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artificial intelligence

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#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

PeroMAS: A Multi-agent System of Perovskite Material Discovery

As a pioneer of the third-generation photovoltaic revolution, Perovskite Solar Cells (PSCs) are renowned for their superior optoelectronic performance and cost potential. The development process of PSCs is precise and complex, involving a series of closed-loop workflows such as literature retrieval, data integration, experimental design, and synthesis. However, existing AI perovskite approaches focus predominantly on discrete models, including material design, process optimization,and property prediction. These models fail to propagate physical constraints across the workflow, hindering end-to-end optimization. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent system for perovskite material discovery, named PeroMAS. We first encapsulated a series of perovskite-specific tools into Model Context Protocols (MCPs). By planning and invoking these tools, PeroMAS can design perovskite materials under multi-objective constraints, covering the entire process from literature retrieval and data extraction to property prediction and mechanism analysis. Furthermore, we construct an evaluation benchmark by perovskite human experts to assess this multi-agent system. Results demonstrate that, compared to single Large Language Model (LLM) or traditional search strategies, our system significantly enhances discovery efficiency. It successfully identified candidate materials satisfying multi-objective constraints. Notably, we verify PeroMAS's effectiveness in the physical world through real synthesis experiments.

Yishu Wang, Wei Liu, Yifan Li et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

FedPS: Federated Preprocessing for structured data via aggregated Statistics

Federated Learning (FL) enables multiple parties to collaboratively train machine learning models without sharing raw data. However, before training, data must be preprocessed to address missing values, inconsistent formats, and heterogeneous feature scales. This preprocessing stage is critical for model performance but is largely overlooked in FL research. In practical FL systems, privacy constraints prohibit centralizing raw data, while communication efficiency introduces further challenges for distributed preprocessing. We introduce FedPS, a framework for federated data preprocessing based on aggregated statistics. FedPS leverages data-sketching techniques to efficiently summarize local datasets while preserving essential statistical information. Building on these summaries, we design federated algorithms for feature scaling, encoding, discretization, and missing-value imputation, and extend preprocessing-related models such as Bayesian Linear Regression to both horizontal and vertical FL settings. FedPS provides flexible, communication-efficient, and consistent preprocessing pipelines for practical FL deployments.

Xuefeng Xu, Graham Cormode · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Ex-Omni: Enabling 3D Facial Animation Generation for Omni-modal Large Language Models

Omni-modal large language models (OLLMs) aim to unify multimodal understanding and generation, yet extending them to jointly produce speech and 3D facial animation remains largely underexplored. A key challenge is the mismatch between the discrete semantic reasoning of LLMs and the dense temporal dynamics required for 3D facial motion. We propose Expressive Omni (Ex-Omni), a framework that augments OLLMs with speech-accompanied 3D facial animation. Ex-Omni decouples semantic reasoning from temporal generation through a speech-unit generator with blendshape co-supervision and a non-autoregressive blendshape decoder, where speech units provide temporal scaffolding and hidden speech representations carry facially relevant cues. We further introduce a token-as-query gated fusion (TQGF) interface for controlled semantic injection, as well as InstructS2SF-1200K, a 1.2M-sample weakly supervised dataset for speech-accompanied facial animation. Extensive experiments show that Ex-Omni retains competitive speech QA capability while natively generating coordinated text, speech, and 3D facial animation, and approaches the Audio2Face-3D teacher cascade in synchronization and human preference.

Haoyu Zhang, Zhipeng Li, Yiwen Guo et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

F-GRPO: Don't Let Your Policy Learn the Obvious and Forget the Rare

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is commonly based on group sampling to estimate advantages and stabilize policy updates. In practice, computational limits often rule out very large groups, so training proceeds with finite rollout sets that can reinforce only the correct behavior they expose. At practical group sizes, updates can miss rare-correct trajectories while still containing mixed rewards, concentrating probability on more common sampled solutions. We derive the probability of such prompt-local tail-miss events as a function of group size, showing non-monotonic behavior, and in the categorical abstraction characterize how unsampled-correct mass can shrink even as total correct mass grows. Motivated by this analysis, we propose a difficulty-aware scaling coefficient, inspired by Focal loss, that down-weights updates on high-success sampled groups. Empirically, categorical simulation illustrates the same effect in the categorical setting, Maze provides a single-solution test, and LLM experiments include a representative GRPO group-size sweep together with fixed-$N$ transfer across GRPO, DAPO, and CISPO. On Qwen2.5-7B at $N{=}8$, our method improves average math pass@256 from 64.1 $\rightarrow$ 70.3 (GRPO), 69.3 $\rightarrow$ 72.5 (DAPO), and 73.2 $\rightarrow$ 76.8 (CISPO); OOD pass@256 also improves in all three cases, without increasing group size or computational cost.

Daniil Plyusov, Alexey Gorbatovski, Boris Shaposhnikov et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Temperature Scaling Attack Disrupting Model Confidence in Federated Learning

Predictive confidence serves as a foundational control signal in mission-critical systems, directly governing risk-aware logic such as escalation, abstention, and conservative fallback. While prior federated learning attacks predominantly target accuracy or implant backdoors, we identify confidence calibration as a distinct attack objective. We present the Temperature Scaling Attack (TSA), a training-time attack that degrades calibration while preserving accuracy. By injecting temperature scaling with learning rate-temperature coupling during local training, TSA shifts model confidence while keeping predictive accuracy and common optimization signals close to benign training. We provide a convergence analysis under non-IID settings, showing that the coupling controls the primary update scale while leaving a bounded temperature-induced residual, yielding the standard non-convex FL convergence structure with an additional residual term. Across three benchmarks, TSA substantially shifts calibration (e.g., 145% error increase on CIFAR-100) with <2% accuracy change, and remains effective under robust aggregation and post-hoc calibration defenses. Case studies further show up to a 7.2x increase in missed verifications in healthcare and severe confidence-gating failures in autonomous driving, even when accuracy is unchanged. Overall, our results establish calibration integrity as a critical attack surface in federated learning.

Kichang Lee, Jaeho Jin, JaeYeon Park et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

VoxPrivacy: A Benchmark for Evaluating Interactional Privacy of Speech Language Models

As Speech Language Models (SLMs) transition from personal devices to shared, multi-user environments such as smart homes, a new challenge emerges: the model is expected to distinguish between users to manage information flow appropriately. Without this capability, an SLM could reveal one user's confidential schedule to another, a privacy failure we term interactional privacy. Thus, the ability to generate speaker-aware responses becomes essential for SLM safe deployment. Current SLM benchmarks test dialogue ability but overlook speaker identity. Multi-speaker benchmarks check who said what without assessing whether SLMs adapt their responses. Privacy benchmarks focus on globally sensitive data (e.g., bank passwords) while neglecting contextual privacy-sensitive information (e.g., a user's private appointment). To address this gap, we introduce VoxPrivacy, the first benchmark designed to evaluate interactional privacy in SLMs. VoxPrivacy spans three tiers of increasing difficulty, from following direct secrecy commands to proactively protecting privacy. Our evaluation of nine SLMs on a 32-hour bilingual dataset reveals a widespread vulnerability: most open-source models perform close to random chance (around 50% accuracy) on conditional privacy decisions, while even strong closed-source systems fall short on proactive privacy inference. We further validate these findings on Real-VoxPrivacy, a human-recorded subset, confirming that failures observed on synthetic data persist in real speech. Finally, we demonstrate a viable path forward: by fine-tuning on a new 4,000-hour training set, we improve privacy-preserving abilities while maintaining robustness. To support future work, we release the VoxPrivacy benchmark, the large-scale training set, and the fine-tuned model to foster the development of safer and more context-aware SLMs.

Yuxiang Wang, Hongyu Liu, Dekun Chen et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Relational Linearity is a Predictor of Hallucinations

Hallucination is a central failure mode of language models (LMs). We focus on hallucinations in response to questions like: "Which instrument did Glenn Gould play?", but we ask these questions for synthetic entities designed to be unknown to the model. We find that LMs like Gemma-7B-IT frequently hallucinate, i.e., they have difficulty recognizing that the hallucinated fact is not part of their knowledge. Based on the idea of linear relational embeddings, we put forward the following hypothesis. (i) Due to the abstract scheme that is used to represent them, LMs can easily produce plausible objects for non-existing subjects of linear relations, which can lead to hallucinations. (ii) For nonlinear relations, this mechanism for producing an object is not available and so a hallucination is easier to avoid. To test this hypothesis, we create SynthHal, a synthetic unknown-entity benchmark for 15 relations. We find that across four instruction-tuned models, relational linearity is a strong predictor of models hallucinating an object for an unknown subject vs refusing to give an answer, with correlations $r \in [.58, .84]$. While this is not direct evidence for the hypothesized causal mechanism, it is suggestive and opens up a new line of inquiry into understanding LM hallucinations.

Yuetian Lu, Yihong Liu, Sebastian Gerstner et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

HOMURA: Taming the Sand-Glass for Time-Constrained LLM Translation via Reinforcement Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable strides in multilingual translation but are hindered by a systemic cross-lingual verbosity bias, rendering them unsuitable for strict time-constrained tasks like subtitling and dubbing. Current prompt-engineering approaches struggle to resolve this conflict between semantic fidelity and rigid temporal feasibility. To bridge this gap, we first introduce Sand-Glass, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate translation under syllable-level duration constraints. Furthermore, we propose Homura, a reinforcement learning framework that explicitly optimizes the trade-off between semantic preservation and temporal compliance. By employing a constrained reinforcement learning objective featuring a novel dynamic syllable-ratio reward, Homura effectively "tames" the output length. Experimental results demonstrate that Homura significantly outperforms strong baselines, achieving precise length control that respects linguistic density hierarchies without compromising semantic adequacy.

Ziang Cui, Mengran Yu, Chenyu Shi et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Imagine-then-Plan: Agent Learning from Adaptive Lookahead with World Models

Recent advances in world models have shown promise for modeling future dynamics of environmental states, enabling agents to reason and act without accessing real environments. Current methods mainly perform single-step or fixed-horizon rollouts, leaving their potential for complex task planning under-exploited. We propose Imagine-then-Plan (\texttt{ITP}), a unified framework for agent learning via lookahead imagination, where an agent's policy model interacts with the learned world model, yielding multi-step ``imagined'' trajectories. Since the imagination horizon may vary by tasks and stages, we introduce a novel adaptive lookahead mechanism by trading off the ultimate goal and task progress. The resulting imagined trajectories provide rich signals about future consequences, such as achieved progress and potential conflicts, which are fused with current observations, formulating a partially \textit{observable} and \textit{imaginable} Markov decision process to guide policy learning. We instantiate \texttt{ITP} with both training-free and reinforcement-trained variants. Extensive experiments across representative agent benchmarks demonstrate that \texttt{ITP} significantly outperforms competitive baselines. Further analyses validate that our adaptive lookahead largely enhances agents' reasoning capability, providing valuable insights into addressing broader, complex tasks. Our code and data will be publicly available at https://github.com/loyiv/ITP.

Youwei Liu, Jian Wang, Hanlin Wang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

FADTI: Fourier and Attention Driven Diffusion for Multivariate Time Series Imputation

Multivariate time series imputation is fundamental in applications such as healthcare, traffic forecasting, and biological modeling, where sensor failures and irregular sampling lead to pervasive missing values. Existing Transformer- and diffusion-based imputers achieve strong performance, but they often rely mainly on time-domain modeling and lack adaptive spectral bias for recovering structured temporal gaps. We propose FADTI, a Fourier- and attention-driven diffusion framework for multivariate time series imputation. FADTI introduces a Fourier Bias Projection (FBP) module that injects learnable frequency-aware bias into intermediate hidden states during denoising. It projects intermediate hidden states onto Fourier bases, avoiding direct spectral estimation from masked or zero-filled inputs. With DFT, STFT, and FSST instantiations, FBP captures global periodicity, localized time--frequency variations, and non-stationary oscillatory patterns. By coupling FBP with self-attention and gated convolution, FADTI integrates frequency-domain guidance, temporal dependency modeling, and probabilistic denoising in a unified framework. Experiments on multiple benchmarks, including a new biological imputation benchmark, show that FADTI improves accuracy, uncertainty estimation, and sampling efficiency, especially under high missing rates and structured missing patterns. Code is available at https://github.com/RazeenLI/FADTI

Runze Li, Hanchen Wang, Wenjie Zhang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Evolving Excellence: Automated Optimization of LLM-based Agents

Agentic AI systems built on large language models (LLMs) offer significant potential for automating complex workflows, from software development to customer support. However, LLM agents often underperform due to suboptimal configurations; poorly tuned prompts, tool descriptions, and parameters that typically require weeks of manual refinement. Existing optimization methods either are too complex for general use or treat components in isolation, missing critical interdependencies. We present ARTEMIS, a no-code evolutionary optimization platform that jointly optimizes agent configurations through semantically-aware genetic operators. Given only a benchmark script and natural language goals, ARTEMIS automatically discovers configurable components, extracts performance signals from execution logs, and evolves configurations without requiring architectural modifications. We evaluate ARTEMIS on four representative agent systems: the \emph{ALE Agent} for competitive programming on AtCoder Heuristic Contest, achieving a \textbf{$13.6\%$ improvement} in acceptance rate; the \emph{Mini-SWE Agent} for code optimization on SWE-Perf, with a statistically significant \textbf{10.1\% performance gain}; and the \emph{CrewAI Agent} for cost and mathematical reasoning on Math Odyssey, achieving a statistically significant \textbf{$36.9\%$ reduction} in the number of tokens required for evaluation. We also evaluate the \emph{MathTales-Teacher Agent} powered by a smaller open-source model (Qwen2.5-7B) on GSM8K primary-level mathematics problems, achieving a \textbf{22\% accuracy improvement} and demonstrating that ARTEMIS can optimize agents based on both commercial and local models.

Paul Brookes, Vardan Voskanyan, Rafail Giavrimis et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Mixed Data Clustering Survey and Challenges

The advent of the big data paradigm has transformed how industries manage and analyze information, ushering in an era of unprecedented data volume, velocity, and variety. Within this landscape, mixed-data clustering has become a critical challenge, requiring innovative methods that can effectively exploit heterogeneous data types, including numerical and categorical variables. Traditional clustering techniques, typically designed for homogeneous datasets, often struggle to capture the additional complexity introduced by mixed data, underscoring the need for approaches specifically tailored to this setting. Hierarchical and explainable algorithms are particularly valuable in this context, as they provide structured, interpretable clustering results that support informed decision-making. This paper introduces a clustering method grounded in pretopological spaces. In addition, benchmarking against classical numerical clustering algorithms and existing pretopological approaches yields insights into the performance and effectiveness of the proposed method within the big data paradigm.

Maxence Choufa, Clement Cornet, Guillaume Guerard et al. · 0 citations

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