arXiv preprints from January 1, 2026 through September 10, 2026 — 12:59:40 EST
Speech-driven 3D facial animation aims to generate realistic and expressive facial motions directly from audio. While recent methods achieve high-quality lip synchronization, they often rely on discrete emotion categories, limiting continuous and fine-grained emotional control. We present EditEmoTalk, a controllable speech-driven 3D...
Learning analytics can guide human tutors to efficiently address motivational barriers to learning that AI systems struggle to support. Students become more engaged when they receive human attention. However, what occurs during short interventions, and when are they most effective? We align student-tutor dialogue transcripts with...
Many manipulation tasks require careful force modulation. With insufficient force the task may fail, while excessive force could cause damage. The high cost, bulky size and fragility of commercial force/torque (F/T) sensors have limited large-scale, force-aware policy learning. We introduce UMI-FT, a handheld data-collection platform...
This paper presents several efficient decision procedures for trace equivalence of GKAT automata, which make use of on-the-fly symbolic techniques via SAT solvers. To demonstrate applicability of our algorithms, we designed symbolic derivatives for CF-GKAT, a practical system based on GKAT designed to validate control-flow...
Approximate Nearest-Neighbor Search (ANNS) is a key technique in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), enabling rapid identification of the most relevant high-dimensional embeddings from massive vector databases. Modern ANNS engines accelerate this process using prebuilt indexes and store compressed vector-quantized representations in...
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models for low-resource languages suffer significant performance degradation under domain shift. We quantify this challenge using Dhao, an indigenous language of Eastern Indonesia with no digital footprint beyond the New Testament (NT). When applied to the unseen Old Testament (OT), a standard NMT...
Reasoning segmentation is an emerging vision-language task that requires reasoning over intricate text queries to precisely segment objects. However, existing methods typically suffer from overthinking, generating verbose reasoning chains that interfere with object localization in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). To address...
We introduce \emph{in-context operator learning on probability measure spaces} for optimal transport (OT). The goal is to learn a single solution operator that maps a pair of distributions to the OT map, using only few-shot samples from each distribution as a prompt and \emph{without} gradient updates at inference. We parameterize the...
Enhancing future wireless networks presents a significant challenge for networking systems due to diverse user demands and the emergence of 6G technology. While reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework, it often encounters difficulties with high-dimensional state spaces and complex environments, leading to substantial...
The proliferation of connected devices and privacy-sensitive applications has accelerated the adoption of Federated Learning (FL), a decentralized paradigm that enables collaborative model training without sharing raw data. While FL addresses data locality and privacy concerns, it does not inherently support data deletion requests...
Personalizing Large Language Models typically relies on static retrieval or one-time adaptation, assuming user preferences remain invariant over time. However, real-world interactions are dynamic, where user interests continuously evolve, posing a challenge for models to adapt to preference drift without catastrophic forgetting....
An algebraic telic problem is a decision problem in $\textsf{NP}_\mathbb{R}$ formalizing finite-time reachability questions for one-dimensional dynamical systems. We prove that the existence of "natural" mapping reductions between algebraic telic problems coming from distinct dynamical systems implies the two dynamical systems exhibit...
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to substantial progress in domain-specific applications, particularly within the legal domain. However, general-purpose models such as GPT-4 often struggle with specialized subdomains that require precise legal knowledge, complex reasoning, and contextual sensitivity. To address...
Time series classification (TSC) is a core machine learning problem with broad applications. Recently there has been growing interest in repurposing large language models (LLMs) for TSC, motivated by their strong reasoning and generalization ability. Prior work has primarily focused on alignment strategies that explicitly map time...
We argue that the machine learning value chain is structurally unsustainable due to an economic data processing inequality: each state in the data cycle from inputs to model weights to synthetic outputs refines technical signal but strips economic equity from data generators. We show, by analyzing seventy-three public data deals, that...
The democratization of artificial intelligence through decentralized networks represents a paradigm shift in computational provisioning, yet the long-term viability of these ecosystems is critically endangered by the extreme volatility of their native economic layers. Current tokenomic models, which predominantly rely on static or...
This paper investigates the problem of Leaky Private Information Retrieval with Side Information (L-PIR-SI), providing a fundamental characterization of the trade-off among leaky privacy, side information, and download cost. We propose a unified probabilistic framework to design L-PIR-SI schemes under $\varepsilon$-differential...
We design new minimal-subpacketization schemes for information-theoretic private information retrieval on graph-based replicated databases. In graph-based replication, the system consists of $K$ files replicated across $N$ servers according to a graph with $N$ vertices and $K$ edges. The client wants to retrieve one desired file,...
Vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced rapidly, but their ability to capture spatial relationships remains a blindspot. Current VLMs are typically built with contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) style image encoders. The training recipe often flattens images into 1D patch sequences, discarding the 2D structure necessary...
Standardized math assessments require expensive human pilot studies to establish the difficulty of test items. We investigate the predictive value of open-source large language models (LLMs) for evaluating the difficulty of multiple-choice math questions for real-world students. We show that, while LLMs are poor direct judges of...
Reliable traversable area segmentation in unstructured environments is critical for planning and decision-making in autonomous driving. However, existing data-driven approaches often suffer from degraded segmentation performance in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios, consequently impairing downstream driving tasks. To address this...
Transformers are designed for discrete tokens, yet many real-world signals are continuous processes observed through noisy sampling. Discrete tokenizations (raw values, patches, finite differences) can be brittle in low signal-to-noise regimes, especially when downstream objectives impose asymmetric penalties that rationally encourage...
The sequence reconstruction problem, introduced by Levenshtein in 2001, considers a communication setting in which a sender transmits a codeword and the receiver observes K independent noisy versions of this codeword. In this work, we study the problem of efficient reconstruction when each of the $K$ outputs is corrupted by a $q$-ary...
Metric Differential Privacy (mDP) generalizes Local Differential Privacy (LDP) by adapting privacy guarantees based on pairwise distances, enabling context-aware protection and improved utility. While existing optimization-based methods reduce utility loss effectively in coarse-grained domains, optimizing mDP in fine-grained or...
University engineering capstone projects involve sustained interaction among students, faculty, and industry sponsors whose objectives are only partially aligned. While capstones are widely used in engineering education, existing analyses typically treat stakeholder behavior informally or descriptively, leaving incentive conflicts,...