SPAGBias: Uncovering and Tracing Structured Spatial Gender Bias in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly used in urban planning, but since gendered space theory highlights how gender hierarchies are embedded in spatial organization, there is concern that LLMs may reproduce or amplify such biases. We introduce SPAGBias - the first systematic framework to evaluate spatial gender bias in LLMs. It combines a taxonomy of 62 urban micro-spaces, a prompt library, and three diagnostic layers: explicit (forced-choice resampling), probabilistic (token-level asymmetry), and constructional (semantic and narrative role analysis). Testing six representative models, we identify structured gender-space associations that go beyond the public-private divide, forming nuanced micro-level mappings. Story generation reveals how emotion, wording, and social roles jointly shape "spatial gender narratives". We also examine how prompt design, temperature, and model scale influence bias expression. Tracing experiments indicate that these patterns are embedded and reinforced across the model pipeline (pre-training, instruction tuning, and reward modeling), with model associations found to substantially exceed real-world distributions. Downstream experiments further reveal that such biases produce concrete failures in both normative and descriptive application settings. This work connects sociological theory with computational analysis, extending bias research into the spatial domain and uncovering how LLMs encode social gender cognition through language.

LLM-Guided Semantic Bootstrapping for Interpretable Text Classification with Tsetlin Machines

Pretrained language models (PLMs) like BERT provide strong semantic representations but are costly and opaque, while symbolic models such as the Tsetlin Machine (TM) offer transparency but lack semantic generalization. We propose a semantic bootstrapping framework that transfers LLM knowledge into symbolic form, combining interpretability with semantic capacity. Given a class label, an LLM generates sub-intents that guide synthetic data creation through a three-stage curriculum (seed, core, enriched), expanding semantic diversity. A Non-Negated TM (NTM) learns from these examples to extract high-confidence literals as interpretable semantic cues. Injecting these cues into real data enables a TM to align clause logic with LLM-inferred semantics. Our method requires no embeddings or runtime LLM calls, yet equips symbolic models with pretrained semantic priors. Across multiple text classification tasks, it improves interpretability and accuracy over vanilla TM, achieving performance comparable to BERT while remaining fully symbolic and efficient.

Single-Stage Signal Attenuation Diffusion Model for Low-Light Image Enhancement and Denoising

Diffusion models excel at image restoration via probabilistic modeling of forward noise addition and reverse denoising, and their ability to handle complex noise while preserving fine details makes them well-suited for Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE). Mainstream diffusion based LLIE methods either adopt a two-stage pipeline or an auxiliary correction network to refine U-Net outputs, which severs the intrinsic link between enhancement and denoising and leads to suboptimal performance owing to inconsistent optimization objectives. To address these issues, we propose the Signal Attenuation Diffusion Model (SADM), a novel diffusion process that integrates the signal attenuation mechanism into the diffusion pipeline, enabling simultaneous brightness adjustment and noise suppression in a single stage. Specifically, the signal attenuation coefficient simulates the inherent signal attenuation of low-light degradation in the forward noise addition process, encoding the physical priors of low-light degradation to explicitly guide reverse denoising toward the concurrent optimization of brightness recovery and noise suppression, thereby eliminating the need for extra correction modules or staged training relied on by existing methods. We validate that our design maintains consistency with Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models(DDIM) via multi-scale pyramid sampling, balancing interpretability, restoration quality, and computational efficiency.

Multi-AUV Ad-hoc Networks-Based Multi-Target Tracking Based on Scene-Adaptive Embodied Intelligence

With the rapid advancement of underwater net-working and multi-agent coordination technologies, autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) ad-hoc networks have emerged as a pivotal framework for executing complex maritime missions, such as multi-target tracking. However, traditional data-centricarchitectures struggle to maintain operational consistency under highly dynamic topological fluctuations and severely constrained acoustic communication bandwidth. This article proposes a scene-adaptive embodied intelligence (EI) architecture for multi-AUV ad-hoc networks, which re-envisions AUVs as embodied entities by integrating perception, decision-making, and physical execution into a unified cognitive loop. To materialize the functional interaction between these layers, we define a beacon-based communication and control model that treats the communication link as a dynamic constraint-aware channel, effectively bridging the gap between high-level policy inference and decentralized physical actuation. Specifically, the proposed architecture employs a three-layer functional framework and introduces a Scene-Adaptive MARL (SA-MARL) algorithm featuring a dual-path critic mechanism. By integrating a scene critic network and a general critic network through a weight-based dynamic fusion process, SA-MARL effectively decouples specialized tracking tasks from global safety constraints, facilitating autonomous policy evolution. Evaluation results demonstrate that the proposedscheme significantly accelerates policy convergence and achieves superior tracking accuracy compared to mainstream MARL approaches, maintaining robust performance even under intense environmental interference and fluid topological shifts.

The Interspeech 2026 Audio Encoder Capability Challenge for Large Audio Language Models

This paper presents the Interspeech 2026 Audio Encoder Capability Challenge, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate and advance the performance of pre-trained audio encoders as front-end modules for Large Audio Language Models (LALMs). While LALMs have shown remarkable understanding of complex acoustic scenes, their performance depends on the semantic richness of the underlying audio encoder representations. This challenge addresses the integration gap by providing a unified generative evaluation framework, XARES-LLM, which assesses submitted encoders across a diverse suite of downstream classification and generation tasks. By decoupling encoder development from LLM fine-tuning, the challenge establishes a standardized protocol for general-purpose audio representations that can effectively be used for the next generation of multimodal language models.

Relational graph-driven differential denoising and diffusion attention fusion for multimodal conversation emotion recognition

In real-world scenarios, audio and video signals are often subject to environmental noise and limited acquisition conditions, resulting in extracted features containing excessive noise. Furthermore, there is an imbalance in data quality and information carrying capacity between different modalities. These two issues together lead to information distortion and weight bias during the fusion phase, impairing overall recognition performance. Most existing methods neglect the impact of noisy modalities and rely on implicit weighting to model modality importance, thereby failing to explicitly account for the predominant contribution of the textual modality in emotion understanding. To address these issues, we propose a relation-aware denoising and diffusion attention fusion model for MCER. Specifically, we first design a differential Transformer that explicitly computes the differences between two attention maps, thereby enhancing temporally consistent information while suppressing time-irrelevant noise, which leads to effective denoising in both audio and video modalities. Second, we construct modality-specific and cross-modality relation subgraphs to capture speaker-dependent emotional dependencies, enabling fine-grained modeling of intra- and inter-modal relationships. Finally, we introduce a text-guided cross-modal diffusion mechanism that leverages self-attention to model intra-modal dependencies and adaptively diffuses audiovisual information into the textual stream, ensuring more robust and semantically aligned multimodal fusion.

Stateful Cross-layer Vision Modulation

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) widely adopt multi-layer visual feature fusion to enhance visual representation. However, existing approaches typically perform static concatenation or weighted aggregation after visual encoding, without intervening in the representation formation process itself. As a result, fine-grained details from early layers may be progressively suppressed during hierarchical abstraction. Moreover, directly introducing shallow-layer features into the language model often leads to semantic distribution mismatch with the visual feature space that the LLM's cross-attention layers were pretrained on, which typically requires additional adaptation or fine-tuning of the LLM. To address these limitations, we revisit visual representation learning from the perspective of representation evolution control and propose a cross-layer memory-modulated vision framework(SCVM). Specifically, we introduce a recursively updated cross-layer memory state inside the vision encoder to model long-range inter-layer dependencies. We further design a layer-wise feedback modulation mechanism that refreshes token representations at each layer based on the accumulated memory, thereby structurally regulating the representation evolution trajectory. In addition, we incorporate an auxiliary semantic alignment objective that explicitly supervises the final memory state, encouraging progressive compression and reinforcement of task-relevant information. Experimental results on multiple visual question answering and hallucination evaluation benchmarks demonstrate that SCVM achieves consistent performance improvements without expanding visual tokens, introducing additional vision encoders, or modifying or fine-tuning the language model.

MeDocVL: A Visual Language Model for Medical Document Understanding and Parsing

Medical document OCR is challenging due to complex layouts, domain-specific terminology, and noisy annotations, while requiring strict field-level exact matching. Existing OCR systems and general-purpose vision-language models often fail to reliably parse such documents. We propose MeDocVL, a post-trained vision-language model for query-driven medical document parsing. Our framework combines Training-driven Label Refinement to construct high-quality supervision from noisy annotations, with a Noise-aware Hybrid Post-training strategy that integrates reinforcement learning and supervised fine-tuning to achieve robust and precise extraction. Experiments on medical invoice benchmarks show that MeDocVL consistently outperforms conventional OCR systems and strong VLM baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance under noisy supervision.

Gesture Recognition from body-Worn RFID under Missing Data

We explore hand-gesture recognition through the use of passive body-worn reflective tags. A data processing pipeline is proposed to address the issue of missing data. Specifically, missing information is recovered through linear and exponential interpolation and extrapolation. Furthermore, imputation and proximity-based inference are employed. We represent tags as nodes in a temporal graph, with edges formed based on correlations between received signal strength (RSS) and phase values across successive timestamps, and we train a graph-based convolutional neural network that exploits graph-based self-attention. The system outperforms state-of-the-art methods with an accuracy of 98.13% for the recognition of 21 gestures. We achieve 89.28% accuracy under leave-one-person-out cross-validation. We further investigate the contribution of various body locations on the recognition accuracy. Removing tags from the arms reduces accuracy by more than 10%, while removing the wrist tag only reduces accuracy by around 2%. Therefore, tag placements on the arms are more expressive for gesture recognition than on the wrist.

SymDrive: Realistic and Controllable Driving Simulator via Symmetric Auto-regressive Online Restoration

High-fidelity and controllable 3D simulation is essential for addressing the long-tail data scarcity in Autonomous Driving (AD), yet existing methods struggle to simultaneously achieve photorealistic rendering and interactive traffic editing. Current approaches often falter in large-angle novel view synthesis and suffer from geometric or lighting artifacts during asset manipulation. To address these challenges, we propose SymDrive, a unified diffusion-based framework capable of joint high-quality rendering and scene editing. We introduce a Symmetric Auto-regressive Online Restoration paradigm, which constructs paired symmetric views to recover fine-grained details via a ground-truth-guided dual-view formulation and utilizes an auto-regressive strategy for consistent lateral view generation. Furthermore, we leverage this restoration capability to enable a training-free harmonization mechanism, treating vehicle insertion as context-aware inpainting to ensure seamless lighting and shadow consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SymDrive achieves state-of-the-art performance in both novel-view enhancement and realistic 3D vehicle insertion.