AI Research Papers

AllLarge Language Models (LLMs)Computer Vision & Image GenerationAudio & Speech SynthesisPrompt Engineering & InferenceAI Agents & ReasoningModel Optimization & QuantizationOther
Other7/7/2026

Static Metrics Are Insufficient: Predicting Java Method Energy Usage with Execution Time

The increasing energy demand of software systems is raising concerns about their environmental impact and associated costs. Reasoning on energy usage early in the development flow has the potential to significantly reduce the overall energy usage of a software system, as it allows developers to make informed design and refactoring decisions before inefficiencies propagate. However, assessing energy usage without repeated profiling and direct measurement is difficult, which limits early reasoning in practice. This study investigates the limits of method-level energy prediction in Java, examining whether static source code metrics complemented with method-level execution time can estimate the energy consumption of Java methods. We profile 2,786 Java methods to extract 33 static features and measure execution time and energy, then train and compare eleven regression models. Our findings show that static source code metrics alone yield poor predictive performance, with average R2 values close to zero. Incorporating execution time as a lightweight dynamic input significantly improves accuracy, raising R2 to as high as 0.46. Execution time, internal method calls, and cyclomatic complexity consistently emerge as the strongest predictors of energy consumption.

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Other7/7/2026

Overview of the NLPCC 2026 Shared Task 1: Difficulty-Aware Multilingual and Multimodal Medical Instructional Video Understanding Evaluation

Following the CMIVQA, MMI-VQA, and M4IVQA challenges in NLPCC 2023--2025, we introduce the Difficulty-Aware Medical Instructional Video Question Answering (DA-MIVQA) shared task for NLPCC 2026. DA-MIVQA extends previous multilingual and multimodal medical video benchmarks by explicitly distinguishing questions according to the type and complexity of evidence required for answering. Specifically, simple questions can often be answered from subtitle-based textual cues, whereas complex questions require visual grounding, procedural understanding, and cross-modal evidence integration. The challenge contains three tracks: Difficulty-Aware Temporal Answer Grounding in Single Video (DA-TAGSV), Difficulty-Aware Video Corpus Retrieval (DA-VCR), and Difficulty-Aware Temporal Answer Grounding in Video Corpus (DA-TAGVC). The dataset is collected from public medical instructional channels, covers diverse scenarios such as first aid, emergency response, rehabilitation, nursing, and general medical education, and is manually verified with difficulty annotations. This paper presents the task motivation, dataset construction, evaluation protocol, participation overview, competition results, and representative systems of DA-MIVQA. DA-MIVQA provides a practical benchmark for evaluating medical instructional video question answering systems under varying textual, visual, temporal, and procedural reasoning requirements.

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Other7/7/2026

Inertia-1: An Open Exploration of Wearable Motion Foundation Models

Wearable motion sensing provides a continuous and scalable window into human behavior and health, making it a natural fit for foundation models, yet its pretraining and scaling principles remain poorly understood. Prior work studies isolated design choices, such as sensor placement or sampling frequency, often under fixed settings and narrow downstream tasks that fail to capture real-world sensing diversity. We introduce Inertia-1, a fully open exploration of wearable motion foundation models. Using massive corpora of accelerometer data from global sources spanning more than 18.2M hours, we build a controlled framework for studying the full lifecycle of wearable motion foundation models, covering data choices such as sensor modality, device placement, sampling rate, window length; model choices such as architectures and model size; and training choices such as pretraining objective and data scale. Extensive evaluations across 15 datasets spanning human activity recognition, freezing-of-gait detection, and disease prediction reveal intriguing findings for building motion foundation models that generalize across tasks and sensing conditions. Collectively, Inertia-1 not only presents state-of-the-art recipes for diverse downstream tasks, but also serves as a comprehensive, practical, and open cookbook for wearable motion representation learning.

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Other7/7/2026

CoPiT: Cognitive Pivot Translation for Digraphic Low-Resource Mongolian in the Traditional Script

Low-resource languages remain challenging for machine translation, and Mongolian is a representative case. As a digraphic language, Mongolian is written in both Cyrillic and Traditional scripts, which exhibit a severe imbalance in data availability. While the Cyrillic script is relatively well-resourced, the Traditional script remains extremely data-scarce and orthographically ambiguous, leading to substantial performance degradation in direct translation. We propose CoPiT, a cognitively motivated pivot-based translation pipeline that exploits this internal resource hierarchy by routing translation through the Cyrillic script. The pipeline explicitly resolves script-induced ambiguity in the Traditional script before translation, enabling more stable and accurate meaning transfer. Across multiple backbone models and target languages, CoPiT consistently outperforms direct translation, achieving substantial absolute BLEU improvements together with consistent 1.5-1.6x COMET gains. These gains allow strong open-source models to match or outperform GPT-4.1 under comparable evaluation settings. Beyond inference-time improvements, CoPiT enables the construction of synthetic parallel data directly from Traditional-script text, mitigating data scarcity in realistic low-resource scenarios. We release a new multi-script parallel dataset covering Mongolian in both scripts alongside English, Korean, and Russian. All datasets and code are publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/anonymous_project-76C7.

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Other7/7/2026

Data-dependent Evaluations for Budgeted Submodular Maximization

Submodular maximization is an important building block for developing algorithms in many areas such as machine learning and data mining. Due to the NP-hardness of the problem, analysis of submodular maximization algorithms typically provides pessimistic worst-case approximation factors only. It is not easy to evaluate how close a produced solution is to an optimal one for a given problem instance. In this paper, we develop new data-dependent upper bounds for submodular maximization with a knapsack constraint. We theoretically prove that they dominate the optimal solution and empirically demonstrate their advantages in certifying how close to optimal a solution is through experiments with real-world datasets.

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Other7/7/2026

Plainbook: Data Science, in Plain Language

Jupyter Notebooks have become widely adopted in data science, as they allow the sharing of reproducible computational analysis. They are, however, accessible only to people who understand computer code. To reach the broader audience of scientists interested in data analysis and computation, but unfamiliar with code, we introduce Plainbook, notebooks centered on natural language rather than code. Plainbook is based on two principles: promote the natural language descriptions, and verify the values. In plainbook, the natural language descriptions are preserved, rather than the resulting code; the code is generated automatically from the cell descriptions. As natural language is read top to bottom, Plainbook adopts a linear execution semantics, in which cells are guaranteed to be executed in the order in which they appear; there is no "hidden state" or out-of-order execution as in Jupyter. To allow users who may not understand code to verify the correctness of the computation, we have built into Plainbook verification mechanisms centered on values and value inspection. These include mechanisms that focus on individual cells, akin to unit tests, as well as global mechanisms. Both the linear execution semantics, and the verification mechanisms, are underpinned by a snapshot kernel that caches execution states and makes execution and verification efficient.

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Other7/6/2026

Whose fairness? Structural concentration in AI bias research

Artificial intelligence increasingly mediates consequential decisions in healthcare, law, and public services, and the field has responded with an extensive methodology for measuring and mitigating bias. Yet the fairness definitions, benchmarks, and debiasing frameworks on which this methodology rests are treated as universal while being produced by a research community whose composition has never been characterized. We show that the AI bias research are structurally concentrated, and that this concentration is greatest, geographically, in precisely the domain the rest of the field inherits from. Analyzing 692 publications spanning five thematic domains, combining bibliometric analysis with semantic clustering, we find that research activity is dominated by a small set of countries, institutions, and authors, with the United States leading publication output and collaboration networks across every domain and most strongly in general fairness and bias mitigation, the largest, most-cited domain with meaningful representation across all four semantic clusters. Low- and middle-income countries remain largely absent from the community and its collaboration networks, and citation influence is highly skewed (median = 9; mean =93.5 ), indicating that a small fraction of publications disproportionately shapes the field. Because the general-fairness domain supplies the definitions and benchmarks that application areas apply, concentration of research effort in this foundational domain propagates across AI bias research as a whole - raising the concern that mitigation methods developed and validated within a narrow set of contexts may not generalize to all populations and settings where AI is deployed. We provide an interactive atlas for continuous monitoring of the field's structure.

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Other7/6/2026

Lean-Quantum: Toward AI-Assisted Formalization of Quantum Information

Quantum information theory is built on entropic quantities; among them, the sandwiched Rényi relative entropy is a fundamental divergence with various applications, and its data processing inequality (DPI) under quantum channels is a cornerstone result. In this work, we present a Lean 4 library for quantum information, designed as a reusable formal infrastructure for theoretical analysis. As a central demonstration of the library, we formalize the DPI for the sandwiched Rényi relative entropy for positive semidefinite operators on finite-dimensional quantum systems. The library provides a basis-independent operator-theoretic framework for finite-dimensional quantum mechanics compatible with the standard mathematical library Mathlib, including reusable interfaces for finite-dimensional systems, states, channels, tensor products, partial traces, Choi operators, Kraus representations, and Stinespring representations. It also builds infrastructure for noncommutative trace inequalities, including operator monotonicity and convexity via the real continuous functional calculus, block-operator positivity, Hilbert-Schmidt operator spaces, Jensen's operator inequality, generalized perspectives, operator power means, and Lieb-Ando trace inequalities. On top of this framework, we formalize entropy-specific ingredients for the DPI: variational formulas for the sandwiched quasi-entropy via Young and reverse-Young inequalities, tensor-product compatibility of real powers, and Haar measures on unitary groups. Together, these components yield a Lean formalization of the DPI, give strong subadditivity as a corollary, and provide the last missing component needed to complete the Lean formalization of the generalized quantum Stein's lemma. More broadly, the development provides machine-checkable foundations for future formalized and AI-assisted research in quantum information theory.

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Other7/6/2026

Interpretable Human-Label-Free Deep Learning for Real-Bogus Classification with Uncertainty Quantification

Time-domain surveys generate many transient candidates, making Real-Bogus classification a critical step in automated discovery pipelines. Reliable labels are costly, while community labels can be noisy and survey-dependent. We aim to develop a Real-Bogus classification framework that can be trained without human-labeled data using injected transients and bogus-dominated survey data, remains robust under strong class contamination, and provides calibrated uncertainty quantification. We combine simulated transient injections with a contaminated survey class and train a dual-network model using asymmetric co-teaching for classes with different label-noise levels. We evaluate performance on a benchmark subset and analyze the learned representation with latent-space visualization tools. For uncertainty quantification (UQ), we compare MC dropout and deep ensembles and propose a low-cost hybrid strategy that exploits the dual-network setting to improve calibration. We extend the evaluation to the light-curve domain to assess recovery of light-curve classes. The method achieves strong Real-Bogus performance on the labeled subset and remains stable under severe class contamination. It recovers transient light-curve classes with high fidelity, while single-source identification is limited by ambiguity in light-curve-derived labels. Our hybrid UQ approach achieves competitive calibration relative to more expensive ensemble baselines. Latent-space analyses indicate that uncertainty aligns with the decision boundary and reveal subclasses within the bogus population. Our results show that injection-driven, weakly supervised training can enable scalable and consistent Real-Bogus classification without human-labeled training data while providing calibrated uncertainties. The method is suited for transfer to forthcoming surveys by re-running the injection-based training pipeline.

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Other7/6/2026

What Does a Discrete Diffusion Model Learn?

What does a discrete diffusion model learn: a denoiser, a score ratio, or a bridge plug-in predictor? At the level of jump rates, these are one object in different coordinates, and reading a neural network in the wrong coordinate changes the process being trained and sampled. Starting with a rigorous derivation of the continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) ELBO for any noising process, boundary terms included, we prove the \emph{Oracle Distance} theorem: the negative ELBO is exactly equal to the data entropy plus the path KL from the oracle reverse process to the learned one, not merely a bound. Its unique optimizer is therefore the conditional expectation of the true reverse jump rate given the current noisy state, and its irreducible cost is the rate at which the forward process $Z_t$ destroys information about the clean data $Z_0$, $-\tfrac{d}{dt}I(Z_0; Z_t)$, so every noising process shares the same best achievable negative ELBO: the data entropy. For sequences with token-factorizing noise, the oracle projection yields three exact coordinates for the optimizer: denoiser, cavity (bridge plug-in), and score, with closed-form conversions among them. This framework identifies which law each loss in the literature actually optimizes, recovering MDM, UDM, SEDD, and GIDD as special cases; explains why denoiser and cavity coincide for masked diffusion but not for uniform diffusion; proves that a denoiser parameterization makes the uniform ELBO diverge at initialization while the bridge plug-in stays finite; and calibrates ELBO implementations exactly at initialization. Every identity is verified numerically, without approximation, on an exactly solvable model.

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Other7/6/2026

Privacy-Preserving Robustness Verification for Neural Networks

Neural network verification and data privacy are inherently in tension: verification demands full access to model parameters and input data, yet both are increasingly restricted by privacy regulations and intellectual property constraints. This tension has left robustness verification impractical in privacy-sensitive domains. In this work, we address this gap with SecureCROWN, the first framework for privacy-preserving neural network robustness verification. Built upon secure two-party computation (2PC), our framework enables a model owner and a data owner to jointly compute certified robustness bounds -- revealing only the final result while provably protecting both parties' private data under the semi-honest security model. A key challenge is securely computing the conditional operations in Linear Bound Propagation, where the data-dependent branching is incompatible with standard secure computation protocols. We eliminate branching by formulating conditional logic as continuous arithmetic operations. Additionally, we introduce a Newton--Raphson refinement method to improve numerical stability. Extensive analysis and experiments show that SecureCROWN strictly matches plaintext verification results, while completing in 0.1--200s across varied model sizes and communication settings (LAN/WAN), demonstrating the feasibility of privacy-preserving neural network verification.

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Other7/6/2026

Open Problems in AI Incident Governance

AI systems may produce failures after deployment that pre-deployment safety assessments do not anticipate. Managing these failures requires what we refer to as adequate \textit{AI incident governance}, where having good definitions, taxonomies, monitoring practices, reporting mechanisms, and incident analysis is essential. We examine existing frameworks related to AI incident governance by regulatory bodies and independent efforts, and find that while there are frameworks that describe how individual functions can be performed, there is a lack of consistency within the aspects of definitions, classification, monitoring, and reporting. These inconsistencies apply to the types of incident data that is collected and reported, the ways in which they are categorised, and as a result, the depth, representativeness, and accuracy of analysis that can be performed.

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