#01Nov 9, 2026
cs.CL
When Audio and Video Mislead: Evaluating Multimodal AI for Conversational Emotion Recognition
Youngseok Kim, Minjae Kim, Eunsoo Lee and 1 more
Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation (MERC) combines lexical, acoustic, visual and conversational cues, but accepting audio and video does not establish their effective or robust use. We audit off-the-shelf Omni models while holding the target transcript and prior textual context fixed and adding, removing or replacing target audio and video. In the primary evaluation of Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, Baichuan-Omni-1.5 and MiniCPM-o 2.6 on MELD and the full five-session six-class IEMOCAP set, T+A improves Accuracy in all six model-dataset pairs, with four gains significant after false discovery rate (FDR) correction. Across three source mappings, unrelated A/V (RandA/V) lowers Accuracy relative to Full in all 18 comparisons; all 18 remain significant under dialogue-cluster inference and BH-FDR correction, both on common-valid pairs and when invalid/OOM outcomes are treated as incorrect. Comparisons with modality-omission baselines further distinguish replacement penalties from mismatch-specific harm. A Qwen/MELD case study finds significantly greater gold-vs-best-candidate margin recovery in Late than Early or Middle under decision-query audio knockout, relative to an edge-count-matched Video-Sham control, using Holm-corrected tests. These results distinguish genuine-modality benefit from sensitivity and vulnerability to misleading input.
#02Nov 9, 2026
stat.ML
Trajectory Density Ratios under Weak Support: A Survey across the Sciences
Wei Chen, Lihao Zhuang, Yubing Wu and 1 more
Many problems across the sciences compare two stochastic processes through the sequences they generate. Reinforcement learning asks what a new policy would return from the trajectories of an old one; molecular simulation asks how much more a ligand binds from samples of the unbound state; climate attribution asks how a heat wave shifted under warming; and language-model post-training asks what a deployed agent will do from logged interactions. In every case, one quantity would answer all these questions at once: the ratio of the two probability laws over their generated sequences, the trajectory density ratio. This ratio exists only under strong conditions. When one process reaches states the other cannot, the ratio does not exist; when their overlap is thin, its variance grows without control with the sequence length; and when they concentrate on different lower-dimensional sets, the ratio is undefined altogether. Weak support of this kind is the norm for sequence data, not a sampling accident, and its price is paid in identifiability rather than in noise alone. This survey organizes the field around a three-level diagnosis of weak support and a map of the nine retreats that methods take when the full ratio is out of reach, from direct estimation and reweighting through staged decomposition, stationarization, and partial-identification bounds to smoothing, transport couplings, operator spectra, and direct estimation of a single functional. Each retreat keeps part of what the ratio offers and pays for the rest, and each application domain has standardized the retreat its data force. The survey closes with open problems: testable diagnostics at every level, partial identification at the trajectory level, a rate theory of time-amplified error, and benchmarks with ground truth.
#03Nov 9, 2026
cs.LG
MambaPD: Bidirectional Selective State Space Model for Parkinson's Disease Detection from Resting-State EEG
Ayesha Zulfiqar
Typical diagnosis of Parkinson's disease (PD) occurs only after significant dopaminergic loss, while resting-state EEG abnormalities like alpha slowing and reduced coherence occur earlier. While many published EEG-based PD detectors claim accuracy greater than 95%, many use epoch-level splits which leak subject identity. I introduce MambaPD, a bidirectional selective state space model for resting-state EEG-based PD detection, blending the channel mixing, patch tokenization and bidirectional Mamba encoder. It is compared with four baselines (TCN, BiLSTM with attention, EEGNet and a patch Transformer) in two public datasets (UNM, SanDiego) using subject-independent 5-fold cross-validation (checkpoints were selected on the held-out fold, so absolute estimates are optimistic). On UNM the accuracy is between 0.67 and 0.71, and MambaPD (0.714) is not statistically distinguishable from the Transformer (0.715), and TCN (0.708), with the highest sensitivity (0.82), while the lowest specificity (0.52). For the smaller SanDiego cohort, accuracy is in the range of 0.60 to 0.70, with the highest scores (0.703) from TCN and the lowest (0.601) from EEGNet, while MambaPD scores 0.631, with the lowest specificity (0.46) among the five models. The differences among the models on UNM are minor compared to the differences among folds. I report the whole pipeline, per-fold results, and the shortcomings of the protocol.
#04Nov 9, 2026
cs.CV
Four-Step Text-Bearing Image Generation via Distillation with Local Response Regularization and Teacher-Guided Training
Kairui Wen, Sheng Ye, Yong-Jin Liu
Generating text-bearing images requires coherent scenes and accurate characters. Large text-to-image models improve both capabilities through repeated denoising, at substantial sampling cost. Few-step distillation reduces this cost but requires the student to organize scenes and refine glyphs within a short trajectory. We present a four-step distillation framework combining local response regularization with teacher-guided text training. Built on distribution matching, the framework distills the GLM-Image DiT while retaining its autoregressive visual prior, glyph encoder, and VAE. A path-length penalty promotes consistent local responses of the conditional denoising field. Progressive training combines synthetic strings with teacher-generated imagery to preserve character accuracy and scene-integrated typography. The student achieves GenEval Overall 0.84 and CVTG-2K word accuracy 0.5045, compared with 0.81 and 0.1690 for four-step TDM. A coefficient study favors $10^{-5}$, and Qwen-Image experiments show additional gains from response regularization and text supervision. Single-image inference takes 1.742 s, compared with 5.818 s for the teacher, yielding a $3.34\times$ speedup at the same 40 GB GPU memory requirement.
#05Nov 9, 2026
cs.AI
Enhancing Multi-Step Chemical Mechanism Prediction with Graph-Guided Preference Data
Yu Zhang, Ruijie Yu, Xuelin Zhao and 5 more
Predicting multi-step chemical reaction mechanisms requires identifying plausible intermediates and correctly ordering the elementary reaction steps. Existing computational methods focus on single-step elementary reaction prediction, limiting their ability to generalize to unseen reaction spaces. We introduce a graph-guided framework for multi-step chemical mechanism prediction that leverages a chemical mechanism knowledge graph (ChemMechKG) to guide large language models (LLMs). To improve pathway prediction, we develop a graph-aligned reaction mechanism predictor (GRMP) that uses graph neural networks to generate synthetic candidate pathways for pathway optimization. During inference, we design a relation retrieval (RR) module to extract relevant graph evidence from the KG for pathway refinement. Experiments show that GRMP achieves the highest pathway accuracy among all compared methods on ChemMechQA and oMe-Gold, reaching 48.1% and 57.9%, respectively. On a fixed sample of 110 out-of-distribution reactions from ChemMechQA-Hard, GRMP achieves 36.4% top-1 pathway accuracy. LLM-as-Judge and human assessment further demonstrate its ability to generalize to unseen reactions.