arXiv:2602.13350v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Brick kilns are a major source of air pollution and forced labor in South Asia, yet large-scale monitoring remains limited by sparse and outdated ground data. We study brick kiln detection at scale using high-resolution satellite imagery and curate a multi city zoom-20 (0.149 meters per pixel) resolution dataset comprising over 1.3 million image tiles across five regions in South and Central Asia. We propose ClimateGraph, a region-adaptive graph-based model that captures spatial and directional structure in kiln layouts, and evaluate it against established graph learning baselines. In parallel, we assess a remote sensing based detection pipeline and benchmark it against recent foundation models for satellite imagery. Our results highlight complementary strengths across graph, foundation, and remote sensing approaches, providing practical guidance for scalable brick kiln monitoring from satellite imagery.

arXiv:2602.13352v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated image captioning using the content from the image is very appealing when done by harnessing the capability of computer vision and natural language processing. Extensive research has been done in the field with a major focus on the English language which gives the scope for further developments in the same with consideration of popular foreign languages. This research utilizes distinct models for translating the image caption into Hindi, the fourth most popular language across the world. Exploring the multi-modal architectures this research comprises local visual features, global visual features, attention mechanisms, and pre-trained models. Using google cloud translator on the image dataset from Flickr8k, Hindi image descriptions have been generated. Pre-trained CNNs like VGG16, ResNet50, and Inception V3 helped in retrieving image characteristics, while the uni-directional and bi-directional techniques of text encoding are used for the text encoding process. An additional Attention layer helps to generate a weight vector and, by multiplying it, combine image characteristics from each time step into a sentence-level feature vector. Bilingual evaluation understudy scores are used to compare the research outcome. Many experiments that serve as a baseline are done for the comparative analysis of the research. An image with a score of BLEU-1 is considered sufficient, whereas one with a score of BLEU-4 is considered to have fluid image captioning. For both BLEU scores, the attention-based bidirectional LSTM with VGG16 produced the best results of 0.59 and 0.19 respectively. The experiments conclude that researchs ability to produce relevant, semantically accurate image captions in Hindi. The research accomplishes the goals and future research can be guided by this research model.

arXiv:2602.13370v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent systems powered by Large Language Models face a critical challenge: agents communicate through natural language, leading to semantic drift, hallucination propagation, and inefficient token consumption. We propose G2CP (Graph-Grounded Communication Protocol), a structured agent communication language where messages are graph operations rather than free text. Agents exchange explicit traversal commands, subgraph fragments, and update operations over a shared knowledge graph, enabling verifiable reasoning traces and eliminating ambiguity. We validate G2CP within an industrial knowledge management system where specialized agents (Diagnostic, Procedural, Synthesis, and Ingestion) coordinate to answer complex queries. Experimental results on 500 industrial scenarios and 21 real-world maintenance cases show that G2CP reduces inter-agent communication tokens by 73%, improves task completion accuracy by 34% over free-text baselines, eliminates cascading hallucinations, and produces fully auditable reasoning chains. G2CP represents a fundamental shift from linguistic to structural communication in multi-agent systems, with implications for any domain requiring precise agent coordination. Code, data, and evaluation scripts are publicly available.

arXiv:2602.13376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly used in document processing pipelines to convert flowchart images into structured code (e.g., Mermaid). In production, these systems process arbitrary inputs for which no ground-truth code exists, making output quality difficult to assess. We propose a reference-free evaluation framework that monitors flowchart image-to-code generation quality at inference time, using only the input image and the generated output. The framework introduces two automated metrics: $\text{Recall}{\text{OCR}}$, which estimates content coverage by extracting text from the input image via OCR as a proxy reference, and $\text{Precision}{\text{VE}}$, which detects hallucinated elements through Visual Entailment against the original image. Their harmonic mean, $\text{F1}{\text{OCR-VE}}$, provides a unified quality score. Validation on the FlowVQA dataset shows strong agreement with ground-truth metrics (average Pearson's $r = 0.97$, $0.91$, and $0.94$ for Recall, Precision, and F1, respectively), confirming the framework's reliability as a practical, reference-free alternative for continuous quality monitoring in production settings.

arXiv:2602.13419v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable potential in scientific domains like retrosynthesis; yet, they often lack the fine-grained control necessary to navigate complex problem spaces without error. A critical challenge is directing an LLM to avoid specific, chemically sensitive sites on a molecule - a task where unconstrained generation can lead to invalid or undesirable synthetic pathways. In this work, we introduce Protect$^*$, a neuro-symbolic framework that grounds the generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in rigorous chemical logic. Our approach combines automated rule-based reasoning - using a comprehensive database of 55+ SMARTS patterns and 40+ characterized protecting groups - with the generative intuition of neural models. The system operates via a hybrid architecture: an ``automatic mode'' where symbolic logic deterministically identifies and guards reactive sites, and a ``human-in-the-loop mode'' that integrates expert strategic constraints. Through ``active state tracking,'' we inject hard symbolic constraints into the neural inference process via a dedicated protection state linked to canonical atom maps. We demonstrate this neuro-symbolic approach through case studies on complex natural products, including the discovery of a novel synthetic pathway for Erythromycin B, showing that grounding neural generation in symbolic logic enables reliable, expert-level autonomy.

arXiv:2602.13421v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Computation in biological systems is fundamentally energy-constrained, yet standard theories of computation treat energy as freely available. Here, we argue that variational free energy minimization under a Poisson assumption offers a principled path toward an energy-aware theory of computation. Our key observation is that the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence term in the Poisson free energy objective becomes proportional to the prior firing rates of model neurons, yielding an emergent metabolic cost term that penalizes high baseline activity. This structure couples an abstract information-theoretic quantity -- the *coding rate* -- to a concrete biophysical variable -- the *firing rate* -- which enables a trade-off between coding fidelity and energy expenditure. Such a coupling arises naturally in the Poisson variational autoencoder (P-VAE) -- a brain-inspired generative model that encodes inputs as discrete spike counts and recovers a spiking form of *sparse coding* as a special case -- but is absent from standard Gaussian VAEs. To demonstrate that this metabolic cost structure is unique to the Poisson formulation, we compare the P-VAE against Grelu-VAE, a Gaussian VAE with ReLU rectification applied to latent samples, which controls for the non-negativity constraint. Across a systematic sweep of the KL term weighting coefficient $\beta$ and latent dimensionality, we find that increasing $\beta$ monotonically increases sparsity and reduces average spiking activity in the P-VAE. In contrast, Grelu-VAE representations remain unchanged, confirming that the effect is specific to Poisson statistics rather than a byproduct of non-negative representations. These results establish Poisson variational inference as a promising foundation for a resource-constrained theory of computation.

arXiv:2602.13427v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in settings where inducing a bias toward a certain topic can have significant consequences, and backdoor attacks can be used to produce such models. Prior work on backdoor attacks has largely focused on a black-box threat model, with an adversary targeting the model builder's LLM. However, in the bias manipulation setting, the model builder themselves could be the adversary, warranting a white-box threat model where the attacker's ability to poison, and manipulate the poisoned data is substantially increased. Furthermore, despite growing research in semantically-triggered backdoors, most studies have limited themselves to syntactically-triggered attacks. Motivated by these limitations, we conduct an analysis consisting of over 1000 evaluations using higher poisoning ratios and greater data augmentation to gain a better understanding of the potential of syntactically- and semantically-triggered backdoor attacks in a white-box setting. In addition, we study whether two representative defense paradigms, model-intrinsic and model-extrinsic backdoor removal, are able to mitigate these attacks. Our analysis reveals numerous new findings. We discover that while both syntactically- and semantically-triggered attacks can effectively induce the target behaviour, and largely preserve utility, semantically-triggered attacks are generally more effective in inducing negative biases, while both backdoor types struggle with causing positive biases. Furthermore, while both defense types are able to mitigate these backdoors, they either result in a substantial drop in utility, or require high computational overhead.

arXiv:2602.13444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models can generate plausible end-effector motions, yet they often fail in long-horizon, contact-rich tasks because the underlying hand-object interaction (HOI) structure is not explicitly represented. An embodiment-agnostic interaction representation that captures this structure would make manipulation behaviors easier to validate and transfer across robots. We propose FlowHOI, a two-stage flow-matching framework that generates semantically grounded, temporally coherent HOI sequences, comprising hand poses, object poses, and hand-object contact states, conditioned on an egocentric observation, a language instruction, and a 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) scene reconstruction. We decouple geometry-centric grasping from semantics-centric manipulation, conditioning the latter on compact 3D scene tokens and employing a motion-text alignment loss to semantically ground the generated interactions in both the physical scene layout and the language instruction. To address the scarcity of high-fidelity HOI supervision, we introduce a reconstruction pipeline that recovers aligned hand-object trajectories and meshes from large-scale egocentric videos, yielding an HOI prior for robust generation. Across the GRAB and HOT3D benchmarks, FlowHOI achieves the highest action recognition accuracy and a 1.7$\times$ higher physics simulation success rate than the strongest diffusion-based baseline, while delivering a 40$\times$ inference speedup. We further demonstrate real-robot execution on four dexterous manipulation tasks, illustrating the feasibility of retargeting generated HOI representations to real-robot execution pipelines.

arXiv:2602.13446v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: An end-to-end autoencoder (AE) framework is developed for downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) over Rayleigh fading channels, which learns interference-aware and channel-adaptive super-constellations. While existing works either assume additive white Gaussian noise channels or treat fading channels without a fully end-to-end learning approach, our framework directly embeds the wireless channel into both training and inference. To account for practical channel state information (CSI), we further incorporate limited feedback via both uniform and Lloyd-Max quantization of channel gains and analyze their impact on AE training and bit error rate (BER) performance. Simulation results show that, with perfect CSI, the proposed AE outperforms the existing analytical NOMA schemes. In addition, Lloyd-Max quantization achieves superior BER performance compared to uniform quantization. These results demonstrate that end-to-end AEs trained directly over Rayleigh fading can effectively learn robust, interference-aware signaling strategies, paving the way for NOMA deployment in fading environments with realistic CSI constraints.

arXiv:2602.13458v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large-scale communities of AI agents are becoming increasingly prevalent, creating new environments for agent-agent social interaction. Prior work has examined multi-agent behavior primarily in controlled or small-scale settings, limiting our understanding of emergent social dynamics at scale. The recent emergence of MoltBook, a social networking platform designed explicitly for AI agents, presents a unique opportunity to study whether and how these interactions reproduce core human social mechanisms. We present MoltNet, a large-scale empirical analysis of agent interaction on MoltBook using data collected in early 2026. Grounded in sociological and social-psychological theory, we examine behavior along four dimensions: intent and motivation, norms and templates, incentives and behavioral drift, emotion and contagion. Our analysis revealed that agents strongly respond to social rewards and rapidly converge on community-specific interaction templates, resembling human patterns of incentive sensitivity and normative conformity. However, they are predominantly knowledge-driven rather than persona-aligned, and display limited emotional reciprocity along with weak dialogic engagement, which diverges systematically from human online communities. Together, these results reveal both similarities and differences between artificial and human social systems and provide an empirical foundation for understanding, designing, and governing large-scale agent communities.

arXiv:2602.13469v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are changing how Blind and Low Vision (BLV) people access visual information in their daily lives. Unlike traditional visual interpretation tools that provide access through captions and OCR (text recognition through camera input), MLLM-enabled applications support access through conversational assistance, where users can ask questions to obtain goal-relevant details. However, evidence about their performance in the real-world and their implications for BLV people's everyday life remain limited. To address this, we conducted a two-week diary study, where we captured 20 BLV participants' use of an MLLM-enabled visual interpretation application. Although participants rated the visual interpretations of the application as "somewhat trustworthy" (mean=3.76 out of 5, max=very trustworthy) and "somewhat satisfying" (mean=4.13 out of 5, max=very satisfying), the AI often produced incorrect answers (22.2%) or abstained (10.8%) from responding to follow-up requests. Our work demonstrates that MLLMs can improve the accuracy of descriptive visual interpretations, but that supporting everyday use also depends on the "visual assistant" skill -- a set of behaviors for providing goal-directed, reliable assistance. We conclude by proposing the "visual assistant" skill and practical guidelines to help future MLLM-enabled visual interpretation applications better support BLV people's access to visual information.

arXiv:2602.13482v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Selecting an optimal classification model requires a robust and comprehensive understanding of the performance of the model. This paper provides a tutorial on the PyCM library, demonstrating its utility in conducting deep-dive evaluations of multi-class classifiers. By examining two different case scenarios, we illustrate how the choice of evaluation metrics can fundamentally shift the interpretation of a model's efficacy. Our findings emphasize that a multi-dimensional evaluation framework is essential for uncovering small but important differences in model performance. However, standard metrics may miss these subtle performance trade-offs.

arXiv:2602.13498v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Muon-style optimizers leverage Newton-Schulz (NS) iterations to orthogonalize updates, yielding update geometries that often outperform Adam-series methods. However, this orthogonalization discards magnitude information, rendering training sensitive to step-size hyperparameters and vulnerable to high-energy bursts. To mitigate this, we introduce TrasMuon (\textbf{T}rust \textbf{R}egion \textbf{A}daptive \textbf{S}caling \textbf{Muon}). TrasMuon preserves the near-isometric geometry of Muon while stabilizing magnitudes through (i) global RMS calibration and (ii) energy-based trust-region clipping. We demonstrate that while reintroducing adaptive scaling improves optimization efficiency, it typically exacerbates instability due to high-energy outliers. TrasMuon addresses this by defining a trust region based on relative energy ratios, confining updates to a stable zone. Empirical experiments on vision and language models demonstrate that TrasMuon converges faster than baselines. Furthermore, experiments without warmup stages confirm TrasMuon's superior stability and robustness.

arXiv:2602.13506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimizing monotone non-convex functions is a fundamental challenge across machine learning and combinatorial optimization. We introduce and study $\gamma$-weakly $\theta$-up-concavity, a novel first-order condition that characterizes a broad class of such functions. This condition provides a powerful unifying framework, strictly generalizing both DR-submodular functions and One-Sided Smooth (OSS) functions. Our central theoretical contribution demonstrates that $\gamma$-weakly $\theta$-up-concave functions are upper-linearizable: for any feasible point, we can construct a linear surrogate whose gains provably approximate the original non-linear objective. This approximation holds up to a constant factor, namely the approximation coefficient, dependent solely on $\gamma$, $\theta$, and the geometry of the feasible set. This linearizability yields immediate and unified approximation guarantees for a wide range of problems. Specifically, we obtain unified approximation guarantees for offline optimization as well as static and dynamic regret bounds in online settings via standard reductions to linear optimization. Moreover, our framework recovers the optimal approximation coefficient for DR-submodular maximization and significantly improves existing approximation coefficients for OSS optimization, particularly over matroid constraints.

arXiv:2602.13521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Natural language to SQL (NL2SQL) translation enables non-expert users to query relational databases through natural language. Recently, NL2SQL agents, powered by the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), have significantly advanced NL2SQL translation. Nonetheless, NL2SQL agents still make mistakes when faced with large-scale real-world databases because they lack knowledge of how to correctly leverage the underlying data (e.g., knowledge about the intent of each column) and form misconceptions about the data when querying it, leading to errors. Prior work has studied generating facts about the database to provide more context to NL2SQL agents, but such approaches simply restate database contents without addressing the agent's misconceptions. In this paper, we propose Tk-Boost, a bolt-on framework for augmenting any NL2SQL agent with tribal knowledge: knowledge that corrects the agent's misconceptions in querying the database accumulated through experience using the database. To accumulate experience, Tk-Boost first asks the NL2SQL agent to answer a few queries on the database, identifies the agent's misconceptions by analyzing its mistakes on the database, and generates tribal knowledge to address them. To enable accurate retrieval, Tk-Boost indexes this knowledge with applicability conditions that specify the query features for which the knowledge is useful. When answering new queries, Tk-Boost uses this knowledge to provide feedback to the NL2SQL agent, resolving the agent's misconceptions during SQL generation, and thus improving the agent's accuracy. Extensive experiments across the BIRD and Spider 2.0 benchmarks with various NL2SQL agents shows Tk-Boost improves NL2SQL agents accuracy by up to 16.9% on Spider 2.0 and 13.7% on BIRD

arXiv:2602.13540v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are widely deployed as general-purpose problem solvers, making accurate confidence estimation critical for reliable use. Prior work on LLM calibration largely focuses on response-level confidence, which estimates the correctness of a single generated output. However, this formulation is misaligned with many practical settings where the central question is how likely a model is to solve a query overall. We show that this mismatch results from the stochastic nature of modern LLM decoding, under which single-response correctness fails to reflect underlying model capability. To address this issue, we introduce capability calibration, which targets the model's expected accuracy on a query. We formally distinguish capability calibration from response calibration and show that the two differ both theoretically and empirically. We establish an empirical evaluation setup and study a range of confidence estimation methods. Our results demonstrate that capability-calibrated confidence improves pass@$k$ prediction and inference budget allocation, establishing a foundation with potential for diverse applications.

arXiv:2602.13571v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, yet hallucinations in knowledge-intensive tasks remain a critical challenge. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) addresses this by integrating external knowledge, but its efficacy depends on accurate document retrieval and ranking. Although existing rerankers demonstrate effectiveness, they frequently necessitate specialized training, impose substantial computational expenses, and fail to fully exploit the semantic capabilities of LLMs, particularly their inherent confidence signals. We propose the LLM-Confidence Reranker (LCR), a training-free, plug-and-play algorithm that enhances reranking in RAG systems by leveraging black-box LLM confidence derived from Maximum Semantic Cluster Proportion (MSCP). LCR employs a two-stage process: confidence assessment via multinomial sampling and clustering, followed by binning and multi-level sorting based on query and document confidence thresholds. This approach prioritizes relevant documents while preserving original rankings for high-confidence queries, ensuring robustness. Evaluated on BEIR and TREC benchmarks with BM25 and Contriever retrievers, LCR--using only 7--9B-parameter pre-trained LLMs--consistently improves NDCG@5 by up to 20.6% across pre-trained LLM and fine-tuned Transformer rerankers, without degradation. Ablation studies validate the hypothesis that LLM confidence positively correlates with document relevance, elucidating LCR's mechanism. LCR offers computational efficiency, parallelism for scalability, and broad compatibility, mitigating hallucinations in applications like medical diagnosis.

arXiv:2602.13575v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current alignment methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on compressing vast amounts of human preference data into static, absolute reward functions, leading to data scarcity, noise sensitivity, and training instability. We introduce Elo-Evolve, a co-evolutionary framework that redefines alignment as dynamic multi-agent competition within an adaptive opponent pool. Our approach makes two key innovations: (1) eliminating Bradley-Terry model dependencies by learning directly from binary win/loss outcomes in pairwise competitions, and (2) implementing Elo-orchestrated opponent selection that provides automatic curriculum learning through temperature-controlled sampling. We ground our approach in PAC learning theory, demonstrating that pairwise comparison achieves superior sample complexity and empirically validate a 4.5x noise reduction compared to absolute scoring approaches. Experimentally, we train a Qwen2.5-7B model using our framework with opponents including Qwen2.5-14B, Qwen2.5-32B, and Qwen3-8B models. Results demonstrate a clear performance hierarchy: point-based methods

arXiv:2602.13588v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inspired by the human visual system, which operates on two parallel yet interactive streams for contextual and spatial understanding, this article presents Two Interactive Streams (TwInS), a novel bio-inspired joint learning framework capable of simultaneously performing scene parsing and geometric vision tasks. TwInS adopts a unified, general-purpose architecture in which multi-level contextual features from the scene parsing stream are infused into the geometric vision stream to guide its iterative refinement. In the reverse direction, decoded geometric features are projected into the contextual feature space for selective heterogeneous feature fusion via a novel cross-task adapter, which leverages rich cross-view geometric cues to enhance scene parsing. To eliminate the dependence on costly human-annotated correspondence ground truth, TwInS is further equipped with a tailored semi-supervised training strategy, which unleashes the potential of large-scale multi-view data and enables continuous self-evolution without requiring ground-truth correspondences. Extensive experiments conducted on three public datasets validate the effectiveness of TwInS's core components and demonstrate its superior performance over existing state-of-the-art approaches. The source code will be made publicly available upon publication.

arXiv:2602.13606v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication, utilizing beamforming techniques to address the inherent path loss limitation, is considered as one of the key technologies to support ever increasing high throughput and low latency demands of connected vehicles. However, adopting standard defined beamforming approach in highly dynamic vehicular environments often incurs high beam training overheads and reduction in the available airtime for communications, which is mainly due to exchanging pilot signals and exhaustive beam measurements. To this end, we present a multi-modal sensing and fusion learning framework as a potential alternative solution to reduce such overheads. In this framework, we first extract the representative features from the sensing modalities by modality specific encoders, then, utilize multi-head cross-modal attention to learn dependencies and correlations between different modalities, and subsequently fuse the multimodal features to obtain predicted top-k beams so that the best line-of-sight links can be proactively established. To show the generalizability of the proposed framework, we perform a comprehensive experiment in four different vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) scenarios from real world multimodal and 60 GHz mmWave wireless sensing data. The experiment reveals that the proposed framework (i) achieves up to 96.72% accuracy on predicting top-15 beams correctly, (ii) incurs roughly 0.77 dB average power loss, and (iii) improves the overall latency and beam searching space overheads by 86.81% and 76.56% respectively for top-15 beams compared to standard defined approach.