arXiv:2605.00018v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data-driven MoCap-to-radar models generate plausible micro-Doppler spectrograms, but do they actually learn the underlying physics? We introduce a physics-based interpretability framework to answer this question via two proposed complementary metrics: one measures alignment between model predictions and the physics-derived Doppler frequency, while the other tests whether predictions preserve the velocity-frequency relationship under velocity intervention. Both metrics require only MoCap input and model predictions, without access to measured radar data. Experiments across several model architectures reveal that low reconstruction error does not guarantee physical consistency: some, but not all, models achieve low error yet perform poorly on the two physics-based metrics. Further analysis shows that temporal attention is critical for transformer-based models to learn the underlying physics.

arXiv:2605.00050v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traffic accidents are routinely documented in textual reports, yet physically grounded accident reconstruction remains difficult because detailed scene measurements and expert reconstructions are scarce, costly and hard to scale. Here we formulate accident reconstruction from publicly accessible reports and scene measurements as a parameterized multimodal learning problem. We construct CISS-REC, a dataset of 6,217 real-world accident cases curated from the NHTSA Crash Investigation Sampling System, and develop a reconstruction framework that grounds report semantics to road topology and participant attributes, reconstructs lane consistent pre-impact motion, and refines collision relevant interactions through localized geometric reasoning and temporal allocation. Our method outperforms representative baselines on CISS-REC, achieving the strongest overall reconstruction fidelity, including improved accident point accuracy and collision consistency. These results show that public accident reports can serve as scalable computational substrates for quantitatively verifiable accident reconstruction, with potential value for traffic safety analysis, simulation and autonomous driving research.

arXiv:2605.00064v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Information-theoretic generalization bounds analyze stochastic optimization by relating expected generalization error to the mutual information between learned parameters and training data. Virtual perturbation analyses of SGD add auxiliary Gaussian noise only in the proof, making mutual information tractable while leaving the actual SGD trajectory unchanged. Existing bounds, however, typically require perturbation covariances to be fixed independently of the optimization history, limiting their ability to represent geometries induced by moving gradient statistics, preconditioners, curvature proxies, and other pathwise information. We introduce predictable history-adaptive virtual perturbations, where the perturbation covariance at each iteration may depend on the past real SGD history but not on current or future randomness. This predictability enables a conditional Gaussian relative-entropy argument and yields generalization bounds for SGD with adaptive virtual-noise geometry. The bounds replace fixed sensitivity and gradient-deviation terms with conditional adaptive counterparts, include an output-sensitivity penalty from accumulated perturbation covariance, and reduce the deviation term to a conditional variance only under conditional unbiasedness. Since adaptive covariances may be data-dependent, we separate local Gaussian smoothing from global reference-kernel comparison. The resulting bound includes a covariance-comparison cost measuring the KL price of using an admissible reference geometry different from the actual adaptive covariance. Fixed-noise-style bounds are recovered under admissible synchronization, such as deterministic, public, or prefix-observable covariance rules. The framework recovers fixed isotropic and geometry-aware bounds as special cases while extending virtual perturbation analysis to history-dependent SGD without modifying the algorithm.

arXiv:2605.00068v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) holds transformative promise for sustainable, near-limitless clean energy, yet remains constrained by prohibitively high costs and limited experimental opportunities. This paper presents Human-in-the-Loop Meta Bayesian Optimization (HL-MBO), a framework that integrates expert knowledge with few-shot, uncertainty-aware machine learning to accelerate discovery in data-scarce, high-stakes scientific domains. HL-MBO introduces a meta-learned surrogate model with an expert-informed acquisition function to recommend candidate experiments. To foster trust and enable informed decisions, HL-MBO also provides interpretable explanations of its suggestions. We show HL-MBO outperforms current BO methods on ICF energy yield optimization, as well as benchmarks in molecular optimization and critical temperature maximization for superconducting materials.

arXiv:2605.00113v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We examine if frontier chat-based large language models (LLMs) adjust their outputs based on neurodivergence (ND) context in system prompts and describe the nature of these adjustments. Specifically, we propose NDBench, a 576-output benchmark involving two frontier models, three system prompt types (baseline, ND-profile assertion, and ND-profile assertion with explicit instructions for adjustments), four canonical ND profiles, and 24 prompts across four categories, one of which involves an adversarial masking strategy. Four trends emerge consistently from our findings. First, LLMs show significant adaptation under ND context, where fully instructed conditions yield lengthier and more structured outputs, characterized by higher token counts, more headings, and more granular steps (p = 0.67) and thus can be considered primary results. NDBench is made publicly available along with its prompts, outputs, code, and other resources, forming a reproducible framework for auditing future LLMs' adaptation to ND awareness.

arXiv:2605.00120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online signature verification (OSV) requires distinguishing skilled forgeries from genuine samples under high intra-class variability and with very few enrollment samples. Existing deep learning methods operate directly on raw temporal sequences, restricting them to 1D architectures and preventing the use of pretrained 2D vision backbones. We bridge this gap with GAFSV-Net, which represents each signature as a six-channel asymmetric Gramian Angular Field image: three kinematic channels (pen speed, pressure derivative, direction angle) are each encoded into complementary GASF and GADF matrices that capture pairwise temporal co-occurrence and directional transition structure respectively. A dual-branch ConvNeXt-Tiny encoder processes GASF and GADF independently, with bidirectional cross-attention enabling each branch to query discriminative patterns from the other before metric-space projection. Training uses semi-hard triplet loss with skilled-forgery hard-negative injection; verification is performed via cosine similarity against a small enrollment prototype. We evaluate on DeepSignDB and BiosecurID, outperforming all sequence-based baselines trained under identical objectives, demonstrating that the representational gain of 2D temporal encoding is consistent and independent of training procedure, with ablations characterising each design choice's contribution.

arXiv:2605.00011v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative intelligence across decentralized data source devices in a privacy-preserving way. While substantial research attention has been drawn to optimizing the learning process for an individual task, real-world applications increasingly require multiple machine learning tasks simultaneously training their models across a shared pool of devices. Naively applying single-FL optimization techniques in multi-FL systems results in suboptimal system performance, particularly due to device heterogeneity and resource inefficiency. To address such a critical open challenge, we introduce {\em FedACT}, a novel resource heterogeneity-aware device scheduling approach designed to efficiently schedule heterogeneous devices across multiple concurrent FL jobs, with the goal of minimizing their average job completion time (JCT). {\em FedACT} dynamically assigns devices to FL jobs based on an alignment scoring mechanism that evaluates the compatibility between available resources of devices and resource demands of jobs. Additionally, it incorporates participation fairness to ensure balanced contributions from devices across jobs, further enhancing the accuracy levels of learned global models. An optimal scheduling plan is formulated in {\em FedACT} by prioritizing devices with higher alignment scores, while ensuring fair participation across jobs. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed scheduling algorithm, we carried out comprehensive experiments using diverse FL jobs and benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that {\em FedACT} reduces the average JCT by up to 8.3\(\times\) and improves model accuracy by up to 44.5\%, compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.

arXiv:2605.00022v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid proliferation of large audio models (LAMs) demands efficient approaches for model comparison, yet comprehensive benchmarks are costly. To fill this gap, we investigate whether minimal subsets can reliably evaluate LAMs while reducing costs and data redundancy. Analyzing 10 subset selection methods with 18 audio models across 40 tasks covering major LAM evaluation dimensions, we show that subsets of just 50 examples (0.3% of data) can achieve over 0.93 Pearson correlation with full benchmark scores. To understand how well these scores align with what practitioners ultimately care about, user satisfaction, we collect 776 human preference ratings from realistic voice assistant conversations, finding that both subsets and full benchmark achieve only 0.85 correlation with human. To better predict preferences, we trained regression models on these selected subsets, achieving 0.98 correlation -- outperforming regression models trained on both random subsets and the full benchmark. This demonstrates that in regression modeling, well-curated subsets outpredict the full benchmark, showing quality over quantity. We open-source these regression-weighted subsets as the HUMANS benchmark, an efficient proxy for LAM evaluation that captures both benchmark performance and user preferences.

arXiv:2605.00005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The increasing deployment of deep neural networks (DNNs) in cyber-physical systems (CPS) enhances perception fidelity, but imposes substantial computational demands on execution platforms, posing challenges to real-time control deadlines. Traditional distributed CPS architectures typically favor on-device inference to avoid network variability and contention-induced delays on remote platforms. However, this design choice places significant energy and computational demands on the local hardware. In this work, we revisit the assumption that cloud-based inference is intrinsically unsuitable for latency-sensitive control tasks. We demonstrate that, when provisioned with high-throughput compute resources, cloud platforms can effectively amortize network and queueing delays, enabling them to match or surpass on-device performance for real-time decision-making. Specifically, we develop a formal analytical model that characterizes distributed inference latency as a function of the sensing frequency, platform throughput, network delay, and task-specific safety constraints. We instantiate this model in the context of emergency braking for autonomous driving and validate it through extensive simulations using real-time vehicular dynamics. Our empirical results identify concrete conditions under which cloud-based inference adheres to safety margins more reliably than its on-device counterpart. These findings challenge prevailing design strategies and suggest that the cloud is not merely a feasible option, but often the preferred inference location for distributed CPS architectures. In this light, the cloud is not as distant as traditionally perceived; in fact, it is closer than it appears.

arXiv:2605.00147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-orbit inspection imagery is crucial as it enables characterization of non-cooperative resident space objects, providing the geometry and structural condition essential for active debris removal and on-orbit servicing mission planning. However, most existing neural implicit surface reconstruction methods have been confined to synthetic or hardware-in-the-loop data with known camera poses and controlled illumination. In this work, we present a pipeline for neural implicit surface reconstruction of non-cooperative space objects from monocular inspection imagery. We demonstrate it on publicly released ISS inspection footage from the STS-119 mission and publicly released on-orbit inspection footage of an H-IIA rocket upper stage. We find that segmentation-based background removal is essential for successful camera pose estimation from real on-orbit footage, where background variation between frames caused direct processing to fail entirely. We further incorporate photometric correction of per-frame exposure variations and analyze its behavior across datasets, finding that performance in shadowed regions varies with the illumination characteristics of the input footage.

arXiv:2605.00086v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality corpora are essential for advancing Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Portuguese. Building on previous encoder-only models such as BERTimbau and Albertina PT-BR, we introduce NorBERTo, a modern encoder based on the ModernBERT architecture, featuring long-context support and efficient attention mechanisms. NorBERTo is trained on Aurora-PT, a newly curated Brazilian Portuguese corpus comprising 331 billion GPT-2 tokens collected from diverse web sources and existing multilingual datasets. We systematically benchmark NorBERTo against Strong baselines on semantic similarity, textual entailment and classification tasks using standardized datasets such as ASSIN 2 and PLUE. On PLUE, NorBERTo-large achieves the best results among the encoder models we evaluated, notably reaching 0.9191 F1 on MRPC and 0.7689 accuracy on RTE. On ASSIN 2, NorBERTo-large attains the highest entailment F1 (~0.904) among all encoders considered, although Albertina-900M and BERTimbau-large still hold an advantage. To the best of our knowledge, Aurora-PT is currently the largest openly available monolingual Portuguese corpus, surpassing previous resources. NorBERTo provides a modern, mid-sized encoder designed for realistic deployment scenarios: it is straight-forward to fine-tune, efficient to serve, and well suited as a backbone for retrieval-augmented generation and other downstream Portuguese NLP systems.

arXiv:2605.00116v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this article, we introduce ViLegalNLI, the first large-scale Vietnamese Natural Language Inference (NLI) dataset specifically constructed for the legal domain. The dataset consists of 42,012 premise-hypothesis pairs derived from official statutory documents and annotated with binary inference labels (Entailment and Non-entailment). It covers multiple legal domains and reflects realistic legal reasoning scenarios characterized by structured logic, conditional clauses, and domain-specific terminology. To construct ViLegalNLI, we propose a semi-automatic data generation framework that integrates large language models for controlled hypothesis generation and systematic quality validation procedures. The framework incorporates artifact mitigation strategies and cross-model validation to improve annotation reliability and ensure legal consistency. The resulting dataset captures diverse reasoning patterns, including paraphrasing, logical implication, and legally invalid inferences, thereby providing a comprehensive benchmark for Vietnamese legal inference tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on the ViLegalNLI using multilingual models, Vietnamese-specific pretrained language models, and instruction-tuned large language models. The results show that few-shot LLM configurations consistently achieve superior performance, while performance is significantly influenced by hypothesis length, lexical overlap, and reasoning complexity. Cross-domain evaluations further reveal the challenges of generalizing legal inference across distinct legal fields. Overall, ViLegalNLI establishes a foundational benchmark for Vietnamese legal NLI and supports future research in legal reasoning, statutory text understanding, and the development of reliable AI systems for legal analysis and decision support. The dataset is publicly available for research purposes.

arXiv:2605.00143v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humor is a fundamental cognitive phenomenon in which humans derive pleasure from the expectation violations and their resolution, exemplifying the brain's dynamic capacity for predictive processing. Classical humor theories emphasize semantic incongruity as the primary driver of amusement, yet overlook temporal dynamics despite comedians' intuition that "timing is everything." The extent to which temporal structure contributes to humor appreciation and how it interacts with semantic content remains poorly understood. Here, we propose the Dual Prediction Violation (DPV) framework to capture the interplay between content and timing. By analyzing 828 professional Chinese stand-up performances, we show that temporal features substantially outweigh semantic incongruity in predicting audience appreciation. Specifically, we find that peak semantic violations matter more than average incongruity levels, and pauses systematically lengthen before high-surprise punchlines--a strategic coupling that distinguishes successful from unsuccessful performances. These findings reframe humor as temporally scaffolded, where timing and semantic content operate in strategic coordination rather than independently. Our DPV framework bridges humor theory with predictive processing, demonstrating that temporal structure plays a central role in naturalistic humor appreciation with implications for understanding multi-scale prediction integration in linguistic processing.

arXiv:2605.00056v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Groundwater in the Densu Basin is increasingly threatened by heavy metal contamination, but conventional methods fail to capture the statistical complexity and spatial heterogeneity of pollution indicators. A key challenge is modelling the Heavy Metal Pollution Index (HPI), which is typically skewed and affected by correlated contaminants, leading to biased predictions without transformation. This study develops a predictive framework integrating response transformations with nested cross-validated ensemble machine learning. Three transformations (raw, log, and Gaussian copula) were applied to HPI and evaluated across six learners: support vector regression (SVM), $k$-nearest neighbours (k-NN), CART, Elastic Net, kernel ridge regression, and a stacked Lasso ensemble. Raw-scale models produced deceptively high fits (Elastic Net and stacked ensemble $R^2 \approx 1.0$), suggesting over-optimism. The log transformation stabilised variance (SVM: $R^2 = 0.93$, RMSE $= 0.18$; k-NN: $R^2 = 0.92$, RMSE $= 0.20$). The Gaussian copula gave the most reliable results: stacked ensemble $R^2 = 0.96$ (RMSE $= 0.19$), with other learners maintaining high accuracy. Copula-based models improved residuals and produced spatially plausible maps. DBSCAN clustering revealed Fe and Mn as primary HPI contributors, consistent with regional hydrogeochemistry. Limitations include reliance on random (not spatial) cross-validation and basin-specific scope. Future work should explore spatial validation and other geological settings. Overall, distribution-aware ensembles with clustering diagnostics offer robust, interpretable assessments of groundwater contamination.

arXiv:2605.00111v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Person re-identification (Re-ID) aims to match images of the same individual across non-overlapping camera views and remains challenging due to domain shifts caused by variations in illumination, background, camera characteristics, and population distributions. Although supervised models perform well under matched training and testing conditions, their performance degrades significantly when deployed in unseen environments. Existing intermediate domain approaches such as IDM and IDM++ alleviate this gap by constructing bridge feature distributions between domains; however, they rely on fixed mixing strategies and joint source-target access, limiting their applicability to multi-source and source-free settings. To address these limitations, this paper proposes Adaptive Intermediate Domain Adaptation (AIDA), also referred to as Source-Free Multi-Source Intermediate Domain Adaptation (SF-MIDA). The proposed framework treats intermediate-domain learning as a dynamically regulated process, where feature mixing and regularization strength are adaptively controlled using feedback signals derived from model uncertainty and training stability. A multi-source intermediate domain generator synthesizes diverse intermediate representations, while a pseudo-mirror regularization strategy preserves identity consistency under domain perturbations. Extensive experiments across domain generalization and source-free settings demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

arXiv:2605.00052v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hybrid-capture novel view synthesis combines images at substantially different camera distances (e.g., aerial drone and ground-level views). Standard 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), trained for 30K iterations with one rendered view per optimizer step, under-fits the minority regime by 1-3 dB on five hybrid-capture benchmarks. We isolate the lever that closes this gap. Among compute-matched alternatives -- vanilla 60K iterations, magnitude corrections (GradNorm), direction-aware near/far gradient surgery, projective preconditioning, confidence-gated sample-level surgery, and a random two-view-per-step control -- the simplest structural change wins: rendering two views per optimizer step. The pairing rule (geometry-defined near/far, random, or active loss-disparity) does not change PSNR beyond seed variance on any of the five scenes; the structural change of having two views per step does. We propose a variance-decomposition framework that predicts and explains this finding: under bimodal camera regimes, between-regime gradient variance turns out to be small relative to within-regime variance in 3DGS, so structured and random pairings are variance-equivalent in expectation, and the variance halving from two-view accumulation itself is the dominant effect. We verify the framework on five scenes whose camera-altitude bimodality coefficients span [0.55, 1.00], and we report the negative result that direction-aware projection, magnitude correction, confidence gating, and an active loss-disparity pairing all fall within seed variance of random two-view pairing. The two-view structural lever transfers cleanly to the Scaffold-GS and Pixel-GS backbones. We position this work as an honest characterization of which training-side axes do and do not move PSNR for hybrid-capture 3DGS, together with the framework that explains why.

arXiv:2605.00119v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: There is a significant gap in evaluating cultural reasoning in LLMs using conversational datasets that capture culturally rich and dialectal contexts. Most Arabic benchmarks focus on short text snippets in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), overlooking the cultural nuances that naturally arise in dialogues. To address this gap, we introduce ArabCulture-Dialogue, a culturally grounded conversational dataset covering 13 Arabic-speaking countries, in both MSA and each country's respective dialect, spanning 12 daily-life topics and 54 fine-grained subtopics. We utilize the dataset to form three benchmarking tasks: (i) multiple-choice cultural reasoning, (ii) machine translation between MSA and dialects, and (iii) dialect-steering generation. Our experiments indicate that the performance gap between MSA and Arabic dialects still exists, whereby the models perform worse on all three tasks in the dialectal setup, compared to the MSA one.

arXiv:2605.00020v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The success of large foundation models is catalyzing a new paradigm for AI-native 6G network design: wireless foundation models for physical layer design. However, existing models often operate on channel state information (CSI) in the space-time-frequency (STF) domain, where distinct multipath components are inherently superimposed and structurally entangled. This hinders the learning of universal channel representation. Meanwhile, their reliance on global attention mechanisms incurs prohibitive computational overhead. In this paper, we propose AirFM-DDA, an Air-interface Foundation Model operating in the Delay-Doppler-Angle (DDA) domain for physicallayer tasks. Specifically, AirFM-DDA reparameterizes CSI from the STF domain into the DDA domain to explicitly resolve multipath components along physically meaningful axes. It employs a window-based attention module augmented with framestructure-aware positional encoding (FS-PE). This window-based attention aligns with locally clustered multipath dependencies while avoiding quadratic-complexity global attention, and FS-PE injects frame-structure priors into network. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AirFM-DDA achieves superior zero-shot generalization across unseen scenarios and datasets, consistently outperforming the baselines on channel prediction and estimation tasks. Compared to the global attention, its window-based attention reduces training and inference costs by nearly an order of magnitude. Moreover, AirFM-DDA maintains robustness under high mobility, large delay spreads, severe noise, and extreme aliasing conditions.

arXiv:2605.00219v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present VkSplat, a high-performance, cross-vendor 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) training pipeline implemented fully in Vulkan compute, addressing performance and compatibility limitation of existing training pipelines. With various optimizations, we achieve $3.3\times$ speed and $33\%$ VRAM reduction over CUDA+PyTorch baseline, maintaining quality, and demonstrating compatibility across GPU vendors. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully-Vulkan-based 3DGS training pipeline that achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code: \href{https://github.com/harry7557558/vksplat}{https://github.com/harry7557558/vksplat}

arXiv:2605.00146v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-time object detection on energy-constrained platforms is critical for applications such as UAV-based inspection, autonomous navigation, and mobile robotics. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) on neuromorphic hardware are believed to be significantly more energy-efficient than conventional artificial neural networks (ANNs). In this work, we present a comprehensive methodology for designing general SNN detection architectures targeting neuromorphic platforms, along with the engineering adaptations required to deploy them on the state-of-the-art Neuromorphic processor, Intel Loihi 2. We benchmark SNN-based object detection on Loihi 2 using both frame-based and event-based datasets, comparing performance with ANN-based detection on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano, NVIDIA Jetson Nano B01, and the Apple M2 CPU. Our results show that SNNs on Loihi 2 can perform real-time detection while achieving the lowest per-inference dynamic energy among all platforms. Also, Loihi 2 outperforms the other platforms in terms of power consumption, though ANNs on Jetson Orin Nano achieve higher inference rates. Furthermore, our ANN-to-SNN distillation-aware training enables SNNs to recover 87-100% of the detection accuracy of their ANN counterparts while maintaining lower inference latency; without distillation, SNNs exhibit an 11-27% accuracy drop. These results highlight the potential of neuromorphic systems for energy-efficient, real-time object detection at the edge.