January 2026

arXiv:2601.04365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In evolutionary reinforcement learning tasks (ERL), agent policies are often encoded as small artificial neural networks (NERL). Such representations lack explicit modular structure, limiting behavioral interpretation. We investigate whether programmatic policies (PERL), implemented as soft, differentiable decision lists (SDDL), can match the performance of NERL. To support reproducible evaluation, we provide the first fully specified and open-source reimplementation of the classic 1992 Artificial Life (ALife) ERL testbed. We conduct a rigorous survival analysis […]

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arXiv:2601.04362v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Phasor Agents are dynamical systems whose internal state is a Phasor Graph: a weighted graph of coupled Stuart-Landau oscillators. A Stuart-Landau oscillator is a minimal stable “rhythm generator” (the normal form near a Hopf bifurcation); each oscillator is treated as an abstract computational unit (inspired by, but not claiming to model, biological oscillatory populations). In this interpretation, oscillator phase tracks relative timing (coherence), while amplitude tracks local gain or activity. Relative phase structure […]

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arXiv:2601.04361v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We tackle a common domain adaptation setting in causal systems. In this setting, the target variable is observed in the source domain but is entirely missing in the target domain. We aim to impute the target variable in the target domain from the remaining observed variables under various shifts. We frame this as learning a compact, mechanism-stable representation. This representation preserves information relevant for predicting the target while discarding spurious variation. For linear […]

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arXiv:2601.04360v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The transition from secondary to higher education represents a critical point in academic trajectories, particularly in programmes with a strong emphasis on basic sciences. Across different higher education systems, introductory Mathematics and Physics courses consistently concentrate high rates of early failure and attrition, yet most available evidence relies on cross-sectional analyses or limited time spans. This study presents a longitudinal evaluation of pre-university preparation based on early academic outcomes in Mathematics and Physics, […]

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arXiv:2601.04359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A unified autoregressive model is a Transformer-based framework that addresses diverse multimodal tasks (e.g., text, image, video) as a single sequence modeling problem under a shared token space. Such models rely on the KV-cache mechanism to reduce attention computation from O(T^2) to O(T); however, KV-cache size grows linearly with the number of generated tokens, and it rapidly becomes the dominant bottleneck limiting inference efficiency and generative length. Unified autoregressive video generation inherits this […]

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arXiv:2601.04357v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In contemporary educational systems, academic performance indicators play a central role in institutional evaluation and in the interpretation of student trajectories. However, under conditions of rapid technological change, the inferential validity of such indicators becomes increasingly fragile. This article examines how, in adaptive educational systems, statistically correct inferences may nevertheless become systematically misleading when structural conditions change. Adopting a theory-informed interpretive approach, the paper conceptualises technological transitions as exogenous structural perturbations that reconfigure […]

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arXiv:2601.04356v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contact-rich manipulation requires reliable estimation of extrinsic contacts-the interactions between a grasped object and its environment which provide essential contextual information for planning, control, and policy learning. However, existing approaches often rely on restrictive assumptions, such as predefined contact types, fixed grasp configurations, or camera calibration, that hinder generalization to novel objects and deployment in unstructured environments. In this paper, we present UNIC, a unified multimodal framework for extrinsic contact estimation that operates […]

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arXiv:2601.04352v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of custom-built Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) against popular pre-trained architectures (ResNet-18 and VGG-16) using both feature extraction and transfer learning approaches. We evaluated these models across five diverse image classification datasets from Bangladesh: Footpath Vision, Auto Rickshaw Detection, Mango Image Classification, Paddy Variety Recognition, and Road Damage Detection. Our experimental results demonstrate that transfer learning with fine-tuning consistently outperforms both custom CNNs built from scratch and […]

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arXiv:2601.04350v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific rigour tends to be sidelined in favour of bold statements, leading authors to overstate claims beyond what their results support. We present RIGOURATE, a two-stage multimodal framework that retrieves supporting evidence from a paper’s body and assigns each claim an overstatement score. The framework consists of a dataset of over 10K claim-evidence sets from ICLR and NeurIPS papers, annotated using eight LLMs, with overstatement scores calibrated using peer-review comments and validated through […]

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arXiv:2601.04349v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific research increasingly depends on robust and scalable IT infrastructures to support complex computational workflows. With the proliferation of services provided by research infrastructures, NRENs, and commercial cloud providers, researchers must navigate a fragmented ecosystem of computing environments, balancing performance, cost, scalability, and accessibility. Hybrid cloud architectures offer a compelling solution by integrating multiple computing environments to enhance flexibility, resource efficiency, and access to specialised hardware. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of […]

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