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artificial intelligence

4,135 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

TRNet: Learning with Topographic Priors for VHR Paddy Rice Mapping

Mapping paddy rice from very high resolution (VHR) imagery in mountainous and hilly regions remains challenging because terrain variations alter optical appearance and increase confusion with visually similar vegetation. To address this issue, we propose TRNet for multimodal paddy rice segmentation using 0.5 m GaoJing 1 red green blue (RGB) imagery, a 5 m TanDEM X digital elevation model (DEM), and derived slope information. TRNet employs separate visual and terrain encoders to preserve modality specific representations. At an early encoder stage, the proposed Topographic Energy Spectral Rectification (TESR) performs terrain conditioned low frequency modulation and asymmetric high frequency regulation to suppress steep slope clutter while selectively enhancing rice related cues on compatible low slope regions. The Topography Guided Paddy Structure Decoder (TPSD) further integrates semantic, rice background boundary, and interior cues with coarse topographic context to refine structural predictions. Experiments are conducted on an Area A internal test set and a geographically held out Area B with steeper terrain and lower rice prevalence. TRNet achieves Rice IoU scores of 85.10% and 80.68% on Areas A and B, outperforming the original Dual Encoder U Net by 9.15 and 18.83 percentage points, respectively. Without any adaptation, evaluation on matched August 2024 imagery retains Rice IoU scores of 82.04% and 76.12%. Extensive ablation, slope stratified, and cross year seasonal analyses demonstrate that the improvements arise from effective frequency rectification and structure learning, which reduce steep terrain false positives and low slope rice omissions. These results demonstrate that coarse topography can serve as a stable contextual prior for robust VHR paddy rice mapping.

Kaiwen Xiao, Chunlong Fu, Liping Zheng et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Spectral Geometry and Bosonic-Bloch Probes: Explorations in Quantum Learning

This paper studies how spectral geometry emerges in quantum learning models and how it can be diagnosed with physically grounded probes. In graph-regularized quantum networks, training reorganizes the output similarity graph, increases the effective spectral dimension Delta S = +0.23, and reshapes the Laplacian spectrum. Edge-resolved two-boson interference directly probes this restructuring: the bosonic enhancement Delta P_uv correlates with the Fiedler edge split |Delta v_2| (r = -0.50), linking learned spectral partitions to interference signatures. A phase diagram shows a nonmonotonic dependence of performance on coupling strength gamma and noise delta, with graph regularization improving fidelity only in a restricted regime; hardware experiments confirm the predicted interference behavior within shot-noise uncertainty. We also analyze a hybrid quantum autoencoder and introduce Bloch-space drift as a geometric diagnostic of its latent representation. With an unsupervised benign-data threshold, the model achieves high ranking performance (ROC-AUC about 0.99) and negligible false-negative rates. Absolute Bloch drift strongly discriminates anomalies (ROC-AUC at least about 0.9), while consecutive drift is near random (ROC-AUC about 0.5), showing that detection arises from persistent state-space displacement rather than local fluctuations. Through the geometry of reduced single-qubit states and associated quantum Fisher information, these results show that learning-induced spectral organization appears as measurable quantum-state structure, establishing a unified spectral-geometric framework for diagnosing quantum learning systems with bosonic and Bloch probes.

Santanu Ganguly, Xing Liang, Dimitrios Makris · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

SoK: AI-Augmented Binary Reversing

Binary reversing is fundamental to software understanding, vulnerability discovery, malware investigation, and firmware auditing. However, it remains inherently challenging due to the lossy transformation of semantic information during compilation. Recent advances in machine learning, large language models (LLMs), and agentic AI systems have accelerated the adoption of AI-augmented binary reversing. Yet, the resulting body of work has become increasingly fragmented across reversing domains, artifact representations, learning approaches, and evaluation practices. This paper presents the first comprehensive systematization of knowledge on AI-augmented binary reversing. We collect 246 research papers published since 2015, and organize them into 22 binary reversing domains according to the inference tasks. We further introduce a unified taxonomy spanning conventional and AI-augmented reversing pipelines. Our taxonomy connects traditional analysis techniques, binary-derived artifacts, representation strategies, learning paradigms, and downstream inference tasks, while clarifying the emerging roles of LLMs and agentic AI systems. By establishing a common vocabulary and structured framework, we offer a holistic view of the field's evolution over the past decade. Our study reveals common structures underlying seemingly disparate approaches, highlights persistent technical challenges and evaluation gaps, and identifies promising opportunities for future research. Collectively, these insights clarify the current state of the field and provide a foundation for the next generation of evidence-grounded and practically deployable AI-augmented binary reversing systems.

Yujeong Kwon, Yiyue Zhang, Kexin Pei et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Golden Ruler: A Numeric Format Catalog with Bit-Exact Conformance Vectors for FP8, BF16, MXFP4, and Microscaling Formats

Numeric format proliferation in machine learning hardware -- FP8 (E4M3 and E5M2), BF16, MXFP4, microscaling block formats, and dozens of research variants -- has outpaced the availability of vendor-neutral, bit-exact reference material. Engineers porting models across accelerators encounter silent divergences that are difficult to diagnose without a shared ruler. This paper describes a catalog of 109 numeric formats spanning 12 clusters (83 at v2; the count is a catalog invariant, not a fixed number), a suite of six bit-exact conformance packs covering GF16, MXFP4 element, BF16, FP8 E4M3, FP8 E5M2, and E8M0 block scale, and an IEEE P3109 v3.2.0 cross-walk that maps each pack to its corresponding standards-track configured format. Each pack is a self-contained JSON document with a SHA-256 fingerprint, a shared row schema, and an anchor vector that encodes 3.0 -- the identity phi^2 + 1/phi^2 = 3 -- as a cross-pack sanity check. Packs are cross-validated against ml_dtypes 0.5.4 (Google/JAX); any divergence is documented explicitly and interpreted as a spec-permitted interpretation gap rather than hidden. The work is framed as registry filling: it does not propose new formats, make model-accuracy claims, or assert superiority over any vendor's implementation. All artifacts are publicly available at https://github.com/gHashTag/t27 under an open license.

Dmitrii Vasilev · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

From Architecture to Output: Structural Origins of Hallucination in Large Language Models and the Amplifying Role of Data

Large language models produce fluent, confident, factually wrong output. Existing taxonomies classify these failures by output type -- intrinsic versus extrinsic, faithfulness versus factuality -- but say nothing about which computational component produced a given failure. We ask what would be required to attribute an individual hallucination to a specific component of the decoder-only stack. We treat three components -- self-attention's associative retrieval, the maximum-likelihood pretraining objective, and autoregressive commitment under exposure bias -- as candidate failure surfaces, justify their separability rather than assuming it, and specify an attribution procedure requiring only sampling access: an ordered set of three interventions on prefix, context, and frequency competition, together with a validation design based on independent annotation and a classifier baseline. We state five falsifiable predictions and identify competing accounts each would discriminate against. We analyse how instruction tuning, RLHF, DPO, retrieval augmentation, scale, and calibration bear on the argument. We execute a direct, pre-registered test of the commitment prediction (P3) across three model families: substituting a correct continuation at the point of divergence reduces downstream failing claims by 46.7 percentage points relative to baseline (p<10^-9). However, a wrong-fact substitution reduces errors at a statistically indistinguishable rate, and the model answers correctly in isolation on only 2.2% of items where substitution succeeded -- a genuine partial result rather than a confirmation. Dataset pathologies amplify each component without originating failure independently, supporting an asymmetric-dependence claim: components are necessary intermediaries for data-induced failure, but data defects are not necessary for component-induced failure.

Md. Rejaul Korim Sadi, Toufiqur Rahman Tasin, Golam Mostofa Naeem · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

"**Important** You should give me full credits!": Exploring Prompt Injection Attacks on LLM-Based Automatic Grading Systems

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has significantly accelerated recent research on LLM-based automatic grading (AG) systems. Benefiting from the strong instruction-following capabilities and broad prior knowledge of LLMs, educators can deploy AG systems across diverse tasks using only natural language rubrics while achieving satisfactory grading performance. Despite these advantages, new security concerns may also arise. In particular, prompt injection (PI) attacks have recently become a major threat to LLM-based applications. In the context of AG, attackers can potentially exploit PI vulnerabilities to manipulate grading systems into assigning artificially high scores regardless of the actual answer quality. Such behavior poses serious risks to the fairness, reliability, and integrity of educational assessment. In this work, we study PI attacks in AG systems, and systematically investigate the effectiveness of such attacks in educational scenarios. We further evaluate the effectiveness of existing defensive strategies against these attacks. Through comprehensive experiments under rubric-based grading settings, we demonstrate that current LLM-based AG systems remain highly vulnerable to PI attacks. We hope that our findings raise awareness of this emerging threat and motivate future research toward secure, robust, and trustworthy LLM-based educational systems.

Hang Li, Fedor Filippov, Yuping Lin et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

FVSpec: Real-World Property-Based Tests as Lean Challenges

We present a benchmark for evaluating AI models and agents on real-world formal software verification tasks. We first scrape 11,039 property-based tests (PBTs) from real-world Python repositories, then automatically translate 2,772 of them (25%) into 9,415 Lean 4 specifications with sorry placeholders (about 3 formalizations/PBT; we retain multiple attempts when none dominates on quality metrics). Translating PBTs into Lean specifications is challenging: it requires modeling Python semantics in Lean, inferring the logical property encoded in an imperative PBT, and handling the inherent difficulties of dependently-typed programming in a seldom-used language. We describe a three-agent LLM pipeline for transpiling PBTs into Lean specifications, evaluate coverage and quality metrics, and provide baselines for proof generation using several automated and model based approaches. All code (scraper and agents) and data (PBTs and Lean specifications) are open source. Our benchmark aims to drive progress on the underexplored problem of AI-assisted formal verification of real-world software, which is of increasing interest as AI produces more and more of the world's code.

Quinn Dougherty, Max von Hippel, Simon Henniger et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Label Over Logic? How Source Cues Bias Human Fallacy Judgments More Than LLMs

As AI-generated and AI-assisted content floods online spaces, source labels attached to such content can distort human reasoning judgments, with downstream consequences for moderation, evaluation, and decision-making. Whether LLMs share this vulnerability, or offer more source-agnostic evaluation, remains an open question with strong implications for human-AI collaboration. We examine this issue using logical fallacies as a controlled setting to isolate source-label effects on reasoning quality, independent of domain knowledge. We conduct an online study (N=505) where participants are assigned to a source condition (human, AI, human with AI assistance, AI with human assistance, or no disclosure) and evaluate comments containing logical fallacies, comparing their judgments with those of LLMs (GPT-5.2, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Claude Sonnet 4.5), which were evaluated across the same source conditions. Human evaluators were significantly more susceptible to fallacies labeled as 'written by human' or 'written by human with AI assistance' and assigned higher trust ratings in these conditions. LLM evaluations remained comparatively stable across source labels, though performance varied across models. Confidence levels were similarly high across conditions for both humans and LLMs, regardless of the presence of fallacies. Our findings indicate that source-label bias is primarily a human vulnerability for logical fallacy evaluation, with potential implications in human-LLM collaboration in increasingly AI-mediated environments.

Mahjabin Nahar, Nafis Irtiza Tripto, Aiping Xiong et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Less Data, Faster Training: repeating smaller datasets speeds up learning via sampling biases

This work investigates the ``small-vs-large gap'', where repeating on fewer samples can lead to compute saving during training compared to using a larger dataset. This is observed across algorithmic tasks, architectures and optimizers and cannot be explained using prior theory. We argue that the speedup comes from appropriate layer-wise growth enabled by sampling biases, which is more pronounced when the dataset size is smaller. We provide both theoretical analysis and empirical evidence from various interventions. Our results suggest that using a smaller dataset with more repetitions is not just a fallback strategy under data scarcity, but can be proactively leveraged as a favorable inductive biases for optimization, particularly in reasoning tasks.

Jingwen Liu, Ezra Edelman, Surbhi Goel et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Towards Generalization of Block Attention via Automatic Segmentation and Block Distillation

Block attention, which processes the input as separate blocks that cannot attend to one another, offers significant potential to improve KV cache reuse in long-context scenarios such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). However, its broader application is hindered by two key challenges: the difficulty of segmenting input text into meaningful, self-contained blocks, and the inefficiency of existing block fine-tuning methods that risk degrading performance. To address these, we first construct SemanticSeg, a large and diverse semantic segmentation dataset containing over 30k instances across 16 categories-including books, code, web text, and conversations with text lengths ranging from 2k to 32k. Using this dataset, we train a lightweight segmenter to automatically partition text into human-instinct-aligned blocks with controllable granularity. Second, we propose block distillation, a training framework that is more efficient than block fine-tuning, which uses a frozen full-attention teacher model to guide the block-attention student. This framework integrates three novel components: block sink tokens to mitigate information loss at block boundaries, block dropout to leverage training signals from all blocks, and token-level loss weighting to focus learning on block-attention-sensitive tokens. Experiments across multiple models and benchmarks demonstrate that our segmenter outperforms heuristic and statistical baselines, and block distillation achieves near-full-attention performance under block attention, establishing a practical and scalable pathway for deploying block attention.

Shuaiyi Li, Zhisong Zhang, Yan Wang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

HLS-Seek: QoR-Aware Code Generation for High-Level Synthesis via Proxy Comparative Reward Reinforcement Learning

High-Level Synthesis (HLS) compiles algorithmic C/C++ descriptions into hardware, with Quality of Results (QoR)---latency and resource utilization---critically governed by pragma configurations and code structure. Existing natural-language-to-HLS (NL-to-HLS) training approaches prioritize functional correctness while largely ignoring QoR. We observe that reinforcement learning (RL) for HLS does not require absolute synthesis results---only relative comparisons between candidates. Based on this insight, we propose \textbf{HLS-Seek}, a QoR-aware NL-to-HLS framework that avoids full synthesis-in-the-loop RL via a comparative proxy reward model achieving 99.53\% Pareto-dominance accuracy. To prevent reward hacking, we introduce \textit{uncertainty-aware Monte Carlo (MC) dropout switching} that selectively invokes real Vitis HLS synthesis for low-confidence candidates and online updates the proxy, creating a self-improving reward system. HLS-Seek achieves 84.7\% syntax correctness pass@1 and 81.4\% functional correctness pass@5 on HLS-Eval~\cite{abikaram2025hlseval} with only 7B parameters, surpassing GPT-5.1 on functional pass@5, while achieving 8.5$\times$ faster training than real-reward RL. On QoR evaluation, HLS-Seek achieves the lowest latency on 19/30 kernels and Pareto-dominates HLS-specific baselines on 9 kernels.

Qingyun Zou, Feng Yu, Hongshi Tan et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Octopus Protocol: One-Shot Hardware Discovery and Control for AI Agents via Infrastructure-as-Prompts

Bringing a previously unintegrated device under the control of an AI agent still requires device-specific engineering: driver selection, dependency resolution, interface design, and deployment, repeated per device and per platform. We present Octopus, a hardware onboarding framework in which a coding agent, rather than a shipped integration, is the runtime that produces the required infrastructure. Given shell access and a model API key, a single bootstrap command drives the agent through a five-stage pipeline that enumerates operating-system- visible hardware, infers device identity and capabilities, generates typed Model Context Protocol tools and the hardware-facing code behind them, and activates the result as a live endpoint. A persistent daemon then maintains the result, repairing defined classes of failure in the deployment it produced. Across four hosts spanning two processor architectures, three operating- system families, and two device-access paths, identical prose specifications produced working interfaces with no per-host edits and no hand-written integration code. Five consecutive runs on the reference host completed end to end on first attempt. We report both the resulting capability and a failure mode of unattended repair loops observed over eleven hours of continuous operation.

Quilee Simeon, Justin M. Wei, Yile Fan · 0 citations

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