AI Research Papers

AllLarge Language Models (LLMs)Computer Vision & Image GenerationAudio & Speech SynthesisPrompt Engineering & InferenceAI Agents & ReasoningModel Optimization & QuantizationOther
Computer Vision & Image Generation7/9/2026

ARGUS: Accelerated, Robust, General, and Unsupervised Cell Tracking Solutions

Background and Objective: Quantitative analysis of cell dynamics is central to modern biological research, providing critical insights into immune cell interactions, disease progression, and drug mechanisms. Automated cell tracking in time-lapse microscopy remains challenging due to noise, morphological variations, overlapping cells, and dynamic events such as divisions and fusions. Methods: We present ARGUS, a framework for Accelerated, Robust, General, and Unsupervised Cell Tracking Solutions. ARGUS combines adaptive cell detection, dense Farneback optical-flow prediction, frame-to-frame linear assignment, and a sequence-level tracklet-refinement step that reconnects trajectory fragments across short temporal gaps. Results: On publicly available Cell Tracking Challenge datasets, ARGUS achieved detection accuracy of 0.905-0.971 and tracking accuracy of 0.897-0.964, with runtimes within 1 minute (5-6 seconds for 3 frames). Conclusions: ARGUS is a modular, interpretable framework that can be adapted to different imaging modalities and biological applications without training data or GPU infrastructure. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/Gitinc/argus

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Computer Vision & Image Generation7/9/2026

ARGUS: Accelerated, Robust, General, and Unsupervised Cell Tracking Solutions

Background and Objective: Quantitative analysis of cell dynamics is central to modern biological research, providing critical insights into immune cell interactions, disease progression, and drug mechanisms. Automated cell tracking in time-lapse microscopy remains challenging due to noise, morphological variations, overlapping cells, and dynamic events such as divisions and fusions. Methods: We present ARGUS, a framework for Accelerated, Robust, General, and Unsupervised Cell Tracking Solutions. ARGUS combines adaptive cell detection, dense Farneback optical-flow prediction, frame-to-frame linear assignment, and a sequence-level tracklet-refinement step that reconnects trajectory fragments across short temporal gaps. Results: On publicly available Cell Tracking Challenge datasets, ARGUS achieved detection accuracy of 0.905-0.971 and tracking accuracy of 0.897-0.964, with runtimes within 1 minute (5-6 seconds for 3 frames). Conclusions: ARGUS is a modular, interpretable framework that can be adapted to different imaging modalities and biological applications without training data or GPU infrastructure. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/Gitinc/argus

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/9/2026

From Legacy Documentation to OSCAL: An MCP-Based Agent Pipeline for Threat-Informed Continuous Compliance in Critical Infrastructure

In critical infrastructure, operational technology environments often cannot be actively scanned, and yet active system feedback is needed for risk assessment and compliance. This paper presents a non-invasive, MCP-grounded multi-agent pipeline that converts natural-language system descriptions into source-verified knowledge graph and audit-ready artifacts in the NIST OSCAL format for continuous automated compliance management. The architecture decouples LLM-based reasoning from deterministic knowledge retrieval against authoritative threat-intelligence sources, reducing the risk of fabricated vulnerabilities and hallucinated attack paths. In an evidence-based synthetic scenario of a water utility, the pipeline achieves 0.90 CVE recall and perfect D3FEND recall. It generates a schema-valid OSCAL System Security Plan and an OSCAL Security Assessment Report. Nevertheless, the core insight is not that grounding via MCP eliminates errors (e.g., hallucinations) entirely from the pipeline, but that it shifts errors into the first phase of asset extraction from the natural language description. Here, a single incorrectly extracted entity can lead to genuine but irrelevant CVEs in subsequent stages of the pipeline, which consumes time and resources. However, it makes the remaining risk visible, verifiable, and suitable for a time-efficient manual review, since the infrastructure (e.g., version numbers, OS, etc.) is typically known.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/9/2026

From Legacy Documentation to OSCAL: An MCP-Based Agent Pipeline for Threat-Informed Continuous Compliance in Critical Infrastructure

In critical infrastructure, operational technology environments often cannot be actively scanned, and yet active system feedback is needed for risk assessment and compliance. This paper presents a non-invasive, MCP-grounded multi-agent pipeline that converts natural-language system descriptions into source-verified knowledge graph and audit-ready artifacts in the NIST OSCAL format for continuous automated compliance management. The architecture decouples LLM-based reasoning from deterministic knowledge retrieval against authoritative threat-intelligence sources, reducing the risk of fabricated vulnerabilities and hallucinated attack paths. In an evidence-based synthetic scenario of a water utility, the pipeline achieves 0.90 CVE recall and perfect D3FEND recall. It generates a schema-valid OSCAL System Security Plan and an OSCAL Security Assessment Report. Nevertheless, the core insight is not that grounding via MCP eliminates errors (e.g., hallucinations) entirely from the pipeline, but that it shifts errors into the first phase of asset extraction from the natural language description. Here, a single incorrectly extracted entity can lead to genuine but irrelevant CVEs in subsequent stages of the pipeline, which consumes time and resources. However, it makes the remaining risk visible, verifiable, and suitable for a time-efficient manual review, since the infrastructure (e.g., version numbers, OS, etc.) is typically known.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/9/2026

Psychological Competence as a Missing Dimension in AI Evaluation

Current AI evaluation frameworks focus primarily on technical performance, including accuracy, robustness, reasoning ability, and policy compliance. These measures remain essential, but they are not sufficient for systems that interact directly with users through natural language. Human-facing AI systems are increasingly used as advisors, coaches, tutors, and companions. In these roles, their responses can shape how users reason, interpret emotions, form beliefs, calibrate trust, and make decisions. The relevant unit of evaluation is therefore not only the model, but the human-AI interaction. This paper introduces psychological competence as a missing dimension in AI evaluation. We define psychological competence as the capacity of a human-facing AI system to support user cognition, emotional interpretation, and behavioral decision-making in ways that are appropriate to the user, context, and purpose of the interaction. This includes interaction properties such as framing, tone, perceived authority, responsiveness, uncertainty handling, and conversational guidance. Existing evaluation approaches capture parts of this problem but rarely assess these psychological effects directly. Drawing on behavioral science and human-AI interaction research, we outline a conceptual framework for psychological competence and its core domains. Rather than proposing a specific benchmark, we define the construct, clarify its boundaries, and describe how it may be assessed through scenario-based probes, structured human evaluation, and model-assisted evaluation methods. We argue that psychological competence should become a core consideration for model providers, deploying organizations, researchers, and regulators concerned with the real-world effects of human-facing AI systems.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/9/2026

Psychological Competence as a Missing Dimension in AI Evaluation

Current AI evaluation frameworks focus primarily on technical performance, including accuracy, robustness, reasoning ability, and policy compliance. These measures remain essential, but they are not sufficient for systems that interact directly with users through natural language. Human-facing AI systems are increasingly used as advisors, coaches, tutors, and companions. In these roles, their responses can shape how users reason, interpret emotions, form beliefs, calibrate trust, and make decisions. The relevant unit of evaluation is therefore not only the model, but the human-AI interaction. This paper introduces psychological competence as a missing dimension in AI evaluation. We define psychological competence as the capacity of a human-facing AI system to support user cognition, emotional interpretation, and behavioral decision-making in ways that are appropriate to the user, context, and purpose of the interaction. This includes interaction properties such as framing, tone, perceived authority, responsiveness, uncertainty handling, and conversational guidance. Existing evaluation approaches capture parts of this problem but rarely assess these psychological effects directly. Drawing on behavioral science and human-AI interaction research, we outline a conceptual framework for psychological competence and its core domains. Rather than proposing a specific benchmark, we define the construct, clarify its boundaries, and describe how it may be assessed through scenario-based probes, structured human evaluation, and model-assisted evaluation methods. We argue that psychological competence should become a core consideration for model providers, deploying organizations, researchers, and regulators concerned with the real-world effects of human-facing AI systems.

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Large Language Models (LLMs)7/9/2026

Understanding Axes of Difficulty For Long Context Tasks Via PredicateLongBench

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated rapidly improving long-context capabilities, prompting a wave of benchmarks designed to evaluate them. However, existing long-context evaluations - from Needle-in-a-Haystack (NIAH) tests to more recent multi-hop reasoning and summarization tasks - predominantly measure average-case performance, and many are either saturated or lack robustness. Notably absent is a systematic way to probe how models perform as we scale up the difficulty of tasks along various axes. We address this gap by proposing PredicateLongBench, a benchmark that stress-tests long-context reasoning by asking models to identify the longest contiguous subsequence of words in a long input that satisfies given predicates/constraints (e.g., lexicographic ordering), drawn from a broader predicate class. The central innovation of our benchmark is the identification and systematic exploration of multiple different axes of difficulty which test multiple aspects of long context understanding. We provide two complementary generation pipelines - a fully synthetic setup using random word-like strings, and a real-world setup that samples words from natural documents while preserving their distributional properties. We find that frontier models struggle to perform well as we scale up the difficulty of tasks along our axes, demonstrating the utility of our benchmark in understanding the limitations of current long-context capabilities. Furthermore, the tasks in PredicateLongBench, though challenging, are conceptually simple and do not require LLM-based generations or judges.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/9/2026

Multi-Agent Firewall Architecture for Privacy Protection of Sensitive Data in Interactions with Language Models

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have become essential productivity tools, their integration into workflows without adequate safeguards creates significant risks. This paper proposes an open-source, privacy-focused, user-facing firewall designed to secure both web-based and programmatic LLM interactions. The architecture combines a browser extension and a proxy for total traffic interception across both HTTP(S) and WebSocket communications. At its core, a flexible multi-agent pipeline delivers data leakage prevention through a hybrid approach combining deterministic detectors with LLM-driven semantic analysis, proprietary code leakage prevention, and extensible components designed for future security enhancements such as prompt injection evasion. The framework's layered architecture enables deployment across heterogeneous environments, allowing organizations to balance computational cost, detection depth and latency. Evaluation results demonstrate it achieves F1 scores of up to 94.93% on optimal configurations.

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Computer Vision & Image Generation7/9/2026

Enhancing the KidSat Model: Integrating Geographical Encoding and Data Quality Assessment for Childhood Poverty Prediction

Accurate poverty mapping using satellite imagery is often hindered by (i) noisy and sparse survey-derived supervision, (ii) image quality issues such as cloud cover and image corruption, and (iii) lack of explicit spatial structure in image-only models. Building on the KidSat framework, we develop an enhanced pipeline that improves predictive accuracy via refined data preprocessing, systematic image quality assessment, and mathematically defined geographic encoding. First, we refine the fine-tuning target matrix by resolving high-cardinality sparsity and reducing one-hot dimensionality from 103 to 51 via DHS re-aggregation. Second, we introduce a simple two-stage quality-screening procedure to filter heavily clouded or corrupted observations. Third, we fuse DINOv2 visual embeddings with Spherical Harmonics (SH) location features. Across extensive experiments, these changes reduce MAE from 0.2167 to 0.1759, corresponding to an 18.83% relative reduction on the cluster-level severe-deprivation proportion scale. When extended from 16 to 33 African countries, the best-performing configuration achieves an overall MAE of 0.1658. We find that SH features consistently improve performance over the image-only backbone, whereas higher-capacity coordinate Multi Layer Perception augmentation (SH+SIREN) can underperform without carefully designed objectives. Finally, gradient-boosted tree heads (XGBoost/LightGBM) most effectively exploit nonlinear interactions in the fused visual-geographic representation. These findings provide a scalable and principled recipe for improving satellite-based socioeconomic predictions using only publicly accessible data.

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Computer Vision & Image Generation7/9/2026

Progression as Latent Drift: Generative Forecasting of Slow-Evolving Pathologies

Forecasting the future anatomy of slow-evolving neurodegenerative diseases could enable earlier, more targeted intervention and improve clinical trial design, but it remains challenging because true progression signals are subtle in longitudinal MRI. In this low-signal regime, transferring modern generative sequence models directly is unreliable: training is dominated by stable baseline anatomy and confounded by dense, sample-specific nuisance variation. We first provide a theoretical analysis that explains these failures through two modes. Identity collapse occurs when optimization is driven toward reproducing the current anatomy, which prevents the model from learning faint temporal change. The continuous interpolation trap arises when standard smooth networks cannot separate localized biological drift from pervasive noise, which leads to spurious changes that diffuse across the volume. To address both issues, we propose Latent Drift, a progressive generative framework that learns change in a compressed semantic representation rather than synthesizing full-resolution anatomy. This design removes pixel-level identity from the prediction target and concentrates model capacity on progression-relevant dynamics. We further apply Finite Scalar Quantization to the learned change representation, which suppresses small, high-frequency nuisance fluctuations while preserving consistent structural drift. Experiments on longitudinal 3D brain MRI show that Latent Drift improves patient-specific neuro-forecasting over diffusion and autoregressive transformer baselines across generative fidelity and clinically relevant evaluation metrics. Project page: \href{https://cutepkq.github.io/latent-drift}{https://cutepkq.github.io/latent-drift}.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/9/2026

PolyUQuest: Verifiable Structure-Aware Web RAG over Heterogeneous Graphs

Existing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems treat web pages as flat text, losing the structural and semantic signals encoded in HTML. We present PolyUQuest, a verifiable, structure-aware web RAG framework built on a heterogeneous graph that unifies hyperlink topology between pages, DOM hierarchy within pages, and entity-relation knowledge across pages. A two-tier router dispatches each query to one of three retrieval modes matched to its structural need, including direct block retrieval, cross-page graph traversal, and multi-hop entity reasoning. Every answer is fully verifiable, as each cited block carries its source page, heading path, and entity links so that users can trace any claim back to its structural evidence. We evaluate on the official websites of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), comprising 4,240 pages, 31,086 DOM blocks, 29,119 entities, and 37,680 relations, together with a multi-type evaluation benchmark. PolyUQuest outperforms existing RAG systems in answer correctness, coverage, and faithfulness, while consuming significantly fewer LLM tokens per query. The demonstration provides an interactive interface for inspecting cited answers, comparing retrieval traces across routing modes, and exploring evidence graph paths. PolyUQuest is being prepared for deployment as a student-facing QA service at PolyU.

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Model Optimization & Quantization7/9/2026

Different Teachers, Different Capabilities: Sub-1B On-Device Distillation for Structured Text Enrichment

High-volume structured extraction pays a large model's latency on every item, so distilling the task into a small on-device model is attractive: comparable output at a fraction of the time and cost. We measure what that distillation actually delivers, per sub-task. Each news article is mapped to one JSON object with a short summary and five categorical labels. We distill an 8B reasoning teacher (deepseek-r1:8b) into a 0.6B student (Qwen3-0.6B; QLoRA, three seeds), and add two teacher controls: a same-size non-reasoning teacher and a larger managed pipeline. A blinded, reference-free, three-judge panel scores every arm against the full article, alongside two non-distillation baselines, few-shot prompting and constrained decoding. The student runs at about 0.8 s per article against the teacher's 39 s, and recovers 58% of the base-to-teacher gap on summary quality, beating its primary baseline (constrained decoding) by +16.8 points and few-shot prompting by a secondary +4.9. A same-size non-reasoning teacher trains a student no better than the untuned base, so the summary gain follows from the teacher's reasoning nature rather than its scale. Capabilities then split by teacher: the reasoning teacher transfers writing quality and the managed pipeline transfers label diversity, while a same-size instruction teacher's students stay more grounded on the 22 short, thin-source articles in the 93-item test set (74 versus 55 faithful), where the reasoning-lineage student fabricates. That grounding difference is a consistent ordering rather than a significant aggregate effect, and the subgroup is small, so we report it as a direction. Because no single engine wins every field, the deliverable is a per-field routing map for on-device enrichment.

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