# Research Papers — 2026-06 · bundle page 100 of 260 > Full-text markdown of papers #4951–5000 of 12993 published in 2026-06, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 12993-paper 2026-06 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/100 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/99.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/101.md) ### Generative Engine Optimization at Scale: Measuring Brand Visibility Across AI Search Engines Authors: Pratyush Kumar Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.IR, cs.CL, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20065v1 People increasingly get answers straight from AI search engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini rather than scrolling search results. Brands that once focused on search engine optimization (SEO) must now optimize for how these engines represent, cite, and recommend them -- a shift variously called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and AI Search Visibility. We treat AEO and AI Visibility as part of GEO, and study how to measure brand visibility across AI engines: what they value when they cite a brand, which sources they rely on, and what content large language models surface. The hard case is everyone outside the already-authoritative top brands -- SMEs, D2C brands, creators, and early-stage startups. We analyze 100K+ prompt responses across 100+ brands tracked on Ranqo between March and May 2026. First visibility runs form a clear three-tier brand-stature ladder: global household names (e.g., Stripe, Nike) appear in 73% of relevant AI answers on their first run; established mid-market and regional brands (e.g., Olipop, Klaviyo) in 44%; niche and small brands in just 11% -- about 30 percentage points per step. When engines cite sources, about 78% go to corporate websites; among non-corporate sources YouTube leads, ahead of Reddit, editorial media, and Wikipedia. The highest-leverage page is the ranked "best-of" listicle, the most-cited content format at about 21% of all citations. Sentiment is the unstable signal: whether a brand is framed positively or negatively flips about 6.7 times more often than whether it is mentioned at all. These findings provide a first large-scale baseline for measuring GEO: AI brand visibility can be measured, differs by platform, and varies strongly by brand maturity. We close by proposing seven v1.1 protocols to test whether specific recommendations can causally improve AI visibility. --- ### Optimal Coarse Correlated Equilibria in Mean Field Games: Linear Programming and No-Regret Learning Authors: Luciano Campi, Federico Cannerozzi, Ioannis Tzouanas Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG, math.PR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20062v1 We introduce optimal coarse correlated equilibria for continuous-time mean field games. A coarse correlated equilibrium is a randomized recommendation scheme from which no player can gain by ignoring the recommendation and switching to an alternative strategy. The problem is as follows: a moderator selects, among all mean-field coarse correlated equilibria, one that optimizes a prescribed performance criterion, which may differ from the representative player's objective. After formulating the problem, we develop a linear programming (LP) formulation, prove the existence of optimal LP coarse correlated equilibria, and relate the LP characterization to the original probabilistic setting. Building on this characterization, we design a no-regret primal-dual algorithm, based on an equivalent Lagrangian formulation of the external-regret constraint, for learning such equilibria. We provide explicit convergence rates for the learning algorithm, and numerical examples illustrate the method. --- ### Autonomous Event-Driven Multi-Agent Orchestration for Enterprise AI at Scale Authors: Harsh Rao Dhanyamraju, Leonidas Raghav, Aaron Lee Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20058v2 Enterprise agent language models must coordinate specialist agents over continuous business event streams, yet most multi-agent evaluations assume discrete request-response workflows. We present a controlled simulation based on a sanitized enterprise research snapshot: 208 scenarios, 393 events, and 1,051 expected agent calls across Persona (<10 agents), Department (20-80), and Enterprise (200) registries. We compare DAG Plan & Execute with ReAct and evaluate a minimal Task Manager for priority inference, related-event merging, and preemption. Both systems perform well on the Persona cohort but score lower on the Enterprise cohort, especially for Simple scenarios; a larger, more confusable discovery space may contribute. The tested DAG Plan & Execute implementation generally maintains higher agent-call precision, whereas ReAct shows stronger recall and Expected Answer Completeness in several Enterprise conditions. The Task Manager reduces high-priority queue latency by 14-75% and improves related-event Expected Answer Completeness by over 20 percentage points at Enterprise scale. These controlled-simulation results characterize the tested systems but do not establish production readiness. --- ### Autonomous Event-Driven Multi-Agent Orchestration for Enterprise AI at Scale Authors: Harsh Rao Dhanyamraju, Leonidas Raghav, Aaron Lee Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20058v1 Enterprise AI aims to move toward continuous event monitoring, detection, and action across specialist agents, yet existing multi-agent systems largely assume discrete request-response workflows and remain underexplored at enterprise scale. We evaluate DAG Plan and Execute and ReAct across 208 production-derived enterprise scenarios spanning Persona (<10 agents), Department (20-80), and Enterprise (200) scales, and introduce a Task Manager for continuous operation via priority inference, related-event merging, and preemption. Results show that scale, not task complexity, dominates orchestration performance: both architectures perform well at small scale but degrade at enterprise scale as agent discovery noise becomes the primary bottleneck, with simple tasks degrading more sharply than complex ones. DAG Plan and Execute offers higher precision and structured parallelization at smaller scales, but its higher overhead worsens at enterprise scale; ReAct is more robust by handling failures incrementally. The Task Manager reduces high-priority queue latency by 14-75% and improves related-event correctness by over 20 percentage points at enterprise scale. --- ### PaAno+: Multiscale Encoding and Cross-Variable Attention for Time Series Anomaly Detection Authors: Youji Zhu, Hongbing Wang, Wenchao Liu, Xiaodong Liu, Xiangguang Xiong Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20055v1 Time-series anomaly detection has significant practical value for industrial and medical monitoring, as well as other critical domains. Current Transformer- and large-model-based detection approaches incur excessive computational overhead, while existing lightweight alternatives are constrained by insufficient feature extraction and inadequate modeling of dependencies across multivariate variables. To mitigate the above drawbacks, this study develops a lightweight, efficient anomaly detection model, dubbed PaAno, within the patch-oriented representation learning paradigm. In the encoder module, a multiscale feature-extraction backbone is constructed using convolutional kernels with differentiated receptive fields to capture hierarchical temporal characteristics; subsequent cross-scale adaptive attention aggregation, combined with residual connection optimization, further stabilizes feature representation learning. A cross-variable fusion attention module is embedded to explicitly characterize inter-variable correlations, empowering the model to identify anomalous patterns amid intricate operational conditions. Moreover, a novel pretext task based on temporal patch-window sorting is customized to uncover intrinsic structural properties of time series, and triplet loss is leveraged to optimize the patch embedding space for enhanced feature discrimination. Extensive experiments on the TSB-AD benchmark demonstrate that the proposed PaAno achieves state-of-the-art detection accuracy on both univariate and multivariate tasks, yielding significant performance gains across evaluation metrics, including VUS-PR, relative to the original PaAno. Leveraging a compact network design, the presented model achieves favorable computational efficiency, enabling deployment on resource-limited terminals for real-time anomaly inference. --- ### Comparative Study of Neural Surrogate Architectures for Autoregressive Prediction of Internal Battery States Authors: Gihyun Lee, Thorben Menne, Simon Olma, Jakob Hilgert, Sangyoung Park Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20053v1 The Doyle-Fuller-Newman (DFN) model resolves internal electrochemical states in lithium-ion batteries with high fidelity. However, the numerical solution of its governing equations is computationally prohibitive for real-time deployment, limiting scalability from individual cells to pack and fleet-scale applications. While machine learning surrogates can substantially reduce inference latency through GPU acceleration, most existing approaches learn solution approximations tied to specific operating conditions rather than learning generalizable state-evolution dynamics. This work presents a systematic comparison of four neural network architectures (MLP, ResNet, U-Net, FNO) formulated as autoregressive state-transition operators that predict full DFN internal states across a wide range of operating conditions. To ensure a controlled architectural comparison, all models are trained under a unified framework using multi-step unrolling and current-conditioning, isolating the impact of spatial inductive bias. Results demonstrate that the U-Net's multi-scale feature hierarchy achieves a mean final-step nRMSE of 3% averaged across all internal state variables after 300-step autoregressive rollouts, while providing a 5.38x speed-up over the numerical solver. These findings highlight spatial inductive bias as a critical determinant of surrogate performance, advancing the development of surrogates for internal state observability for next-generation battery management systems and digital twins. --- ### See-and-Reach: Precise Vision-Language Navigation for UAVs within the Field of View Authors: Fanfu Xue, En Yu, Yantian Shen, Zhikun Hu, Hongjun Wang, Yang Yang, Xindi Wang, Jiande Sun Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20045v1 UAV Vision-Language Navigation (UAV-VLN) is typically formulated as a holistic search-and-reach problem, where long-range target discovery and final target approach are optimized and evaluated jointly. This formulation makes it difficult to assess a critical capability of aerial embodied agents, namely whether a UAV can accurately ground a visible target and translate vision-language evidence into precise 3D motion once the target enters its field of view. To address this limitation, we introduce UAV-VLN-FOV, a target-visible navigation task that isolates the see-and-reach stage and enables a more diagnostic evaluation of terminal reaching ability. We further propose 3DG-VLN, a vision-language waypoint prediction framework guided by dynamic 3D direction cues to enhance fine-grained visual grounding and spatial direction alignment for precise target reaching. Specifically, 3DG-VLN adaptively processes high-resolution front-view and downward-view observations to preserve fine-grained visual and geometric details for target grounding. It also updates the target-relative direction online during closed-loop navigation, allowing the agent to maintain spatial alignment with the target and reduce accumulated direction drift. To support this task, we construct a dedicated high-resolution benchmark which contains 2,717 trajectories with target-oriented high-level instructions, high-resolution front-view and downward-view egocentric observations, and continuous 3D waypoint annotations. Experiments show that 3DG-VLN outperforms competitive UAV-VLN baselines, achieving a 13.82\% improvement in success rate. Real-world trials further demonstrate the potential of 3DG-VLN for practical see-and-reach navigation. The source code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/xuefanfu/3DG-VLN. --- ### FUSE: Frequency-domain Unification and Spectral Energy Alignment for Multi-modal Object Re-Identification Authors: Xuanhao Qi, Tom H. Luan, Yukang Zhang, Jinkai Zheng, Zhou Su, Shuwei Li, Lei Tan Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20044v1 Despite significant progress in multi-modal Re-Identification (ReID), existing methods tend to emphasize low-frequency cues. Consequently, they focus on attributes such as color, illumination, and coarse appearance, while overlooking mid and high-frequency structures that encode geometric, textural, and identity-discriminative details. This imbalance leads to incomplete spectral representations and unstable cross-modal alignment. To overcome these limitations, we introduce FUSE, a frequency-domain framework that reformulates multi-modal ReID as a two-stage process of spectral disentanglement and energy alignment. The proposed Spectral Decomposition Module (SDM) adaptively partitions features into low, mid, and high-frequency subspaces, enabling hierarchical spectral modeling. The Cross-Modal Alignment Module (CAM) further enforces energy alignment and subspace complementarity across modalities via frequency-consistency regularization. In addition, FUSE incorporates learnable frequency modulation to enhance robustness under varying illumination and heterogeneous sensor conditions. Extensive experiments on RGBNT201, RGBNT100, and MSVR310 show that FUSE achieves 9.1\% mAP and 9.5\% Rank-1 improvements, establishing an interpretable frequency-domain paradigm for multi-modal representation learning. --- ### AI Economist Agent: An Agentic Framework for Evidence-Based Economic and Financial Analysis with RAG, Knowledge Graphs, and Large Language Models Authors: Masahiro Kato Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: econ.GN, cs.AI, cs.LG, q-fin.GN arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20041v2 We propose an AI economist agent for economic and financial scenario analysis. Scenario design often requires analysts to assess emerging risks with limited historical precedent, combine information from many sources, and translate qualitative mechanisms into internally consistent quantitative paths. Large language models (LLMs) can search and synthesize this information, but fluent narratives alone do not establish the model-based calculations needed for economic conclusions. Our framework uses LLM agents to plan the analysis, retrieve relevant evidence, and organize economic mechanisms, while registered quantitative models generate numerical outcomes and predefined tests determine whether intermediate results can be used in the final report. We apply the framework to European macro-financial stress scenarios and bank capital analysis. The empirical analysis evaluates retrieval of economic mechanisms, scenario construction, model execution, and report generation under a historical information cutoff. The results show how the AI economist agent can combine flexible evidence retrieval and scenario construction while keeping the resulting analysis linked to identifiable sources and explicit model calculations. --- ### AI Economist Agent: An Agentic Framework for Model-Grounded Economic Analysis with RAG, Knowledge Graphs, and Large Language Models Authors: Masahiro Kato Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: econ.GN, cs.AI, cs.LG, q-fin.GN arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20041v1 We propose a model-grounded RAG-based AI economist with an agentic framework for economic scenario analysis using large language models (LLMs) and knowledge graphs. While LLMs can generate fluent economic narratives, economists are often required to make economic claims grounded by economic theory and real-world data. Based on this motivation, this study proposes an RAG-based AI economist, which utilizes knowledge graphs including economic data and theory and LLM-based agents to plan the analysis, retrieve relevant evidence, select appropriate models, and generate reports. In our framework, we do not produce quantitative claims directly with the language model alone; instead, we generate narratives grounded in explicit model-based computations and linked to the retrieved evidence via AI agents. We refer to our framework as an AI economist agent. We evaluate the AI economist agent in two applications: economist report generation for U.S. inflation persistence and Federal Reserve policy, and bank stress-test narrative generation for U.S. commercial real estate refinancing stress. The results illustrate how grounding the generated reports improves their economic coherence and traceability. --- ### Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis using a Multimodal Approach with 3D MRI and PET Authors: Loukas Ilias, Anthi-Maria Vozinaki, Christos Ntanos, Dimitris Askounis Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20037v1 Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an irreversible neurodegenerative disorder and a leading cause of death worldwide. Early diagnosis plays an important part especially at the Mild Cognitive Impairment stage, where timely intervention can help slow its progression before it advances to AD. Neuroimaging data, like Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans, can help detect brain changes early by providing structural and functional brain changes related to the disease. Yet, many multimodal models still fuse MRI and PET with static concatenation and apply identical computation to all subjects, which limits robustness to patient/site heterogeneity and can waste computation. To address these limitations, we present the first study of combining 3D convolutional feature extractors with three fusion strategies - concatenation, Gated Multimodal Unit (GMU), and gated self-attention - and a sparsely gated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) classifier that performs input-adaptive routing, activating only the most informative experts per case. Finally, we utilize Grad-CAM to visualize disease-related regions, ensuring model interpretability. Experiments are performed across three binary classification tasks (NC vs. MCI, MCI vs. AD, and NC vs. AD). Results show that GMU achieves accuracies of 80.46 % (NC vs. MCI) and 95.47 % (NC vs. AD), while gated self-attention attains 82.08 % on MCI vs. AD. Ablations show that removing the MoE consistently degrades accuracy across all tasks. These findings underscore the value of input-adaptive, multimodal modeling for AD diagnosis by leveraging the complementary nature of MRI and PET. --- ### PU-UNet: Stable Multiplicative Interactions for Medical Image Segmentation Authors: Ziyuan Li, Osamah Sufyan, Uwe Jaekel, Babette Dellen Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20035v1 Many dense prediction networks rely on additive feature transformations and model higher-order feature interactions only implicitly. Product units provide an explicit mechanism for multiplicative feature modeling, but their logarithmic--exponential formulation can cause numerical instability, which has limited their use in deep dense prediction networks. In this work, we propose Product-Unit U-Net (PU-UNet), a residual U-Net that integrates stable product-unit residual blocks into rich low-resolution stages for medical image segmentation. The proposed formulation combines smooth positivity mapping with log-domain clipping, enabling stable multiplicative feature learning with negligible computational overhead. On ISIC 2018, Kvasir-SEG, and BUSI, PU-UNet achieves Dice scores of 0.942, 0.959, and up to 0.925, respectively. Compared with a matched Residual U-Net baseline, PU-UNet consistently improves Dice and IoU while keeping parameters, FLOPs, and inference latency nearly unchanged, and reduces the image-level false-positive rate on normal BUSI cases from 0.077 to zero. Ablation studies suggest that the gains are associated with product-unit interactions, are strongest under low-resolution placement, and benefit from the proposed stabilization design. These results suggest that stable product-unit residual learning can be an effective way to enhance U-Net-style segmentation networks with explicit multiplicative interactions. --- ### Exploring the potential of AlphaEarth and TESSERA embeddings for Fine-scale Local Climate Zone Mapping: A case study across five cities in Switzerland Authors: Htet Yamin Ko Ko, Clement Atzberger Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20034v1 Understanding urban spatial morphology is critical for climate modeling, risk assessment, and sustainable urban design, and Local Climate Zone (LCZ) mapping provides the basic framework for this. However, many cities still use coarse ~100-m resolution LCZ records, which are unsuitable for fine-scale urban research. In this study, precomputed embeddings from TESSERA (Feng et al., 2025) and AlphaEarth (Brown et al., 2025) are compared to traditional Sentinel-1/2 (S1S2) composites in five Swiss cities to see if they can upscale coarse LCZ maps to 10-m resolution using an attention-based U-Net. Three experiments assess multi-city transferability, the impact of higher-resolution reference data, and temporal robustness to year-to-year phenology changes. We find that all datasets achieve strong performance with test data Intersection-over-Union (IoU) ranging from 0.59-0.69 and 0.77-0.82 in the first two experiments. TESSERA consistently outperforms both S1S2 and AlphaEarth across both settings As expected, we find that the transfer of embedding-based models from one year to another remains an open challenge. Overall, however, our results demonstrate the promising potential of embeddings derived from EO foundation models to reduce time consuming preprocessing, respectively, manual feature engineering tasks and to guide a universal deep learning-based LCZ mapping workflow. When combined with a simple location-aware attention U-Net architecture, the embeddings enhance regional transferability and scalability, supporting the development of comprehensive and reproducible fine-scale LCZ maps for global urban climate applications Improving reference data quality remains the strongest lever for further accuracy gains. --- ### ReA-OVCD: Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Change Detection via Semantic-Spatial Reliability Assessment Authors: Hongming Zhu, Huaji Chen, Bowen Du, Sicong Liu, Qin Liu Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20032v2 Unlike traditional remote sensing change detection that relies on predefined categories, Open-Vocabulary Change Detection (OVCD) identifies land cover changes flexibly using arbitrary text prompts. However, most existing OVCD methods rely on instance-level matching for stable correspondence but may overlook fine-grained variations (e.g., partial building extensions). Dense pixel-level comparison is more flexible, yet direct semantic comparison often produces unreliable candidate changes due to semantic ambiguity and spatial inconsistency. To this end, we propose ReA-OVCD, an efficient training-free framework that revisits pixel-level OVCD from a reliability assessment perspective. It first derives candidate change regions from pixel-wise semantic discrepancies to retain flexible localization. Instead of directly trusting these candidates, ReA-OVCD applies a two-stage semantic-spatial reliability assessment. The semantic stage evaluates whether a label discrepancy is supported by meaningful distributional and response-level changes, while the spatial stage validates whether a candidate region contains stable interior evidence rather than only boundary-induced responses. Extensive experiments across LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, DSIFN, and SECOND show that the proposed framework improves the reliability of pixel-level OVCD and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving $\mathrm{F}_{1}^{C}$ improvements of 3.54\% to 8.45\% while maintaining superior computational efficiency. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/Funny0101/ReA-OVCD}{https://github.com/Funny0101/ReA-OVCD}. --- ### ReA-OVCD: Reliability-Aware Open-Vocabulary Change Detection via Semantic and Spatial Refinement Authors: Hongming Zhu, Huaji Chen, Bowen Du, Sicong Liu, Qin Liu Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20032v1 Unlike traditional remote sensing change detection that relies on predefined categories, Open-Vocabulary Change Detection (OVCD) identifies land cover changes flexibly using arbitrary text prompts. However, existing methods suffer from an inherent trade-off when modeling changes: instance-level comparison overlooks fine-grained semantic variations (e.g., partial building extensions), while direct pixel comparison proves unreliable, yielding unstable responses and boundary artifacts due to semantic ambiguity and spatial inconsistency. To this end, we propose an efficient training-free Reliability-Aware Open-Vocabulary Change Detection (ReA-OVCD) framework. It first derives candidate change regions from pixel-wise semantic discrepancies to ensure flexible and detailed localization. To ensure reliability, it subsequently introduces a collaborative refinement strategy to explicitly model change validity from both semantic and spatial perspectives. Specifically, we develop a Semantic Change Reasoning (SCR) module that reassesses changes by jointly analyzing distributional divergence and response variation, enabling the suppression of incidental inconsistencies while preserving reliable semantic shifts. In addition, a Boundary-aware Change Refinement (BCR) module is designed to mitigate artifacts stemming from boundary misalignment and uncertainty through validating whether candidate regions are supported by reliable interior pixels. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets (LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, DSIFN, and SECOND) demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving $\mathrm{F}_{1}^{C}$ improvements of 2.13\% to 9.75\% with higher computational efficiency. The code is publicly available at \https://github.com/Funny0101/ReA-OVCD --- ### A Neuromorphic Reinforcement Learning Framework for Efficient Pathfinding in Robotic Mobile Fulfillment Systems Authors: Junzhe Xu, Zecui Zeng, Lusong Li, Yuetong Fang, Renjing Xu Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20031v3 Dynamic environmental changes, confined workspaces, and stringent real-time constraints make pathfinding in Robotic Mobile Fulfillment Systems (RMFS) a challenging problem for conventional search- and rule-based methods, which typically suffer from high computational complexity and long decision latency. While reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful alternative, deploying learned policies with extreme energy efficiency on resource-constrained hardware remains an open challenge. We present SDQN-RMFS, an end-to-end framework that achieves high-fidelity deployment of an RL-trained policy from a full-precision artificial neural network (ANN) through to a neuromorphic chip. By computing only when triggered by sparse events, this framework unlocks ultra-low-power RMFS pathfinding. Our full-stack pipeline operates as follows: an ANN policy is first efficiently trained via a collision-allowing strategy to densify informative trajectories, and then converted into a spiking neural network (SNN) via a hard-label knowledge distillation approach. This effectively addresses the output distribution mismatch, preserving policy capability across the ANN-to-SNN pipeline while substantially reducing inference latency. Hardware experiments demonstrate up to 11,281$\times$ energy savings and a nearly two-fold reduction in latency compared to a high-performance GPU baseline, while maintaining decision quality on par with the original trained policy. These results establish physical neuromorphic inference as a practical and energy-sustainable pathway for large-scale RMFS operations. --- ### QG-MIL: A Gated Transformer Aggregator for Domain-Agnostic Multiple Instance Learning in Medical Imaging Authors: Luca Zedda, Davide Antonio Mura, Cecilia Di Ruberto, Maurizio Atzori, Muhammed Furkan Dasdelen, Carsten Marr, Andrea Loddo Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20027v1 Attention-based Multiple Instance Learning aggregators in medical imaging are prone to attention concentration, producing overconfident and unstable predictions. We introduce QG-MIL, a gated transformer aggregator that addresses this through four synergistic architectural components: RMSNorm-based pre-normalization, per-head QK normalization, fine-grained attention output gating, and SwiGLU-style feed-forward modules. Together, these design choices stabilize training and distribute attention more uniformly across instances without auxiliary losses, masking, or multi-stage regularization. We evaluate QG-MIL across six benchmarks spanning whole-slide pathology and cell-level hematology, covering two fundamentally different MIL scales. The best-performing QG-MIL variants outperform leading baselines on all six benchmarks, with an average improvement of +6.1 mean macro F1 points. Attention overlays and attention mass analysis confirm more distributed instance weighting. Ablation studies show that while individual components can match the full model on specific datasets, the QG-MIL design provides the most consistent cross-domain performance and tightest variance when compared to selected baselines. We release a configurable implementation to support reproducibility at: https://github.com/unica-visual-intelligence-lab/QG-MIL --- ### When Lower Privileges Suffice: Investigating Over-Privileged Tool Selection in LLM Agents Authors: Kaiyue Yang, Yuyan Bu, Jingwei Yi, Yuchi Wang, Biyu Zhou, Juntao Dai, Songlin Hu, Yaodong Yang Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20023v2 As LLM agents increasingly select tools autonomously, their choices among tools with different privileges become safety-relevant. However, prior tool-selection studies focus on safety-agnostic metadata preferences, leaving privilege-sensitive choices underexplored. To address this gap, we study over-privileged tool selection, in which an agent selects or escalates to a higher-privilege tool despite a sufficient lower-privilege alternative. We introduce ToolPrivBench to evaluate whether agents choose higher-privilege tools despite sufficient lower-privilege alternatives, measuring both initial selection and escalation after transient tool failures. Across eight domains and five recurring risk patterns, we find that over-privileged tool selection is common among mainstream LLM agents and is further amplified by transient failures. We further find that general safety alignment does not reliably transfer to least-privilege tool choice, while prompt-level controls provide only limited mitigation under transient failures. We therefore introduce a privilege-aware post-training defense that teaches agents to prefer sufficient lower-privilege tools and escalate only when necessary. Our mitigation experiments show that this defense substantially reduces unnecessary high-privilege tool use while preserving general capabilities. --- ### Stochastic Linear Contextual Bandits with Bounded Noise: A Set-Membership Approach Authors: Haonan Xu, Yingying Li Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20022v1 This paper considers stochastic linear contextual bandits (SLCB) with bounded reward noise. Existing works typically assume sub-Gaussian reward noise and bounded expected rewards, under which the optimal regret bound scales as $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ in terms of horizon $T$. However, in many applications, realized/observed rewards are also naturally bounded, implying bounded reward noise. Bounded noise is more informative than the sub-Gaussian condition but has not been leveraged explicitly in the SLCB literature. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm SME-OFU by utilizing an uncertainty quantification method called set-membership estimation (SME) and applying the principle of optimism in the face of uncertainty (OFU). Our algorithm enjoys an improved regret bound $O(\log T)$. Notice that this does not contradict the existing optimal bound $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ for sub-Gaussian noise because bounded noise is a stronger condition. Finally, simulations show empirical improvements of SME-OFU over a benchmark algorithm designed for sub-Gaussian noise when the reward noise is bounded. --- ### Adaptive Distance-Aware Trunk Deep Operator Learning for Long-Span Roadway Bridges Authors: Bilal Ahmed, Diab W. Abueidda, Waleed El-Sekelly, Tarek Abdoun, Mostafa E. Mobasher Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20015v1 Long-span roadway bridges exhibit highly localized structural responses under vehicular loading, making repeated FE analysis computationally expensive for applications such as influence surface generation and structural digital twins. Existing SciML approaches struggle to accurately capture these localized responses. To address this challenge, this study proposes an adaptive-trunk DeepONet for localized structural response prediction in large-scale bridge systems. The framework dynamically constructs a load-dependent learning domain using a KNN strategy, allowing the network to focus on structural influence zones. The trunk network is further enhanced using distance-aware features that encode the geometric relationship between the load and structural nodes. A physics-based full-field reconstruction is incorporated through a stiffness-informed Schur complement formulation, enabling predictions at adaptive nodes to be extended to the entire structural domain. To enable scalable training, response data are generated using a reduced-order equivalent shell model that preserves the dominant global behavior while significantly reducing computational cost. The proposed framework is validated on both a benchmark bridge model and the real-world Mussafah Bridge. Results show that the method achieves FEM-level accuracy with relative errors below 5%, while reducing the total response evaluation time (including full-field reconstruction) by approximately 60x; excluding the post-processing reconstruction step, the AD-DeepONet inference is up to four orders of magnitude faster than FEM. In addition, the framework enables rapid generation of full-field responses, influence lines, and influence surfaces under arbitrary vehicular loading configurations, demonstrating strong potential for large-scale bridge analysis and digital twin applications. --- ### Hierarchical Control in Multi-Agent Games: LLM-based Planning and RL Execution Authors: Jannik Hösch, Alessandro Sestini, Florian Fuchs, Amir Baghi, Joakim Bergdahl, Iolanda Leite, Konrad Tollmar, Jean-Philippe Barrette-LaPierre, Linus Gisslén Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20014v3 Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved strong performance in sequential decision-making, yet scaling to complex multi-agent environments remains challenging due to sparse rewards, large state-action spaces, and the difficulty of learning coordinated strategies. We propose a hierarchical architecture where a pretrained large language model (LLM) acts as a centralized strategic controller that selects among specialized RL skill policies for a team of agents, while RL policies handle reactive low-level execution. We evaluate this hybrid system in a competitive 2v2 King of the Hill environment against behavior tree (BT) and \emph{``Flat''} RL (end-to-end training without skill decomposition) baselines. The LLM+RL system achieves task performance statistically equivalent to hand-crafted BT (46.4\% vs 51.5\% win rate, $p=0.103$) while both significantly outperform Flat RL trained without skill decomposition. A user study ($n=15$) reveals that 60\% of participants perceive LLM+RL agents as the most human-like ($p=0.027$), citing behavioral adaptability and tactical variability. These results demonstrate that pretrained LLM reasoning can effectively orchestrate pretrained RL skills, achieving competitive multi-agent coordination and superior perceived believability without manual rule engineering. --- ### Self-Adaptive Scale Handling for Forecasting Time Series with Scale Heterogeneity Authors: Xu Zhang, Zhengang Huang, Yunzhi Wu, Xun Lu, Erpeng Qi, Yunkai Chen, Zhongya Xue, Peng Wang, Wei Wang Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20010v1 Current time series forecasting (TSF) research predominantly focuses on scale-homogeneous data, where different time series share similar numerical magnitude ranges. However, in real-world industrial scenarios such as financial product sales, different time series often differ by orders of magnitude (scale heterogeneity). Since these series share similar temporal patterns, joint modeling is desirable for better data utilization, yet existing scaling methods either compress low-scale signals (global normalization) or destroy semantic discriminability and amplify inverse-scaling errors (window-based scaling). This paper proposes a self-Adaptive Scale-handling (AS) module that learns adaptive scale factors tailored to each input, preserving semantic discriminability while reducing inverse-scaling errors. AS consists of Scale Calibrating (SC), which calibrates prior mean scaling factors through neural networks, and Scaling Selection (SS), which decides whether to apply calibration or retain the original factor, avoiding over-calibration. Experiments on real-world fund sales datasets from Ant Fortune and Alipay show that AS seamlessly integrates into popular TSF models and consistently improves their performance. The code and dataset are available at the link https://github.com/Meteor-Stars/ASTSF. --- ### VIMPO: Value-Implicit Policy Optimization for LLMs Authors: Zhewei Kang, Aosong Feng, Sergey Levine, Dawn Song, Xuandong Zhao Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20008v1 Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has become a central tool for improving the reasoning ability of large language models, but current methods face a trade-off between simplicity and credit assignment. Group-relative methods such as GRPO avoid training a critic, but typically assign a trajectory-level advantage to every token. Actor-critic methods provide denser learning signals, but require a learned value function with its own training instability. We introduce VIMPO, a critic-free policy optimization method that derives a policy-implied value function from the optimality conditions of KL-regularized reinforcement learning. For autoregressive generation, the resulting value recurrence can be written in terms of policy-reference log-ratios and anchored by the terminal condition that no future reward remains at the end of a trajectory. This gives a simple value loss that incorporates outcome-level verifiable rewards without training a critic. The same derivation also yields a critic-free actor advantage, allowing VIMPO to separate reward incorporation through the value loss from policy improvement through a PPO-style actor update. On mathematical RLVR benchmarks, VIMPO improves over GRPO across MATH-500, AIME 2024, AIME 2025, and OlympiadBench, with especially larger gains on competition-style evaluations. Under noisy rewards, VIMPO retains a consistent advantage over GRPO, suggesting that policy-implied value optimization can provide finer credit assignment while preserving the practical simplicity of critic-free training. --- ### StreamKL: Fast and Memory-Efficient KL Divergence for Boosting Attention Distillation Authors: Guangda Liu, Yiquan Wang, Chengwei Li, Wenhao Chen, Jing Lin, Yiwu Yao, Danning Ke, Wenchao Ding, Jieru Zhao Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20005v1 Attention distillation, which trains one attention distribution to match another by minimizing their Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, is widely used in knowledge distillation, model compression, continual learning, and sparse-attention LLM training. However, existing approaches materialize both attention distributions before computing the KL reduction, incurring $O(N_QN_K)$ memory and IO costs that become prohibitive at long context lengths. We present StreamKL, the first fused GPU primitive for attention KL divergence that eliminates this quadratic materialization. StreamKL derives a novel online formulation for the coupled two-distribution KL reduction, enabling a single one-pass forward kernel that streams query-key tiles through on-chip SRAM. For the backward pass, StreamKL recomputes attention probabilities tile-by-tile, avoiding storage of quadratic intermediates. We further design and implement efficient GPU kernels with dedicated optimizations. Experiments show StreamKL delivers up to $43\times$ and $14\times$ speedups over baseline methods in the forward and backward passes, respectively. Most importantly, StreamKL reduces the extra HBM footprint of attention distillation from $O(N_QN_K)$ to $O(1)$, enabling long-context distillation on a single GPU. --- ### Connect the Dots: Training LLMs for Long-Lifecycle Agents with Cross-Domain Generalization Via Reinforcement Learning Authors: Yanxi Chen, Weijie Shi, Boyi Hu, Zeyue Zhang, Zhiwei Wang, Yuexiang Xie, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Jingren Zhou Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20002v2 This work presents a general framework for training large language models (LLMs) to "Connect the Dots" (CoD), a meta-capability required by long-lifecycle agents: as an LLM-based AI agent gets deployed in an environment, it solves a long sequence of tasks while continuously exploring the environment, learning from its own experiences, and iteratively self-updating its context about the environment, thereby achieving progressively better performance on future tasks conditioned on the updated context. Major components of the CoD framework include: (1) algorithm design and infrastructure for end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) with long rollout sequences interleaving solve-task and update-context episodes; (2) tasks and environments for incentivizing and eliciting the targeted meta-capability in LLMs during training, as well as for faithfully measuring progress during evaluation. We present proof-of-concept implementations of the CoD framework, including a GRPO-style RL algorithm with fine-grained credit assignment, as well as tasks and environments tailored to the targeted meta-capability (rather than domain-specific LLM capabilities or standard task-by-task RL). Empirical results with Qwen3-8B and Qwen3.6-27B validate the efficacy of end-to-end RL training in the CoD setting, and demonstrate the potential for out-of-distribution generalization -- within the training domains, across different domains, and from CoD to Ralph-loop settings -- of the elicited meta-capability. Our investigation of CoD connects several lines of prior work, and opens up new opportunities for advancing LLMs and AI agents. To facilitate further research and applications, we release our implementations at https://github.com/agentscope-ai/Trinity-RFT/tree/research/cod_v2/examples/research_cod. --- ### Connect the Dots: Training LLMs for Long-Lifecycle Agents with Cross-Domain Generalization Via Reinforcement Learning Authors: Yanxi Chen, Weijie Shi, Yuexiang Xie, Boyi Hu, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Jingren Zhou Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20002v1 This work presents a general framework for training large language models (LLMs) to "Connect the Dots" (CoD), a meta-capability required by long-lifecycle agents: as an LLM-based AI agent gets deployed in an environment, it solves a long sequence of tasks while continuously exploring the environment, learning from its own experiences, and iteratively self-updating its context about the environment, thereby achieving progressively better performance on future tasks conditioned on the updated context. Major components of the CoD framework include: (1) algorithm design and infrastructure for end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) with long rollout sequences interleaving solve-task and update-context episodes; (2) tasks and environments for incentivizing and eliciting the targeted meta-capability in LLMs during training, as well as for faithfully measuring progress during evaluation. We present proof-of-concept implementations of the CoD framework, including a GRPO-style RL algorithm with fine-grained credit assignment, as well as tasks and environments tailored to the targeted meta-capability (rather than domain-specific LLM capabilities or standard task-by-task RL). Empirical results validate the efficacy of end-to-end RL training in the CoD setting, and demonstrate the potential for out-of-distribution generalization -- within the training domains, across different domains, and from CoD to Ralph-loop settings -- of the elicited meta-capability. Our investigation of CoD connects several lines of prior works, and opens up new opportunities for advancing LLMs and AI agents. To facilitate further research and applications, we release our implementations at \url{https://github.com/agentscope-ai/Trinity-RFT/tree/research/cod/examples/research_cod}. --- ### Tri-Info: Generalizable, Interpretable Failure Prediction for VLA Models via Information Theory Authors: Jinghan Yang, Yunchao Zhang, Wang Yuan, Haolun Wan, Jiaming Zhang, Zhengyang Hu, Yanchao Yang Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19998v1 Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are increasingly deployed across diverse tasks, yet they remain black boxes whose physical interactions can cause irreversible harm, making generalizable and interpretable failure detection essential. We observe that successful and failed rollouts carry systematically different information-theoretic signatures. Building on this, we formalize VLA control as a closed-loop information pipeline and derive the Triple Information-theoretic (Tri-Info) signals that capture whether actions remain diverse, temporally consistent, and coupled to state transitions. Across six VLA models and three benchmark environments, Tri-Info matches the strongest baselines in-domain. Moreover, Tri-Info transfers across architectures, environments, and the sim-to-real gap without retraining, reaching 83\% accuracy on real-world tasks where prior detectors collapse to chance. This establishes Tri-Info as a simple yet powerful method that not only detects failures with strong cross-domain generalization, but also delivers interpretable diagnostics of the underlying failure modes. --- ### Segment-Level Mandarin Chinese Speech-Based Cognitive Impairment Detection via an Autoencoder with Contrastive Learning Authors: Yongqi Shao, Hong Huo, Flavio Bertini, Danilo Montesi, Tao Fang Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.SD, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19996v2 \noindent\textbf{Background and Objective:} Speech has emerged as a low-cost and non-invasive digital biomarker with considerable potential for cognitive impairment detection. However, limited labeled data and cross-dataset variability remain major challenges for robust speech-based screening systems. \par\noindent\textbf{Methods:} We developed a segment-level representation learning framework for speech-based cognitive impairment detection. Speech recordings were divided into short segments and converted into spectrogram representations. To improve robustness under limited-data conditions, offline and online augmentation strategies were combined with autoencoder-based representation learning and contrastive objectives to enhance discriminative latent representations. \par\noindent\textbf{Results:} Experiments conducted on four independent Mandarin Chinese speech datasets demonstrated stable and competitive performance in both binary and three-class classification tasks, with particularly notable improvements in the clinically challenging three-class setting. Ablation studies further supported the effectiveness of the proposed framework. \par\noindent\textbf{Conclusions:} The findings suggest that segment-level speech representation learning may provide a scalable and practical approach for cognitive impairment screening in resource-constrained clinical settings. --- ### Activation- and Influence-Aware Ranks (AIR): Function-Preserving SVD Compression for LLMs Authors: Nico Harder, Daniel Becking, Karsten Mueller, Wojciech Samek Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19993v2 We present Activation- and Influence-Aware Ranks (AIR), an SVD-based LLM compression framework that guides each weight matrix's low-rank approximation with a backward-signal influence metric. Starting from the activation-aware optimum of SVD-LLM(W), AIR runs a single closed-form alternating least squares (ALS) sweep that integrates influence element-wise under a monotone-descent guarantee. AIR is layer-local and composes orthogonally with end-to-end methods: alone it exceeds ACIP, and AIR+LoRA outperforms it further. AIR improves perplexity over SVD-LLM(W) by >18% at <=60% parameter retention, matches its quality with ~90% less calibration data, and turns parameter savings into FLOP, peak-memory, and per-token latency gains. --- ### Activation- and Influence-Aware Ranks (AIR): Function-Preserving SVD Compression for LLMs Authors: Nico Harder, Daniel Becking, Karsten Mueller, Wojciech Samek Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19993v1 We present Activation- and Influence-Aware Ranks (AIR), an SVD-based LLM compression framework that guides each weight matrix's low-rank approximation with a backward-signal influence metric. Starting from the activation-aware optimum of SVD-LLM(W), AIR runs a single closed-form alternating least squares (ALS) sweep that integrates influence element-wise under a monotone-descent guarantee. AIR is layer-local and composes orthogonally with end-to-end methods: alone it exceeds ACIP, and AIR+LoRA outperforms it further. AIR improves perplexity over SVD-LLM(W) by >18% at <=60% parameter retention, matches its quality with ~90% less calibration data, and turns parameter savings into FLOP, peak-memory, and per-token latency gains. --- ### Beyond Static Endpoints: Tool Programs as an Interface for Flexible Agentic Web Services Authors: Mugeng Liu, Shuoqi Li, Yixuan Zhang, Yun Ma Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19992v1 In the agentic web era, LLM-based agents increasingly invoke web services as tools, yet most interfaces remain \emph{static endpoints} that poorly express long-horizon workflows with loops, conditionals, joins, and retries. We present ToolPro, which represents an agent's tool intent as an \emph{executable tool program} that compactly encodes multi-step service interactions with explicit effect types. ToolPro combines constraint-guided program construction, effect-aware replay for exactly-once state-modifying calls, and a profile-driven policy that decides when program execution outperforms stepwise calling. We instantiate ToolPro over MCP-style services with WebAssembly sandboxing and evaluate it on diverse workflows of real-world applications. ToolPro reduces end-to-end latency by up to 53.4\% and client-side traffic by up to 96.1\%, with larger gains under higher network latency and workflow complexity. --- ### Reward as An Agent for Embodied World Models Authors: Pu Li, Zhigang Lin, Qiang Wu, Yongxuan Lv, Fei Wang, Shan You Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19990v2 While RL has become a promising tool for refining world models, existing methods largely rely on conservative rollouts near the training distribution, limiting exploration, behavioral diversity, and richer dynamic discovery. In this work, we challenge this conservative paradigm. We argue that the core limitation is not exploration itself, but the lack of reliable verification strategies to support broader exploration. Without reliable verification, expanded exploration becomes highly susceptible to reward hacking, where policies exploit imperfect rewards without achieving genuine improvement. To evaluate this motivation, we instantiate our method in embodied world models, where physical plausibility, and task completion provide a rigorous testbed for scalable RL under complex dynamics. On the verification side, we introduce Reward as an Agent, an agentic reward framework that actively evaluates generated behaviors to provide robust reward signals and mitigate reward hacking under distribution shifts. On the exploration side, we introduce Dynamic-Aware Rollout Diversification through DynDiff-GRPO, which explicitly expands action-space exploration to diversify trajectories, broaden state-action coverage, and encourage richer embodied behaviors beyond conservative rollout regimes. By unifying Reward as an Agent with DynDiff-GRPO, we enable RL on a more reliable reward foundation with substantially diversified sampling, effectively mitigating reward hacking while yielding significant accuracy gains across multiple open-source world models, thereby demonstrating that broader exploration can scale successfully when grounded in robust verification. --- ### Online Dynamic Batching with Formal Guarantees for LLM Training Authors: Dian Li, Zekun Wang, Yaoru Wang, Jiahong Yan Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.DC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19989v1 Modern LLM training breaks a core assumption behind offline batch samplers: the true training cost of a sample is only observable after preprocessing, augmentation, templating, tokenization, and multimodal visual-token expansion. Unless one pays for a preprocessing- and augmentation-dependent length cache, batch construction is therefore blind to the quantity that determines padding, memory use, and GPU saturation. We introduce Online Dynamic Batching (ODB), a DataLoader-side drop-in system that moves batch formation to this point of accurate observability while preserving DDP step alignment. We formalize this synchronization requirement as the Distributed Group Alignment Problem and prove deadlock-free bounded termination with default join-mode identity coverage and opt-in non-join sample-quota closure. ODB requires no model, optimizer, or attention-kernel changes and is released as online-dynamic-batching with lightweight trainer adapters. Across public 2B/8B Qwen3-VL runs on UltraChat/LLaVA/ShareGPT4o, ODB improves literal emitted-sample throughput vs. fixed-batch Standard by 1.58-2.51x on single-node Full FT/LoRA and 1.71-3.78x on two-node Full FT, with Standard-comparable quality; production MM-Mix reaches 4.43x. Against GMT/BMT offline token-budget oracles, ODB is within 15% on UltraChat/LLaVA and faster on high-CV ShareGPT4o: 2.24-2.39x single-node Full FT/LoRA and 3.06-3.69x two-node Full FT. Together, ODB occupies the online/drop-in regime for high-heterogeneity LLM fine-tuning: large throughput gains at Standard-comparable quality, formal DGAP guarantees, and no length-cache precompute or kernel rewrites. --- ### Vision-Reasoning-Guided Occlusion Removal from Light Fields Authors: Mohamed Youssef, Oliver Bimber Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19985v2 Occlusion-robust scene recovery remains a major challenge in computational imaging, particularly where dense vegetation severely limits visibility. We propose a visionreasoning-guided light field occlusion removal framework combining light field integration (LFI) with vision-language model (VLM) semantic reasoning. Multi-view observations are first integrated via LFI to suppress foreground occlusions, producing an initial visibility-enhanced representation, a VLM then acts as a conditional semantic prior to restore degraded structures and fine details. A multi-sample fusion strategy aggregates multiple generated hypotheses to improve consistency and reduce hallucination. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets show state-of-the-art performance, achieving the highest average SSIM across four synthetic benchmark scenes (4-Syn) and strong generalization across structured and unstructured acquisition settings, with applicability to search-and-rescue and exploratory robotic navigation. --- ### Vision-Reasoning-Guided Occlusion Removal from Light Fields Authors: Mohamed Youssef, Oliver Bimber Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19985v1 Occlusion-robust scene recovery remains a major challenge in computational imaging, particularly in natural environments where dense foreground vegetation severely limits visibility. We propose a vision-reasoning-guided light field occlusion removal framework that combines the visibility recovery capability of light field integration (LFI) with the semantic reasoning capacity of vision-language models (VLMs). Multi-view observations are first integrated via LFI to suppress foreground occlusions and produce an initial visibility-enhanced representation. A VLM is then incorporated as a conditional semantic prior to restore degraded structures and recover fine details, guided by the observed measurements. To improve recovery consistency and reduce hallucination artifacts, we introduce a multi-sample fusion strategy that aggregates multiple generated hypotheses into a unified estimate. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving the highest average SSIM across four synthetic light field benchmark scenes (4-Syn) and strong generalization across structured and unstructured acquisition settings. These results highlight the effectiveness of combining physical imaging constraints with vision-language reasoning for robust perception under severe occlusion, with applicability to search-and-rescue and exploratory robotic navigation. --- ### Kolmogorov-Arnold Reservoir Computing Authors: Juntian Huang, Jürgen Kurths, Ying Tang Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19984v4 Reservoir computing offers a lightweight framework for forecasting dynamical systems but may struggle to capture long-range dependencies due to limited representational capacity. Conventional reservoir computing recurrently uses fixed reservoirs with hyperparameter sensitivity, while the next generation reservoir computing removes recurrence at the cost of rapidly growing feature dimensions. Here, we develop Kolmogorov-Arnold Reservoir Computing (KARC), which replaces reservoirs with explicit basis-function expansions inspired by the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem. We rigorously show that KARC is a lightweight design of Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs), preserving the potential expressive capacity of KANs while admitting efficient closed-form training of reservoir computing. At comparable cost, KARC outperforms existing reservoir computing methods on challenging benchmarks including partial differential equations. It can also be integrated with generative diffusion models for facilitating text-to-image generation. This work thus establishes a principled bridge between reservoir computing and KANs, yielding a unified framework for efficient dynamical forecasting and generative modeling. --- ### ENPIRE: Agentic Robot Policy Self-Improvement in the Real World Authors: Wenli Xiao, Jia Xie, Tonghe Zhang, Haotian Lin, Letian "Max" Fu, Haoru Xue, Jalen Lu, Yi Yang, Cunxi Dai, Zi Wang, Jimmy Wu, Guanzhi Wang et al. Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19980v2 Achieving dexterous robotic manipulation in the real world heavily relies on human supervision and algorithm engineering, which becomes a central bottleneck in the pursuit of general physical intelligence. Although emerging coding agents can generate code to automate algorithm search, their successes remain largely confined in digital environments. We conjecture that the missing abstraction to automate robotics research is a repeatable feedback loop for real-world policy improvement: reset the scene, execute a policy, verify the outcome, and refine the next iteration. To bridge this gap, we introduce ENPIRE, a harness framework for coding agents that instantiates this physical feedback routine with four core modules: an Environment module (EN) for automatic reset and verification, a Policy Improvement module (PI) that launches policy refinement, a Rollout module (R) to evaluate policies with one or multiple physical robots operating in parallel, and an Evolution module (E) in which coding agents analyze logs, consult literature, improve training infrastructure and algorithm code to address failure modes. This closed-loop system transforms real-world manipulation learning into a controllable optimization procedure, minimizing human effort while allowing fair ablations across training recipe and agent variants. Powered by ENPIRE, frontier coding agents can autonomously train a policy to achieve a 99% success rate on challenging, dexterous manipulation tasks, such as organizing a pin box, fastening a zip tie, and tool use, a process that further accelerates when we dispatch an agent team on a robot fleet. Our results suggest a practical and scalable path toward deploying coding agents to autonomously advancing robotics in the physical world. --- ### ENPIRE: Agentic Robot Policy Self-Improvement in the Real World Authors: Wenli Xiao, Jia Xie, Tonghe Zhang, Haotian Lin, Letian "Max" Fu, Haoru Xue, Jalen Lu, Yi Yang, Cunxi Dai, Zi Wang, Jimmy Wu, Guanzhi Wang et al. Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19980v1 Achieving dexterous robotic manipulation in the real world heavily relies on human supervision and algorithm engineering, which becomes a central bottleneck in the pursuit of general physical intelligence. Although emerging coding agents can generate code to automate algorithm search, their successes remain largely confined in digital environments. We conjecture that the missing abstraction to automate robotics research is a repeatable feedback loop for real-world policy improvement: reset the scene, execute a policy, verify the outcome, and refine the next iteration. To bridge this gap, we introduce ENPIRE, a harness framework for coding agents that instantiates this physical feedback routine with four core modules: an Environment module (EN) for automatic reset and verification, a Policy Improvement module (PI) that launches policy refinement, a Rollout module (R) to evaluate policies with one or multiple physical robots operating in parallel, and an Evolution module (E) in which coding agents analyze logs, consult literature, improve training infrastructure and algorithm code to address failure modes. This closed-loop system transforms real-world manipulation learning into a controllable optimization procedure, minimizing human effort while allowing fair ablations across training recipe and agent variants. Powered by ENPIRE, frontier coding agents can autonomously train a policy to achieve a 99% success rate on challenging, dexterous manipulation tasks, such as organizing a pin box, fastening a zip tie, and tool use, a process that further accelerates when we dispatch an agent team on a robot fleet. Our results suggest a practical and scalable path toward deploying coding agents to autonomously advancing robotics in the physical world. --- ### The Algorithmic-Human Manager: AI, Apps, and Workers in the Indian Gig Economy Authors: Omir Kumar, Krishnan Narayanan Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19975v1 This paper examines the impact of artificial intelligence and digital technologies on the blue-collar gig economy in India, focusing on algorithmic management. This paper examines the impact of artificial intelligence and digital technologies on the blue collar gig economy in India, focusing on algorithmic management he use of automated systems to allocate, monitor, and evaluate work in location-based services such as ride sharing and delivery. Using a social justice framework and a mixed-methods approach comprising interviews with 16 gig workers and 21 key stakeholders, the study uncovers a dual reality: while AI-powered systems expand access to work and generate operational efficiencies, they simultaneously introduce significant challenges related to fairness, transparency, and worker dignity. Key findings reveal that algorithmic systems are opaque by design, produce inequitable outcomes, and are not structured to reward additional labour with proportionate pay. The study advocates for a pragmatic hybrid governance model an Algorithmic Human Manager framework in which technological efficiency and human accountability operate together rather than in opposition. The findings carry implications for policymakers, platform companies, and civil society organizations working to design equitable AI governance frameworks for the gig economy in India and across the Global South. --- ### CrossFlow: One-Step Generation Across Latent and Pixel Spaces Authors: Xiyuan Wang, Xiao Zhang, Yang Li, Ruoxi Jiang, Zhao Zhong, Liefeng Bo, Muhan Zhang Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19970v1 Most diffusion and flow-matching generators define the prior, probability path, and prediction target in the same representation space. Latent diffusion improves efficiency by moving this path into an autoencoder latent space, but the final sample is still produced by a separately trained decoder. This separation creates a mismatch: the generator is optimized for latent-space prediction, while final quality depends on how the decoder handles generated latents that may differ from clean encoder outputs. We introduce CrossFlow, a cross-space flow formulation that maps noisy latent inputs directly to pixel-space images. The key technical step is a velocity-free one-step objective: the latent trajectory defines the training path, but the supervised prediction is an image rather than a latent displacement. This lets one model act both as a one-step latent-to-pixel generator and as a decoder replacement for latent diffusion pipelines. On class-conditional ImageNet-1k at $256\times256$, CrossFlow-XL achieves 1.62 FID with one function evaluation. Ablations show that the latent encoder and pixel-space perceptual and adversarial losses are important for fidelity. These results indicate that cross-space flow objectives can combine the efficiency of latent representations with direct pixel-space supervision, without requiring a separate decoder at inference. --- ### Semantic-Anchored Evidential Fusion for Domain-Robust Whole-Slide Survival Analysis Authors: Yucheng Xing, Ling Huang, Pei Liu, Jingying Ma, Jiaxing Xu, Kai He, Mengling Feng Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19966v2 Whole-slide images (WSIs) are widely used for computational cancer prognosis. However, most existing methods primarily focus on in-domain performance and fail to generalize across clinical centers. This limitation stems from their reliance on pixel-derived representations that are highly susceptible to domain-specific artifacts caused by staining protocols and scanner hardware. We hypothesize that high-level pathology semantics, such as tumor grade and micro-environmental architecture, provide a domain-invariant semantic representation that mirrors the robust diagnostic logic of human pathologists. Therefore, we propose a Semantic-Anchored Evidential Fusion Survival (SAEFS) framework, where SAEFS derives semantic anchors from WSIs via Visual Question Answering (VQA), employs a dual-stream WSI evidence extraction architecture, uses Dirichlet-based Subjective Logic to model uncertainty, and fuses semantic and visual evidence through a cautious conjunction rule to avoid overconfident fusion from correlated sources. Trained exclusively on one source domain and evaluated zero-shot across four unseen domains, SAEFS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models both in prediction accuracy and reliability, improving the average C-index by 10.2%. Quantitative analyses further show that VQA-derived semantic features exhibit significantly lower cross-center divergence than pixel-derived features, highlighting their robustness for cross-center clinical applications. --- ### Semantic-Anchored Evidential Fusion for Domain-Robust Whole-Slide Survival Analysis Authors: Yucheng Xing, Ling Huang, Pei Liu, Jingying Ma, Jiaqing Xu, Kai He, Mengling Feng Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19966v1 Whole-slide images (WSIs) are widely used for computational cancer prognosis. However, most existing methods primarily focus on in-domain performance and fail to generalize across clinical centers. This limitation stems from their reliance on pixel-derived representations that are highly susceptible to domain-specific artifacts caused by staining protocols and scanner hardware. We hypothesize that high-level pathology semantics, such as tumor grade and micro-environmental architecture, provide a domain-invariant semantic representation that mirrors the robust diagnostic logic of human pathologists. Therefore, we propose a Semantic-Anchored Evidential Fusion Survival (SAEFS) framework, where SAEFS derives semantic anchors from WSIs via Visual Question Answering (VQA), employs a dual-stream WSI evidence extraction architecture, uses Dirichlet-based Subjective Logic to model uncertainty, and fuses semantic and visual evidence through a cautious conjunction rule to avoid overconfident fusion from correlated sources. Trained exclusively on one source domain and evaluated zero-shot across four unseen domains, SAEFS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models both in prediction accuracy and reliability, improving the average C-index by 10.2%. Quantitative analyses further show that VQA-derived semantic features exhibit significantly lower cross-center divergence than pixel-derived features, highlighting their robustness for cross-center clinical applications. --- ### ROSE: Benchmarking the Perception-to-Action Gap in Multimodal Models Authors: Yihao Wang, Zijian He, Jie Ren, Keze Wang Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19965v1 Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly expected to act on visual information, yet the same scene may require different actions under different task contexts. How reliably can a model turn the same visual evidence into the action required by the current context? To answer this question, we introduce \textsc{ROSE} (\textbf{R}eference-conditioned \textbf{O}ddity and \textbf{S}ymbolic \textbf{E}xecution), a controlled benchmark that holds the visual scene fixed while varying region constraints and required symbolic outputs. Through coupled counting and coordinate-action tasks, \textsc{ROSE} tests whether models can infer an implicit majority reference and act on the resulting fine-grained visual evidence under changing contexts. Across nine recent MLLMs, performance drops by as much as 44.5 percentage points from counting-oriented tasks to region-conditioned action, despite 98.8\% human performance. The gap persists on paired scenes and regions for which the same model returns the correct count, while global-click and matched local controls show that coordinate grounding explains only part of the loss, revealing a distinct, model-dependent bottleneck in turning shared visual evidence into context-specific actions. --- ### Low-Energy Reduced RISC-V Instruction Subset Processor for Tsetlin Machine Inference at the Edge Authors: Chanda Gupta, Sanidhya Bhatia, Shaurya Priyadarshi, Himani Panwar, Rishad Shafik, Sudip Roy Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19964v1 Tsetlin Machine (TM) is a logic-based machine learning approach that relies on simple bitwise operations and finite-state automata, which makes it attractive for edge AI deployments. Recent work has focused on co-processor and accelerator designs based on Tsetlin Machines (TMs). Although these designs achieve high performance, they typically depend on tightly coupled interfaces, microcode-style programming, and external host processors, limiting flexibility and ease of programming. In this work, we present a domain-specific RISC-V microprocessor architecture and design flow tailored for TM inference. Leveraging the modular structure of RISC-V, we design a reduced instruction subset processor that retains programmability while targeting improved performance and lower energy consumption for TM workloads. Instruction profiling is employed to guide instruction reduction, followed by datapath and control path simplifications tailored to TM inference. Both the baseline RV32IM core and the proposed reduced core are evaluated across multiple datasets and compared with Binarized Neural Networks (BNNs), which serve as a hardware-efficient baseline due to their reliance on bitwise operations during inference. Results show that TM achieves comparable or higher accuracy (e.g., up to 88.18% on CIFAR-2 compared to 60.0% for BNN) while reducing execution time by up to 98% across multiple datasets. Furthermore, the proposed design achieves an average $29.7\times$ reduction in energy consumption, demonstrating its effectiveness for programmable and efficient edge AI systems. --- ### Addressing Detail Bottlenecks in Latent Diffusion for RGB-to-SWIR Image Translation Authors: Kaili Wang, Martin Dimitrievski, Jose Maria Salvador, Ben Stoffelen, David Van Hamme, Lore Goetschalckx Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19961v1 Latent diffusion models (LDMs) enable efficient image-to-image translation but discard fine spatial details during compression, degrading downstream perception tasks. We identify two bottlenecks: the autoencoder, which loses spatial information, and the conditioning pathway, which further degrades the source signal through naive downsampling. We propose two lightweight, backbone-agnostic fixes: a Source-Conditioned Autoencoder (SCAE) that injects high-resolution source features into the decoder via skip connections, and a Learnable Guidance Encoder (LGE) that replaces naive downsampling with a learned conditioning signal. Evaluated on RGB-to-SWIR translation for driving scenes with two denoiser backbones (U-Net and DiT), our approach improves detection mAP by up to 2x over the latent diffusion baseline, with up to 3.4x gains on small objects (COCO-small, <32^2 px^2), while achieving state-of-the-art FID. We further show that FID and detection performance are poorly correlated, motivating multi-axis evaluation. Results generalise zero-shot to the public RASMD benchmark. We will publicly release test data with annotations, all checkpoints, and training code. --- ### SketchKeyAnime: Reference-anchored Sparse Key-Sketch Animation Synthesis Authors: Meixi Li, Xianlin Zhang, Yue Zhang, Xueming Li Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19958v1 Traditional animation production relies heavily on manual drawing and iterative refinement, particularly for key-pose design, in-betweening, and character coloring. While existing animation and video generation methods have made notable progress, they typically depend on RGB boundary frames, dense frame-wise conditions, or complete sketch sequences, limiting their applicability under low-cost input conditions. We present SketchKeyAnime, a video diffusion framework for generating structurally controllable, appearance-consistent, and temporally coherent animations from sparse key-sketch inputs. Given a single reference RGB image and a few temporally indexed key sketches, SketchKeyAnime introduces a dual-branch conditioning mechanism to encode local geometric constraints alongside semantic-temporal context. It leverages Sketch Cross Attention to fuse reference image and sketch conditions with learnable gating, and incorporates an Adaptive Weighted Loss to strengthen supervision on key-sketch frames and line-art regions. Experimental results on the Aesthetic subset of Sakuga-42M show that our approach consistently outperforms representative animation interpolation and sketch-guided generation baselines. Compared to the best-performing baseline, SketchKeyAnime reduces EDMD by 31.9\% and FVD by 9.5\%, demonstrating superior sketch fidelity and temporal coherence, while achieving the best overall performance across most quantitative metrics. These results validate the proposed framework and highlight its potential for low-cost, highly controllable animation creation. --- ### Towards Graph-Based Deep Learning for Map Generalization: Insights from Building Footprints Simplification and Aggregation Authors: Yanning Wang, Zhiyong Zhou, Zhouyu Liu, Mengni Yu, Yu Feng Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19956v1 Map generalization remains one of the fundamental tasks in cartography, especially for the simplification and aggregation of complex building footprints. This study presents the first exploratory application of graph-based deep learning to both tasks, reformulating simplification as node movement prediction and aggregation as link prediction within a unified graph learning framework. We evaluate representative graph neural network architectures (GCN, GAT, and GraphSAGE) on multi-scale building datasets, showing that GraphSAGE demonstrates relative strengths in link prediction accuracy, while also revealing persistent challenges in precise node movement prediction. Beyond quantitative performance, the results highlight that aggregation poses greater complexity and challenges than simplification, underscoring the difficulty of capturing higher-level spatial relationships in map generalization with current deep learning approaches. Although limitations such as data imbalance and the need for post-processing remain, the study provides valuable insights and methodological directions for advancing automated map generalization with deep learning approaches. --- ### Investigating Human-Model Discrepancies in Speech Quality Assessment via Acoustic and Prosodic Perturbations Authors: Masato Takagi, Masaya Kawamura, Reo Shimizu, Yuma Shirahata Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: eess.AS, cs.CL, cs.LG, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19951v1 Mean opinion score (MOS) prediction models are widely used as proxy metrics in text-to-speech (TTS) research, yet their ability to capture quality differences beyond acoustic fidelity remains unclear. We investigate this via controlled perturbations on speech: acoustic degradation, prosodic errors, and manipulation of speaker-specific characteristics such as pitch and speaking rate. We obtained MOS predictions for these speech samples from both human listeners and the model, and analyzed the differences in their perceptual characteristics. Results show that most models track acoustic degradation well, while all are insensitive to prosodic errors despite large subjective score drops. For speaker characteristics, models exhibit a double dissociation: strong mean fundamental frequency (F0) biases absent in human ratings, yet insensitivity to speaking rate and F0 variability that humans notice. These findings highlight limitations of scalar MOS prediction beyond acoustic fidelity. --- ### Confidence Calibration for Multimodal LLMs: An Empirical Study through Medical VQA Authors: Yuetian Du, Yucheng Wang, Ming Kong, Tian Liang, Qiang Long, Bingdi Chen, Qiang Zhu Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19950v1 Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show great potential in medical tasks, but their elicited confidence often misaligns with actual accuracy, potentially leading to misdiagnosis or overlooking correct advice. This study presents the first comprehensive analysis of the relationship between accuracy and confidence in medical MLLMs. It proposes a novel method that combines Multi-Strategy Fusion-Based Interrogation (MS-FBI) with auxiliary expert LLM assessment, aiming to improve confidence calibration in Medical Visual Question Answering (VQA). Experiments demonstrate that our method reduces the Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by an average of 40\% across three Medical VQA datasets, significantly enhancing MLLMs' reliability. The findings highlight the importance of domain-specific calibration for MLLMs in healthcare, offering a more trustworthy solution for AI-assisted diagnosis. --- ### Advancing DialNav through Automatic Embodied Dialog Augmentation Authors: Leekyeung Han, Sangwon Jung, Hyunji Min, Jinseong Jeong, Minyoung Kim, Paul Hongsuck Seo Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19948v1 For embodied agents capable of physical interaction, the capability to create and understand dialog is crucial to ensure both safety and effectiveness. While DialNav~\cite{han2025dialnav} provides a framework for holistic evaluation of the dialog--execution loop in photorealistic indoor navigation, its performance remains limited by a critical scarcity of training data (2K episodes). To address this, we propose an automatic generation pipeline, and construct the \textbf{RAINbow} dataset, a large-scale training dataset with 238K episodes for DialNav. Our pipeline converts existing VLN datasets into multi-turn dialog and creates cost-efficient and high-quality dataset. Then, we introduce two additional complementary advances to unlock the data's full potential: (1) Dual-Strategy Training, a navigation training scheme to align the navigation training with the dynamic dialog-navigation loop, and (2) a localization model that leverages VLN knowledge. By combining these complementary solutions, our model substantially outperforms the baseline in success rate on both \textbf{Val Seen} (58.24, \textbf{+89\%}) and \textbf{Val Unseen} (29.05, \textbf{+100\%}) splits, establishing a new state of the art. ---