Scalable Multi-Task Learning for Particle Collision Event Reconstruction with Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks

This paper proposes a scalable Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (HGNN) that employs a multi-task learning paradigm to simultaneously perform particle vertex association and graph pruning, thereby significantly improving beauty hadron reconstruction performance and inference efficiency for complex particle collision events at the Large Hadron Collider.

William Sutcliffe, Marta Calvi, Simone Capelli + 5 more2026-03-09⚛️ hep-ex

Entropic Mirror Descent for Linear Systems: Polyak's Stepsize and Implicit Bias

This paper introduces a variant of Polyak's stepsizes for entropic mirror descent to solve linear systems without restrictive domain assumptions, establishing sublinear and linear convergence rates, strengthening 1\ell_1-norm implicit bias bounds, and generalizing results to arbitrary convex LL-smooth functions while proposing an exponentiation-free alternative method.

Yura Malitsky, Alexander Posch2026-03-09🤖 cs.LG

ESGenius: Benchmarking LLMs on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and Sustainability Knowledge

The paper introduces ESGenius, the first comprehensive benchmark comprising a curated corpus of authoritative ESG documents and a rigorously validated question-answer dataset, which reveals that while large language models exhibit moderate zero-shot performance in sustainability domains, their accuracy significantly improves when grounded in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) using the provided source materials.

Chaoyue He, Xin Zhou, Yi Wu + 9 more2026-03-09💬 cs.CL

ContextBench: Modifying Contexts for Targeted Latent Activation

This paper introduces ContextBench, a benchmark for evaluating methods that generate fluent inputs to trigger specific latent features in language models, and demonstrates that enhanced Evolutionary Prompt Optimization variants achieve state-of-the-art performance in balancing elicitation strength with linguistic fluency.

Robert Graham, Edward Stevinson, Leo Richter, Alexander Chia, Joseph Miller, Joseph Isaac Bloom2026-03-09🤖 cs.AI

Quantifying Cross-Attention Interaction in Transformers for Interpreting TCR-pMHC Binding

This paper introduces Quantifying Cross-Attention Interaction (QCAI), a novel post-hoc explainable AI method that interprets cross-attention mechanisms in encoder-decoder transformers to improve the understanding of TCR-pMHC binding, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the newly established TCR-XAI benchmark of 274 experimentally determined structures.

Jiarui Li, Zixiang Yin, Haley Smith, Zhengming Ding, Samuel J. Landry, Ramgopal R. Mettu2026-03-09🤖 cs.LG

Temporal Misalignment Attacks against Multimodal Perception in Autonomous Driving

This paper introduces DejaVu, a novel attack that exploits in-vehicular network vulnerabilities to induce subtle temporal misalignments between camera and LiDAR streams, thereby severely degrading multimodal fusion-based perception tasks like object detection and tracking in autonomous driving systems.

Md Hasan Shahriar, Md Mohaimin Al Barat, Harshavardhan Sundar, Ning Zhang, Naren Ramakrishnan, Y. Thomas Hou, Wenjing Lou2026-03-09🤖 cs.LG

Diverse and Adaptive Behavior Curriculum for Autonomous Driving: A Student-Teacher Framework with Multi-Agent RL

This paper proposes a novel student-teacher framework for autonomous driving that utilizes a graph-based multi-agent RL teacher to automatically generate diverse, adaptive traffic curricula, enabling a student agent to achieve superior robustness and balanced driving performance compared to traditional rule-based approaches.

Ahmed Abouelazm, Johannes Ratz, Philip Schörner, J. Marius Zöllner2026-03-09🤖 cs.LG

Characterizing Evolution in Expectation-Maximization Estimates for Overspecified Mixed Linear Regression

This paper provides a theoretical characterization of the Expectation-Maximization algorithm's behavior in overspecified two-component mixed linear regression, establishing that unbalanced initial mixing weights yield linear convergence and optimal statistical accuracy, whereas balanced initial weights result in sublinear convergence and degraded accuracy.

Zhankun Luo, Abolfazl Hashemi2026-03-09🤖 cs.LG

Reasoned Safety Alignment: Ensuring Jailbreak Defense via Answer-Then-Check

This paper introduces "Answer-Then-Check," a novel safety alignment method that enhances LLM robustness against jailbreak attacks by training models to generate direct answers internally and then critically evaluate their safety before responding, achieving superior protection with reduced over-refusal while maintaining general reasoning capabilities through the newly constructed 80K-sample ReSA dataset.

Chentao Cao, Xiaojun Xu, Bo Han, Hang Li2026-03-09🤖 cs.AI

VEGA: Electric Vehicle Navigation Agent via Physics-Informed Neural Operator and Proximal Policy Optimization

VEGA is an electric vehicle navigation system that combines a physics-informed neural operator for real-time vehicle parameter estimation with a Proximal Policy Optimization agent for efficient, charge-aware route and charging stop planning, demonstrating superior inference speed and generalization across international road networks compared to traditional energy-aware baselines.

Hansol Lim, Minhyeok Im, Jonathan Boyack, Jee Won Lee, Jongseong Brad Choi2026-03-09🤖 cs.LG