitted 21 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

TopoGate: Quality-Aware Topology-Stabilized Gated Fusion for Longitudinal Low-Dose CT New-Lesion Prediction

Authors: Seungik Cho

Abstract: Longitudinal low-dose CT follow-ups vary in noise, reconstruction kernels, and registration quality. These differences destabilize subtraction images and can trigger false new lesion alarms. We present TopoGate, a lightweight model that combines the follow-up appearance view with the subtraction view and controls their influence through a learned, quality-aware gate. The gate is driven by three ca… ▽ More Longitudinal low-dose CT follow-ups vary in noise, reconstruction kernels, and registration quality. These differences destabilize subtraction images and can trigger false new lesion alarms. We present TopoGate, a lightweight model that combines the follow-up appearance view with the subtraction view and controls their influence through a learned, quality-aware gate. The gate is driven by three case-specific signals: CT appearance quality, registration consistency, and stability of anatomical topology measured with topological metrics. On the NLST--New-Lesion--LongCT cohort comprising 152 pairs from 122 patients, TopoGate improves discrimination and calibration over single-view baselines, achieving an area under the ROC curve of 0.65 with a standard deviation of 0.05 and a Brier score of 0.14. Removing corrupted or low-quality pairs, identified by the quality scores, further increases the area under the ROC curve from 0.62 to 0.68 and reduces the Brier score from 0.14 to 0.12. The gate responds predictably to degradation, placing more weight on appearance when noise grows, which mirrors radiologist practice. The approach is simple, interpretable, and practical for reliable longitudinal LDCT triage. △ Less

Submitted 19 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

A Systematic Evaluation of Sample-Level Tokenization Strategies for MEG Foundation Models

Authors: SungJun Cho, Chetan Gohil, Rukuang Huang, Oiwi Parker Jones, Mark W. Woolrich

Abstract: Recent success in natural language processing has motivated growing interest in large-scale foundation models for neuroimaging data. Such models often require discretization of continuous neural time series data, a process referred to as 'tokenization'. However, the impact of different tokenization strategies for neural data is currently poorly understood. In this work, we present a systematic eva… ▽ More Recent success in natural language processing has motivated growing interest in large-scale foundation models for neuroimaging data. Such models often require discretization of continuous neural time series data, a process referred to as 'tokenization'. However, the impact of different tokenization strategies for neural data is currently poorly understood. In this work, we present a systematic evaluation of sample-level tokenization strategies for transformer-based large neuroimaging models (LNMs) applied to magnetoencephalography (MEG) data. We compare learnable and non-learnable tokenizers by examining their signal reconstruction fidelity and their impact on subsequent foundation modeling performance (token prediction, biological plausibility of generated data, preservation of subject-specific information, and performance on downstream tasks). For the learnable tokenizer, we introduce a novel approach based on an autoencoder. Experiments were conducted on three publicly available MEG datasets spanning different acquisition sites, scanners, and experimental paradigms. Our results show that both learnable and non-learnable discretization schemes achieve high reconstruction accuracy and broadly comparable performance across most evaluation criteria, suggesting that simple fixed sample-level tokenization strategies can be used in the development of neural foundation models. The code is available at https://github.com/OHBA-analysis/Cho2026_Tokenizer. △ Less

Submitted 18 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

Comments: 15 pages, 10 figures, 1 table

Control Reinforcement Learning: Interpretable Token-Level Steering of LLMs via Sparse Autoencoder Features

Authors: Seonglae Cho, Zekun Wu, Adriano Koshiyama

Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose language model activations into interpretable features, but existing methods reveal only which features activate, not which change model outputs when amplified. We introduce Control Reinforcement Learning (CRL), which trains a policy to select SAE features for steering at each token, producing interpretable intervention logs: the learned policy identifies featu… ▽ More Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose language model activations into interpretable features, but existing methods reveal only which features activate, not which change model outputs when amplified. We introduce Control Reinforcement Learning (CRL), which trains a policy to select SAE features for steering at each token, producing interpretable intervention logs: the learned policy identifies features that change model outputs when amplified. Adaptive Feature Masking encourages diverse feature discovery while preserving singlefeature interpretability. The framework yields new analysis capabilities: branch point tracking locates tokens where feature choice determines output correctness; critic trajectory analysis separates policy limitations from value estimation errors; layer-wise comparison reveals syntactic features in early layers and semantic features in later layers. On Gemma 2 2B across MMLU, BBQ, GSM8K, HarmBench, and XSTest, CRL achieves improvements while providing per-token intervention logs. These results establish learned feature steering as a mechanistic interpretability tool that complements static feature analysis with dynamic intervention probes △ Less

Submitted 11 February, 2026; v1 submitted 10 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

MATA: Multi-Agent Framework for Reliable and Flexible Table Question Answering

Authors: Sieun Hyeon, Jusang Oh, Sunghwan Steve Cho, Jaeyoung Do

Abstract: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly improved table understanding tasks such as Table Question Answering (TableQA), yet challenges remain in ensuring reliability, scalability, and efficiency, especially in resource-constrained or privacy-sensitive environments. In this paper, we introduce MATA, a multi-agent TableQA framework that leverages multiple complementary reas… ▽ More Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly improved table understanding tasks such as Table Question Answering (TableQA), yet challenges remain in ensuring reliability, scalability, and efficiency, especially in resource-constrained or privacy-sensitive environments. In this paper, we introduce MATA, a multi-agent TableQA framework that leverages multiple complementary reasoning paths and a set of tools built with small language models. MATA generates candidate answers through diverse reasoning styles for a given table and question, then refines or selects the optimal answer with the help of these tools. Furthermore, it incorporates an algorithm designed to minimize expensive LLM agent calls, enhancing overall efficiency. MATA maintains strong performance with small, open-source models and adapts easily across various LLM types. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks of varying difficulty with ten different LLMs demonstrate that MATA achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and highly efficient reasoning while avoiding excessive LLM inference. Our results highlight that careful orchestration of multiple reasoning pathways yields scalable and reliable TableQA. The code is available at https://github.com/AIDAS-Lab/MATA. △ Less

Submitted 10 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

The Confidence Manifold: Geometric Structure of Correctness Representations in Language Models

Authors: Seonglae Cho, Zekun Wu, Kleyton Da Costa, Adriano Koshiyama

Abstract: When a language model asserts that "the capital of Australia is Sydney," does it know this is wrong? We characterize the geometry of correctness representations across 9 models from 5 architecture families. The structure is simple: the discriminative signal occupies 3-8 dimensions, performance degrades with additional dimensions, and no nonlinear classifier improves over linear separation. Centroi… ▽ More When a language model asserts that "the capital of Australia is Sydney," does it know this is wrong? We characterize the geometry of correctness representations across 9 models from 5 architecture families. The structure is simple: the discriminative signal occupies 3-8 dimensions, performance degrades with additional dimensions, and no nonlinear classifier improves over linear separation. Centroid distance in the low-dimensional subspace matches trained probe performance (0.90 AUC), enabling few-shot detection: on GPT-2, 25 labeled examples achieve 89% of full-data accuracy. We validate causally through activation steering: the learned direction produces 10.9 percentage point changes in error rates while random directions show no effect. Internal probes achieve 0.80-0.97 AUC; output-based methods (P(True), semantic entropy) achieve only 0.44-0.64 AUC. The correctness signal exists internally but is not expressed in outputs. That centroid distance matches probe performance indicates class separation is a mean shift, making detection geometric rather than learned. △ Less

Submitted 8 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

DIAL-SUMMER: A Structured Evaluation Framework of Hierarchical Errors in Dialogue Summaries

Authors: Sahana Ramnath, Nima Chitsazan, Mingyang Zhou, Chia-Hsuan Lee, Shi-Xiong Zhang, Stephen Rawls, Sambit Sahu, Sangwoo Cho, Xiang Ren, Genta Indra Winata, Akshaj Kumar Veldanda

Abstract: Dialogues are a predominant mode of communication for humans, and it is immensely helpful to have automatically generated summaries of them (e.g., to revise key points discussed in a meeting, to review conversations between customer agents and product users). Prior works on dialogue summary evaluation largely ignore the complexities specific to this task: (i) shift in structure, from multiple spea… ▽ More Dialogues are a predominant mode of communication for humans, and it is immensely helpful to have automatically generated summaries of them (e.g., to revise key points discussed in a meeting, to review conversations between customer agents and product users). Prior works on dialogue summary evaluation largely ignore the complexities specific to this task: (i) shift in structure, from multiple speakers discussing information in a scattered fashion across several turns, to a summary's sentences, and (ii) shift in narration viewpoint, from speakers' first/second-person narration, standardized third-person narration in the summary. In this work, we introduce our framework DIALSUMMER to address the above. We propose DIAL-SUMMER's taxonomy of errors to comprehensively evaluate dialogue summaries at two hierarchical levels: DIALOGUE-LEVEL that focuses on the broader speakers/turns, and WITHIN-TURN-LEVEL that focuses on the information talked about inside a turn. We then present DIAL-SUMMER's dataset composed of dialogue summaries manually annotated with our taxonomy's fine-grained errors. We conduct empirical analyses of these annotated errors, and observe interesting trends (e.g., turns occurring in middle of the dialogue are the most frequently missed in the summary, extrinsic hallucinations largely occur at the end of the summary). We also conduct experiments on LLM-Judges' capability at detecting these errors, through which we demonstrate the challenging nature of our dataset, the robustness of our taxonomy, and the need for future work in this field to enhance LLMs' performance in the same. Code and inference dataset coming soon. △ Less

Submitted 8 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

TimelyFreeze: Adaptive Parameter Freezing Mechanism for Pipeline Parallelism

Authors: Seonghye Cho, Jaemin Han, Hyunjin Kim, Euisoo Jung, Jae-Gil Lee

Abstract: Pipeline parallelism enables training models that exceed single-device memory, but practical throughput remains limited by pipeline bubbles. Although parameter freezing can improve training throughput by adaptively skipping backward computation, existing methods often over-freeze parameters, resulting in unnecessary accuracy degradation. To address this issue, we propose TimelyFreeze, which models… ▽ More Pipeline parallelism enables training models that exceed single-device memory, but practical throughput remains limited by pipeline bubbles. Although parameter freezing can improve training throughput by adaptively skipping backward computation, existing methods often over-freeze parameters, resulting in unnecessary accuracy degradation. To address this issue, we propose TimelyFreeze, which models the pipeline schedule as a directed acyclic graph and solves a linear program to compute optimal freeze ratios that minimize batch execution time under accuracy constraints. Experiments show that TimelyFreeze achieves up to 40% training throughput improvement on LLaMA-8B with comparable accuracy. Overall, it enables faster large-scale model training without compromising convergence and generalizes across diverse pipeline-parallel settings. △ Less

Submitted 6 February, 2026; v1 submitted 5 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

SCALE: Self-uncertainty Conditioned Adaptive Looking and Execution for Vision-Language-Action Models

Authors: Hyeonbeom Choi, Daechul Ahn, Youhan Lee, Taewook Kang, Seongwon Cho, Jonghyun Choi

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for general-purpose robotic control, with test-time scaling (TTS) gaining attention to enhance robustness beyond training. However, existing TTS methods for VLAs require additional training, verifiers, and multiple forward passes, making them impractical for deployment. Moreover, they intervene only at action decoding while k… ▽ More Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for general-purpose robotic control, with test-time scaling (TTS) gaining attention to enhance robustness beyond training. However, existing TTS methods for VLAs require additional training, verifiers, and multiple forward passes, making them impractical for deployment. Moreover, they intervene only at action decoding while keeping visual representations fixed-insufficient under perceptual ambiguity, where reconsidering how to perceive is as important as deciding what to do. To address these limitations, we propose SCALE, a simple inference strategy that jointly modulates visual perception and action based on 'self-uncertainty', inspired by uncertainty-driven exploration in Active Inference theory-requiring no additional training, no verifier, and only a single forward pass. SCALE broadens exploration in both perception and action under high uncertainty, while focusing on exploitation when confident-enabling adaptive execution across varying conditions. Experiments on simulated and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that SCALE improves state-of-the-art VLAs and outperforms existing TTS methods while maintaining single-pass efficiency. △ Less

Submitted 3 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

Comments: 20 pages, 8 figures

Spectral-Aligned Pruning for Universal Error-Correcting Code Transformers

Authors: Sanghyeon Cho, Taewoo Park, Seong-Joon Park, Dae-Young Yun, Hee-Youl Kwak, Sang-Hyo Kim, Yongjune Kim

Abstract: Recently, the Foundation Error Correction Code Transformer (FECCT) has emerged as a promising universal channel decoder, achieving competitive decoding performance across diverse code families by relying on a single shared model backbone, optionally followed by code-specific retraining. Despite this flexibility, the high computational complexity and large parameter footprint of transformer-based d… ▽ More Recently, the Foundation Error Correction Code Transformer (FECCT) has emerged as a promising universal channel decoder, achieving competitive decoding performance across diverse code families by relying on a single shared model backbone, optionally followed by code-specific retraining. Despite this flexibility, the high computational complexity and large parameter footprint of transformer-based decoders present substantial obstacles to practical deployment. To address these challenges, we investigate structured pruning for FECCT and propose Spectral-Aligned Pruning (SAP), a structure-aware framework that enables cross-code reuse of structured pruning masks across codes by leveraging the spectrum of the corresponding bipartite graph. After pruning, SAP performs per-code recovery via parameter-efficient low-rank adaptation (LoRA), enabling a shared pruned backbone while storing only small code-specific adapter parameters. Experiments across diverse codes show that SAP achieves decoding performance comparable to dedicated per-code pruning, while enabling substantial reductions in computational cost and model memory footprint through kernel-level structured pruning. △ Less

Submitted 4 February, 2026; v1 submitted 1 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

PPoGA: Predictive Plan-on-Graph with Action for Knowledge Graph Question Answering

Authors: MinGyu Jeon, SuWan Cho, JaeYoung Shu

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) augmented with Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have advanced complex question answering, yet they often remain susceptible to failure when their initial high-level reasoning plan is flawed. This limitation, analogous to cognitive functional fixedness, prevents agents from restructuring their approach, leading them to pursue unworkable solutions. To address this, we propose PPoG… ▽ More Large Language Models (LLMs) augmented with Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have advanced complex question answering, yet they often remain susceptible to failure when their initial high-level reasoning plan is flawed. This limitation, analogous to cognitive functional fixedness, prevents agents from restructuring their approach, leading them to pursue unworkable solutions. To address this, we propose PPoGA (Predictive Plan-on-Graph with Action), a novel KGQA framework inspired by human cognitive control and problem-solving. PPoGA incorporates a Planner-Executor architecture to separate high-level strategy from low-level execution and leverages a Predictive Processing mechanism to anticipate outcomes. The core innovation of our work is a self-correction mechanism that empowers the agent to perform not only Path Correction for local execution errors but also Plan Correction by identifying, discarding, and reformulating the entire plan when it proves ineffective. We conduct extensive experiments on three challenging multi-hop KGQA benchmarks: GrailQA, CWQ, and WebQSP. The results demonstrate that PPoGA achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing methods. Our work highlights the critical importance of metacognitive abilities like problem restructuring for building more robust and flexible AI reasoning systems. △ Less

Submitted 22 November, 2025; originally announced February 2026.

PsyProbe: Proactive and Interpretable Dialogue through User State Modeling for Exploratory Counseling

Authors: Sohhyung Park, Hyunji Kang, Sungzoon Cho, Dongil Kim

Abstract: Recent advances in large language models have enabled mental health dialogue systems, yet existing approaches remain predominantly reactive, lacking systematic user state modeling for proactive therapeutic exploration. We introduce PsyProbe, a dialogue system designed for the exploration phase of counseling that systematically tracks user psychological states through the PPPPPI framework (Presenti… ▽ More Recent advances in large language models have enabled mental health dialogue systems, yet existing approaches remain predominantly reactive, lacking systematic user state modeling for proactive therapeutic exploration. We introduce PsyProbe, a dialogue system designed for the exploration phase of counseling that systematically tracks user psychological states through the PPPPPI framework (Presenting, Predisposing, Precipitating, Perpetuating, Protective, Impact) augmented with cognitive error detection. PsyProbe combines State Builder for extracting structured psychological profiles, Memory Construction for tracking information gaps, Strategy Planner for Motivational Interviewing behavioral codes, and Response Generator with Question Ideation and Critic/Revision modules to generate contextually appropriate, proactive questions. We evaluate PsyProbe with 27 participants in real-world Korean counseling scenarios, including automatic evaluation across ablation modes, user evaluation, and expert evaluation by a certified counselor. The full PsyProbe model consistently outperforms baseline and ablation modes in automatic evaluation. User evaluation demonstrates significantly increased engagement intention and improved naturalness compared to baseline. Expert evaluation shows that PsyProbe substantially improves core issue understanding and achieves question rates comparable to professional counselors, validating the effectiveness of systematic state modeling and proactive questioning for therapeutic exploration. △ Less

Submitted 26 January, 2026; originally announced January 2026.

Comments: In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026

Edge-Aware Image Manipulation via Diffusion Models with a Novel Structure-Preservation Loss

Authors: Minsu Gong, Nuri Ryu, Jungseul Ok, Sunghyun Cho

Abstract: Recent advances in image editing leverage latent diffusion models (LDMs) for versatile, text-prompt-driven edits across diverse tasks. Yet, maintaining pixel-level edge structures-crucial for tasks such as photorealistic style transfer or image tone adjustment-remains as a challenge for latent-diffusion-based editing. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel Structure Preservation Loss (SPL… ▽ More Recent advances in image editing leverage latent diffusion models (LDMs) for versatile, text-prompt-driven edits across diverse tasks. Yet, maintaining pixel-level edge structures-crucial for tasks such as photorealistic style transfer or image tone adjustment-remains as a challenge for latent-diffusion-based editing. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel Structure Preservation Loss (SPL) that leverages local linear models to quantify structural differences between input and edited images. Our training-free approach integrates SPL directly into the diffusion model's generative process to ensure structural fidelity. This core mechanism is complemented by a post-processing step to mitigate LDM decoding distortions, a masking strategy for precise edit localization, and a color preservation loss to preserve hues in unedited areas. Experiments confirm SPL enhances structural fidelity, delivering state-of-the-art performance in latent-diffusion-based image editing. Our code will be publicly released at https://github.com/gongms00/SPL. △ Less

Submitted 23 January, 2026; originally announced January 2026.

Comments: Accepted to WACV 2026

Rewarding How Models Think Pedagogically: Integrating Pedagogical Reasoning and Thinking Rewards for LLMs in Education

Authors: Unggi Lee, Jiyeong Bae, Jaehyeon Park, Haeun Park, Taejun Park, Younghoon Jeon, Sungmin Cho, Junbo Koh, Yeil Jeong, Gyeonggeon Lee

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as intelligent tutoring systems, yet research on optimizing LLMs specifically for educational contexts remains limited. Recent works have proposed reinforcement learning approaches for training LLM tutors, but these methods focus solely on optimizing visible responses while neglecting the model's internal thinking process. We introduce Pedagog… ▽ More Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as intelligent tutoring systems, yet research on optimizing LLMs specifically for educational contexts remains limited. Recent works have proposed reinforcement learning approaches for training LLM tutors, but these methods focus solely on optimizing visible responses while neglecting the model's internal thinking process. We introduce PedagogicalRL-Thinking, a framework that extends pedagogical alignment to reasoning LLMs in education through two novel approaches: (1) Pedagogical Reasoning Prompting, which guides internal reasoning using domain-specific educational theory rather than generic instructions; and (2) Thinking Reward, which explicitly evaluates and reinforces the pedagogical quality of the model's reasoning traces. Our experiments reveal that domain-specific, theory-grounded prompting outperforms generic prompting, and that Thinking Reward is most effective when combined with pedagogical prompting. Furthermore, models trained only on mathematics tutoring dialogues show improved performance on educational benchmarks not seen during training, while preserving the base model's factual knowledge. Our quantitative and qualitative analyses reveal that pedagogical thinking reward produces systematic reasoning trace changes, with increased pedagogical reasoning and more structured instructional decision-making in the tutor's thinking process. △ Less

Submitted 20 January, 2026; originally announced January 2026.

OpenLearnLM Benchmark: A Unified Framework for Evaluating Knowledge, Skill, and Attitude in Educational Large Language Models

Authors: Unggi Lee, Sookbun Lee, Heungsoo Choi, Jinseo Lee, Haeun Park, Younghoon Jeon, Sungmin Cho, Minju Kang, Junbo Koh, Jiyeong Bae, Minwoo Nam, Juyeon Eun, Yeonji Jung, Yeil Jeong

Abstract: Large Language Models are increasingly deployed as educational tools, yet existing benchmarks focus on narrow skills and lack grounding in learning sciences. We introduce OpenLearnLM Benchmark, a theory-grounded framework evaluating LLMs across three dimensions derived from educational assessment theory: Knowledge (curriculum-aligned content and pedagogical understanding), Skills (scenario-based c… ▽ More Large Language Models are increasingly deployed as educational tools, yet existing benchmarks focus on narrow skills and lack grounding in learning sciences. We introduce OpenLearnLM Benchmark, a theory-grounded framework evaluating LLMs across three dimensions derived from educational assessment theory: Knowledge (curriculum-aligned content and pedagogical understanding), Skills (scenario-based competencies organized through a four-level center-role-scenario-subscenario hierarchy), and Attitude (alignment consistency and deception resistance). Our benchmark comprises 124K+ items spanning multiple subjects, educational roles, and difficulty levels based on Bloom's taxonomy. The Knowledge domain prioritizes authentic assessment items from established benchmarks, while the Attitude domain adapts Anthropic's Alignment Faking methodology to detect behavioral inconsistency under varying monitoring conditions. Evaluation of seven frontier models reveals distinct capability profiles: Claude-Opus-4.5 excels in practical skills despite lower content knowledge, while Grok-4.1-fast leads in knowledge but shows alignment concerns. Notably, no single model dominates all dimensions, validating the necessity of multi-axis evaluation. OpenLearnLM provides an open, comprehensive framework for advancing LLM readiness in authentic educational contexts. △ Less

Submitted 20 January, 2026; originally announced January 2026.

A.X K1 Technical Report

Authors: Sung Jun Cheon, Jaekyung Cho, Seongho Choi, Hyunjun Eun, Seokhwan Jo, Jaehyun Jun, Minsoo Kang, Jin Kim, Jiwon Kim, Minsang Kim, Seungsik Kim, Sungwan Kim, Tae Yoon Kim, Youngrang Kim, Hyeongmun Lee, Sangyeol Lee, Sungeun Lee, Youngsoon Lee, Yujin Lee, Seongmin Ok, Chanyong Park, Hyewoong Park, Junyoung Park, Hyunho Yang, Subin Yi , et al. (35 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: We introduce A.X K1, a 519B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model trained from scratch. Our design leverages scaling laws to optimize training configurations and vocabulary size under fixed computational budgets. A.X K1 is pre-trained on a corpus of approximately 10T tokens, curated by a multi-stage data processing pipeline. Designed to bridge the gap between reasoning capability and i… ▽ More We introduce A.X K1, a 519B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model trained from scratch. Our design leverages scaling laws to optimize training configurations and vocabulary size under fixed computational budgets. A.X K1 is pre-trained on a corpus of approximately 10T tokens, curated by a multi-stage data processing pipeline. Designed to bridge the gap between reasoning capability and inference efficiency, A.X K1 supports explicitly controllable reasoning to facilitate scalable deployment across diverse real-world scenarios. We propose a simple yet effective Think-Fusion training recipe, enabling user-controlled switching between thinking and non-thinking modes within a single unified model. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that A.X K1 achieves performance competitive with leading open-source models, while establishing a distinctive advantage in Korean-language benchmarks. △ Less

Submitted 10 February, 2026; v1 submitted 14 January, 2026; originally announced January 2026.

Lessons from the Field: An Adaptable Lifecycle Approach to Applied Dialogue Summarization

Authors: Kushal Chawla, Chenyang Zhu, Pengshan Cai, Sangwoo Cho, Scott Novotney, Ayushman Singh, Jonah Lewis, Keasha Safewright, Alfy Samuel, Erin Babinsky, Shi-Xiong Zhang, Sambit Sahu

Abstract: Summarization of multi-party dialogues is a critical capability in industry, enhancing knowledge transfer and operational effectiveness across many domains. However, automatically generating high-quality summaries is challenging, as the ideal summary must satisfy a set of complex, multi-faceted requirements. While summarization has received immense attention in research, prior work has primarily u… ▽ More Summarization of multi-party dialogues is a critical capability in industry, enhancing knowledge transfer and operational effectiveness across many domains. However, automatically generating high-quality summaries is challenging, as the ideal summary must satisfy a set of complex, multi-faceted requirements. While summarization has received immense attention in research, prior work has primarily utilized static datasets and benchmarks, a condition rare in practical scenarios where requirements inevitably evolve. In this work, we present an industry case study on developing an agentic system to summarize multi-party interactions. We share practical insights spanning the full development lifecycle to guide practitioners in building reliable, adaptable summarization systems, as well as to inform future research, covering: 1) robust methods for evaluation despite evolving requirements and task subjectivity, 2) component-wise optimization enabled by the task decomposition inherent in an agentic architecture, 3) the impact of upstream data bottlenecks, and 4) the realities of vendor lock-in due to the poor transferability of LLM prompts. △ Less

Submitted 13 January, 2026; originally announced January 2026.

Comments: EACL 2026 Industry Track

BHaRNet: Reliability-Aware Body-Hand Modality Expertized Networks for Fine-grained Skeleton Action Recognition

Authors: Seungyeon Cho, Tae-kyun Kim

Abstract: Skeleton-based human action recognition (HAR) has achieved remarkable progress with graph-based architectures. However, most existing methods remain body-centric, focusing on large-scale motions while neglecting subtle hand articulations that are crucial for fine-grained recognition. This work presents a probabilistic dual-stream framework that unifies reliability modeling and multi-modal integrat… ▽ More Skeleton-based human action recognition (HAR) has achieved remarkable progress with graph-based architectures. However, most existing methods remain body-centric, focusing on large-scale motions while neglecting subtle hand articulations that are crucial for fine-grained recognition. This work presents a probabilistic dual-stream framework that unifies reliability modeling and multi-modal integration, generalizing expertized learning under uncertainty across both intra-skeleton and cross-modal domains. The framework comprises three key components: (1) a calibration-free preprocessing pipeline that removes canonical-space transformations and learns directly from native coordinates; (2) a probabilistic Noisy-OR fusion that stabilizes reliability-aware dual-stream learning without requiring explicit confidence supervision; and (3) an intra- to cross-modal ensemble that couples four skeleton modalities (Joint, Bone, Joint Motion, and Bone Motion) to RGB representations, bridging structural and visual motion cues in a unified cross-modal formulation. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks (NTU RGB+D~60/120, PKU-MMD, N-UCLA) and a newly defined hand-centric benchmark exhibit consistent improvements and robustness under noisy and heterogeneous conditions. △ Less

Submitted 1 January, 2026; originally announced January 2026.

Comments: 16 pages; 8 figures. Extension of previous conference paper. Project page: https://github.com/VinnyCSY/BHaRNet

Soft Filtering: Guiding Zero-shot Composed Image Retrieval with Prescriptive and Proscriptive Constraints

Authors: Youjin Jung, Seongwoo Cho, Hyun-seok Min, Sungchul Choi

Abstract: Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to find a target image that aligns with user intent, expressed through a reference image and a modification text. While Zero-shot CIR (ZS-CIR) methods sidestep the need for labeled training data by leveraging pretrained vision-language models, they often rely on a single fused query that merges all descriptive cues of what the user wants, tending to dilute key i… ▽ More Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to find a target image that aligns with user intent, expressed through a reference image and a modification text. While Zero-shot CIR (ZS-CIR) methods sidestep the need for labeled training data by leveraging pretrained vision-language models, they often rely on a single fused query that merges all descriptive cues of what the user wants, tending to dilute key information and failing to account for what they wish to avoid. Moreover, current CIR benchmarks assume a single correct target per query, overlooking the ambiguity in modification texts. To address these challenges, we propose Soft Filtering with Textual constraints (SoFT), a training-free, plug-and-play filtering module for ZS-CIR. SoFT leverages multimodal large language models (LLMs) to extract two complementary constraints from the reference-modification pair: prescriptive (must-have) and proscriptive (must-avoid) constraints. These serve as semantic filters that reward or penalize candidate images to re-rank results, without modifying the base retrieval model or adding supervision. In addition, we construct a two-stage dataset pipeline that refines CIR benchmarks. We first identify multiple plausible targets per query to construct multi-target triplets, capturing the open-ended nature of user intent. Then guide multimodal LLMs to rewrite the modification text to focus on one target, while referencing contrastive distractors to ensure precision. This enables more comprehensive and reliable evaluation under varying ambiguity levels. Applied on top of CIReVL, a ZS-CIR retriever, SoFT raises R@5 to 65.25 on CIRR (+12.94), mAP@50 to 27.93 on CIRCO (+6.13), and R@50 to 58.44 on FashionIQ (+4.59), demonstrating broad effectiveness. △ Less

Submitted 23 December, 2025; originally announced December 2025.

Comments: Accepted to AAAI 2026 Workshop on New Frontiers in Information Retrieval

What Happens When: Learning Temporal Orders of Events in Videos

Authors: Daechul Ahn, Yura Choi, Hyeonbeom Choi, Seongwon Cho, San Kim, Jonghyun Choi

Abstract: Video Large Multimodal Models (VLMMs) have shown impressive performance in video understanding, yet their ability to accurately capture the temporal order of multiple events remains underexplored. We interestingly observe that, even when video frames are scrambled, models perform very well on the existing benchmarks by comprehensive experiments. This implies that VLMMs may not necessarily rely on… ▽ More Video Large Multimodal Models (VLMMs) have shown impressive performance in video understanding, yet their ability to accurately capture the temporal order of multiple events remains underexplored. We interestingly observe that, even when video frames are scrambled, models perform very well on the existing benchmarks by comprehensive experiments. This implies that VLMMs may not necessarily rely on accurate sequential processing of visual events, but instead depend on prior knowledge of typical scenarios to answer the question. To benchmark temporal understanding capabilities in VLMMs, we propose VECTOR, designed to explicitly assess a model's ability to identify the temporal order of events. On this benchmark, we observe that various VLMMs often fail to understand the orders of events. To address this, we propose MECOT (Multi-Event instruction fine-tuning with Chain-of-Thought), which (1) trains models on detailed, event-by-event video descriptions and (2) using chain-of-thought prompts at inference to enhance temporal awareness. MECOT outperforms prior arts on VECTOR as well as improving performance on existing video benchmarks, implying effectiveness of temporal understanding. We release our code, model and datasets. △ Less

Submitted 5 December, 2025; originally announced December 2025.

Comments: WACV 2026

MV-TAP: Tracking Any Point in Multi-View Videos

Authors: Jahyeok Koo, Inès Hyeonsu Kim, Mungyeom Kim, Junghyun Park, Seohyun Park, Jaeyeong Kim, Jung Yi, Seokju Cho, Seungryong Kim

Abstract: Multi-view camera systems enable rich observations of complex real-world scenes, and understanding dynamic objects in multi-view settings has become central to various applications. In this work, we present MV-TAP, a novel point tracker that tracks points across multi-view videos of dynamic scenes by leveraging cross-view information. MV-TAP utilizes camera geometry and a cross-view attention mech… ▽ More Multi-view camera systems enable rich observations of complex real-world scenes, and understanding dynamic objects in multi-view settings has become central to various applications. In this work, we present MV-TAP, a novel point tracker that tracks points across multi-view videos of dynamic scenes by leveraging cross-view information. MV-TAP utilizes camera geometry and a cross-view attention mechanism to aggregate spatio-temporal information across views, enabling more complete and reliable trajectory estimation in multi-view videos. To support this task, we construct a large-scale synthetic training dataset and real-world evaluation sets tailored for multi-view tracking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MV-TAP outperforms existing point-tracking methods on challenging benchmarks, establishing an effective baseline for advancing research in multi-view point tracking. △ Less

Submitted 1 December, 2025; originally announced December 2025.

Comments: Project Page: https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/MV-TAP/

BINDER: Instantly Adaptive Mobile Manipulation with Open-Vocabulary Commands

Authors: Seongwon Cho, Daechul Ahn, Donghyun Shin, Hyeonbeom Choi, San Kim, Jonghyun Choi

Abstract: Open-vocabulary mobile manipulation (OVMM) requires robots to follow language instructions, navigate, and manipulate while updating their world representation under dynamic environmental changes. However, most prior approaches update their world representation only at discrete update points such as navigation targets, waypoints, or the end of an action step, leaving robots blind between updates an… ▽ More Open-vocabulary mobile manipulation (OVMM) requires robots to follow language instructions, navigate, and manipulate while updating their world representation under dynamic environmental changes. However, most prior approaches update their world representation only at discrete update points such as navigation targets, waypoints, or the end of an action step, leaving robots blind between updates and causing cascading failures: overlooked objects, late error detection, and delayed replanning. To address this limitation, we propose BINDER (Bridging INstant and DEliberative Reasoning), a dual process framework that decouples strategic planning from continuous environment monitoring. Specifically, BINDER integrates a Deliberative Response Module (DRM, a multimodal LLM for task planning) with an Instant Response Module (IRM, a VideoLLM for continuous monitoring). The two modules play complementary roles: the DRM performs strategic planning with structured 3D scene updates and guides what the IRM attends to, while the IRM analyzes video streams to update memory, correct ongoing actions, and trigger replanning when necessary. Through this bidirectional coordination, the modules address the trade off between maintaining awareness and avoiding costly updates, enabling robust adaptation under dynamic conditions. Evaluated in three real world environments with dynamic object placement, BINDER achieves substantially higher success and efficiency than SoTA baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness for real world deployment. △ Less

Submitted 14 April, 2026; v1 submitted 27 November, 2025; originally announced November 2025.

Comments: 12 pages, 8 figures

AssurAI: Experience with Constructing Korean Socio-cultural Datasets to Discover Potential Risks of Generative AI

Authors: Chae-Gyun Lim, Seung-Ho Han, EunYoung Byun, Jeongyun Han, Soohyun Cho, Eojin Joo, Heehyeon Kim, Sieun Kim, Juhoon Lee, Hyunsoo Lee, Dongkun Lee, Jonghwan Hyeon, Yechan Hwang, Young-Jun Lee, Kyeongryul Lee, Minhyeong An, Hyunjun Ahn, Jeongwoo Son, Junho Park, Donggyu Yoon, Taehyung Kim, Jeemin Kim, Dasom Choi, Kwangyoung Lee, Hyunseung Lim , et al. (29 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: The rapid evolution of generative AI necessitates robust safety evaluations. However, current safety datasets are predominantly English-centric, failing to capture specific risks in non-English, socio-cultural contexts such as Korean, and are often limited to the text modality. To address this gap, we introduce AssurAI, a new quality-controlled Korean multimodal dataset for evaluating the safety o… ▽ More The rapid evolution of generative AI necessitates robust safety evaluations. However, current safety datasets are predominantly English-centric, failing to capture specific risks in non-English, socio-cultural contexts such as Korean, and are often limited to the text modality. To address this gap, we introduce AssurAI, a new quality-controlled Korean multimodal dataset for evaluating the safety of generative AI. First, we define a taxonomy of 35 distinct AI risk factors, adapted from established frameworks by a multidisciplinary expert group to cover both universal harms and relevance to the Korean socio-cultural context. Second, leveraging this taxonomy, we construct and release AssurAI, a large-scale Korean multimodal dataset comprising 11,480 instances across text, image, video, and audio. Third, we apply the rigorous quality control process used to ensure data integrity, featuring a two-phase construction (i.e., expert-led seeding and crowdsourced scaling), triple independent annotation, and an iterative expert red-teaming loop. Our pilot study validates AssurAI's effectiveness in assessing the safety of recent LLMs. We release AssurAI to the public to facilitate the development of safer and more reliable generative AI systems for the Korean community. △ Less

Submitted 20 November, 2025; originally announced November 2025.

Comments: 16 pages, HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/datasets/TTA01/AssurAI

Schema Matching on Graph: Iterative Graph Exploration for Efficient and Explainable Data Integration

Authors: Mingyu Jeon, Jaeyoung Suh, Suwan Cho

Abstract: Schema matching is a critical task in data integration, particularly in the medical domain where disparate Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems must be aligned to standard models like OMOP CDM. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in schema matching, they suffer from hallucination and lack of up-to-date domain knowledge. Knowledge Graphs (KGs) offer a solution by providing struc… ▽ More Schema matching is a critical task in data integration, particularly in the medical domain where disparate Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems must be aligned to standard models like OMOP CDM. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in schema matching, they suffer from hallucination and lack of up-to-date domain knowledge. Knowledge Graphs (KGs) offer a solution by providing structured, verifiable knowledge. However, existing KG-augmented LLM approaches often rely on inefficient complex multi-hop queries or storage-intensive vector-based retrieval methods. This paper introduces SMoG (Schema Matching on Graph), a novel framework that leverages iterative execution of simple 1-hop SPARQL queries, inspired by successful strategies in Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA). SMoG enhances explainability and reliability by generating human-verifiable query paths while significantly reducing storage requirements by directly querying SPARQL endpoints. Experimental results on real-world medical datasets demonstrate that SMoG achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art baselines, validating its effectiveness and efficiency in KG-augmented schema matching. △ Less

Submitted 1 December, 2025; v1 submitted 25 November, 2025; originally announced November 2025.

How Far Can LLMs Emulate Human Behavior?: A Strategic Analysis via the Buy-and-Sell Negotiation Game

Authors: Mingyu Jeon, Jaeyoung Suh, Suwan Cho, Dohyeon Kim

Abstract: With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), recent studies have drawn attention to their potential for handling not only simple question-answer tasks but also more complex conversational abilities and performing human-like behavioral imitations. In particular, there is considerable interest in how accurately LLMs can reproduce real human emotions and behaviors, as well as whether s… ▽ More With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), recent studies have drawn attention to their potential for handling not only simple question-answer tasks but also more complex conversational abilities and performing human-like behavioral imitations. In particular, there is considerable interest in how accurately LLMs can reproduce real human emotions and behaviors, as well as whether such reproductions can function effectively in real-world scenarios. However, existing benchmarks focus primarily on knowledge-based assessment and thus fall short of sufficiently reflecting social interactions and strategic dialogue capabilities. To address these limitations, this work proposes a methodology to quantitatively evaluate the human emotional and behavioral imitation and strategic decision-making capabilities of LLMs by employing a Buy and Sell negotiation simulation. Specifically, we assign different personas to multiple LLMs and conduct negotiations between a Buyer and a Seller, comprehensively analyzing outcomes such as win rates, transaction prices, and SHAP values. Our experimental results show that models with higher existing benchmark scores tend to achieve better negotiation performance overall, although some models exhibit diminished performance in scenarios emphasizing emotional or social contexts. Moreover, competitive and cunning traits prove more advantageous for negotiation outcomes than altruistic and cooperative traits, suggesting that the assigned persona can lead to significant variations in negotiation strategies and results. Consequently, this study introduces a new evaluation approach for LLMs' social behavior imitation and dialogue strategies, and demonstrates how negotiation simulations can serve as a meaningful complementary metric to measure real-world interaction capabilities-an aspect often overlooked in existing benchmarks. △ Less

Submitted 22 November, 2025; originally announced November 2025.

Are Graph Transformers Necessary? Efficient Long-Range Message Passing with Fractal Nodes in MPNNs

Authors: Jeongwhan Choi, Seungjun Park, Sumin Park, Sung-Bae Cho, Noseong Park

Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful tools for learning on graph-structured data, but often struggle to balance local and global information. While graph Transformers aim to address this by enabling long-range interactions, they often overlook the inherent locality and efficiency of Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs). We propose a new concept called fractal nodes, inspired by… ▽ More Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful tools for learning on graph-structured data, but often struggle to balance local and global information. While graph Transformers aim to address this by enabling long-range interactions, they often overlook the inherent locality and efficiency of Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs). We propose a new concept called fractal nodes, inspired by the fractal structure observed in real-world networks. Our approach is based on the intuition that graph partitioning naturally induces fractal structure, where subgraphs often reflect the connectivity patterns of the full graph. Fractal nodes are designed to coexist with the original nodes and adaptively aggregate subgraph-level feature representations, thereby enforcing feature similarity within each subgraph. We show that fractal nodes alleviate the over-squashing problem by providing direct shortcut connections that enable long-range propagation of subgraph-level representations. Experiment results show that our method improves the expressive power of MPNNs and achieves comparable or better performance to graph Transformers while maintaining the computational efficiency of MPNN by improving the long-range dependencies of MPNN. △ Less

Submitted 17 November, 2025; originally announced November 2025.

Comments: Accepted in AAAI 2026 for Oral Representation. This is the extended version including the appendix

Leveraging Parameter Space Symmetries for Reasoning Skill Transfer in LLMs

Authors: Stefan Horoi, Sangwoo Cho, Supriyo Chakraborty, Shi-Xiong Zhang, Sambit Sahu, Guy Wolf, Genta Indra Winata

Abstract: Task arithmetic is a powerful technique for transferring skills between Large Language Models (LLMs), but it often suffers from negative interference when models have diverged during training. We address this limitation by first aligning the models' parameter spaces, leveraging the inherent permutation, rotation, and scaling symmetries of Transformer architectures. We adapt parameter space alignme… ▽ More Task arithmetic is a powerful technique for transferring skills between Large Language Models (LLMs), but it often suffers from negative interference when models have diverged during training. We address this limitation by first aligning the models' parameter spaces, leveraging the inherent permutation, rotation, and scaling symmetries of Transformer architectures. We adapt parameter space alignment for modern Grouped-Query Attention (GQA) and SwiGLU layers, exploring both weight-based and activation-based approaches. Using this alignment-first strategy, we successfully transfer advanced reasoning skills to a non-reasoning model. Experiments on challenging reasoning benchmarks show that our method consistently outperforms standard task arithmetic. This work provides an effective approach for merging and transferring specialized skills across evolving LLM families, reducing redundant fine-tuning and enhancing model adaptability. △ Less

Submitted 13 November, 2025; originally announced November 2025.

Expandable and Differentiable Dual Memories with Orthogonal Regularization for Exemplar-free Continual Learning

Authors: Hyung-Jun Moon, Sung-Bae Cho

Abstract: Continual learning methods used to force neural networks to process sequential tasks in isolation, preventing them from leveraging useful inter-task relationships and causing them to repeatedly relearn similar features or overly differentiate them. To address this problem, we propose a fully differentiable, exemplar-free expandable method composed of two complementary memories: One learns common f… ▽ More Continual learning methods used to force neural networks to process sequential tasks in isolation, preventing them from leveraging useful inter-task relationships and causing them to repeatedly relearn similar features or overly differentiate them. To address this problem, we propose a fully differentiable, exemplar-free expandable method composed of two complementary memories: One learns common features that can be used across all tasks, and the other combines the shared features to learn discriminative characteristics unique to each sample. Both memories are differentiable so that the network can autonomously learn latent representations for each sample. For each task, the memory adjustment module adaptively prunes critical slots and minimally expands capacity to accommodate new concepts, and orthogonal regularization enforces geometric separation between preserved and newly learned memory components to prevent interference. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet show that the proposed method outperforms 14 state-of-the-art methods for class-incremental learning, achieving final accuracies of 55.13\%, 37.24\%, and 30.11\%, respectively. Additional analysis confirms that, through effective integration and utilization of knowledge, the proposed method can increase average performance across sequential tasks, and it produces feature extraction results closest to the upper bound, thus establishing a new milestone in continual learning. △ Less

Submitted 12 November, 2025; originally announced November 2025.

Comments: To appear in AAAI 2026 (The 40th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

MARC: Multimodal and Multi-Task Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Cold-Start Recommender System

Authors: Seung Hwan Cho, Yujin Yang, Danik Baeck, Minjoo Kim, Young-Min Kim, Heejung Lee, Sangjin Park

Abstract: Recommender systems (RS) are currently being studied to mitigate limitations during cold-start conditions by leveraging modality information or introducing Agent concepts based on the exceptional reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Meanwhile, food and beverage recommender systems have traditionally used knowledge graph and ontology concepts due to the domain's unique data attri… ▽ More Recommender systems (RS) are currently being studied to mitigate limitations during cold-start conditions by leveraging modality information or introducing Agent concepts based on the exceptional reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Meanwhile, food and beverage recommender systems have traditionally used knowledge graph and ontology concepts due to the domain's unique data attributes and relationship characteristics. On this background, we propose MARC, a multimodal and multi-task cocktail recommender system based on Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) utilizing graph database under cold-start conditions. The proposed system generates high-quality, contextually appropriate answers through two core processes: a task recognition router and a reflection process. The graph database was constructed by processing cocktail data from Kaggle, and its effectiveness was evaluated using 200 manually crafted questions. The evaluation used both LLM-as-a-judge and human evaluation to demonstrate that answers generated via the graph database outperformed those from a simple vector database in terms of quality. The code is available at https://github.com/diddbwls/cocktail_rec_agentrag △ Less

Submitted 15 November, 2025; v1 submitted 11 November, 2025; originally announced November 2025.

Comments: 13 pages, 2 figures, Accepted at RDGENAI at CIKM 2025 workshop