# Research Papers — 2026-06 · bundle page 118 of 260 > Full-text markdown of papers #5851–5900 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/118 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/117.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/119.md) ### Beyond Native Success: Auditing Deployment-Interface Exposure of CLIP Backdoors Authors: Kunlan Xiang, Haomiao Yang, Wenbo Jiang Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CR, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17815v1 Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training models are widely reused across downstream interfaces, including feature extraction, retrieval, reranking, and selection. Existing CLIP backdoor, however, usually validate attacks on a small attack-native task, leaving unclear whether the same poisoned checkpoint remains exposed, weakens, or becomes not applicable when reused through other interfaces. We introduce DIFE, a Deployment-Interface Footprint Evaluation framework that audits backdoored CLIP checkpoints across deployment interfaces. DIFE makes various evaluations comparable by specifying each interface's component readout, trigger channel, target event, reference condition, and metric. DIFE also introduces effective-footprint diagnosis to identify the reusable CLIP component or component combination that carries exposure and explains where risk transfers. Auditing reproduced CLIP backdoors with DIFE reveals a structured landscape: native success is not a checkpoint-level risk certificate, exposure follows component footprints, text-side poisoning does not yield textual-encoder control, and some coupled attacks remain mechanism-bound. This audit reveals a import gapin existing CLIP backdoors: a textual encoder that itself becomes a reusable carrier of adversarial behavior. We therefore introduce BadTextTower to fill this gap. BadTextTower produces strong text-conditioned retrieval, reranking, and selection exposure while leaving visual-only reuse nearly clean. --- ### No-Free-Fairness: Fundamental Limits and Trade-offs in Learning Systems Authors: Khoat Than Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17810v1 In this paper, we establish a set of theoretical impossibility results, termed the No-Free-Fairness theorems, that identify three fundamental sources of disparity in learning systems. First, we show that when a task exhibits irreducible cost on a subgroup, any decision rule must trade off overall performance with disparity, yielding an inherent fairness--cost frontier. Second, we prove that even in ideal, noise-free settings where a perfectly fair and accurate solution exists, finite-sample learning alone induces nontrivial subgroup disparity, ruling out distribution-free fairness guarantees. More seriously, enforcing strict relative fairness creates a statistical bottleneck: achieving low cost may require exponentially many samples. Third, we show that limitations of the model class can independently induce disparity: if the model cannot represent accurate solutions for a subgroup, fairness remains unattainable regardless of data or training procedure. Overall, these results demonstrate that unfairness is not solely a consequence of biased data or suboptimal optimization, but arises from the intrinsic structure of decision problems, the constraints of finite data, and the expressivity of models. Our framework applies broadly beyond standard supervised learning, and suggests that achieving fairness requires explicit trade-offs and should be treated as a core design consideration. --- ### Million-scale multimodal pollen microscopy with expert-guided foundation models Authors: András Biricz, Björn Gedda, Donát Magyar, Antonio Spanu, János Fillinger, Péter Pollner, István Csabai Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17809v1 Automated pollen identification from microscopy remains a bottleneck in aerobiology, palaeoecology and biodiversity monitoring, because scalable systems must generalise across specimen preparation, scanner settings and geographic origins while retaining palynological interpretability. To address this gap, we present a million-scale multimodal pollen microscopy resource, Pollen AI Atlas, assembled from pure-species whole-slide bright-field images spanning four geographic origins, four scanner settings and 46 taxon labels across 31 botanical families. Seeded by one manually selected exemplar per source slide, token-level mining and filtering produced 1,511,390 released grain detections with 99.6\% proposal precision in expert-curated test regions. Each detection was paired with machine-generated grain-level morphological captions from five open-weight vision-language models, guided by expert-verified palynological anchors, yielding structured descriptions of aperture systems, wall ornamentation, shape and size. Among the evaluated models, Gemma4 provided the most controlled primary caption set, combining tight length control, no leakage and the strongest text-retrieval performance. Baseline benchmarks with frozen visual features reached 88.16\% top-1 accuracy, while cross-regional retrieval showed that caption-derived text embeddings remained robust when image similarity degraded (mAP@20 0.811 versus 0.262). Released data, annotations, captions, splits, code, and weights provide a benchmark for pollen recognition, cross-regional domain adaptation and domain-specific multimodal microscopy learning. --- ### QueryMarket: Cost-Aware Online Active Learning in Data Markets Authors: Xiwen Huang, Pierre Pinson Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17805v1 Data acquisition is a major bottleneck for learning in real-time streams: analysts must decide on the fly which labels to purchase while respecting a rolling budget. However, existing online active learning rarely unifies pricing, information gain, and rolling budget constraints under concept drift. We introduce QueryMarket, a market-inspired framework that queries each incoming data point based on its estimated utility to the model and its price. Within this framework, we propose OVBAL (online variance-based active learning), which integrates data pricing with information-driven selection by estimating each sample's marginal utility via a D-optimality criterion with exponential forgetting and executing cost-aware purchases under rolling budget constraints. OVBAL yields a simple, fully online decision rule that adapts to nonstationary streams and heterogeneous label costs. Experiments on synthetic data and a real-world solar power generation forecasting task show that OVBAL is particularly effective under seller-centric pricing and yields a more favorable long-run error-cost trade-off in the real-world task under both pricing schemes. --- ### Continual Self-Improvement with Lightweight Experiential Latent Memories Authors: Vaggelis Dorovatas, Nancy Kalaj, Rahaf Aljundi Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17803v1 Large language models achieve strong reasoning performance by scaling inference-time compute, yet remain fundamentally stateless, discarding the rich, self-produced reasoning traces generated during this process. We investigate whether models can instead learn online from this experience, converting transient computation (reasoning traces) into persistent reusable knowledge, and without external supervision or access to future data. We show that In-Context Learning (ICL) over raw reasoning traces fails to generalize, reflecting a fundamental limitation of token-level reuse: individual traces lack the abstraction needed for transfer, even after refinement (e.g. self-reflection). In contrast, drawing inspiration from recent works on unsupervised reinforcement learning, we find that lightweight per-instance training with self-generated test-time signals (majority voting) as rewards yields substantial gains, often surpassing full-dataset offline training, motivating a shift from raw traces to learned latent representations. Building on this insight, we propose an online method that distills inference-time compute spent on encountered problems into compact modular latent memories capturing the underlying reasoning structure. These memories are stored and retrieved for future inputs, enabling continual improvement while avoiding catastrophic forgetting through modular design. Importantly, our method is highly efficient, parametrized as extremely lightweight soft prompt memories (~0.001% of model parameters) and trained with only a few gradient steps, yet achieving performance competitive with full parametric updates and offline training. Across challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, our approach significantly outperforms zero-shot and raw data ICL baselines, while transferring effectively across datasets. --- ### MaineCoon: Pursuing A Real-Time Audio-Visual Social World Model Authors: Lichen Bai, Tianhao Zhang, Shitong Shao, Dingwei Tan, Qiyu Zhong, Zhengpeng Xie, Haopeng Li, Qinghao Huang, Dandan Shen, Tengjiao Ji, Wei Wang, Peicheng Wu et al. Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17800v1 As an increasing majority of global video content is consumed on social platforms for interactive social purposes, video generation models built for social worlds are important but largely overlooked by previous studies. In this work, we define the position of social world models and build a prototype model as the first step towards this goal. While previous world models successfully simulate physical environments or gaming world exploration, they remain fundamentally detached from human-centric social dynamics. To bridge this gap as the first step to social world models, we present MaineCoon, the first real-time audio-visual autoregressive model that has 22B parameters and is capable of real-time streaming generation and sub-second interaction, with a record-breaking frame rate of up to 47.5 FPS, on a single GPU. To the best of our knowledge, MaineCoon is also the first real-time audio-visual generation model specifically optimized for social-interactive applications. To enable efficient and stable training, we introduce several novel techniques into MaineCoon, including self-resampling, cross-modal representation alignment, domain-aware preference optimization, and reinforced online-policy distillation (ROPD). We also design the first agentic streaming inference framework that supports thousand-second-scale or even longer generation while mitigating drift with agentic cache management and prompt planing. These innovations significantly accelerate training while optimizing real-time inference performance. We believe this work not only sets a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance benchmark for high-quality, low-latency, and long-horizon audio-visual autoregressive models, but also points out the paradigm shift desired for next-generation AI-native social platforms. --- ### Position: Coding Benchmarks Are Misaligned with Agentic Software Engineering Authors: Maria I. Gorinova, Macey Baker, Amy Heineike, Maksim Shaposhnikov, Rob Willoughby, Dru Knox Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17799v2 Coding agents have become a major mode of software engineering, but the benchmarks we use to compare them were designed in a pre-agent era: they collapse model, harness, and environment into a single end-to-end score, typically computed against one reference solution, with no component-level signal for iteration. We argue that current coding benchmarks are misaligned with agentic software engineering. A coding agent in practice is not a model: it is a system harness -- a composite of models, harnesses, contexts, environments, and feedback signals, any one of which can move the benchmark score by margins comparable to those between adjacent model generations. We discuss three symptoms: (i) benchmark scores conflate the model with the rest of the harness; (ii) grading against a single reference solution penalises equally valid alternatives; and (iii) the absence of signal at the level of individual harness components makes the end-to-end system score difficult to iterate on. --- ### LiveStarPro: Proactive Streaming Video Understanding with Hierarchical Memory for Long-Horizon Streams Authors: Zhenyu Yang, Kairui Zhang, Bing Wang, Shengsheng Qian, Changsheng Xu Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17798v1 Despite the remarkable progress of Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs), current online architectures still struggle to simultaneously process continuous video streams, decide autonomously when to respond, and preserve long-horizon contextual memory. These obstacles undermine real-time responsiveness and cause severe forgetting throughout prolonged interactions. In this work, we introduce LiveStarPro, a live streaming assistant that is designed for proactive video understanding over long-horizon streams. The design of LiveStarPro rests on three complementary components. The first component is Streaming Verification Decoding (SVeD), an inference framework that identifies the appropriate response timing through single-pass perplexity verification, thereby eliminating the dependency on explicit silence tokens. The second component is Streaming Causal Attention Masks (SCAM), a training strategy that enforces incremental video-language alignment over variable-length streams. The third component is Tree-Structured Hierarchical Memory (TSHM), a recursive memory architecture that organizes evicted historical information into event chains and consequently enables efficient retrieval from effectively unbounded video streams. To facilitate a comprehensive evaluation under realistic online conditions, we further present OmniStarPro, a large-scale benchmark that spans 15 diverse real-world scenarios and that extends to hour-scale streams for the assessment of long-term recall. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LiveStarPro consistently surpasses existing methods, attaining a 28.9% improvement in semantic correctness and an 18.2% reduction in timing error, while its streaming key-value cache further yields a 1.58x inference speedup over the same model without caching. The model and the code are publicly available at https://github.com/sotayang/LiveStarPro. --- ### The Slop Paradox: How Synthetic Standardization Erodes Clinical Uncertainty and Cross-Modal Alignment in AI-Rewritten Radiology Reports Authors: Samar Ansari Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17791v1 AI-assisted clinical documentation tools increasingly summarize, standardize, and reformat radiology reports using large language models (LLMs). We present a controlled measurement of the resulting information degradation. Using 450 chest X-ray reports from the Indiana University dataset, we generate synthetic versions via three realistic LLM rewriting tasks: EHR summarization, standardized rewriting, and teaching case preparation. We measure entity erosion (via medical NER), hedging collapse (loss of clinical uncertainty language), and cross-modal alignment degradation (via BiomedCLIP image-text similarity). Our central finding is a dissociation between information loss and cross-modal fidelity. EHR summarization is the most destructive at the content level, eroding 51.4% of clinical entities and 43.7% of hedging language, yet it preserves image-text alignment almost entirely (a 2.5% drop). The two tasks meant to produce cleaner training data, standardized rewriting and teaching case preparation, do the reverse: they preserve more entities (26.8% and 29.3% eroded) but cause 14.9-16.5% alignment drops, six to seven times those of EHR summarization. We term this the slop paradox: rewriting that makes clinical text look cleaner for multimodal training is precisely what pulls it away from the image. Contrary to our pre-specified hypothesis, rare pathologies were not preferentially degraded: across nine rare-versus-common comparisons, no difference survived multiple-comparison correction, and nominal differences ran in the opposite direction (common > rare), so contamination is invisible to condition-specific monitoring. The dominant determinant of degradation is the type of AI rewriting task, not the clinical content. These findings bear on multimodal medical AI dataset construction and the governance of AI-assisted clinical documentation. --- ### Toward Accessible Psychotherapy Training Using AI-Driven Interactive Patient Avatars Authors: Pascal Riachi, Sofie Kamber, Stella Brogna, Andrew Gloster, Rafael Wampfler Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.HC, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17786v1 Training psychotherapists in evidence-based interventions such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) requires repeated practice with meaningful feedback, yet opportunities for safe, standardized training are limited by ethical, logistical, and resource constraints. We introduce a system designed to support ACT-oriented psychotherapy training through spoken dialogue with an embodied virtual patient. The system uses large language models to simulate patient behavior conditioned on profiles derived from real therapy sessions and configurable clinical scenarios, while a separate automated evaluator provides turn-by-turn feedback on therapist responses based on established ACT fidelity criteria. Rather than aiming to replace supervision, the system is intended to support deliberate practice by enabling experimentation, reflection, and immediate feedback in low-risk settings. Expert evaluation with practicing psychologists confirmed high realism in patient behavior and demonstrated that immediate turn-by-turn ACT feedback increased therapists' awareness of intervention choices and enabled effective experimentation with alternative responses. Quantitative evaluation across 49 therapy transcripts identified GPT-4o-mini as the optimal feedback model, achieving the lowest mean absolute error (MAE = 6.12) in replicating human supervisor ACT fidelity ratings with statistically significant agreement. This work demonstrates the potential of fidelity-aware simulated patients as a scalable complement to psychotherapy training. --- ### Blind Recovery of Latent Domains via Unsupervised Symmetry Discovery Authors: Onur Efe, Arkadas Ozakin Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17782v1 Primary motivation in blind inverse problems is to recover signals of interest from corrupted observations without knowing the obfuscating mechanism. Blind deconvolution is a prominent approach when the corruption is convolutional, but it is not applicable when general linear transformations obfuscate the domain structure. In this work, we propose an unsupervised framework for recovering latent domains and signals by discovering symmetries of the data distribution. Our framework models observations as linear measurements of signals sampled from a latent random field, and optimizes a shallow group-convolutional network by imposing stationarity and locality regularization at the model output. The model learns a latent symmetry action and an appropriate filter, thereby mapping unstructured observations to a symmetry-based representation that reveals latent signals. Experiments on stochastic processes, Ising models, shuffled and bit-scrambled images, and neural recordings show that the method recovers latent domains and signals from unstructured observations, suggesting symmetry discovery as a new direction for unsupervised structure learning and blind inverse problems. --- ### MIVE: A Minimalist Integer Vector Engine for Softmax LayerNorm and RMSNorm Acceleration Authors: Kosmas Alexandridis, Giorgos Dimitrakopoulos Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.AR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17781v1 The rapid growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) has intensified the need for specialized hardware accelerators that can satisfy stringent inference latency and power constraints. Although matrix multiplications dominate the overall computational workload, non-linear vector normalization operations, such as LayerNorm, RMSNorm and Softmax can become critical hardware bottlenecks. Existing accelerators typically implement these functions using dedicated hardware blocks, leading to duplicated resources and inefficient silicon utilization. To address this limitation, we propose a Minimalist Integer Vector Engine (MIVE), a programmable architecture capable of executing all three operations within a unified datapath. By exploiting common computational patterns across LayerNorm, RMSNorm and Softmax the proposed vector engine maximizes hardware sharing while reducing implementation overhead. Physical ASIC implementation results show that MIVE provides comprehensive multi-function support while achieving higher area and hardware efficiency than most state-of-the-art standalone accelerators. --- ### On Response-Adaptive Targeting Strategies for Multi-Treatment Experiments Authors: Redouane Yagouti, Rémy Degenne, Emilie Kaufmann Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: stat.ME, math.ST, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17777v1 Response-adaptive randomization (RAR) in clinical trials aims to improve ethical and statistical efficiency by dynamically allocating patients to treatments based on observed outcomes. While RAR based on a target optimal allocation have been extensively studied for two-arms settings, their extension to multi-treatment experiments ($K \geq 2$) remains theoretically fragmented, with most existing methods focusing on specific algorithms or restricted target allocations. In this paper, we introduce a unified framework for response-adaptive targeting, the $α$-Rebalancing Targeting Strategies ($α$RTS), which generalize the ERADE two-armed strategy of Hu et al. (2009). We prove that all designs in this family share fundamental asymptotic properties: strong consistency, asymptotic normality of allocation proportions and treatment effect estimators, and asymptotic efficiency. To address sparse target regimes (where some treatments are asymptotically eliminated), we further propose $α$RTS with Forced Exploration, a variant that guarantees infinite sampling for all treatments while preserving the asymptotic guarantees. Extensive simulations illustrate the finite-sample behavior of $α$RTS variants in a 3-armed context, highlighting in particular the critical role of forced exploration in sparse settings. --- ### A Neuromorphic Trigger for Efficient Audio Event Detection Authors: Benjamin Hatton, Oliver Rhodes, Luca Peres Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17775v2 Efficient processing of continuous audio streams remains a key challenge for real-time and resource-constrained systems. This paper introduces a neuromorphic trigger for audio event detection, based on a spiking neural network (SNN) that selectively gates input to downstream models. The proposed neuromorphic trigger acts as a flexible low-cost front-end, identifying salient audio segments and enabling these to be processed by a more computationally intensive model for tasks such as classification. The trigger is implemented as a lightweight fully connected SNN using a close-open filter for postprocessing, and is evaluated on two representative tasks: Anomalous Sound Detection (ASD) and Sound Event Detection (SED). For ASD, the trigger achieves a one-second segment-based F1 score of 0.97 on a class-agnostic form of the URBAN-SED dataset, demonstrating high reliability in identifying relevant audio regions. For SED, the trigger is combined with the Dang classifier on the DCASE 2017 Challenge Task 2 dataset, showing a potential $42.6\times$ reduction in FLOPs while reducing the lower bound of the event-based error rate from 0.41 to 0.25. These results highlight the potential of neuromorphic triggers as real-time, energy-efficient front-end filters, enabling substantial reductions in computational cost. --- ### Talking to Your Data: Exploring Embodied Conversation as an Interface for Personal Health Reflection Authors: Nikola Kovacevic, Bastien Husler, Di Zhuang, Rafael Wampfler, Barbara Solenthaler Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17767v1 Personal health data from wearables are typically presented through dashboards of charts and summary statistics, requiring users to actively interpret patterns and implications. We explore an alternative interaction paradigm: engaging with personal health data through an embodied conversational agent that facilitates objective data reflection in dialogue with the user. We present a system that combines lightweight preprocessing of wearable data with a Unity-based embodied character. Internally, the system follows a dual-agent design in which an Observer agent extracts descriptive statistics and temporal trends, and a Presenter agent communicates these findings through "spoken statistics," intentionally refraining from clinical advice to isolate the impact of the interaction modality. We evaluate this approach through a simulated-self user study (N=5) using a within-subject design. Participants adopted health personas and goals derived from the LifeSnaps dataset to compare traditional dashboard exploration with embodied conversational reflection. Our evaluation focuses on perceived understanding, the specificity of generated actions, and the cognitive shift from passive viewing to active sensemaking. The paper contributes a functional prototype, a design pattern for objective health data narrative generation, and early empirical insights into how embodiment affects the interpretation of personal health metrics. --- ### Horizon-Uniform Sensitivity Certificates for Finite-Horizon Pontryagin Systems Authors: Pyuyi Chufeng Huang, Zikang Song, Xingshu Chen Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: math.OC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17762v2 Finite-horizon optimal-control computations repeatedly solve two-point Pontryagin boundary value problems whose conditioning can deteriorate as the horizon grows. We give a verifiable data-level certificate under which it does not. Hyperbolicity of the reduced state--costate transition matrix, together with scaled stable--unstable boundary transversality, yields an endpoint-corrected Green inverse with horizon-independent constants and weighted contractions transfer this inverse to the nonlinear problem, so the original Pontryagin endpoint rows $x_0=x_{\rm in}$ and $p_T=r_x(x_T,y)$ carry a unique local stationary branch whose first-order expansion and Lipschitz constants are uniform in the horizon. Consequently the finite-horizon feedback map is horizon-uniformly Lipschitz, first-order expandable, and satisfies an exact shrinking-horizon consistency identity. Symplectic and Riccati criteria certify the hypotheses from matrix data: every stabilizable definite linear-quadratic system with invertible dynamics and a locally concave terminal Hessian at the reference qualifies. Reproducible computations illustrate both certificates. --- ### A fairness-aware extension of Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis for ranking Authors: Guilherme Dean Pelegrina, Renata Pelissari Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17756v1 Fairness has become a central concern in ranking problems involving individuals or social groups, particularly under the Responsible Artificial Intelligence agenda. In Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis (SMAA) provides a robust framework for handling uncertainty and incomplete preference information, but it does not explicitly address fairness in the resulting rankings. This paper proposes SMAA-Fair, a fairness-aware extension of SMAA for ranking problems. The approach reweights the simulated rankings generated by SMAA according to their level of group fairness, so that fairer rankings contribute more strongly to the acceptability indices and central weights vector. The framework is independent of the aggregation model and can incorporate different fairness metrics. In this study, Statistical Parity, normalized discounted Kullback--Leibler divergence (rKL) and normalized discounted cumulative Kullback--Leibler divergence (nDKL) are adopted. Rankings are derived from the fairness-adjusted acceptability matrix using expected ranking and maximum acceptability ranking. We also derive the central weight according to the degree of fairness in the obtained rankings. Numerical experiments with synthetic and real data show that SMAA-Fair improves the representation of protected groups among favourable ranking positions, while preserving robustness to preference uncertainty. --- ### BrainWorld: A Structural-Prior-Conditioned Generative Model for Whole-Brain 4D fMRI Dynamics Authors: Junfeng Xia, Wenhao Ye, Junxiang Zhang, Xuanye Pan, Mo Wang, Quanying Liu Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV, q-bio.NC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17742v1 Whole-brain 4D fMRI generation is valuable for modeling functional brain dynamics, yet existing fMRI foundation models mainly target representation learning and downstream prediction rather than conditional predictive generation. We introduce BrainWorld, a structural-prior-conditioned generative model for whole-brain 4D fMRI dynamics. BrainWorld uses sMRI as subject-level anatomical context to guide future fMRI generation, integrating structural information into the denoising process rather than treating it as a parallel modality. Evaluated on 22 datasets spanning diverse cohorts and brain states, BrainWorld generates stable 4D fMRI trajectories up to 400 frames, improves downstream performance through generated-example augmentation, and learns transferable multimodal representations that outperform baselines. Together, these results establish BrainWorld as a condition-aware generative framework for long-horizon brain dynamics modeling and multimodal representation learning. --- ### ED3R: Energy-Aware Distributed Disaster Detection Enabled by Cooperative Robotic Agents Authors: Lina Magoula, Nikolaos Koursioumpas, Nancy Alonistioti, Ramin Khalili Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17739v1 Robotics are expected to support environmental monitoring and natural disaster management, where decisions must be made under uncertainty, resource limitations, and strict operational constraints. In critical missions, such as wildfires, robotic agents must not only identify hazardous events with sufficient confidence, but also manage the energy cost and time until detection. This paper introduces ED3R, an energy-aware distributed framework for wildfire detection under uncertainty. ED3R enables hierarchical cooperative decision-making between a robot and a remote controller. The remote controller decides upon the robot's motion, while the robot senses the environment and decides where to execute the wildfire detection (onboard or remotely) and how. The common goal is to detect wildfires with a required confidence while minimizing the energy consumed by any robot operation. ED3R further integrates mechanisms to avoid nearby obstacles, prevent redundant exploration, enable adaptive early mission completion, and ensure feasibility through a custom penalty function. ED3R also introduces a forward-looking capability, enabled through distributed neural regression models that allow the agents to anticipate the future by evaluating candidate strategies before execution. The framework is evaluated through realistic robotics simulations, ablation studies, and baseline comparisons. Overall, ED3R achieves a mission success rate of up to 97.18%. Especially in the most demanding missions, it reduces energy consumption by up to 36.4% and detects wildfires up to 41% faster than baselines. --- ### Shattering the Autoregressive Curse: Dynamic Epistemic Entropy Orchestrated Erasable Reinforcement Learning for LLMs Authors: Ziliang Wang, Kang An, Faqiang Qian, Jialu Cai, Cijun Ouyang, Yuhang Wang, Qibing Ren, Yichao Wu Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17735v1 Although reinforcement learning (RL) has expanded the cognitive boundaries of large language models (LLMs), it often remains vulnerable to the autoregressive curse in long-horizon logical reasoning: small epistemic perturbations introduced early in generation can propagate irreversibly along the Markov decision process flow, triggering cascading failures that drive the reasoning trajectory toward collapse. To overcome this autoregressive cascade, in which a single early mistake can compromise all subsequent reasoning steps, we propose dynamic epistemic entropy orchestrated erasable reinforcement learning ($\text{E}^3\text{RL}$). $\text{E}^3\text{RL}$ eliminates reliance on external signals by grounding the model's endogenous local autoregressive cross-entropy as an intrinsic coordinate of epistemic uncertainty. By introducing segment-level adaptive dynamic thresholds and advantage allocation, $\text{E}^3\text{RL}$ enables the model to precisely excise localized logical defects while reusing historical key-value (KV) cache streams, thereby endowing the reasoning process with a self-healing capability. We train $\text{E}^3\text{RL}$ on the DeepMath-103k dataset. Experimental results show that $\text{E}^3\text{RL}$ reshapes the exploration efficiency of long-sequence reasoning and improves sample efficiency while maintaining linear memory overhead. On mathematical reasoning benchmarks such as AIME, $\text{E}^3\text{RL}$ achieves substantial performance gains, with the 4B and 8B parameter models surpassing previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) results by 5.349\% and 6.514\%, respectively. These findings suggest that $\text{E}^3\text{RL}$ shatters the autoregressive curse in long-sequence reasoning and establishes a theoretical and systems-level foundation for the next generation of self-healing artificial general intelligence (AGI). --- ### Evolutionary Algorithms and Multi-Objective Minimum Spanning Trees with Limited Distinct Weight Values Authors: Narges Tavassoli Kejani, Andrew M. Sutton, Frank Neumann Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17731v1 Evolutionary algorithms have been used for a wide range of multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems. Despite practical success, theoretical results on the runtime of evolutionary algorithms for multi-objective combinatorial problems are rather limited. One classical problem that has been investigated is the multi-objective minimum spanning tree problem for which runtime bounds have been obtained to compute all extremal corner points of the Pareto front. With this paper, we provide some more detailed insights into the structure of the Pareto front when the edge weights take on a small number of distinct values. Based on these insights, we derive new runtime results for evolutionary multi-objective algorithms and complement our theoretical results with experimental investigations. --- ### ActWorld: From Explorable to Interactive World Model via Action-Aware Memory Authors: Zhexiao Xiong, Yizhi Song, Hao Kang, Qing Yan, Liming Jiang, Jenson Yang, Zhoujie Fu, Stathi Fotiadis, Angtian Wang, Zichuan Liu, Bo Liu, Yiding Yang et al. Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17730v1 Interactive world models aim to simulate environment dynamics under real-time user actions. However, their action vocabulary is largely confined to navigation: most actions correspond to motion (e.g., walk, turn, look around), while interaction with objects in the scene (e.g., pick up plates, open doors, or trigger physical responses) is either absent, restricted to game domains, or relegated to prompt-to-full-video scenarios. The resulting worlds are visually explorable but not truly actionable. In this work, we present ActWorld, an interactive world model that extends prior navigation-centric generators to support mid-rollout object interaction within a chunk-autoregressive framework. We argue that the navigation-interaction gap stems from two bottlenecks. First, a data bottleneck: the lack of human-object interaction data with accurate, dense labels. Second, a memory bottleneck: recency-biased history compression in existing world models discards the event-transition frames that causally determine subsequent object states, leading to an action-forgetting pathology. On the data side, we construct a 100K interaction video dataset, each annotated with per-chunk captions via chain-of-thought reasoning. On the model side, we introduce a hierarchical action-aware memory design that routes history compression by interaction importance, complemented by a persistent memory bank that maintains event-update and object-identity tokens across long rollouts. Experiments show that ActWorld supports both flexible navigation and rich object interaction within a single model, substantially improving interaction fidelity over navigation-only baselines without sacrificing viewpoint control. Project page is available at https://interactwm.github.io/ActWorld. --- ### LongWebBench: Evaluating Structural and Functional Webpage Generation in Long-Horizon Settings Authors: Yi Zhao, Zhen Yang, Mengpan Chen, Mingde Xu, Shanghui Gong, Xijun Liu, Jibing Gong, Jie Tang Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17727v1 Recent vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promising progress in generating webpages from visual inputs, yet existing evaluations mainly focus on short, single-screen, and largely static webpages. We introduce LongWebBench, a benchmark for evaluating long-horizon webpage generation from both structural and functional perspectives. LongWebBench contains 490 real-world long webpages for structural fidelity evaluation and 507 goal-oriented interaction tasks over 129 webpages for functional evaluation. It employs two complementary protocols: a multi-dimensional VLM-based metric for assessing long-range structural coherence, and a DOM-augmented agent-based pipeline for end-to-end functional verification. We further examine the automatic evaluation protocols through human agreement analysis. Experiments with state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary VLMs under single-image and multi-image settings reveal that structural fidelity degrades as webpage length increases, while visually plausible generations often fail to support executable multi-step interactions. These results highlight the need to evaluate long webpage generation beyond visual similarity, with executable interaction as a core criterion. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/zheny2751-dotcom/LongWebBench. --- ### GSPan: A Continuous Gaussian Primitive Representation for Arbitrary-Scale Pansharpening Authors: Fangyi Li, Xiaoyuan Yang, Yixiao Li, Zongyang Sui, Kangqing Shen, Gemine Vivone Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17722v1 Pansharpening aims to generate high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) images by fusing low-resolution multispectral (LRMS) and panchromatic (PAN) observations. Most existing deep learning methods treat pansharpening as fixed-grid prediction, which limits scale adaptation. To address this, we propose GSPan, a framework that introduces 2D Gaussian Splatting (GS) into pansharpening. Instead of directly predicting pixels, GSPan represents band-wise residual details as continuous and learnable 2D Gaussian primitives. We design a Dual-Stream Hierarchical Interaction (DSHI) architecture with a Spatial-Spectral Interactive Attention (SSIA) module to estimate these primitives from complementary PAN and MS observations. The predicted primitives are rendered as a residual detail field and injected into the upsampled MS image. This continuous representation allows GSPan to render fused images on arbitrary target sampling grids without scale-specific retraining. It further enables a Scale-Decoupled Asymmetric Inference (SDAI) strategy, which estimates primitives at a reduced resolution and renders the fused image at the target resolution for efficient large-scene pansharpening. Experiments on QuickBird, GaoFen-2, WorldView-3, and WorldView-3-4K datasets show that GSPan delivers state-of-the-art fusion performance. Moreover, SDAI markedly accelerates inference, achieving a favorable trade-off between computational efficiency and fusion quality. Our results demonstrate the potential of continuous Gaussian residual representations as a flexible and scale-decoupled alternative to fixed-grid prediction. --- ### Heterogeneous SAR-optical fusion for near-real-time land use and land cover mapping under cloud contamination: A novel framework and global benchmark dataset Authors: Jiangong Xu, Weibao Xue, Xiaoyu Yu, Jun Pan, Xinlian Lianga, Mi Wang Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17713v1 Optical remote sensing imagery is frequently degraded by cloud and cloud-shadow contamination, which limits its reliability for near-real-time land use and land cover (LULC) mapping. Although synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can provide cloud-penetrating structural information, existing SAR-optical fusion methods often assume reliable optical observations and insufficiently address the semantic uncertainty introduced by cloud contamination. To address this issue, we propose CloudLULC-Net, an end-to-end heterogeneous SAR-optical fusion framework that directly predicts LULC maps from cloud-contaminated Sentinel-2 imagery and temporally adjacent Sentinel-1 SAR observations. The proposed network incorporates optical reliability modulation to suppress unreliable optical responses, heterogeneous information adaptive aggregation to model high-order spatial-channel interactions between optical and SAR representations, and a unified semantic mapping transformer to organize fused features in a LULC-oriented latent space. A semantic anchor-guided optimization strategy is further introduced to improve the consistency of intermediate semantic representations. To support this task, we construct CloudLULC-Set, a large-scale benchmark dataset containing 40,223 curated SAR-optical-label triplets with pixel-level LULC annotations across diverse geographic regions and cloud conditions. Experimental results show that CloudLULC-Net achieves an OA of 86.60%, an F1-score of 83.29%, and an mIoU of 73.51%, outperforming representative heterogeneous reconstruction-first and end-to-end SAR-optical mapping methods. Comparisons with existing global LULC products and analyses under different cloud-cover levels further demonstrate the robustness and practical value of CloudLULC-Net for target-date LULC mapping in cloud-prone regions.The project is publicly available at: https://github.com/RSIIPAC/CloudLULC --- ### Structured Adversarial Camouflage via Voronoi Diagrams Authors: Jens Bayer, Stefan Becker, David Münch, Michael Arens, Jürgen Beyerer Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17711v1 Pixel-wise adversarial patches are computationally heavy and often visually detectable, limiting utility in security-critical systems. We present adversarial Voronoi camouflage that optimizes only seed-point locations under fixed, printable palettes using a soft assignment, producing structured, splinter camouflage-like patterns without additional regularization. Evaluated on person detection with COCO-style AP@(.5:.95), naive placement (Inria -> COCO) performs comparably bad, while garment-level application via segmentation mask (3DPeople) results in a significant AP drop. The attack transfers to out-of-domain backgrounds and across detector families (YOLOv9/10/11/12), indicating robustness in black-box settings. Repainting with different palettes largely nullifies the effect, and single-color tweaks show limited tolerance (<=0.17), highlighting a structure-palette coupling. The parameter-efficient, palette-constrained design improves visual plausibility while degrading real-time detector performance. Physical validation and color calibration are left for future work. Code: https://github.com/JensBayer/Voronoi This paper was originally presented at the International Conference on Military Communication and Information Systems (ICMCIS), organized by the Information Systems Technology (IST) Scientific and Technical Committee, IST-224-RSY - the ICMCIS, held in Bath, United Kingdom, 12-13 May 2026. --- ### Vision-language models for chest radiography do not always need the image Authors: Mahshad Lotfinia, Sebastian Ziegelmayer, Lisa Adams, Daniel Truhn, Andreas Maier, Soroosh Tayebi Arasteh Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17710v2 Medical vision-language models report strong chest radiograph accuracy, and this is increasingly read as evidence that they use the image. That inference is unsafe: a model exploiting finding-name priors scores like one that reads the scan, and no standard benchmark separates them. We introduce a causal audit that intervenes on the image, occluding the relevant region, occluding an irrelevant one, and swapping in another patient's same-label scan, and combines three behavioral metrics to test whether a correct answer depends on the image. Across nine systems, a text-only model with no image access reaches within 5.7 accuracy points of the best multimodal one, and a 119-billion-parameter multimodal model is statistically indistinguishable from a 7-billion text-only baseline. The audit splits the cohort into three models that ignore the image, one that is unstable, and five that use it selectively, for a subset of findings; the categories hold across a second dataset, resolution, and prompt phrasing. Against board-certified radiologists, a text-only model is statistically indistinguishable from a radiologist's accuracy while grounding at zero, whereas the image-using models ground at radiologist-comparable rates. Reported confidence flags ungrounded answers only when a model uses the image. Grounding audits, not accuracy, should gate clinical deployment. --- ### Confusion-Aware Transfer Teacher Curriculum Learning Framework: Disentangling Scoring and Pacing Effects Authors: Savini Kommalage, Sanka Mohottala, Asiri Gawesha, Dulara Madhusanka, Menan Velayuthan, Dharshana Kasthurirathna, Mahima Milinda Alwis Weerasinghe, Charith Abhayaratne Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17706v1 Curriculum learning couples two design choices, how samples are scored by difficulty and how harder samples are paced into training, making it difficult to attribute observed gains to either component. We disentangle these factors with two evaluation protocols: stage-wise test subsets that validate scoring functions independently of curriculum training, and a baseline that applies the same pacing schedule to randomly ordered data. Within the Transfer Teacher framework (TTF), we use these protocols to evaluate a confusion-aware difficulty score that considers both correct-class confidence and the probability distribution over incorrect classes. On CIFAR-10 with ResNet-18 and VGG-16, the proposed score produces model-interpretable difficulty rankings that align with human intuition. However, at full data, neither curriculum nor anti-curriculum ordering improves accuracy over standard training, indicating that improving the scoring function alone is insufficient to overcome the known failure modes of curriculum learning in TTF. In contrast, We find that confusion-aware curriculum ordering result in consistent data-efficiency benefits, outperforming random ordering by up to 8.7% points at the 20% data regime, suggesting the potential of TTF as a data-efficient training method. --- ### SegTME-UNI2: A Foundation Model-Based Framework for Generalisable Multiclass Cell Segmentation and LLM-Driven Tumour Microenvironment Characterisation in Histopathology Authors: Wan Siti Halimatul Munirah Wan Ahmad, Faris Syahmi Samidi, Mohammad Badal Ahmmed, Vimal Angela Thiviyanathan, Selvam Thavaraj, Anwar P. P. Abdul Majeed Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17702v2 Characterising the tumour microenvironment (TME) from routine H&E-stained histology images requires simultaneous cell segmentation, feature extraction, and interpretable clinical reporting. We present SegTME-UNI2, a unified framework addressing these requirements. Its core is UNI2-UperHoVeR, a dual-head segmentation model pairing the UNI2-h pathology foundation model (ViT-Giant, pretrained on >100M tiles from 100K slides) with two parallel UperNet decoders: one for six-class semantic segmentation and one for horizontal-vertical gradient regression enabling watershed-based nuclear instance separation. To address the lack of pixel-level annotations in large real-world repositories, UNI2-UperHoVeR undergoes a three-stage progressive pseudo-label curriculum. Each stage trains a fresh model without weight transfer, driving improvement entirely via increased pseudo-label quality: Stage 1: Uses human-annotated PanNuke (7,901 images, 189,744 nuclei, 0.25 um/pixel). Stage 2: Uses entropy-filtered pseudo-labels from the Stage 1 model on 271,711 TCGA-UT scale-0 patches (0.5 um/pixel). Stage 3: Uses pseudo-labels from the Stage 2 model on all 1,608,060 TCGA-UT patches across six resolution scales (0.5-1.0 um/pixel). Segmentation outputs feed a structured TME feature extraction pipeline computing 20+ per-patch compositional, morphological, spatial entropy, and intercellular distance metrics. These are encoded as JSON and passed to a fine-tuned NVIDIA BioNeMo GPT model to generate clinically interpretable TME narratives. Preliminary validation on held-out PanNuke and TCGA-UT partitions demonstrates framework feasibility and internal consistency. The pseudo-labelled TCGA-UT dataset and UNI2-UperHoVeR checkpoint are publicly released to support large-scale TME profiling and spatial biology research. --- ### EComAgentBench: Benchmarking Shopping Agents on Long-Horizon Tasks with Distributed Hidden Intent Authors: Zeyao Du, Tong Li, Yanci Zhang, Haibo Zhang Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17698v2 As LLM-based shopping agents enter production, existing benchmarks fail to capture how a shopper's requirements arrive: stated implicitly in the query, recorded in a profile, or revealed only when the right question is asked. Benchmarks that expose full intent upfront and grade only the final choice can neither pose this long-horizon challenge nor explain which requirement an agent missed. To address this gap, we introduce EComAgentBench, a benchmark of 662 tasks grounded in real Amazon products and reviews. Each task scatters these requirements across a visible query, a tool-gated profile, and scripted clarification; an agent must uncover hidden intent, verify candidates against attributes and review evidence, and commit to a single product within 100 tool calls. Moreover, typed, source-tagged rubrics grade every task, attributing each failure to a requirement and its source. Construction is automated yet reliable, with every answer fixed in code before any text is generated and every sample validated. Our evaluation of seven models reveals that even the strongest attains only 57.1% overall accuracy, and rubric satisfaction degrades from visible to hidden sources. Overall, we believe EComAgentBench will serve as a reproducible foundation for moving shopping agents from single-query search toward dependable assistance over long horizons. --- ### FllumaOne: A Code-Native Multimodal CAD Dataset with Executable Programs and Kernel-Validated Feature Histories Authors: Jizong Zhan Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.AI, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17696v1 Parametric computer-aided design records both final geometry and the ordered construction history that determines how a part can be edited. Datasets for editable CAD research should therefore expose modeling operations, parameters, and feature dependencies together with validated geometry. We introduce FllumaOne, a code-native multimodal CAD dataset whose models are generated by executable Python programs in Flluma, a Qt/C++ OpenCASCADE-based CAD system. Each sample aligns its program with a structured feature tree, a training-oriented intermediate representation, STEP geometry, a surface point cloud, natural-language descriptions, metadata, and eight canonical visible-edge renderings. The primary release, FllumaOne-100K, contains 100,000 accepted samples across four template-level complexity regimes. Programs are executed and retained only after kernel geometry, solid validity, and export checks; release reports also record modality completeness and split-level duplicate tests. A Qwen2.5-Coder-1.5B LoRA baseline trained on 80,000 samples achieves 99.98% Python syntax validity, 99.97% Flluma build success, and 99.14% STEP-export validity on the held-out 10,000-sample test split. For the 9,909 predictions converted to surface point clouds, the mean normalized Chamfer Distance is 0.002124. The dataset supports conditioned CAD reconstruction, executable program synthesis, feature-tree prediction, B-Rep analysis, retrieval, design completion, and editable reverse engineering. --- ### Delta-Based Target Reformulation for Short-Term Electricity Load Forecasting Using LSTM and Transformer Models Authors: Vansh Bansal Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17692v1 Accurate short-term electricity load forecasting is critical for the reliable and economic operation of modern power systems, under non-stationarity arising from weather variability, calendar effects, and evolving consumption patterns. While deep learning models such as LSTMs and Transformers show promising performance, most existing studies focus on direct absolute load prediction without explicitly addressing target non-stationarity. Motivated by classical time-series differencing techniques in ARIMA models, this paper investigates a delta-based target reformulation for short-term electricity load forecasting using deep learning. Instead of directly predicting absolute load values, the proposed formulation trains models to predict the change in load between consecutive time steps, with final forecasts reconstructed using the last observed load. This aims to stabilize the learning target and reduce forecasting difficulty. Using multi-year, hourly real-world electricity load data from India, augmented with meteorological variables from the NASA POWER project and calendar features, this study evaluates LSTM and Transformer models under both formulations, benchmarking them against LightGBM. Experiments are conducted for hour-ahead and day-ahead horizons, assessing performance via Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). Results show that delta-based reformulation consistently improves forecasting accuracy for hour-ahead prediction across all evaluated models, yielding MAPE reductions of over 50% compared to absolute formulations. For day-ahead forecasting, delta targets specifically benefit deep sequence models (LSTM and Transformer), while LightGBM remains competitive under the absolute formulation. These findings indicate that while delta reformulation is a powerful inductive bias for neural networks, its efficacy is model- and horizon-dependent. --- ### LLMs Infer Cultural Context but Fail to Apply It When Responding Authors: Yisong Miao, Jian Zhu, Vered Shwartz Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17688v1 Recent work has shown that LLMs overrepresent dominant cultures, particularly Western ones, while marginalizing others. We investigate whether this affects models' ability to generate culturally adapted responses by evaluating their use of local measurement units based on the user's perceived cultural background. We introduce Cultural and Pragmatic Response Inference (CAPRI), a dataset of conversations with varying levels of cultural cues. Experiments with state-of-the-art LLMs show that models can infer cultural background and recall relevant conventions, but often fail to utilize the information to adapt their answers to the relevant cultural conventions, unless explicitly prompted to perform the tasks sequentially. We further evaluate adaptation to the interpretation of time and quantity expressions, two subjective language grounding dimensions that are affected by culture. We find that models increasingly adapt their answers as cultural cues accumulate, but their priors are not culture-neutral, sometimes aligning with the model's country of origin. Overall, CAPRI provides a resource for future research aimed at narrowing the gap between cultural knowledge and culturally adaptive language generation. --- ### SuCo: Sufficiency-guided Continuous Adaptive Reasoning Authors: Jiahao Wang, Bingyu Liang, Chenhao Hu, Longhui Zhang, Xuebo Liu, Min zhang, Jing Li, Xuelong Li Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17687v1 Despite remarkable performance on complex tasks, Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often generate excessively long Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT), inflating computational costs even for simple queries. Existing efforts to mitigate this inefficiency typically rely on discrete reasoning modes or fixed budget tiers, lacking a principled criterion of when reasoning is sufficient. In this work, we introduce Minimal Sufficient CoT (MSC), defined as the shortest prefix of a CoT trajectory which is adequate for producing the correct answer. We empirically show that MSC not only reduces reasoning tokens, but also improves accuracy across difficulty levels. Building on MSC, we propose Sufficiency-guided Continuous Adaptive Reasoning (SuCo), a two-stage training framework for autonomous reasoning control along a continuous spectrum. In stage 1, MSC-Aligned Fine-Tuning (MFT) constructs MSC data using problem-adaptive sufficiency thresholds that naturally scale with question difficulty, then fine-tunes the model to internalize concise yet sufficient reasoning patterns. In stage 2, Sufficiency-Aware Policy Optimization (SAPO) further optimizes the model through reinforcement learning with dynamic complexity tracking and sufficiency-aware rewards that penalize both over- and under-thinking. Extensive experiments across mathematics, code, and science benchmarks show that SuCo consistently achieves improvements in both accuracy and reasoning efficiency. --- ### Geometrical fairness in graph neural networks Authors: Arturo Pérez-Peralta, Sandra Benítez-Peña, Blas Kolic, Rosa E. Lillo Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: stat.ML, cs.CY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17684v1 Graph-based learning methods have become increasingly prominent due to their strong performance across diverse applications. Among these, recent frameworks grounded in diffusion processes provide a unifying perspective that extends traditional graph neural network formulations while addressing limitations of standard message-passing mechanisms. Despite these advances, concerns remain regarding the fairness of such models, as they may propagate or amplify biases present in the data. In this work, we introduce a fairness-aware adaptation of graph-based diffusion by modifying the underlying Laplacian operator. Our approach incorporates multiple complementary transformations, including subspace projections, spectral adjustments, and frequency-based filtering, to mitigate bias-related components. Leveraging the intrinsic smoothing properties of graph diffusion, we provide a principled analysis of the resulting behavior and establish theoretical insights into fairness properties. We evaluate the proposed framework on both synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating that it achieves competitive performance while improving fairness metrics with limited additional computational cost. --- ### Bridging Functional Correctness and Runtime Efficiency Gaps in LLM-Based Code Translation Authors: Longhui Zhang, Jiahao Wang, Chenhao Hu, Bingyu Liang, Jing Li, Min Zhang Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CL, cs.PL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17683v1 While large language models (LLMs) have greatly advanced the functional correctness of automated code translation systems, the runtime efficiency of translated programs has received comparatively little attention. With the waning of Moore's law, runtime efficiency has become increasingly important for program quality, alongside functional correctness. Our preliminary study reveals that LLM-translated programs often run slower than human-written ones, and this issue cannot be remedied through prompt engineering alone. Therefore, our work proposes SwiftTrans, a code translation framework comprising two key stages: (1) Multi-Perspective Exploration, where MpTranslator leverages parallel in-context learning (ICL) to generate diverse translation candidates; and (2) Difference-Aware Selection, where DiffSelector identifies the optimal candidate by explicitly comparing differences between translations. We further introduce Hierarchical Guidance for MpTranslator and Ordinal Guidance for DiffSelector, enabling LLMs to better adapt to these two core components. To support the evaluation of runtime efficiency in translated programs, we extend existing benchmarks, CodeNet and F2SBench, and introduce a new benchmark, SwiftBench. Experimental results across all three benchmarks show that SwiftTrans achieves consistent improvements in both correctness and runtime efficiency. --- ### From Trainee to Trainer: LLM-Designed Training Environment for RL with Multi-Agent Reasoning Authors: Chao Chen, Chengzu Li, Zhiwei Li, Yinhong Liu, Zhijiang Guo Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17682v1 Reinforcement learning pipelines for Large Language Model (LLM) training often rely on manually redesigned environments between stages, requiring practitioners to heuristically infer which configuration will best improve the current policy. To automate this process, we propose the LLM-as-Environment-Engineer framework in which the current policy model analyzes failure trajectories together with contextual information and proposes modifications to the next-stage training environment configuration. We also introduce MAPF-FrozenLake, a controllable testbed whose generator exposes multi-dimensional environment configurations, making it suitable for studying and benchmarking environment redesign. On this testbed, we condition the environment engineer on structured summaries of policy behavior, failure cases, and environment statistics, from which it produces the configuration for the next training stage. With Qwen3-4B as the backbone, our framework achieves the strongest aggregate performance on our benchmarks, outperforming larger proprietary LLMs (e.g., GPT, Gemini) and fixed-environment training baselines. We further analyze which forms of context are most effective, finding that successful environment updates rely on failure evidence and preserve configurations that already work. Interestingly, the current RL checkpoint serves as a better environment engineer than the original base model, suggesting that policy learning improves the model's ability to diagnose its remaining weaknesses. --- ### EnvRL: Learn from Environment Dynamics in Agentic Reinforcement Learning Authors: Zhitong Wang, Songze Li, Hao Peng, Shuzheng Si, Yi Wang, Maosong Sun, Juanzi Li Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17680v1 Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents. However, conventional RL methods for long-horizon agentic tasks often struggle with sparse outcome rewards. Intuitively, this overlooks the rich environment dynamics information contained in rollout interaction trajectories. We argue that the interaction experience inherently serves as an implicit supervision signal, reveals the underlying transition mechanisms of the environment, and enables the agent to construct a more accurate internal model of the environment.. Therefore, in this work, we investigate how to leverage this additional signal to improve policy learning. Specifically, we propose EnvRL, a framework that incorporates environment dynamics learning into agentic RL via two auxiliary objectives: state prediction and inverse dynamics. By jointly optimizing with the primary RL objective, we encourage the agent to internalize environment dynamics from its own interaction experience. Extensive experiments on two long-horizon agentic benchmarks demonstrate that EnvRL achieves significant improvements on success-rates over RL-only baselines, e.g., when trained with GRPO, lifting Qwen-2.5-1.5B-Instruct from 72.8% to 77.4% on ALFWorld, and from 56.8% to 67.0% on WebShop. --- ### See First, Answer Later: Visual Evidence Pre-Alignment via Sufficiency-Driven RL Authors: Yilian Liu, Sicong Leng, Guoshun Nan, Junyi Zhu, Jiayu Huang, Minghao Sun, Xuancheng Zhu, Yisong Chen, Zexian Wei, Xiaofeng Tao Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17678v1 Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) integrate strong text reasoning with visual inputs, yet their responses can be inconsistent with the underlying images, indicating ineffective utilization of visual evidence during inference. The prevailing training paradigm relies on large-scale caption-based pretraining for general alignment, followed by supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to enable instruction following and complex reasoning. However, such pretraining provides only weak visual grounding: short, coarse captions bias models toward salient objects while neglecting fine-grained visual evidence. In this paper, we introduce Visual Evidence Pre-Alignment (VEPA), an intermediate stage between pretraining and post-training that explores a novel sufficiency-driven objective with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to optimize question-conditioned visual evidence descriptions. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks show that our VEPA consistently enhances performance on visually demanding evaluations and complements standard supervised post-training. Further analyses show that the income stems from strengthened, transferable visual grounding, rather than from additional task-specific training. --- ### Do We Really Need Diffusion? A Fast U-Net for Paired Medical Image Translation Authors: Alicia Pirwass, Birte Glimm, Michael Munz, Hans-Joachim Wilke Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17675v1 Magnetic resonance imaging-signal fat fraction (MRI-SFF) quantifies tissue fat and serves as an established biomarker for metabolic and musculoskeletal disorders. The acquisition requires, however, specialized MRI sequences, which are not available routinely. We investigate whether SFF can be estimated from widely available T2-weighted (T2w) MRI via image-to-image translation (I2I). We further compare a lightweight 4-level U-Net to a state-of-the-art Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) using a dataset of 230 048 paired 2D images (183 517 train, 23 621 val, 22 910 test) from the German National Cohort (NAKO). Both models clearly outperform the identity baseline (Pearson correlation r = 0.769, mean absolute error MAE = 0.070 +/- 0.054), which confirms that the models learn a non-trivial cross-modal mapping. Interestingly, the lightweight U-Net outperforms the DDPM in both correlation (r = 0.975 vs. 0.962) and error (MAE = 0.014 +/- 0.015 vs. 0.019 +/- 0.019), while reducing inference time by a factor of 208 (25.2 ms vs. 5 227.2 ms per image using 50 Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM) steps). The strong clinical performance at substantially reduced computational cost enables real-time clinical use. --- ### ASTEROID: A Spatiotemporal Information Transformer for Forecasting Multi-Step Time Series of Molecular Dynamics Authors: Kexin Wu, Luonan Chen, Renxiao Wang Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, q-bio.QM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17668v1 Molecular dynamics (MD) simulation is computationally demanding, particularly for large-scale systems requiring long-term analysis. Accurate forecast of the outcomes of a MD simulation is not only an attractive scientific challenge but also has substantial practical value. In this work, we developed a data-driven framework, termed ASTEROID (Advanced Spatiotemporal TransformER fOr Inferring Dynamics), that can directly predict multi-step atomic coordinates, avoiding conventional iterative integration. For this purpose, our ASTEROID reformulates MD trajectories as high-dimensional spatiotemporal sequences and integrates the Spatiotemporal Information (STI) Transformation equation into a Transformer architecture. The core innovation of ASTEROID lies in its ability to model multiscale spatiotemporal dependencies. In particular, for spatial dependencies, a local-global self-attention mechanism captures both short- and long-range interactions. For temporal dependencies, an encoder-decoder structure integrates global context with autoregressive forecasting. ASTEROID was evaluated on several quantum-mechanics derived molecular datasets. Our results indicate that ASTEROID achieved not only a higher level of accuracy in multi-step prediction than existing methods on various benchmarks, but also significantly reduced computational cost of conventional MD simulation. Moreover, the model supports iterative multi-step forecasting over an extended time scale. This work establishes a robust and generalizable data-driven paradigm for accelerating MD simulations. --- ### Handling Feature Heterogeneity with Learnable Graph Patches Authors: Yifei Sun, Yang Yang, Xiao Feng, Zijun Wang, Haoyang Zhong, Chunping Wang, Lei Chen Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17667v1 In recent years, the rapid development of foundation models and graph pre-training technologies has spurred increasing interest in constructing a universal pre-trained graph model or Graph Foundation Model (GFM). However, a significant challenge is that existing models are unable to address feature heterogeneity in graph data without textual information, which hinders the transferability of graph models across different datasets. To bridge this gap, we propose the concept of learnable graph patches, which we regard as the smallest semantic units of any graph data. We decompose the graph into learnable graph patches by unfolding the node features and constructing corresponding patch structures separately. We then design a framework that mines transferable information from graph data across domains. Specifically, after extracting graph patches, we propose a patch encoder to extract knowledge from each unit and a patch aggregator to learn how the units are combined into a whole. Due to its domain-agnostic nature, the model can be applied to downstream data across different domains. Furthermore, we analyze the connection between our method and existing graph models, as well as the transferability of the node embeddings it generates. Empirically, our method not only achieves the capability to use multi-domain graphs for pre-training, but also shows enhanced performance across various downstream datasets and tasks. Moreover, we observe consistent improvement in downstream performance as the volume of pre-training data increases. --- ### FacProcessTwin: An LLM-Based System for Process Twin Development Authors: Yash Pulse, Yong-Bin Kang, Abhik Banerjee, Prem Prakash Jayaraman Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17666v1 Process twins provide real-time representations of entire production processes. By capturing how process steps interact, rather than monitoring a single machine in isolation as an asset-based digital twin does, they have the potential to drive efficiency gains across the whole process. However, developing a process twin is costly. It requires accurately modelling the entire production process: its process steps, the equipment and product-specific settings each step uses, and its process variations. The resulting model must then be bound to live operational data. We present FacProcessTwin, a system that leverages a large language model (LLM) to reduce this development time, building a process twin from a plant's process documentation and natural-language input from an operator. FacProcessTwin generates this complete process model and then automatically binds its process steps to live operational data. The generated model and its data bindings are rendered as an interactive process diagram through which manufacturing personnel can monitor and correct the system's autonomous decisions, such as resolving uncertainty at safety-critical binding steps. We evaluate FacProcessTwin through a real-world case study of an Australian food manufacturer, covering 16 production process flows that span chilled, frozen, and aseptic shelf-stable product categories and include process variations within the same product. The results show that FacProcessTwin generates these process models accurately (a mean F1 of 95.2% against ground truth) and builds each twin in roughly a sixth of the manual time. Its human-in-the-loop governance then keeps the safety-critical bindings correct: at ambiguous tags where a single-pass baseline silently mis-binds 75.0% of the time, FacProcessTwin defers to the operator and mis-binds none. --- ### Non-asymptotic Tail Bounds for the Kostlan--Shub--Smale Field: Tensor PCA and Spherical $k$-Spin Complexity Authors: Jean-Marc Azaïs, Federico Dalmao, Yohann De Castro Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: math.ST, math.PR, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17665v1 This paper builds a hierarchy of explicit, non-asymptotic tail bounds for the supremum of the Kostlan--Shub--Smale (KSS) random field on the sphere, and applies it to two problems: Spiked Tensor PCA and the landscape of the spherical $k$-spin model. For Tensor PCA, we study the non-asymptotic statistical limits of estimating a rank-$R$ symmetric signal tensor of order~$k\ge 3$ and dimension~$d\ge 3$ from a single Gaussian observation at signal-to-noise ratio~$λ$, through the \emph{profile maximum likelihood estimator}, the MLE restricted to normalized rank-$R$ tensors of coherence at least~$κ$. Our analysis uses a single reduction: a deterministic geometric inequality (the Tube Method) and a rank-reduction step bound the estimation error by the supremum of the canonical KSS field, which the Kac--Rice formula turns into a Gaussian integral against the expected absolute characteristic polynomial of a shifted Gaussian Orthogonal Ensemble, controlled in turn by the four explicit tail bounds of our hierarchy (three from a Mehta--Fyodorov representation, one from a Ben Arous--Dembo--Guionnet large deviation). The same reduction yields two results, each with explicit constants. For estimation, a finite-$(k,d)$ error bound recovers the asymptotically optimal rate~$\sqrt{d\log k}$ of Perry, Wein and Bandeira, with explicit dependence on the rank~$R$ and the coherence~$κ$. For the landscape, a two-sided non-asymptotic bracketing of the annealed complexity of the spherical $k$-spin Hamiltonian recovers the Auffinger--Ben Arous--Černý complexity function in the high-dimensional limit. --- ### Temporal Preference Optimization for Unsupervised Retrieval Authors: HyunJin Kim, Jaejun Shim, Young Jin Kim, JinYeong Bak Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17664v1 Unsupervised dense retrievers offer scalability by learning semantic similarity from unlabeled documents via contrastive learning, but they struggle to capture the temporal relevance, retrieving semantically related but temporally misaligned documents-an important aspect when a document collection spans multiple time periods (e.g., retrieving documents from 2018-2025 for "Who is the president in 2019?" introduces temporal ambiguity). Existing methods rely on supervised training with explicit timestamps, which are not always feasible. We propose TPOUR (Temporal Preference Optimization for Unsupervised Retriever), which uses our novel training method Temporal Retrieval Preference Optimization (TRPO). TRPO reinterprets preference learning in the temporal dimension, guiding the retriever to favor temporally aligned documents. TPOUR further generalizes to unseen time periods via interpolation in a learned time embedding, enabling continuous temporal alignment. Experiments on temporal information retrieval (T-IR), TPOUR outperforms both unsupervised and supervised baselines. Compared to Qwen-Embedding-8B, despite being about 72.7x smaller, TPOUR Contriever improves average nDCG@5 by +4.04 (+12.15%) on explicit and +4.98 (+15.21%) on implicit queries. We provide our code at https://github.com/agwaBom/TPOUR. --- ### TuneAhead: Predicting Fine-tuning Performance Before Full Training Begins Authors: Yuxiang Luo, Haonan Long, Chen Wang, Qiqi Duan, Xiaotian Lin, Yanwei Xu, Yuyu Luo, Weikai Yang, Nan Tang Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17660v1 Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is compute-intensive and error-prone: model performance depends sensitively on data quality and hyperparameter choices, and naïve runs can even degrade model performance. This raises a practical question:can we predict fine-tuning performance before committing to a full training run? We present TUNEAHEAD, a lightweight framework for pre-hoc prediction of fine-tuning performance. TUNEAHEAD encodes each candidate run as a meta-feature vector that combines static dataset descriptors with dynamic probe features from a short standardized probe. A predictor maps these features to performance estimates, while SHAP-based attributions provide interpretable diagnostics that reveal which specific features drive the prediction. Across 1,300+ fine-tuning runs on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, TUNEAHEAD consistently outperforms strong baselines such as Early-Stop Extrapolation and ProxyLM. On a held-out test set of 370 runs, TUNEAHEAD achieves an RMSE of 1.47 percentage points and places 95.1% of predictions within +3/-3 percentage points of the true score. These accurate continuous predictions support practical go/no-go screening policies that can reduce unnecessary full fine-tuning while retaining most promising runs. --- ### Physics-Constrained Neural Networks for Improved Short-Term Weather Forecasting: A Case Study over the South Pacific Authors: Egor Bugaev, Fedor Buzaev, Dmitry Efremenko, Denis Derkach, Fedor Ratnikov Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17659v1 This study introduces enhancements to physics-constrained neural networks (PCNNs) that improve the accuracy and stability of hybrid short-term weather forecasting models. Building on the WeatherGFT architecture, three innovations are proposed. First, an upgraded numerical solver, combining a fifth-order weighted essentially non-oscillatory scheme (WENO-5), a beta-plane approximation, and subgrid-scale viscosity, permits a fourfold increase in the integration time step to 1200 s while reducing the daily mean squared error by up to 26%. Second, a unified autoregressive hybrid block replaces the original chain of 24 specialised modules, eliminating overfitting to specific lead times. Third, the physical core is integrated with two state-of-the-art neural backbones, resulting in PI-PredFormer and PI-IAM4VP. Evaluation on the WeatherBench South Pacific subset from 2000 to 2004 shows that these hybrids reduce root mean squared error at 1-12 h lead times by 8-22% compared to purely neural counterparts, while better preserving physical consistency. These results demonstrate that incremental refinement of hybrid components offers a practical route toward more accurate and efficient short-range weather forecasting. --- ### Using Cognitive Models to Improve Language Model Simulation of Human Persuasion Games Authors: Zirui Cheng, Zeyu Shen, Thomas L. Griffiths, Peter Henderson Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17657v1 People make decisions differently in strategic interactions. Some update beliefs like a Bayesian; others exhibit biases like motivated reasoning. Although creators of large language models use simulated humans for safety evaluations and training, they often fail to cover this breadth of human behavior. We argue that cognitive science and economics provide a convenient tool for doing so, making use of mathematical models of human decision-making. We propose an approach that we call Equation-to-Behavior Prompting for guiding large language models to match cognitive models, and evaluate this approach on persuasion games based on legal decision-making. We find that large models can approximate equation-based specifications -- Bayesian updating, affine distortion, motivated updating, and Grether's $α$-$β$ model -- using prompting, but small models fail to do so. However, training small models with reinforcement learning to adhere to mathematical rules, Equation-to-Behavior RL, reduces belief error by 26.5% in out-of-distribution parameterizations. We show that these simulations can help create diverse training environments; training small models to consider different kinds of decision-makers improves average belief change by 2.5%--12% over Bayesian-only training, even when persuading GPT-5-mini. Our work could improve human simulations for training and evaluation in increasingly realistic settings, and could also enable novel research into more complicated mathematical models of human decision-making. --- ### MambaCount: Efficient Text-guided Open-vocabulary Object Counting with Spatial Sparse State Space Duality Block Authors: Hao-Yuan Ma, Li Zhang, Minjie Qiang, Jie Gao Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17650v1 Text-guided Open-vocabulary Object Counting (TOOC) aims to estimate the number of objects described by text prompts, which is particularly challenging in dense scenes with large scale variations. Existing TOOC approaches predominantly rely on Transformers, whose quadratic complexity with respect to image resolution limits their scalability. Mamba offers a promising alternative due to its linear complexity. However, previous Mamba-based methods have two main limitations. On the one hand, the inherent causal formulation of Mamba constrains the bidirectional spatial dependency modeling required by non-causal vision tasks. On the other hand, existing Mamba-based vision models often overlook the unconstrained high entropy in the spatial token responses, which can weaken local details and high-frequency cues. To address these limitations, we propose MambaCount, an efficient framework built on the Spatial Sparse State Space Duality (S^4D) block. Specifically, we analyze and reconstruct the decay dynamics of hidden states in Mamba to alleviate the dependency constraints introduced by causal modeling. Moreover, we introduce a Spatial Token Selection (STS) sub-block to reduce the unconstrained high entropy in spatial token responses within Mamba. In addition, we design Multi-Granularity Prototypes (MGP) to identify object-like regions at different semantic levels, improving cross-modal alignment and interpretability. Extensive experiments on FSC-147 demonstrate that MambaCount achieves state-of-the-art performance among methods without secondary querying, obtaining a test MAE of 12.23, while retaining linear complexity. --- ### A Risk Decomposition Framework for Pre-Hoc Fine-Tuning Prediction Authors: Yuxiang Luo, Chen Wang, Nan Tang Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17649v1 The high cost of fine-tuning LLMs poses a significant economic barrier; pre-hoc performance prediction offers a critical solution to substantially reduce this expense. However, the theoretical limits of pre-hoc performance prediction remain unexplored. We formulate it as a stochastic estimation problem under information constraints, decomposing prediction risk into two components: an intrinsic limit (static data-model compatibility) and a reducible optimization variance. We prove that optimization variance admits a necessary lower bound on its decay rate, implying fundamental constraints on how quickly uncertainty dissipates, regardless of the predictor used. Based on these dynamics, we derive a budget-optimal probing principle and introduce a predictability phase diagram that organizes tasks into three distinct regimes: Static-Sufficient, Dynamic-Critical, and Noise-Dominant. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks validate these theoretical regimes and demonstrate the efficiency of our probing strategy. ---