arXiv:2603.03343v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose NEURONA, a neuro-symbolic framework for fMRI decoding and concept grounding in neural activity. Leveraging image- and video-based fMRI question-answering datasets, NEURONA learns to decode interacting concepts from visual stimuli based on patterns of fMRI responses, integrating symbolic reasoning and compositional execution with fMRI grounding across brain regions. We demonstrate that incorporating structural priors (e.g., compositional predicate-argument dependencies between concepts) into the decoding process significantly improves both decoding accuracy over precise queries, and notably, generalization to unseen queries at test time. With NEURONA, we highlight neuro-symbolic frameworks as promising tools for understanding neural activity.

arXiv:2603.03680v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in learned tasks, yet they often struggle to adapt to non-stationary environments with feedback. While In-Context Learning and external memory offer some flexibility, they fail to internalize the adaptive ability required for long-term improvement. Meta-Reinforcement Learning (meta-RL) provides an alternative by embedding the learning process directly within the model. However, existing meta-RL approaches for LLMs focus primarily on exploration in single-agent settings, neglecting the strategic exploitation necessary for multi-agent environments. We propose MAGE, a meta-RL framework that empowers LLM agents for strategic exploration and exploitation. MAGE utilizes a multi-episode training regime where interaction histories and reflections are integrated into the context window. By using the final episode reward as the objective, MAGE incentivizes the agent to refine its strategy based on past experiences. We further combine population-based training with an agent-specific advantage normalization technique to enrich agent diversity and ensure stable learning. Experiment results show that MAGE outperforms existing baselines in both exploration and exploitation tasks. Furthermore, MAGE exhibits strong generalization to unseen opponents, suggesting it has internalized the ability for strategic exploration and exploitation. Code is available at https://github.com/Lu-Yang666/MAGE.

arXiv:2603.03761v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents are rapidly becoming the practical interface for task automation, yet the ecosystem lacks a principled way to choose among an exploding space of deployable configurations. Existing LLM leaderboards and tool/agent benchmarks evaluate components in isolation and remain fragmented across tasks, metrics, and candidate pools, leaving a critical research gap: there is little query-conditioned supervision for learning to recommend end-to-end agent configurations that couple a backbone model with a toolkit. We address this gap with AgentSelect, a benchmark that reframes agent selection as narrative query-to-agent recommendation over capability profiles and systematically converts heterogeneous evaluation artifacts into unified, positive-only interaction data. AgentSelectcomprises 111,179 queries, 107,721 deployable agents, and 251,103 interaction records aggregated from 40+ sources, spanning LLM-only, toolkit-only, and compositional agents. Our analyses reveal a regime shift from dense head reuse to long-tail, near one-off supervision, where popularity-based CF/GNN methods become fragile and content-aware capability matching is essential. We further show that Part~III synthesized compositional interactions are learnable, induce capability-sensitive behavior under controlled counterfactual edits, and improve coverage over realistic compositions; models trained on AgentSelect also transfer to a public agent marketplace (MuleRun), yielding consistent gains on an unseen catalog. Overall, AgentSelect provides the first unified data and evaluation infrastructure for agent recommendation, which establishes a reproducible foundation to study and accelerate the emerging agent ecosystem.

arXiv:2603.03292v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit high reasoning capacity in medical question-answering, but their tendency to produce hallucinations and outdated knowledge poses critical risks in healthcare fields. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates these issues, existing methods rely on noisy token-level signals and lack the multi-round refinement required for complex reasoning. In the paper, we propose **MA-RAG** (**M**ulti-Round **A**gentic RAG), a framework that facilitates test-time scaling for complex medical reasoning by iteratively evolving both external evidence and internal reasoning history within an agentic refinement loop. At each round, the agent transforms semantic **conflict** among candidate responses into actionable queries to retrieve external evidence, while optimizing history reasoning traces to mitigate long-context degradation. MA-RAG extends the *self-consistency* principle by leveraging the lack of consistency as a proactive signal for multi-round agentic reasoning and retrieval, and mirrors a *boosting* mechanism that iteratively minimizes the residual error toward a stable, high-fidelity medical **consensus**. Extensive evaluations across 7 medical Q&A benchmarks show that MA-RAG consistently surpasses competitive inference-time scaling and RAG baselines, delivering **substantial +6.8 points** on average accuracy over the backbone model. Our code is available at [this url](https://github.com/NJU-RL/MA-RAG).

arXiv:2603.03303v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate how specific users respond to a given context, enabling more user-centric applications that rely on user feedback. However, existing user simulators mostly imitate surface-level patterns and language styles, which fail to reflect the underlying states of real users (e.g., beliefs and emotions). To address these limitations, we propose a novel training framework, HumanLM, which builds user simulators that accurately reflect real users. Our key insight is that, in addition to generating responses, the model should generate natural-language latent states that align with ground-truth responses through reinforcement learning. These latent states correspond to a set of psychologically grounded state dimensions that drive how real users respond. HumanLM further synthesizes these aligned latent states into responses that accurately represent real users. For extensive evaluation, we develop Humanual, a comprehensive benchmark for simulating real users based on public data. Humanual consists of six large-scale datasets with 26k users and 216k responses in total, spanning diverse tasks such as generating user responses to daily life issues, political blogs, and chat sessions with LLM assistants. Across datasets, HumanLM significantly outperforms alternative approaches, achieving an average relative improvement of 16.3% in alignment scores from an LLM judge. In a real-time simulation study with 111 participants, HumanLM achieves the highest similarity to real user responses and competitive human-likeness scores.

arXiv:2603.03313v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a significant "embodiment gap", where their text-based representations fail to align with human sensorimotor experiences. This study systematically investigates whether and how task-specific fine-tuning can bridge this gap. Utilizing Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) and dimension-specific correlation metrics, we demonstrate that the internal representations of LLMs can be steered toward more embodied, grounded patterns through fine-tuning. Furthermore, the results show that while sensorimotor improvements generalize robustly across languages and related sensory-motor dimensions, they are highly sensitive to the learning objective, failing to transfer across two disparate task formats.

arXiv:2603.03314v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable and steadily improving performance across a wide range of tasks. However, LLM performance may be highly sensitive to prompt variations especially in scenarios with limited openness or strict output formatting requirements, indicating insufficient robustness. In real-world applications, user prompts provided to LLMs often contain imperfections, which may undermine the quality of the model's responses. To address this issue, previous work has primarily focused on preprocessing prompts, employing external tools or even LLMs to refine prompt formulations in advance. However, these approaches overlook the intrinsic robustness of LLMs, and their reliance on external components introduces additional computational overhead and uncertainty. In this work, we propose a Contrastive Learning-based Inverse Direct Preference Optimization (CoIPO) method that minimizes the discrepancy between the label-aligned logits produced by the model under a clean prompt and its noisy counterpart, and conduct a detailed analysis using mutual information theory. We augment the FLAN dataset by constructing paired prompts, each consisting of a clean prompt and its corresponding noisy version for training. Additionally, to evaluate the effectiveness, we develop NoisyPromptBench, a benchmark enhanced and derived from the existing PromptBench. Experimental results conducted on NoisyPromptBench demonstrate that our proposed method achieves a significant improvement in average accuracy over the current state-of-the-art approaches. The source code of CoIPO, pair-wise FLAN datasets, and NoisyPromptBench have already been released on https://github.com/vegetable-yx/CoIPO.

arXiv:2603.03325v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have become integral to modern Human-AI collaboration workflows, where accurately understanding user intent serves as a crucial step for generating satisfactory responses. Context-aware intent understanding, which involves inferring user intentions from situational environments, is inherently challenging because it requires reasoning over both the immediate context and the user's underlying motivations that drive their behavior. Moreover, existing approaches often treat intent understanding as a static recognition task, overlooking users' accumulated intent patterns that could provide valuable references for more accurate and generalizable understanding. To address this gap, we propose IntPro, a proxy agent that learns to adapt to individual users via retrieval-conditioned intent inference. We design intent explanations that abstract how contextual signals connect to expressed intents, and store them in an individual intent history library for retrieval. We train IntPro through supervised fine-tuning on retrieval-conditioned trajectories and multi-turn Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with tool-aware reward functions, enabling the agent to learn when to leverage historical intent patterns and when to infer directly. Experiments across three diverse scenarios (Highlight-Intent, MIntRec2.0, and Weibo Post-Sync) demonstrate that IntPro achieves strong intent understanding performance with effective context-aware reasoning capabilities across different scenarios and model types.

arXiv:2603.03327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: User satisfaction is closely related to enterprises, as it not only directly reflects users' subjective evaluation of service quality or products, but also affects customer loyalty and long-term business revenue. Monitoring and understanding user emotions during interactions helps predict and improve satisfaction. However, relevant Chinese datasets are limited, and user emotions are dynamic; relying on single-turn dialogue cannot fully track emotional changes across multiple turns, which may affect satisfaction prediction. To address this, we constructed a multi-task, multi-label Chinese dialogue dataset that supports satisfaction recognition, as well as emotion recognition and emotional state transition prediction, providing new resources for studying emotion and satisfaction in dialogue systems.

arXiv:2603.03331v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Photoplethysmography (PPG) is a widely used non-invasive sensing modality for continuous cardiovascular and physiological monitoring across clinical, laboratory, and wearable settings. While existing PPG datasets support a broad range of downstream tasks, they typically provide supervision in the form of numerical measurements or task-specific labels, limiting their suitability for language-based physiological reasoning and multimodal foundation models. In this work, we introduce PulseLM, a large-scale PPG-text dataset designed to bridge raw PPG waveforms and natural language through a unified, closed-ended question answering (QA) formulation. PulseLM aggregates PPG recordings from fifteen publicly available sources and harmonizes heterogeneous annotations into twelve common physiologically QA tasks. The dataset comprises 1.31 million standardized 10-second PPG segments, associated with 3.15 million question-answer pairs. We further define reproducible preprocessing, supervision, and evaluation protocols and establish baseline benchmarks using multimodal PPG-aware large language models. PulseLM provides a standardized foundation for studying multimodal physiological reasoning, cross-dataset generalization, and scalable benchmarking of PPG-based language models. The data and code can be found publicly available at: https://github.com/manhph2211/PulseLM.

arXiv:2603.03344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Earthquake detection and seismic phase picking are fundamental yet challenging tasks in seismology due to low signal-to-noise ratios, waveform variability, and overlapping events. Recent deep-learning models achieve strong results but rely on large datasets and heavy backpropagation training, raising concerns over efficiency, interpretability, and sustainability. We propose GreenPhase, a multi-resolution, feed-forward, and mathematically interpretable model based on the Green Learning framework. GreenPhase comprises three resolution levels, each integrating unsupervised representation learning, supervised feature learning, and decision learning. Its feed-forward design eliminates backpropagation, enabling independent module optimization with stable training and clear interpretability. Predictions are refined from coarse to fine resolutions while computation is restricted to candidate regions. On the Stanford Earthquake Dataset (STEAD), GreenPhase achieves excellent performance with F1 scores of 1.0 for detection, 0.98 for P-wave picking, and 0.96 for S-wave picking. This is accomplished while reducing the computational cost (FLOPs) for inference by approximately 83% compared to state-of-the-art models. These results demonstrate that the proposed model provides an efficient, interpretable, and sustainable alternative for large-scale seismic monitoring.

arXiv:2603.03367v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Our analysis of recent AI4H publications reveals that, despite a trend toward utilizing open datasets and sharing modeling code, 74% of AI4H papers still rely on private datasets or do not share their code. This is especially concerning in healthcare applications, where trust is essential. Furthermore, inconsistent and poorly documented data preprocessing pipelines result in variable model performance reports, even for identical tasks and datasets, making it challenging to evaluate the true effectiveness of AI models. Despite the challenges posed by the reproducibility crisis, addressing these issues through open practices offers substantial benefits. For instance, while the reproducibility mandate adds extra effort to research and publication, it significantly enhances the impact of the work. Our analysis shows that papers that used both public datasets and shared code received, on average, 110% more citations than those that do neither--more than doubling the citation count. Given the clear benefits of enhancing reproducibility, it is imperative for the AI4H community to take concrete steps to overcome existing barriers. The community should promote open science practices, establish standardized guidelines for data preprocessing, and develop robust benchmarks. Tackling these challenges through open-source development can improve reproducibility, which is essential for ensuring that AI models are safe, effective, and beneficial for patient care. This approach will help build more trustworthy AI systems that can be integrated into healthcare settings, ultimately contributing to better patient outcomes and advancing the field of medicine.

arXiv:2603.03415v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we investigate how Large Language Models (LLMs) adapt their internal representations when encountering inputs of increasing difficulty, quantified as the degree of out-of-distribution (OOD) shift. We reveal a consistent and quantifiable phenomenon: as task difficulty increases, whether through harder reasoning questions, longer contexts, or adding answer choices, the last hidden states of LLMs become substantially sparser. In short, \textbf{\textit{the farther the shift, the sparser the representations}}. This sparsity--difficulty relation is observable across diverse models and domains, suggesting that language models respond to unfamiliar or complex inputs by concentrating computation into specialized subspaces in the last hidden state. Through a series of controlled analyses with a learning dynamic explanation, we demonstrate that this sparsity is not incidental but an adaptive mechanism for stabilizing reasoning under OOD. Leveraging this insight, we design \textit{Sparsity-Guided Curriculum In-Context Learning (SG-ICL)}, a strategy that explicitly uses representation sparsity to schedule few-shot demonstrations, leading to considerable performance enhancements. Our study provides new mechanistic insights into how LLMs internalize OOD challenges. The source code is available at the URL: https://github.com/MingyuJ666/sparsityLLM.

arXiv:2603.03485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent video diffusion models have achieved impressive capabilities as large-scale generative world models. However, these models often struggle with fine-grained physical consistency, exhibiting physically implausible dynamics over time. In this work, we present \textbf{Phys4D}, a pipeline for learning physics-consistent 4D world representations from video diffusion models. Phys4D adopts \textbf{a three-stage training paradigm} that progressively lifts appearance-driven video diffusion models into physics-consistent 4D world representations. We first bootstrap robust geometry and motion representations through large-scale pseudo-supervised pretraining, establishing a foundation for 4D scene modeling. We then perform physics-grounded supervised fine-tuning using simulation-generated data, enforcing temporally consistent 4D dynamics. Finally, we apply simulation-grounded reinforcement learning to correct residual physical violations that are difficult to capture through explicit supervision. To evaluate fine-grained physical consistency beyond appearance-based metrics, we introduce a set of \textbf{4D world consistency evaluation} that probe geometric coherence, motion stability, and long-horizon physical plausibility. Experimental results demonstrate that Phys4D substantially improves fine-grained spatiotemporal and physical consistency compared to appearance-driven baselines, while maintaining strong generative performance. Our project page is available at https://sensational-brioche-7657e7.netlify.app/

arXiv:2603.03505v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: State-of-the-art text-to-video (T2V) generators frequently violate physical laws despite high visual quality. We show this stems from insufficient physical constraints in prompts rather than model limitations: manually adding physics details reliably produces physically plausible videos, but requires expertise and does not scale. We present PhyPrompt, a two-stage reinforcement learning framework that automatically refines prompts for physically realistic generation. First, we fine-tune a large language model on a physics-focused Chain-of-Thought dataset to integrate principles like object motion and force interactions while preserving user intent. Second, we apply Group Relative Policy Optimization with a dynamic reward curriculum that initially prioritizes semantic fidelity, then progressively shifts toward physical commonsense. This curriculum achieves synergistic optimization: PhyPrompt-7B reaches 40.8\% joint success on VideoPhy2 (8.6pp gain), improving physical commonsense by 11pp (55.8\% to 66.8\%) while simultaneously increasing semantic adherence by 4.4pp (43.4\% to 47.8\%). Remarkably, our curriculum exceeds single-objective training on both metrics, demonstrating compositional prompt discovery beyond conventional multi-objective trade-offs. PhyPrompt outperforms GPT-4o (+3.8\% joint) and DeepSeek-V3 (+2.2\%, 100$\times$ larger) using only 7B parameters. The approach transfers zero-shot across diverse T2V architectures (Lavie, VideoCrafter2, CogVideoX-5B) with up to 16.8\% improvement, establishing that domain-specialized reinforcement learning with compositional curricula surpasses general-purpose scaling for physics-aware generation.

arXiv:2603.03772v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-driven analytics are increasingly crucial to data-centric decision-making. The practice of exporting data to machine learning runtimes incurs high overhead, limits robustness to data drift, and expands the attack surface, especially in multi-tenant, heterogeneous data systems. Integrating AI directly into database engines, while offering clear benefits, introduces challenges in managing joint query processing and model execution, optimizing end-to-end performance, coordinating execution under resource contention, and enforcing strong security and access-control guarantees. This paper discusses the challenges of joint DB-AI, or AIxDB, data management and query processing within AI-powered data systems. It presents various challenges that need to be addressed carefully, such as query optimization, execution scheduling, and distributed execution over heterogeneous hardware. Database components such as transaction management and access control need to be re-examined to support AI lifecycle management, mitigate data drift, and protect sensitive data from unauthorized AI operations. We present a design and preliminary results to demonstrate what may be key to the performance for serving AIxDB queries.

arXiv:2603.03782v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Shared-account usage is common on streaming and e-commerce platforms, where multiple users share one account. Existing shared-account sequential recommendation (SSR) methods often assume a fixed number of latent users per account, limiting their ability to adapt to diverse sharing patterns and reducing recommendation accuracy. Recent latent reasoning technique applied in sequential recommendation (SR) generate intermediate embeddings from the user embedding (e.g, last item embedding) to uncover users' potential interests, which inspires us to treat the problem of inferring the number of latent users as generating a series of intermediate embeddings, shifting from inferring preferences behind user to inferring the users behind account. However, the last item cannot be directly used for reasoning in SSR, as it can only represent the behavior of the most recent latent user, rather than the collective behavior of the entire account. To address this, we propose DisenReason, a two-stage reasoning method tailored to SSR. DisenReason combines behavior disentanglement stage from frequency-domain perspective to create a collective and unified account behavior representation, which serves as a pivot for latent user reasoning stage to infer the number of users behind the account. Experiments on four benchmark datasets show that DisenReason consistently outperforms all state-of-the-art baselines across four benchmark datasets, achieving relative improvements of up to 12.56\% in MRR@5 and 6.06\% in Recall@20.

arXiv:2603.03963v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamic link prediction plays a crucial role in diverse applications including social network analysis, communication forecasting, and financial modeling. While recent Transformer-based approaches have demonstrated promising results in temporal graph learning, their performance remains limited when capturing complex multi-scale temporal dynamics. In this paper, we propose TFWaveFormer, a novel Transformer architecture that integrates temporal-frequency analysis with multi-resolution wavelet decomposition to enhance dynamic link prediction. Our framework comprises three key components: (i) a temporal-frequency coordination mechanism that jointly models temporal and spectral representations, (ii) a learnable multi-resolution wavelet decomposition module that adaptively extracts multi-scale temporal patterns through parallel convolutions, replacing traditional iterative wavelet transforms, and (iii) a hybrid Transformer module that effectively fuses local wavelet features with global temporal dependencies. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that TFWaveFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing Transformer-based and hybrid models by significant margins across multiple metrics. The superior performance of TFWaveFormer validates the effectiveness of combining temporal-frequency analysis with wavelet decomposition in capturing complex temporal dynamics for dynamic link prediction tasks.

arXiv:2603.03983v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in MLLMs are reframing segmentation from fixed-category prediction to instruction-grounded localization. While reasoning based segmentation has progressed rapidly in natural scenes, remote sensing lacks a generalizable solution due to the prohibitive cost of reasoning-oriented data and domain-specific challenges like overhead viewpoints. We present GeoSeg, a zero-shot, training-free framework that bypasses the supervision bottleneck for reasoning-driven remote sensing segmentation. GeoSeg couples MLLM reasoning with precise localization via: (i) bias-aware coordinate refinement to correct systematic grounding shifts and (ii) a dual-route prompting mechanism to fuse semantic intent with fine-grained spatial cues. We also introduce GeoSeg-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark of 810 image--query pairs with hierarchical difficulty levels. Experiments show that GeoSeg consistently outperforms all baselines, with extensive ablations confirming the effectiveness and necessity of each component.

arXiv:2603.04024v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Equivocal 3D lesion segmentation exhibits high inter-observer variability. Conventional deterministic models ignore this aleatoric uncertainty, producing over-confident masks that obscure clinical risks. Conversely, while generative methods (e.g., standard diffusion) capture sample diversity, recovering complex topology from pure noise frequently leads to severe structural fractures and out-of-distribution anatomical hallucinations. To resolve this fidelity-diversity trade-off, we propose Volumetric Directional Diffusion (VDD). Unlike standard diffusion models that denoise isotropic Gaussian noise, VDD mathematically anchors the generative trajectory to a deterministic consensus prior. By restricting the generative search space to iteratively predict a 3D boundary residual field, VDD accurately explores the fine-grained geometric variations inherent in expert disagreements without risking topological collapse. Extensive validation on three multi-rater datasets (LIDC-IDRI, KiTS21, and ISBI 2015) demonstrates that VDD achieves state-of-the-art uncertainty quantification (significantly improving GED and CI) while remaining highly competitive in segmentation accuracy against deterministic upper bounds. Ultimately, VDD provides clinicians with anatomically coherent uncertainty maps, enabling safer decision-making and mitigating risks in downstream tasks (e.g., radiotherapy planning or surgical margin assessment).