AlignVAR: Towards Globally Consistent Visual Autoregression for Image Super-Resolution

This paper proposes AlignVAR, a globally consistent visual autoregressive framework for image super-resolution that overcomes locality bias and error accumulation through Spatial Consistency Autoregression and Hierarchical Consistency Constraint, achieving superior structural coherence and perceptual fidelity with significantly faster inference and fewer parameters than diffusion-based methods.

Cencen Liu, Dongyang Zhang, Wen Yin + 6 more2026-03-06💻 cs

Real Money, Fake Models: Deceptive Model Claims in Shadow APIs

This paper presents the first systematic audit revealing that widely used "shadow APIs," which claim to provide access to restricted frontier LLMs, frequently employ deceptive practices such as model substitution and safety manipulation, thereby compromising the reliability, reproducibility, and validity of downstream applications and academic research.

Yage Zhang, Yukun Jiang, Zeyuan Chen, Michael Backes, Xinyue Shen, Yang Zhang2026-03-06🔒 cs.CR

AOI: Turning Failed Trajectories into Training Signals for Autonomous Cloud Diagnosis

AOI is a secure, trainable multi-agent framework that automates Site Reliability Engineering by leveraging Group Relative Policy Optimization and a read-write separated architecture to distill expert knowledge into local models and convert failed trajectories into corrective signals, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the AIOpsLab benchmark while ensuring data privacy and safe execution.

Pei Yang, Wanyi Chen, Asuka Yuxi Zheng + 11 more2026-03-06💻 cs

Baseline Performance of AI Tools in Classifying Cognitive Demand of Mathematical Tasks

This study evaluates eleven general-purpose and education-specific AI tools, finding that they achieve only moderate accuracy (63%) in classifying the cognitive demand of mathematical tasks due to a systematic bias toward middle-level categories and a tendency to prioritize surface textual features over underlying cognitive processes, thereby limiting their immediate reliability for teacher planning without improved prompt engineering or tool development.

Danielle S. Fox, Brenda L. Robles, Elizabeth DiPietro Brovey + 1 more2026-03-06💻 cs

Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) Authentication for Offline CBDC Payment System Using IoT Devices

This paper proposes a privacy-preserving, offline Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) payment model for resource-constrained IoT devices that integrates Secure Elements, lightweight Zero-Knowledge Proofs, and intermittent synchronization to enable secure, cash-like transactions while preventing double-spending and ensuring AML/CFT compliance without continuous internet connectivity.

Santanu Mondal, T. Chithralekha2026-03-06🔒 cs.CR