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Received — 26 March 2026 ⏭

Memory Bear AI Memory Science Engine for Multimodal Affective Intelligence: A Technical Report

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Deliang Wen · Ke Sun · Yu Wang
25 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2603.22306v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Affective judgment in real interaction is rarely a purely local prediction problem. Emotional meaning often depends on prior trajectory, accumulated context, and multimodal evidence that may be weak, noisy, or incomplete at the current moment. Although multimodal emotion recognition (MER) has improved the integration of text, speech, and visual signals, many existing systems remain optimized for short-range inference and provide limited support for persistent affective memory, long-horizon dependency modeling, and robust interpretation under imperfect input. This technical report presents the Memory Bear AI Memory Science Engine, a memory-centered framework for multimodal affective intelligence. Instead of treating emotion as a transient output label, the framework models affective information as a structured and evolving variable within a memory system. It organizes processing through structured memory formation, working-memory aggregation, long-term consolidation, memory-driven retrieval, dynamic fusion calibration, and continuous memory updating. At its core, multimodal signals are transformed into structured Emotion Memory Units (EMUs), enabling affective information to be preserved, reactivated, and revised across interaction horizons. Experimental results show consistent gains over comparison systems across benchmark and business-grounded settings, with stronger accuracy and robustness, especially under noisy or missing-modality conditions. The framework offers a practical step from local emotion recognition toward more continuous, robust, and deployment-relevant affective intelligence.

Geometric Mixture-of-Experts with Curvature-Guided Adaptive Routing for Graph Representation Learning

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Haifang Cao · Yu Wang · Timing Li · Xinjie Yao · Pengfei Zhu
25 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2603.22317v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph-structured data typically exhibits complex topological heterogeneity, making it difficult to model accurately within a single Riemannian manifold. While emerging mixed-curvature methods attempt to capture such diversity, they often rely on implicit, task-driven routing that lacks fundamental geometric grounding. To address this challenge, we propose a Geometric Mixture-of-Experts framework (GeoMoE) that adaptively fuses node representations across diverse Riemannian spaces to better accommodate multi-scale topological structures. At its core, GeoMoE leverages Ollivier-Ricci Curvature (ORC) as an intrinsic geometric prior to orchestrate the collaboration of specialized experts. Specifically, we design a graph-aware gating network that assigns node-specific fusion weights, regularized by a curvature-guided alignment loss to ensure interpretable and geometry-consistent routing. Additionally, we introduce a curvature-aware contrastive objective that promotes geometric discriminability by constructing positive and negative pairs according to curvature consistency. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that GeoMoE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across diverse graph types.

An Accurate and Interpretable Framework for Trustworthy Process Monitoring

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Hao Wang · Zhiyu Wang · Yunlong Niu · Zhaoran Liu · Haozhe Li · Yilin Liao · Yuxin Huang · Xinggao Liu
25 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2302.10426v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Trustworthy process monitoring seeks to build an accurate and interpretable monitoring framework, which is critical for ensuring the safety of energy conversion plant (ECP) that operates under extreme working conditions such as high pressure and temperature. Contemporary self-attentive models, however, fall short in this domain for two main reasons. First, they rely on step-wise correlations that fail to involve physically meaningful semantics in ECP logs, resulting in suboptimal accuracy and interpretability. Second, attention matrices are frequently cluttered with spurious correlations that obscure physically meaningful ones, further impeding effective interpretation. To overcome these issues, we propose AttentionMixer, a framework aimed at improving both accuracy and interpretability of existing methods and establish a trustworthy ECP monitoring framework. Specifically, to tackle the first issue, we employ a spatial adaptive message passing block to capture variate-wise correlations. This block is coupled with a temporal adaptive message passing block through an \textit{mixing} operator, yielding a multi-faceted representation of ECP logs accounting for both step-wise and variate-wise correlations. Concurrently, to tackle the second issue, we employ a sparse message passing regularizer to filter out spurious correlations. We validate the efficacy of AttentionMixer using two real-world datasets from the radiation monitoring network for Chinese nuclear power plants.

NUP85 as a Pan-Cancer Immune Biomarker: Integrated Multi Omics and Functional Analyses Reveal Its Role in Tumor Prognosis

✇(Multiomics OR Omics) AND (Lung OR gastric OR Hepatocellular)
By: Weihao Kong · Ying Hu · Kangjie Zhang · Zhipeng Zhu · Yajun Zou · Long Teng · Xingyu Wang · Jianlin Zhang
23 March 2026 at 18:00

Immunotargets Ther. 2026 Mar 17;15:541852. doi: 10.2147/ITT.S541852. eCollection 2026.

ABSTRACT

PURPOSE: NUP85 encodes protein components of the Nup107-160 subunit of the nuclear pore complex, belonging to the Nucleoporins (NUPs) family, potentially implicating its role in human cancer. This study aims to elucidate the potential involvement of NUP85 in cancer pathogenesis.

METHODS: Leveraging data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx), Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC), Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia (CCLE), Human Protein Atlas (HPA), Gene Expression Profiling Interactive Analysis (GEPIA), CellMiner, and GeneMANIA databases, we investigated the role of NUP85 across various tumors. Correlations between NUP85 expression and pathological stage, histological grade, survival, immune infiltration, tumor mutational burden (TMB), microsatellite instability (MSI), drug resistance, DNA methylation, copy number variation (CNV), and single-cell expression were analyzed. Gene functional enrichment analysis was conducted to explore NUP85-associated pathways. Molecular biology experiments including Western blotting, flow cytometry, trans-well migration, and invasion assays were performed to validate NUP85's oncogenic role in lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) and oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) cell lines.

RESULTS: Our findings reveal up-regulated expression of NUP85 in most tumor tissues, with significant correlations observed with pathological stage, survival, immune infiltration, TMB, MSI, drug resistance, DNA methylation, and CNV. Molecular biology experiments confirm NUP85's tumor-promoting role in LUAD and OSCC cell lines. Single-cell sequencing data suggest elevated NUP85 expression primarily in proliferative T cells (Tprolif).

CONCLUSION: NUP85 emerges as a potential tumor marker associated with tumor immunity and poor prognosis. These insights offer avenues for the development of novel therapeutic targets and anti-neoplastic drugs.

PMID:41869435 | PMC:PMC13005628 | DOI:10.2147/ITT.S541852

Received — 17 March 2026 ⏭

SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Xiangyi Li · Wenbo Chen · Yimin Liu · Shenghan Zheng · Xiaokun Chen · Yifeng He · Yubo Li · Bingran You · Haotian Shen · Jiankai Sun · Shuyi Wang · Binxu Li · Qunhong Zeng · Di Wang · Xuandong Zhao · Yuanli Wang · Roey Ben Chaim · Zonglin Di · Yipeng Gao · Junwei He · Yizhuo He · Liqiang Jing · Luyang Kong · Xin Lan · Jiachen Li · Songlin Li · Yijiang Li · Yueqian Lin · Xinyi Liu · Xuanqing Liu · Haoran Lyu · Ze Ma · Bowei Wang · Runhui Wang · Tianyu Wang · Wengao Ye · Yue Zhang · Hanwen Xing · Yiqi Xue · Steven Dillmann · Han-chung Lee
16 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2602.12670v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent Skills are structured packages of procedural knowledge that augment LLM agents at inference time. Despite rapid adoption, there is no standard way to measure whether they actually help. We present SkillsBench, a benchmark of 86 tasks across 11 domains paired with curated Skills and deterministic verifiers. Each task is evaluated under three conditions: no Skills, curated Skills, and self-generated Skills. We test 7 agent-model configurations over 7,308 trajectories. Curated Skills raise average pass rate by 16.2 percentage points(pp), but effects vary widely by domain (+4.5pp for Software Engineering to +51.9pp for Healthcare) and 16 of 84 tasks show negative deltas. Self-generated Skills provide no benefit on average, showing that models cannot reliably author the procedural knowledge they benefit from consuming. Focused Skills with 2--3 modules outperform comprehensive documentation, and smaller models with Skills can match larger models without them.

OpenVision 3: A Family of Unified Visual Encoder for Both Understanding and Generation

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Letian Zhang · Sucheng Ren · Yanqing Liu · Xianhang Li · Zeyu Wang · Yuyin Zhou · Huaxiu Yao · Zeyu Zheng · Weili Nie · Guilin Liu · Zhiding Yu · Cihang Xie
16 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2601.15369v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper presents a family of advanced vision encoder, named OpenVision 3, that learns a single, unified visual representation that can serve both image understanding and image generation. Our core architecture is simple: we feed VAE-compressed image latents to a ViT encoder and train its output to support two complementary roles. First, the encoder output is passed to the ViT-VAE decoder to reconstruct the original image, encouraging the representation to capture generative structure. Second, the same representation is optimized with contrastive learning and image-captioning objectives, strengthening semantic features. By jointly optimizing reconstruction- and semantics-driven signals in a shared latent space, the encoder learns representations that synergize and generalize well across both regimes. We validate this unified design through extensive downstream evaluations with the encoder frozen. For generation, we test it under the RAE framework: ours substantially surpasses the standard CLIP-based encoder (e.g., gFID: 1.87 vs. 2.54 on ImageNet). For multimodal understanding, we plug the encoder into the LLaVA-1.5 and LLaVA-NeXT framework: it performs comparably with a standard CLIP vision encoder (e.g., 63.3 vs. 61.2 on SeedBench, and 59.2 vs. 58.1 on GQA). We provide empirical evidence that generation and understanding are mutually beneficial in our architecture, while further underscoring the critical role of the VAE latent space. We hope this work can spur future research on unified modeling.
Received — 14 March 2026 ⏭

Machine Learning for Stress Testing: Uncertainty Decomposition in Causal Panel Prediction

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Yu Wang · Xiangchen Liu · Siguang Li
10 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2603.07438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Regulatory stress testing requires projecting credit losses under hypothetical macroeconomic scenarios -- a fundamentally causal question typically treated as a prediction problem. We propose a framework for policy-path counterfactual inference in panels that transparently separates what can be learned from data from what requires assumptions about confounding. Our approach has four components: (i) observational identification of path-conditional means via iterated regression, enabling continuous macro-path contrasts without requiring a control group; (ii) causal set identification under bounded confounding, yielding sharp identified sets with interpretable breakdown values that communicate robustness in a single number; (iii) an oracle inequality showing that recursive rollout error is governed by a horizon-dependent amplification factor, providing a concrete answer to how far ahead one can reliably predict under stress; and (iv) importance-weighted conformal calibration bands with diagnostics that quantify extrapolation cost and trigger abstention when coverage guarantees degrade. The final output is a three-layer uncertainty decomposition that cleanly separates estimation uncertainty from confounding uncertainty. We validate all results through simulation and semi-synthetic experiments with real unemployment data, including a Covid retrospective demonstrating the framework's diagnostic value under extreme scenarios.
Received — 11 March 2026 ⏭

A prior information informed learning architecture for flying trajectory prediction

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Xianda Huang · Zidong Han · Ruibo Jin · Zhenyu Wang · Wenyu Li · Xiaoyang Li · Yi Gong
10 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2603.06863v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Trajectory prediction for flying objects is critical in domains ranging from sports analytics to aerospace. However, traditional methods struggle with complex physical modeling, computational inefficiencies, and high hardware demands, often neglecting critical trajectory events like landing points. This paper introduces a novel, hardware-efficient trajectory prediction framework that integrates environmental priors with a Dual-Transformer-Cascaded (DTC) architecture. We demonstrate this approach by predicting the landing points of tennis balls in real-world outdoor courts. Using a single industrial camera and YOLO-based detection, we extract high-speed flight coordinates. These coordinates, fused with structural environmental priors (e.g., court boundaries), form a comprehensive dataset fed into our proposed DTC model. A first-level Transformer classifies the trajectory, while a second-level Transformer synthesizes these features to precisely predict the landing point. Extensive ablation and comparative experiments demonstrate that integrating environmental priors within the DTC architecture significantly outperforms existing trajectory prediction frameworks

An Embedding-based Approach to Inconsistency-tolerant Reasoning with Inconsistent Ontologies

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Keyu Wang · Site Li · Jiaye Li · Guilin Qi · Qiu Ji
10 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2304.01664v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Inconsistency handling is an important issue in knowledge management. Especially in ontology engineering, logical inconsistencies may occur during ontology construction. A natural way to reason with an inconsistent ontology is to utilize the maximal consistent subsets of the ontology. However, previous studies on selecting maximum consistent subsets have rarely considered the semantics of the axioms, which may result in irrational inference. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to reasoning with inconsistent ontologies in description logics based on the embeddings of axioms. We first give a method for turning axioms into distributed semantic vectors to compute the semantic connections between the axioms. We then define an embedding-based method for selecting the maximum consistent subsets and use it to define an inconsistency-tolerant inference relation. We show the rationality of our inference relation by considering some logical properties. Finally, we conduct experiments on several ontologies to evaluate the reasoning power of our inference relation. The experimental results show that our embedding-based method can outperform existing inconsistency-tolerant reasoning methods based on maximal consistent subsets.

MAS-Orchestra: Understanding and Improving Multi-Agent Reasoning Through Holistic Orchestration and Controlled Benchmarks

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Zixuan Ke · Yifei Ming · Austin Xu · Ryan Chin · Xuan-Phi Nguyen · Prathyusha Jwalapuram · Jiayu Wang · Semih Yavuz · Caiming Xiong · Shafiq Joty
10 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2601.14652v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While multi-agent systems (MAS) promise elevated intelligence through coordination of agents, current approaches to automatic MAS design under-deliver. Such shortcomings stem from two key factors: (1) methodological complexity - agent orchestration is performed using sequential, code-level execution that limits global system-level holistic reasoning and scales poorly with agent complexity - and (2) efficacy uncertainty - MAS are deployed without understanding if there are tangible benefits compared to single-agent systems (SAS). We propose MASOrchestra, a training-time framework that formulates MAS orchestration as a function-calling reinforcement learning problem with holistic orchestration, generating an entire MAS at once. In MAS-Orchestra, complex, goal-oriented subagents are abstracted as callable functions, enabling global reasoning over system structure while hiding internal execution details. To rigorously study when and why MAS are beneficial, we introduce MASBENCH, a controlled benchmark that characterizes tasks along five axes: Depth, Horizon, Breadth, Parallel, and Robustness. Our analysis reveals that MAS gains depend critically on task structure, verification protocols, and the capabilities of both orchestrator and subagents, rather than holding universally. Guided by these insights, MAS-Orchestra achieves consistent improvements on public benchmarks including mathematical reasoning, multi-hop QA, and search-based QA, while achieving more than 10x efficiency over strong baselines. Together, MAS-Orchestra and MASBENCH enable better training and understanding of MAS in the pursuit of multi-agent intelligence.

SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Xiangyi Li · Wenbo Chen · Yimin Liu · Shenghan Zheng · Xiaokun Chen · Yifeng He · Yubo Li · Bingran You · Haotian Shen · Jiankai Sun · Shuyi Wang · Binxu Li · Qunhong Zeng · Di Wang · Xuandong Zhao · Yuanli Wang · Roey Ben Chaim · Zonglin Di · Yipeng Gao · Junwei He · Yizhuo He · Liqiang Jing · Luyang Kong · Xin Lan · Jiachen Li · Songlin Li · Yijiang Li · Yueqian Lin · Xinyi Liu · Xuanqing Liu · Haoran Lyu · Ze Ma · Bowei Wang · Runhui Wang · Tianyu Wang · Wengao Ye · Yue Zhang · Hanwen Xing · Yiqi Xue · Steven Dillmann · Han-chung Lee
10 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2602.12670v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent Skills are structured packages of procedural knowledge that augment LLM agents at inference time. Despite rapid adoption, there is no standard way to measure whether they actually help. We present SkillsBench, a benchmark of 86 tasks across 11 domains paired with curated Skills and deterministic verifiers. Each task is evaluated under three conditions: no Skills, curated Skills, and self-generated Skills. We test 7 agent-model configurations over 7,308 trajectories. Curated Skills raise average pass rate by 16.2 percentage points(pp), but effects vary widely by domain (+4.5pp for Software Engineering to +51.9pp for Healthcare) and 16 of 84 tasks show negative deltas. Self-generated Skills provide no benefit on average, showing that models cannot reliably author the procedural knowledge they benefit from consuming. Focused Skills with 2--3 modules outperform comprehensive documentation, and smaller models with Skills can match larger models without them.

A Simple "Motivation" Can Enhance Reinforcement Finetuning of Large Reasoning Models

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Junjie Zhang · Guozheng Ma · Shunyu Liu · Haoyu Wang · Jiaxing Huang · Ting-En Lin · Fei Huang · Yongbin Li · Dacheng Tao
10 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2506.18485v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards~(RLVR) has emerged as a powerful learn-to-reason paradigm for large reasoning models to tackle complex tasks. However, the current RLVR paradigm is still not efficient enough, as it works in a trial-and-error manner. To perform better, the model needs to explore the reward space by numerously generating responses and learn from fragmented reward signals, blind to the overall reward patterns. Fortunately, verifiable rewards make the natural language description of the reward function possible, and meanwhile, LLMs have demonstrated strong in-context learning ability. This motivates us to explore if large reasoning models can benefit from a \textbf{motivation} of the task, \textit{i.e.}, awareness of the reward function, during the reinforcement finetuning process, as we humans sometimes do when learning. In this paper, we introduce \textit{\textbf{M}otivation-\textbf{e}nhanced \textbf{R}einforcement \textbf{F}inetuning}~(\textbf{MeRF}), an intuitive yet effective method enhancing reinforcement finetuning of LLMs by involving \emph{``telling LLMs rules of the game''}. Specifically, \textbf{MeRF} directly injects the reward specification into the prompt, which serves as an in-context motivation for the model to be aware of the optimization objective. This simple modification leverages the in-context learning ability of LLMs, aligning generation with optimization, thereby incentivizing the model to generate desired outputs from both inner motivation and external reward. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that \textbf{MeRF} achieves substantial performance gains over the RLVR baseline. Moreover, ablation studies show that MeRF performs better with greater consistency between the in-context motivation and the external reward function, while the model also demonstrates an ability to adapt to misleading motivations through reinforcement finetuning.

Continuous-Flow Data-Rate-Aware CNN Inference on FPGA

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Tobias Habermann · Michael Mecik · Zhenyu Wang · C\'esar David Vera · Martin Kumm · Mario Garrido
10 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2601.19940v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Among hardware accelerators for deep-learning inference, data flow implementations offer low latency and high throughput capabilities. In these architectures, each neuron is mapped to a dedicated hardware unit, making them well-suited for field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation. Previous unrolled implementations mostly focus on fully connected networks because of their simplicity, although it is well known that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) require fewer computations for the same accuracy. When observing the data flow in CNNs, pooling layers and convolutional layers with a stride larger than one, the number of data at their output is reduced with respect to their input. This data reduction strongly affects the data rate in a fully parallel implementation, making hardware units heavily underutilized unless it is handled properly. This work addresses this issue by analyzing the data flow of CNNs and presents a novel approach to designing data-rate-aware, continuous-flow CNN architectures. The proposed approach ensures a high hardware utilization close to 100% by interleaving low data rate signals and sharing hardware units, as well as using the right parallelization to achieve the throughput of a fully parallel implementation. The results show that a significant amount of the arithmetic logic can be saved, which allows implementing complex CNNs like MobileNet on a single FPGA with high throughput.
Received — 5 March 2026 ⏭

MAGE: Meta-Reinforcement Learning for Language Agents toward Strategic Exploration and Exploitation

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Lu Yang · Zelai Xu · Minyang Xie · Jiaxuan Gao · Zhao Shok · Yu Wang · Yi Wu
5 March 2026 at 13:00
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.

MedFeat: Model-Aware and Explainability-Driven Feature Engineering with LLMs for Clinical Tabular Prediction

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Zizheng Zhang · Yiming Li · Justin Xu · Jinyu Wang · Rui Wang · Lei Song · Jiang Bian · David W Eyre · Jingjing Fu
4 March 2026 at 13:00
arXiv:2603.02221v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In healthcare tabular predictions, classical models with feature engineering often outperform neural approaches. Recent advances in Large Language Models enable the integration of domain knowledge into feature engineering, offering a promising direction. However, existing approaches typically rely on a broad search over predefined transformations, overlooking downstream model characteristics and feature importance signals. We present MedFeat, a feedback-driven and model-aware feature engineering framework that leverages LLM reasoning with domain knowledge and provides feature explanations based on SHAP values while tracking successful and failed proposals to guide feature discovery. By incorporating model awareness, MedFeat prioritizes informative signals that are difficult for the downstream model to learn directly due to its characteristics. Across a broad range of clinical prediction tasks, MedFeat achieves stable improvements over various baselines and discovers clinically meaningful features that generalize under distribution shift, demonstrating robustness across years and from ICU cohorts to general hospitalized patients, thereby offering insights into real-world deployment. Code required to reproduce our experiments will be released, subject to dataset agreements and institutional policies.

Curriculum Learning for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Distillation via Structure-Aware Masking and GRPO

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Bowen Yu · Maolin Wang · Sheng Zhang · Binhao Wang · Yi Wen · Jingtong Gao · Bowen Liu · Zimo Zhao · Wanyu Wang · Xiangyu Zhao
4 March 2026 at 13:00
arXiv:2602.17686v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distilling Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning from large language models into compact student models presents a fundamental challenge: teacher rationales are often too verbose for smaller models to faithfully reproduce. Existing approaches either compress reasoning into single-step, losing the interpretability that makes CoT valuable. We present a three-stage curriculum learning framework that addresses this capacity mismatch through progressive skill acquisition. First, we establish structural understanding via masked shuffled reconstruction. Second, we apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on masked completion tasks, enabling the model to discover its own balance between accuracy and brevity. Third, we identify persistent failure cases and guide the student to internalize teacher knowledge through targeted rewriting, again optimized with GRPO. Experiments on GSM8K demonstrate that our approach enables Qwen2.5-3B-Base to achieve an 11.29 percent accuracy improvement while reducing output length by 27.4 percent, surpassing both instruction-tuned variants and prior distillation methods.
Received — 25 February 2026 ⏭

Rules or Weights? Comparing User Understanding of Explainable AI Techniques with the Cognitive XAI-Adaptive Model

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Louth Bin Rawshan · Zhuoyu Wang · Brian Y Lim
24 February 2026 at 13:00
arXiv:2602.19620v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rules and Weights are popular XAI techniques for explaining AI decisions. Yet, it remains unclear how to choose between them, lacking a cognitive framework to compare their interpretability. In an elicitation user study on forward and counterfactual decision tasks, we identified 7 reasoning strategies of interpreting three XAI Schemas - weights, rules, and their hybrid. To analyze their capabilities, we propose CoXAM, a Cognitive XAI-Adaptive Model with shared memory representation to encode instance attributes, linear weights, and decision rules. CoXAM employs computational rationality to choose among reasoning processes based on the trade-off in utility and reasoning time, separately for forward or counterfactual decision tasks. In a validation study, CoXAM demonstrated a stronger alignment with human decision-making compared to baseline machine learning proxy models. The model successfully replicated and explained several key empirical findings, including that counterfactual tasks are inherently harder than forward tasks, decision tree rules are harder to recall and apply than linear weights, and the helpfulness of XAI depends on the application data context, alongside identifying which underlying reasoning strategies were most effective. With CoXAM, we contribute a cognitive basis to accelerate debugging and benchmarking disparate XAI techniques.
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