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arXiv:2405.10160v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Remote sensing image-text retrieval plays a crucial role in remote sensing interpretation, yet remains challenging under both closed-domain and open-domain scenarios due to semantic noise and domain shifts. To address these issues, we propose a visual prior-guided vision-language model, PriorCLIP, which leverages visual priors for unbiased representation learning and adaptive vision-language alignment. In the closed-domain setting, PriorCLIP introduces two Progressive Attention Encoder (PAE) structures: Spatial-PAE constructs a belief matrix with instruction embeddings to filter key features and mitigate semantic bias. At the same time, Temporal-PAE exploits cyclic activation across time steps to enhance text representation. For the open-domain setting, we design a two-stage prior representation learning strategy, consisting of large-scale pre-training on coarse-grained image-text pairs, followed by fine-tuning on fine-grained pairs using vision-instruction, which enables robust retrieval across long-tail concepts and vocabulary shifts. Furthermore, a cluster-based symmetric contrastive Attribution Loss is proposed to constrain inter-class relations and alleviate semantic confusion in the shared embedding space. Extensive experiments on RSICD and RSITMD benchmarks demonstrate that PriorCLIP achieves substantial improvements, outperforming existing methods by 4.9% and 4.0% in closed-domain retrieval, and by 7.3% and 9.4% in open-domain retrieval, respectively.

arXiv:2509.08593v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: If we use LLMs as judges to evaluate the complex decisions of other LLMs, who or what monitors the judges? Infinite monitoring chains are inevitable whenever we do not know the ground truth of the decisions by experts and we do not want to trust them. One way to ameliorate our evaluation uncertainty is to exploit the use of logical consistency between disagreeing experts. By observing how LLM judges agree and disagree while grading other LLMs, we can compute the only possible evaluations of their grading ability. For example, if two LLM judges disagree on which tasks a third one completed correctly, they cannot both be 100% correct in their judgments. This logic can be formalized as a Linear Programming problem in the space of integer response counts for any finite test. We use it here to develop no-knowledge alarms for misaligned LLM judges. The alarms can detect, with no false positives, that at least one member or more of an ensemble of judges are violating a user specified grading ability requirement.

arXiv:2502.12737v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge base question answering (KBQA) aims to answer user questions in natural language using rich human knowledge stored in large KBs. As current KBQA methods struggle with unseen knowledge base elements at test time,we introduce SG-KBQA: a novel model that injects schema contexts into entity retrieval and logical form generation to tackle this issue. It uses the richer semantics and awareness of the knowledge base structure provided by schema contexts to enhance generalizability. We show that SG-KBQA achieves strong generalizability, outperforming state-of-the-art models on two commonly used benchmark datasets across a variety of test settings. Our source code is available at https://github.com/gaosx2000/SG_KBQA.

arXiv:2509.08682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent systems (MAS) are critical for automating complex tasks, yet their practical deployment is severely hampered by the challenge of failure attribution. Current diagnostic tools, which rely on statistical correlations, are fundamentally inadequate; on challenging benchmarks like Who&When, state-of-the-art methods achieve less than 15% accuracy in locating the root-cause step of a failure. To address this critical gap, we introduce the first failure attribution framework for MAS grounded in multi-granularity causal inference. Our approach makes two key technical contributions: (1) a performance causal inversion principle, which correctly models performance dependencies by reversing the data flow in execution logs, combined with Shapley values to accurately assign agent-level blame; (2) a novel causal discovery algorithm, CDC-MAS, that robustly identifies critical failure steps by tackling the non-stationary nature of MAS interaction data. The framework's attribution results directly fuel an automated optimization loop, generating targeted suggestions whose efficacy is validated via counterfactual simulations. Evaluations on the Who&When and TRAIL benchmarks demonstrate a significant leap in performance. Our method achieves up to 36.2% step-level accuracy. Crucially, the generated optimizations boost overall task success rates by an average of 22.4%. This work provides a principled and effective solution for debugging complex agent interactions, paving the way for more reliable and interpretable multi-agent systems.

arXiv:2505.14157v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper investigates prior prompt engineering (pPE) in the context of reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT), where language models (LMs) are incentivized to exhibit behaviors that maximize performance through reward signals. While existing RFT research has primarily focused on algorithms, reward shaping, and data curation, the design of the prior prompt--the instructions prepended to queries during training to elicit behaviors such as step-by-step reasoning--remains underexplored. We investigate whether different pPE approaches can guide LMs to internalize distinct behaviors after RFT. Inspired by inference-time prompt engineering (iPE), we translate five representative iPE strategies--reasoning, planning, code-based reasoning, knowledge recall, and null-example utilization--into corresponding pPE approaches. We experiment with Qwen2.5-7B using each of the pPE approaches, then evaluate performance on in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks (e.g., AIME2024, HumanEval+, and GPQA-Diamond). Our results show that all pPE-trained models surpass their iPE-prompted counterparts, with the null-example pPE approach achieving the largest average performance gain and the highest improvement on AIME2024 and GPQA-Diamond, surpassing the commonly used reasoning approach. Furthermore, by adapting a behavior-classification framework, we demonstrate that different pPE strategies instill distinct behavioral styles in the resulting models. These findings position pPE as a powerful yet understudied axis for RFT.

arXiv:2509.08705v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a novel Theory of Mind (ToM) framework inspired by dual-process theories from cognitive science, integrating a fast, habitual graph-based reasoning system (System 1), implemented via graph convolutional networks (GCNs), and a slower, context-sensitive meta-adaptive learning system (System 2), driven by meta-learning techniques. Our model dynamically balances intuitive and deliberative reasoning through a learned context gate mechanism. We validate our architecture on canonical false-belief tasks and systematically explore its capacity to replicate hallmark cognitive biases associated with dual-process theory, including anchoring, cognitive-load fatigue, framing effects, and priming effects. Experimental results demonstrate that our dual-process approach closely mirrors human adaptive behavior, achieves robust generalization to unseen contexts, and elucidates cognitive mechanisms underlying reasoning biases. This work bridges artificial intelligence and cognitive theory, paving the way for AI systems exhibiting nuanced, human-like social cognition and adaptive decision-making capabilities.

arXiv:2508.05264v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) aims to combine the thermal radiation information from infrared images with the rich texture details from visible images to enhance perceptual capabilities for downstream visual tasks. However, existing methods often fail to preserve key targets due to a lack of deep semantic understanding of the scene, while the fusion process itself can also introduce artifacts and detail loss, severely compromising both image quality and task performance. To address these issues, this paper proposes SGDFuse, a conditional diffusion model guided by the Segment Anything Model (SAM), to achieve high-fidelity and semantically-aware image fusion. The core of our method is to utilize high-quality semantic masks generated by SAM as explicit priors to guide the optimization of the fusion process via a conditional diffusion model. Specifically, the framework operates in a two-stage process: it first performs a preliminary fusion of multi-modal features, and then utilizes the semantic masks from SAM jointly with the preliminary fused image as a condition to drive the diffusion model's coarse-to-fine denoising generation. This ensures the fusion process not only has explicit semantic directionality but also guarantees the high fidelity of the final result. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SGDFuse achieves state-of-the-art performance in both subjective and objective evaluations, as well as in its adaptability to downstream tasks, providing a powerful solution to the core challenges in image fusion. The code of SGDFuse is available at https://github.com/boshizhang123/SGDFuse.

arXiv:2509.08713v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI scientist systems, capable of autonomously executing the full research workflow from hypothesis generation and experimentation to paper writing, hold significant potential for accelerating scientific discovery. However, the internal workflow of these systems have not been closely examined. This lack of scrutiny poses a risk of introducing flaws that could undermine the integrity, reliability, and trustworthiness of their research outputs. In this paper, we identify four potential failure modes in contemporary AI scientist systems: inappropriate benchmark selection, data leakage, metric misuse, and post-hoc selection bias. To examine these risks, we design controlled experiments that isolate each failure mode while addressing challenges unique to evaluating AI scientist systems. Our assessment of two prominent open-source AI scientist systems reveals the presence of several failures, across a spectrum of severity, which can be easily overlooked in practice. Finally, we demonstrate that access to trace logs and code from the full automated workflow enables far more effective detection of such failures than examining the final paper alone. We thus recommend journals and conferences evaluating AI-generated research to mandate submission of these artifacts alongside the paper to ensure transparency, accountability, and reproducibility.

arXiv:2509.08697v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Backpropagation is the pivotal algorithm underpinning the success of artificial neural networks, yet it has critical limitations such as biologically implausible backward locking and global error propagation. To circumvent these constraints, the Forward-Forward algorithm was proposed as a more biologically plausible method that replaces the backward pass with an additional forward pass. Despite this advantage, the Forward-Forward algorithm significantly trails backpropagation in accuracy, and its optimal form exhibits low inference efficiency due to multiple forward passes required. In this work, the Forward-Forward algorithm is reshaped through its integration with similarity learning frameworks, eliminating the need for multiple forward passes during inference. This proposed algorithm is named Forward-Forward Algorithm Unified with Similarity-based Tuplet loss (FAUST). Empirical evaluations on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10 datasets indicate that FAUST substantially improves accuracy, narrowing the gap with backpropagation. On CIFAR-10, FAUST achieves 56.22% accuracy with a simple multi-layer perceptron architecture, approaching the backpropagation benchmark of 57.63% accuracy.

arXiv:2411.16043v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In frequency division duplex (FDD) massive MIMO systems, a major challenge lies in acquiring the downlink channel state information} (CSI) at the base station (BS) from limited feedback sent by the user equipment (UE). To tackle this fundamental task, our contribution is twofold: First, a simple feedback framework is proposed, where a compression and Gaussian dithering-based quantization strategy is adopted at the UE side, and then a maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) is formulated at the BS side. Recoverability of the MIMO channel under the widely used double directional model is established. Specifically, analyses are presented for two compression schemes -- showing one being more overhead-economical and the other computationally lighter at the UE side. Second, to realize the MLE, an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm is proposed. The algorithm is carefully designed to integrate a sophisticated harmonic retrieval (HR) solver as subroutine, which turns out to be the key of effectively tackling this hard MLE problem.Extensive numerical experiments are conducted to validate the efficacy of our approach.