A Miniature Brain Transformer: Thalamic Gating, Hippocampal Lateralization, Amygdaloid Salience, and Prefrontal Working Memory in Attention-Coupled Latent Memory

This paper introduces a miniature brain transformer architecture that demonstrates a novel, falsifiable prediction: functional lateralization of hippocampal banks requires the synergistic interaction of a prefrontal working-memory buffer (acting as a symmetry-breaker) and inhibitory callosal coupling, a mechanism that triggers a sharp phase transition in memory performance while a cerebellar fast-path merely accelerates convergence.

Hong Jeong2026-03-10💻 cs

VINO: Video-driven Invariance for Non-contextual Objects via Structural Prior Guided De-contextualization

VINO is a self-supervised learning framework that overcomes the "co-occurrence trap" in dense video by using a teacher-student distillation approach with structural priors to force representations to focus on foreground objects rather than background context, achieving state-of-the-art unsupervised object discovery performance.

Seul-Ki Yeom, Marcel Simon, Eunbin Lee, Tae-Ho Kim2026-03-10💻 cs

LEPA: Learning Geometric Equivariance in Satellite Remote Sensing Data with a Predictive Architecture

This paper introduces LEPA, a learned architecture that conditions on geometric augmentations to accurately predict transformed satellite image embeddings, effectively overcoming the limitations of standard interpolation in non-convex geospatial foundation model manifolds and significantly improving geometric adjustment performance.

Erik Scheurer, Rocco Sedona, Stefan Kesselheim, Gabriele Cavallaro2026-03-10💻 cs

Do Deployment Constraints Make LLMs Hallucinate Citations? An Empirical Study across Four Models and Five Prompting Regimes

This empirical study demonstrates that deployment-motivated prompting constraints significantly exacerbate citation hallucinations across four large language models, with no model achieving a citation existence rate above 47.5% and a substantial portion of unverifiable outputs being fabricated, thereby underscoring the critical need for post-hoc verification in academic and software engineering contexts.

Chen Zhao, Yuan Tang, Yitian Qian2026-03-10💻 cs

MAviS: A Multimodal Conversational Assistant For Avian Species

This paper introduces MAviS, a domain-adaptive multimodal conversational assistant for avian species that leverages the newly created MAviS-Dataset and is evaluated on the MAviS-Bench to achieve state-of-the-art performance in fine-grained bird species understanding and multimodal question answering.

Yevheniia Kryklyvets, Mohammed Irfan Kurpath, Sahal Shaji Mullappilly, Jinxing Zhou, Fahad Shabzan Khan, Rao Anwer, Salman Khan, Hisham Cholakkal2026-03-10💻 cs

FinSheet-Bench: From Simple Lookups to Complex Reasoning, Where LLMs Break on Financial Spreadsheets

FinSheet-Bench introduces a synthetic benchmark modeled on real private equity fund structures to evaluate LLMs on financial spreadsheet tasks, revealing that even the best-performing models currently lack the accuracy required for unsupervised professional use, particularly on complex, large-scale documents, and suggesting that reliable extraction will require separating document understanding from deterministic computation.

Jan Ravnik, Matjaž Ličen, Felix Bührmann, Bithiah Yuan, Felix Stinson, Tanvi Singh2026-03-10💻 cs

Norm-Hierarchy Transitions in Representation Learning: When and Why Neural Networks Abandon Shortcuts

This paper introduces the Norm-Hierarchy Transition (NHT) framework, which explains that neural networks delay learning structured representations in favor of spurious shortcuts because weight decay slowly drives the model from high-norm solutions to lower-norm ones, with the transition delay logarithmically scaling to the ratio between these norms.

Truong Xuan Khanh, Truong Quynh Hoa2026-03-10🤖 cs.LG

VisualScratchpad: Inference-time Visual Concepts Analysis in Vision Language Models

This paper introduces VisualScratchpad, an interactive inference-time analysis tool that leverages sparse autoencoders and attention mechanisms to visualize and debug vision language models by linking visual concepts to text tokens, thereby revealing previously underexplored failure modes such as limited cross-modal alignment and misleading visual concepts.

Hyesu Lim, Jinho Choi, Taekyung Kim, Byeongho Heo, Jaegul Choo, Dongyoon Han2026-03-10💻 cs

Agora: Teaching the Skill of Consensus-Finding with AI Personas Grounded in Human Voice

The paper introduces Agora, an AI-powered platform that leverages LLMs to simulate diverse human perspectives on policy issues, enabling users to practice consensus-building and demonstrating through a preliminary study that access to authentic voice explanations significantly enhances problem-solving skills and the quality of collective decisions compared to viewing aggregate data alone.

Suyash Fulay, Prerna Ravi, Emily Kubin, Shrestha Mohanty, Michiel Bakker, Deb Roy2026-03-10💻 cs