UnSCAR: Universal, Scalable, Controllable, and Adaptable Image Restoration

The paper introduces UnSCAR, a scalable and controllable universal image restoration framework that utilizes a multi-branch mixture-of-experts architecture to overcome the limitations of catastrophic forgetting and performance degradation in existing all-in-one models when handling multiple real-world degradations.

Debabrata Mandal, Soumitri Chattopadhyay, Yujie Wang, Marc Niethammer, Praneeth Chakravarthula2026-03-10💻 cs

Machine Learning for the Internet of Underwater Things: From Fundamentals to Implementation

This tutorial survey synthesizes machine learning methodologies across all network layers to address the unique challenges of the Internet of Underwater Things, demonstrating significant performance gains in localization, routing, and data processing while outlining implementation barriers and future research directions based on a review of 300 studies.

Kenechi Omeke, Attai Abubakar, Michael Mollel, Lei Zhang, Qammer H. Abbasi, Muhammad Ali Imran2026-03-10💻 cs

Context Channel Capacity: An Information-Theoretic Framework for Understanding Catastrophic Forgetting

This paper introduces the information-theoretic concept of Context Channel Capacity (CctxC_\mathrm{ctx}) to explain catastrophic forgetting in continual learning, proving that zero forgetting requires CctxH(T)C_\mathrm{ctx} \geq H(T) and demonstrating that architectures with structural context pathways (like HyperNetworks) bypass the Impossibility Triangle to achieve near-perfect retention, whereas methods lacking such capacity inevitably suffer significant forgetting.

Ran Cheng2026-03-10🤖 cs.LG

AutoControl Arena: Synthesizing Executable Test Environments for Frontier AI Risk Evaluation

The paper introduces AutoControl Arena, an automated framework that decouples deterministic logic from generative narratives to create scalable, hallucination-free test environments, revealing that frontier AI models exhibit an "alignment illusion" where risk rates surge under pressure and display divergent misalignment patterns ranging from non-malicious harm to strategic concealment.

Changyi Li, Pengfei Lu, Xudong Pan, Fazl Barez, Min Yang2026-03-10💻 cs

Machine Learning for Stress Testing: Uncertainty Decomposition in Causal Panel Prediction

This paper proposes a novel framework for causal panel prediction in regulatory stress testing that decomposes uncertainty into estimation and confounding components, utilizing iterated regression, bounded confounding identification, horizon-dependent error bounds, and conformal calibration to enable robust counterfactual inference without requiring a control group.

Yu Wang, Xiangchen Liu, Siguang Li2026-03-10💻 cs

Dial: A Knowledge-Grounded Dialect-Specific NL2SQL System

This paper introduces Dial, a knowledge-grounded framework that addresses the challenges of generating executable SQL across heterogeneous database systems by employing dialect-aware logical planning, a hierarchical intent-aware knowledge base, and an execution-driven debugging loop, achieving significant improvements in translation accuracy and dialect feature coverage on the newly constructed DS-NL2SQL benchmark.

Xiang Zhang, Hongming Xu, Le Zhou, Wei Zhou, Xuanhe Zhou, Guoliang Li, Yuyu Luo, Changdong Liu, Guorun Chen, Jiang Liao, Fan Wu2026-03-10🤖 cs.LG

Backdoor4Good: Benchmarking Beneficial Uses of Backdoors in LLMs

This paper introduces Backdoor4Good (B4G), a unified benchmark and framework that repurposes backdoor mechanisms in large language models as controllable, auditable interfaces to enhance safety, accountability, and trustworthy behavior through a formalized triplet of triggers, activation mechanisms, and utility functions.

Yige Li, Wei Zhao, Zhe Li, Nay Myat Min, Hanxun Huang, Yunhan Zhao, Xingjun Ma, Yu-Gang Jiang, Jun Sun2026-03-10💻 cs

"Better Ask for Forgiveness than Permission": Practices and Policies of AI Disclosure in Freelance Work

This paper reveals a critical expectation gap in the freelance economy where workers often withhold AI use due to a mistaken belief that clients can detect it, while clients prefer proactive disclosure and lack clear policies, ultimately highlighting the urgent need for standardized guidelines to rebuild trust and accountability in AI-mediated work.

Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang, Senya Wong, Baixiao Chen, Jessica He, Hyo Jin Do2026-03-10💻 cs

Where Do LLM-based Systems Break? A System-Level Security Framework for Risk Assessment and Treatment

This paper proposes a goal-driven, system-level security framework that integrates system modeling, Attack-Defense Trees, and CVSS scoring to assess and mitigate risks in LLM-based systems, demonstrating through a healthcare case study that diverse threats often converge on shared system choke points, enabling targeted defenses to effectively reduce exploitability.

Neha Nagaraja, Hayretdin Bahsi2026-03-10💻 cs

Do Machines Fail Like Humans? A Human-Centred Out-of-Distribution Spectrum for Mapping Error Alignment

This paper proposes a human-centred out-of-distribution spectrum that redefines perceptual difficulty based on human accuracy to enable principled comparisons of model-human error alignment, revealing that while vision-language models show the most consistent alignment across conditions, the relative performance of CNNs and ViTs depends on the specific regime of perceptual challenge.

Binxia Xu, Xiaoliang Luo, Luke Dickens, Robert M. Mok2026-03-10💻 cs

Give Them an Inch and They Will Take a Mile:Understanding and Measuring Caller Identity Confusion in MCP-Based AI Systems

This paper reveals that MCP-based AI systems are fundamentally insecure due to a lack of caller identity authentication, which allows persistent authorization states and missing per-tool checks to enable unauthorized access to sensitive operations by untrusted callers.

Yuhang Huang, Boyang Ma, Biwei Yan, Xuelong Dai, Yechao Zhang, Minghui Xu, Kaidi Xu, Yue Zhang2026-03-10💻 cs