# Research Papers — 2026-06 · bundle page 120 of 260 > Full-text markdown of papers #5951–6000 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/120 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/119.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/121.md) ### GASE: Gaussian Splatting-Based Automated System for Reconstructing Embodied-Simulation Environments Authors: Jiawei Zhang, Yiming Yan, Chao Liang, Nuo Xu, Seson Sun, Qichen Zhang, Yuhao Xu, Yantai Yang, Yingqiao Wang, Qin Jin, Zhipeng Zhang Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17520v1 Training embodied agents in the real world requires skilled operators and expensive hardware. Simulation environments offer a compelling alternative by enabling large-scale, cost-effective data augmentation. Consequently, rapidly constructing high-fidelity simulation scenes with a minimal sim-to-real gap has become a critical objective in robot learning. While reconstruction-based methods provide superior visual quality, current workflows are hindered by inefficient data acquisition and subpar foreground object extraction. We thus propose GASE, a highly automated system for simulation scene construction. GASE leverages multi-view video streams from panoramic camera arrays to enable rapid environment scanning. To ensure high-quality asset generation, our pipeline introduces a camera-pose-based strategy that robustly extracts objects across frames in the 2D domain, followed by high-fidelity scene inpainting. Foreground objects and the static background are then reconstructed independently and seamlessly imported into physics simulators for policy training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GASE outperforms existing 3D Gaussian-based methods in segmentation accuracy by over 10\% while achieving state-of-the-art inpainting quality. Furthermore, real-robot deployments across manipulation and navigation tasks maintains a performance gap of less than 10\% compared to policies trained purely on real-world data. These results confirm that GASE provides an efficient and highly effective solution for bridging the sim-to-real gap. Code will be released. --- ### Scaling Enterprise Agent Routing: Degradation, Diagnosis, and Recovery Authors: Kellen Gillespie, Robyn Perry Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17519v1 Production LLM assistants route user requests to growing libraries of specialized tools, but how does routing accuracy degrade as the catalog scales? We study single-step routing on a 110-agent, 584-tool catalog from a deployed enterprise productivity assistant, evaluating three frontier models from 10 to 110 agents. Routing F1 on under-specified requests drops 16--23 percentage points across models. An oracle analysis decomposes the degradation into a \emph{retrieval} gap (the model cannot surface the right tool) and a \emph{confusion} gap (even with perfect retrieval, the oracle ceiling drops 10pp). Embedding-based shortlisting recovers +10--11pp F1 at full scale across all three models and two providers. A production annotation study (1,435 human-labeled utterances, three annotators) confirms the recovery on real traffic at +10--17pp despite 10--15pp lower absolute performance. --- ### FoundCause: Causal Discovery with Latent Confounders from Observational Data Authors: Patrick Blöbaum, Krishnakumar Balasubramanian, Shiva Prasad Kasiviswanathan Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ME, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17516v1 Causal discovery from observational data remains challenging due to the need to recover directed structure and latent confounding without interventions. We propose FoundCause, an amortized causal discovery model trained entirely on synthetic data that maps datasets directly to causal graphs in a single forward pass. By learning from large collections of simulated structural causal models, FoundCause captures transferable statistical patterns that generalize beyond individual datasets. The architecture incorporates several key inductive biases for causal discovery. It uses a permutation-invariant transformer encoder with alternating attention over samples and variables to jointly model cross-variable dependence and per-variable distributions. Pairwise statistical features derived from classical asymmetry measures are injected through statistics-conditioned attention, guiding the model toward known causal signals. A factorized decoder separates edge existence from direction, while a triangular refinement module enables reasoning over higher-order causal motifs such as chains and colliders. In addition, a dedicated confounder module based on learnable latent tokens explicitly models hidden common causes, and the model explicitly handles missing data via its masked input representation. To our knowledge, FoundCause is the first amortized causal discovery approach to explicitly model latent confounding. FoundCause outperforms 11 classical non-amortized methods (e.g., PC, GES, NOTEARS-style optimization) and 4 amortized causal discovery methods on 15 real-world datasets, achieving +9.6% improvement in $F_1$, +1.2% in AUROC, and an 18.9% reduction in structural Hamming distance relative to the strongest non-amortized methods, while performing inference in a single forward pass. --- ### Anytime-valid Optimal Policy Identification Authors: Daniel Molitor Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: stat.ME, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17515v1 We develop an anytime-valid framework for optimal policy identification from logged contextual bandit data. In many applied settings, the analyst wants to select the optimal policy from a candidate policy class $Π$, but data are generated by an externally determined logging policy that they do not control. The analyst may also wish to monitor evidence continuously, stopping once the optimal policy is clear rather than committing to a fixed sample size in advance. This paper addresses these challenges by constructing a time-indexed set $S_t$ that retains the true optimal policy set uniformly over time with high probability. The resulting procedure allows the analyst to monitor policy values, eliminate clearly suboptimal policies, and stop at data-dependent times without invalidating inference. When the optimal policy is unique, we define a stopping time for its identification and derive a sample-complexity bound scaling as $O\!\left(\frac{\log |Π|+\log\log(1/Δ_{\min})}{Δ_{\min}^2}\right)$, where $Δ_{\min}$ is the gap between the best and second-best policy values. Simulations demonstrate that the anytime-valid approach can yield substantial sample savings relative to fixed-$N$ designs. An application to a large adaptive experiment on reducing misinformation online illustrates how the method provides a dynamic view as evidence on the optimal policy accumulates. --- ### Unlocking LLM Code Correction with Iterative Feedback Loops Authors: Le Zhang, Suresh Kothari Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17514v1 Large Language Models have shown remarkable capabilities in code generation. However, most existing evaluations focus only on single-attempt accuracy and overlook the iterative refinement process that is central to real-world programming. This study presents a systematic investigation of LLMs' ability to rectify their own code through execution feedback. Using real-world programming problems across four models and two major programming languages, this study evaluates performance using iterative refinement framework where LLMs receive compiler error messages and testcase feedback after each attempt. This study introduces metrics to evaluate code failures, analyze rectification patterns, and compare the effectiveness of reasoning and non-reasoning models, offering actionable insights into both the understanding and practical application of feedback loops in LLM-driven code generation systems. Results show that reasoning models consistently improve over iterations, substantially outperforming non-reasoning models in leveraging feedback, while syntactic and runtime errors are far more tractable than logical or algorithmic failures. --- ### Geometry-Aware Post-Hoc Uncertainty Quantification in Operator Learning Authors: Oriol Vendrell-Gallart, Nima Negarandeh, Ramin Bostanabad Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17513v1 Neural operators provide fast surrogates for PDEs but their deterministic predictions limit their use in tasks requiring uncertainty quantification (UQ), especially under geometric variability. Existing approaches primarily model uncertainty in network parameters, largely overlooking the geometry-aware representations learned by the operator itself. We propose REEF-GP (Residual on Embedded Features Gaussian Process), a post-hoc UQ framework that fits a GP to the residuals of a frozen neural operator whose internal embeddings define the kernel feature space. Rather than learning a separate feature map, REEF-GP adapts the operator's intrinsic coordinate-feature representations to construct geometry-aware uncertainties. To ensure stability and scalability on unstructured domains, REEF-GP incorporates spectral-normalized projections, heteroscedastic geometry-aware noise, and efficient subset-based training that avoids restrictive low-rank approximations. Across five PDE benchmarks with varying geometries, REEF-GP preserves predictive accuracy while achieving calibrated uncertainty estimates competitive with deep ensembles but at a fraction of their cost. Our approach remains robust under geometric distribution shift, with uncertainty concentrating in physically meaningful regions (e.g., shock fronts). Our results demonstrate that accurate and scalable post-hoc UQ for neural operators can be achieved directly in their learned feature space, offering a practical alternative to parameter-centric approaches. --- ### MagicSim: A Unified Infrastructure for Executable Embodied Interaction Authors: Haoran Lu, Songling Liu, Yue Chen, Guo Ye, Mutian Shen, Shuyang Yu, Yu Xiao, Jihai Zhao, Shang Wu, Jianshu Zhang, Xiangtian Gui, Chuye Hong et al. Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17511v1 Robot learning and embodied agents now require simulation to serve as a shared execution substrate linking control, skills, and planning, not only as a renderer, controller testbed, or fixed task environment. Existing pipelines split these layers with "magic" actions, disconnected training environments, or forward-only renders that cannot reproduce, evaluate, and annotate the same episode. We present MagicSim, an embodied interaction infrastructure built around one deterministic batched runtime and a shared Markov decision process (MDP). From YAML-first specifications that decouple contents, placement, behavior, and agent exposure, MagicSim constructs diverse executable worlds spanning task families, interaction regimes, physics, layouts, sensors, avatars, and robot embodiments in one reset-and-step loop. A common execution interface grounds high-level commands through controllers, atomicskills, planner primitives, and asynchronous planning, realizing them as robot actions rather than simulator-side state edits. One task definition supports three capabilities: benchmark and RL evaluation, an autocollect interface that automatically turns commands into grounded trajectories, and agent/VLM-facing interaction. For automatic execution, commands flow through a Command->Skill->Planner->Robot->Record pipeline, while per-environment command, skill, planning, retry, annotation, and episode states advance independently above the shared physics tick. Successful rollouts are saved as structured multimodal trajectories aligning language supervision, action representations, visual/geometric representations, and task-level status with the executed episode. MagicSim thus unifies diverse world construction, embodied execution, task evaluation, automatic rollout generation, and interactive agent interfaces in one planner-in-the-loop runtime. --- ### When the Next Step Is Not One Step: Distribution-Aware Execution Modeling for Concurrent Go Programs Authors: Kaviru Hapuarachchi Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.DC, cs.PL, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17508v1 Training a model to predict the next step in a concurrent program is harder than it looks: two runs of the same program from the same trace prefix can produce different next events, both valid, because the scheduler is nondeterministic. A model trained against a single label is learning to guess one outcome of a random process. We turn this around and use the nondeterminism as a training signal. We run each program many times, aggregate the observed next events into an empirical distribution, and fine-tune a 7B model to match that distribution with a KL objective. On 798 held-out predictions drawn from real production Go bugs (CockroachDB, Kubernetes, gRPC, etcd), fine-tuning on fewer than a thousand traces reaches 36.2% accuracy, ahead of Gemini 3.5 Flash used zero-shot (34.8%) and the same model without fine-tuning (28.6%). Distribution training matches cross-entropy on accuracy (35.8% vs. 36.2%) while reducing Expected Calibration Error from 0.205 to 0.169. We also derive a formal goroutine-leak signature for a class of select-blocked goroutines where P(GoUnblock)=0 holds by scheduler semantics, not by learning. We release the dataset, trained adapters, and all tooling. --- ### LLM-as-Judge in Education: A Curriculum-Grounded Marking Pipeline Authors: Xiwei Xu, Chen Wang, Jacky Jiang, Phil Yang, Qian Fu, Mohan Dhall, Wenjie Zhang, Liming Zhu Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17507v1 Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to question generation and automated assessment. However, deploying LLMs in preparation for high-stakes exams requires more than prompt engineering; it demands software pipelines that systematically ground model outputs in authorised curriculum artefacts and marking guidelines issued by education authorities. This paper presents a curriculum-grounded, configurable LLM-as-Judge pipeline for question-level marking, co-developed with an industrial partner, to support exam preparation for university admission. The pipeline identifies the relevant topics, subtopics, and cognitive demand of a question, and assembles verifiable and authorised context to support LLM judgement. Curriculum intent is operationalised through concrete syllabus artefacts, including prescribed verbs and outcomes, performance band descriptors, glossary definitions, and marking-guideline principles. A staged LLM workflow is employed to first generate question-specific rubrics, capturing structured expectations of performance, and then derive and evaluate marking criteria used to allocate marks to student responses. This design improves consistency, transparency, and alignment with official marking practices. Preliminary evaluation shows that the proposed LLM-as-Judge pipeline delivers marking outcomes comparable to human tutors, while yielding justifications that are more traceable to authorised curriculum artefacts and marking standards. The pipeline has also been integrated into an online study platform, where early deployment data provide initial insights into operational usage and manual overrides. --- ### Evaluating Second-Order Bias of LLMs Through Epistemic Entitlement Authors: Ramaravind Kommiya Mothilal, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Raiyan Ahmed, Zhijing Jin, Shion Guha, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17506v1 Evaluations of social bias in LLMs largely focus on whether models generate or imply biased content. However, as LLMs are increasingly used as judges of bias, they may exhibit social biases in subtler ways in how they evaluate biased content, which current methods do not systematically capture. We call this second-order bias: social bias in an LLM's judgment about social bias, which we evaluate through a novel, philosophically grounded reasoning task. Drawing on entitlement epistemology, we conceptualize bias as misplaced foundational knowledge that shapes an agent's rational inquiry, and derive a logical reasoning task for LLMs to judge to whom a biased text is acceptable or non-acceptable. We develop two simple metrics to measure how biased LLM judges are in inferring demographics for acceptability without sufficient support, and how these inferences vary across groups targeted by biased texts. Evaluating open and closed models, we find that our task evades safety guardrails by surfacing bias in model judgment. It varies systematically across target groups, reflects implicit social maps, and shows how models are still triggered by demographic labels. Our work points to the need for LLM bias evaluation in judgment tasks and broadly, for more theoretically grounded approaches to bias evaluation in NLP. We release our code and model responses at https://github.com/uofthcdslab/second-order-bias. --- ### Reconfigurable Computing Challenge: Transformer for Jet Tagging on Versal AI Engines Authors: Gram Koski, Sean Lipps, Zhenghua Ma, G. Abarajithan, Ryan Kastner Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17500v1 Transformer-based models achieve strong performance for jet tagging at the CERN LHC, but deploying them in low-latency, resource-constrained trigger systems is challenging. We present an initial implementation of a quantized, integer-only transformer for jet tagging on the AMD Versal AI Engine (AIE), mapping dense and multi-head attention (MHA) layers to AIE tiles. The main contribution is a reusable software framework that represents transformer layers as composable AIE building blocks and automatically generates the corresponding Vitis graph code from a high-level Python model description. This framework provides a foundation for future research and is released as open-source software at https://github.com/KastnerRG/particle_transformer_aie. --- ### A Bayesian Boolean Matrix Factorization with Application to Copy Number Analysis in Cancer Authors: Adolphus Wagala, Mehmet Samur, Giovanni Parmigiani Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17491v2 Binary data factorization is common, but real-valued methods ignore discreteness and yield hard-to-interpret factors. Boolean Matrix Factorization (BooMF) instead decomposes a binary matrix into two lower-rank binary matrices via logical AND and OR, expressing the data as a Boolean disjunction of interpretable patterns. In cancer genomics, BooMF can reveal coordinated feature changes that may drive tumor evolution, unlike rotational or additive decompositions. Most existing BooMF methods are heuristic, greedy, sensitive to initialization, prone to local optima, and do not support principled model selection or uncertainty quantification. We introduce Bayesian Boolean Matrix Factorization (BBMF), a fully conjugate generative model with sparsity-inducing priors. It enforces Boolean constraints, yields interpretable latent factors with coherent uncertainty quantification, and admits Gibbs sampling with closed-form full conditionals. Because cancer evolution often involves widespread, near-simultaneous chromosome-number changes (e.g., whole-genome duplication followed by instability and selection), Boolean factorizations capture these patterns more naturally than additive models. Applied to arm-level copy-number alteration data in multiple myeloma, where entries indicate presence/absence of chromosomal-arm amplifications, BBMF finds a small set of interpretable bicliques linking patient subsets to recurrently co-altered chromosomal arms, providing a compact, biologically meaningful summary of tumor heterogeneity and demonstrating BBMF's utility for uncovering discrete latent structure in complex binary data. --- ### Online LLM Selection via Constrained Bandits with Time-Varying Demand Authors: Yin Huang, Qingsong Liu, Jie Xu Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17489v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in edge-cloud inference systems to handle diverse user tasks with heterogeneous accuracy, latency, and cost profiles. Selecting the appropriate LLM for each incoming task is critical for ensuring service quality and efficient resource utilization. However, model heterogeneity, stochastic and unknown performance characteristics, and time-varying task demands make static selection strategies inadequate. Real-world deployments often impose hard resource budgets such as monetary expenditure limits, along with soft service-level requirements such as latency guarantees. These constraints introduce additional challenges for online decision-making. We formulate this problem as a constrained stochastic bandit learning task, where the learner sequentially selects models under both packing-type (hard) and covering-type (soft) constraints, while adapting to time-varying task demand. The learner operates without access to the underlying reward, cost, or latency distributions and must rely on partial feedback. We develop a novel online learning algorithm that leverages confidence-bound estimates and demand predictions to balance reward maximization with long-term constraint satisfaction. We provide theoretical guarantees showing sublinear regret and sublinear covering constraint violations compared to an offline benchmark with full information. Experimental results on synthetic workloads demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach in dynamic, resource-constrained environments. --- ### SPHINX: First Explain, Then Explore Authors: Nguyen Do, Tue M. Cao, Tien Van Do, András Hajdu, Tamás Bérczes, My T. Thai Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17482v2 Generating adversarial driving scenarios is critical for evaluating and improving autonomous vehicle decision-making systems in simulation. Recent approaches rely primarily on the prior knowledge of Large Language Models and Vision-Language Models to generate driving scenarios procedurally. We argue that adversarial scenes should be generated based on the failure diagnosis (e.g., indecisiveness, multi-frame inconsistency) of the driving policy to specifically address the policy's weaknesses instead of relying on prior assumptions. In this paper, we propose SPHINX, a closed-loop framework for adversarial scenario synthesis guided by a simple principle: first explain, then explore. Beyond blindly exploring the scenario space, SPHINX leverages explainable artificial intelligence methods to analyze the policy, identifying key visual concepts and their influence on policy outputs, and the uncertainty of the decisions. Given the interpretable evidence extracted from the policy's own decision process, we use a vision language model to rationalize and criticize failure modes of the current policy. These critics are then used to generate targeted adversarial scenarios for policy retraining and improvement. We demonstrate that SPHINX can highlight an interpretable account of policy failures while other adversarial scene generation cannot. Across the evaluated benchmarks and test suites, SPHINX can be applied to diverse state-of-the-art autonomous vehicle architectures and yields consistent robustness improvements over existing scenario-generation methods. --- ### GeneralVLA-2: Geometry-Aware Reconstruction and Governed Memory for Robot Planning Authors: Haoyu Wang, Guoqing Ma, Zeyu Zhang, Yandong Guo, Boxin Shi, Hao Tang Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17480v1 Generalist vision-language-action systems need object-centric 3D evidence and reusable manipulation experience to plan reliable robot trajectories. GeneralVLA provides a hierarchical interface for converting language and RGB-D observations into 3D end-effector paths, but two bottlenecks remain. First, monocular SAM3D-style object reconstruction can hallucinate pose and unseen geometry, while manipulation benefits from stable object shape when calibrated multi-view observations are available. Second, the original KnowledgeBank mainly retrieves semantically similar snippets and appends new knowledge, which makes it difficult to control memory quality, conflicts, confidence, and geometric relevance. To address the first challenge, we introduce GeoFuse-MV3D, a geometry-prior-guided MV-SAM3D reconstruction branch that verifies external geometry cues with input-view masks, applies soft visual-hull support, performs axis-wise refinement, and fuses only geometry while preserving appearance. To address the second challenge, we upgrade KnowledgeBank into a governed long-term memory system with explicit quality, confidence, lifecycle, verifier, and conflict metadata, together with precision-oriented retrieval. Finally, we evaluate the reconstruction branch on GSO-30 and the memory module on Terminal-Bench 2.0 and SWE-Bench Verified; GeoFuse-MV3D improves over the MV-SAM3D baseline by reducing CD and LPIPS by 2.20% and 2.02% while increasing PSNR and SSIM by 2.36% and 1.03%, and KnowledgeBank improves over ReasoningBank by 4.53% on Terminal-Bench SR and 3.73% on SWE-Bench resolve rate, while reducing AS by 4.95% and 5.65%, respectively. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/GeneralVLA-2. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/GeneralVLA-2. --- ### Decoding Hidden Deception in Reasoning LLMs: Activation Explainers for Deception Auditing Authors: Kexin Chen, Yi Liu, Haonan Zhang, Yanhui Li, Xinyu Deng, Dongxia Wang Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17478v1 As LLMs acquire stronger reasoning capabilities, deceptive behavior becomes an increasingly serious safety concern. Existing deception monitors either score visible transcripts or derive scalar probe scores from representation vectors, leaving little inspectable evidence about why a response is suspicious. We introduce STATEWITNESS, an activation explainer for deception auditing. A separate decoder reads a target model's hidden states, then answers natural-language queries or emits structured reports about them. We evaluate STATEWITNESS on two target reasoning LLMs across seven deception datasets. STATEWITNESS reaches 0.916 mean AUROC, a relative gain of 11.6% over the best black-box text monitor and 25.0% over the best activation-probe baseline under the same evaluation protocol. When combined with existing monitors, STATEWITNESS reduces missed deceptive examples in simple threshold ensembles. Beyond scalar detection, the decoder returns query-level answers, schema reports, and token- or sentence-level evidence traces for human inspection. We view this interface as a potential building block for broader interpretability and alignment tools. --- ### Theoretical Grounding of Out-Of-Distribution Detection With Reinforcement Learning Optimizer Authors: Salimeh Sekeh, Xin Zhang Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17477v1 Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection in dynamic open-world environments requires a model to continually adapt to evolving data distributions while generalizing to covariate-shifted inputs and rejecting semantic-shifted OOD examples. Most existing OOD detection methods optimize only the current-step objective and do not explicitly account for how post-deployment environment changes affect future OOD behavior. In this paper, we establish a theoretical grounding for dynamic OOD detection using a reinforcement learning (RL)-guided optimizer that explicitly favors updates that reduce the semantic OOD false positive rate over time. We develop a novel augmented optimizer that uses an RL-guided correction term on top of standard gradient descent (GD) and show its improvement over both future-domain generalization and semantic-OOD rejection. We analyze temporal error decomposition in terms of model-change and environment-change generalization errors and develop a new theoretical framework for comparing the generalization errors under both GD and RL-guided optimizers. --- ### Multi-Adapter PPO: A Cross-Attention Enhanced Wavelength Selection Framework for LIBS Quantitative Analysis Authors: Hao Li, Man Fung Zhuo Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17476v1 Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) quantitative analysis faces critical challenges in wavelength selection due to high-dimensional spectral data and the fundamental trade-off between prediction accuracy and feature efficiency. This paper presents a novel Multi-Adapter PPO framework that transforms wavelength selection into a reinforcement learning problem, leveraging cross-attention mechanisms and multiple specialized adapters to capture complex spectral relationships. Our approach outperforms traditional Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) by an average of 28.4\% in comprehensive score and 45.2\% in prediction accuracy across steel and coal datasets. The proposed method demonstrates superior performance in balancing prediction accuracy with feature efficiency, achieving state-of-the-art results in LIBS quantitative analysis while maintaining interpretability and computational efficiency. We released our code and dataset here: https://github.com/Hflying/MAPPO --- ### StereoFactory: A Unified Merging Framework for Robust Stereo Matching Authors: Xianda Guo, Pinhan Fu, Ruilin Wang, Wenke Huang, Mang Ye, Qin Zou Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17475v1 Stereo matching has advanced through foundation models trained on large-scale datasets, yet this paradigm suffers from a scalability bottleneck: incorporating new data requires costly joint retraining. Model merging offers a scalable post-hoc alternative by integrating knowledge from specialized models after source checkpoints are available. However, existing merging methods typically retain all available models or rely on greedy inclusion, which can preserve harmful task-vector interference. We propose StereoFactory, a coarse-to-fine evolutionary framework for adaptive model merging. Stage~1 employs a genetic algorithm to search the combinatorial space of model subsets, determining which models should participate. Stage~2 addresses module-level knowledge specialization (different functional modules exhibit distinct preferences for knowledge sources) through CMA-ES optimization of architecture-adaptive routing over the selected task vectors, with optional module-level scaling. Experiments across two architectures and four benchmarks demonstrate that StereoFactory consistently achieves the best four-benchmark average under the same checkpoint pool, reducing the average error from 3.80 to 3.30 on NMRF and from 2.88 to 2.19 on FoundationStereo relative to the strongest controlled baseline. The post-hoc search requires only 2.7--3.7\% of the corresponding joint-retraining wall-clock time. Analysis reveals that knowledge contributions are inherently module-specific, and selected subsets can transfer across architectures with minimal degradation. Code will be publicly released upon acceptance at: https://github.com/XiandaGuo/StereoFactory. --- ### AIPatient Arena: EHR-grounded evaluation of large language models in end-to-end clinical consultation workflows Authors: Jiahui Niu, Huizi Yu, Wenkong Wang, Guangxin Dai, Jingxian He, Xiang Li, Zhiying Liang, Xinxin Lin, Kent CY So, Bryan YP Yan, Yun Kwok Wing, Yanqiu Xing et al. Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17474v1 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly considered for use in clinical consultation tasks, yet most medical evaluations remain static, single-turn, or narrowly outcome-based, limiting their ability to reflect the sequential, uncertain, and interactive nature of real-world care. Here, we propose AIPatient Arena, an EHRs-grounded evaluation framework for assessing the clinical utility of LLMs across eight dimensions of clinical competence. The framework integrates EHR data into patient-specific knowledge graphs, enabling multi-turn physician-patient interactions. We applied AIPatient Arena on a primary cohort of 437 patients and two out-of-distribution validation cohorts of 119 and 67 patients. We observe that LLMs performed well in medical interview questioning skills (QS; mean scores, 4.43-4.99/5), ethical and professional conduct (ET; 4.38-4.93/5), and clarity and transparency of clinical explanations (EX; 3.80-4.72/5). Performance was moderate in information integration (II; 3.19-4.21/5) and medication safety and justification (MS; 3.13-3.78/5), but persistent weaknesses were observed in handling of ambiguous patient responses (HR; 2.57-3.32/5), information coverage (IC; 2.08-3.02/5), and diagnostic accuracy and reasoning (Dx; 2.63-3.55/5). Process-based evaluation revealed recurrent interaction failures, including repetitive questioning, omission of past medical history, and inadequate handling of uncertainty. Richer conversational context improved diagnostic reasoning but yielded limited gains in treatment planning. These findings indicate that final-answer accuracy alone is insufficient for evaluating clinical readiness and highlight the importance of assessing how models gather, interpret, and communicate information throughout a consultation. AIPatient Arena provides an EHR-grounded framework for workflow-oriented pre-deployment evaluation of medical LLMs. --- ### ReRAM-aware Model Finetuning addressing I-V Non-linearity and Retention Errors Authors: Ching-Yi Lin, Shamik Kundu, Arnab Raha, Sahil Shah Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17471v3 Traditional CPU, GPU, and NPU architectures are increasingly limited by the von Neumann bottleneck. While In-Memory Computing (IMC) using ReRAM crossbar arrays offers a high-density, energy-efficient alternative, its practical deployment is constrained through their non-idealities. Existing hardware-aware training frameworks often require training from scratch, which is computationally prohibitive for modern large-scale models. In this work, we propose a finetuning-based hardware-aware training algorithm that enables robust DNN deployment on ReRAM with minimal training overhead. Our approach mitigates I-V non-linearity by applying a range-shrunk sinh transformation and incorporates retention errors directly into a regularization loss during the finetuning process. We evaluate our framework across models and tasks such as image classification and question-answering (QA). Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves similar accuracy on large-scale models like ResNet18 and DeiT-Tiny as the base model. In-case of ImageNet for MobileNetV3 families the technique has only less than 2% accuracy degradation. Further, applying the technique on the SQuAD v2 dataset results in only 1 point degradation of F-1 score. --- ### PARSE: Provenance-Aware Retrieval Sanitization for Professional Domain LLM Agents Authors: Aaditya Pai Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CR, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17467v2 Prompt injection defenses evaluated on synthetic benchmarks do not generalize to real enterprise documents, which are longer, denser, and interleave legitimate authority language with factual content. We demonstrate this gap with a real-document benchmark of 122 tasks across five professional domains (financial, legal, medical, scientific, DevOps) using actual SEC filings, Federal Register rules, PubMed abstracts, arXiv papers, and GitHub postmortems. Paraphrasing, the strongest defense on synthetic benchmarks, shows no statistically significant attack success rate reduction on real documents (p=0.500) while degrading utility from 91.8% to 82.8%. We introduce PARSE (Provenance-Aware Retrieval Sanitization), a domain-aware, fact-preserving sanitization pipeline that classifies each sentence by injection likelihood, extracts structured facts before rewriting, and verifies fact preservation via a consistency-checking loop. A directiveness gate routes 59% of real enterprise documents to a lightweight path, concentrating computational cost on high-risk documents. PARSE achieves 15.6% attack success rate -- a 38% reduction versus the 25.4% baseline -- at 86.9% utility, the only condition that is both statistically significant (p=0.014, adequately powered) and maintains near-baseline utility. Practitioners should evaluate defenses on domain-matched real documents, not synthetic proxies. --- ### Perron--Frobenius Operator Matching for Generative Modeling Authors: Shiqi Zhang, Wuwei Wu, Jaemin Oh, Jie Chen, Xiaoning Qian Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17465v1 We introduce Perron--Frobenius Operator Matching (PFOM), a generative framework that matches density evolution via the integral PF operator, subsuming flow, diffusion, and jump models. We prove that among Bregman divergences, only Kullback--Leibler divergence preserves equality between density-level and sample-conditioned objectives, yielding a practical loss equivalent to Koopman path matching. We further develop Nesterov-accelerated training and sampling that stabilize discretization and accelerate convergence. %On Gaussian mixtures and two-moons, PFOM achieves faster KL/$W_2$/MMD decrease and improved wall-clock efficiency with empirical validation. PFOM unifies operator-theoretic identification with modern generative modeling and opens paths to adaptive dictionaries and high-dimensional applications. --- ### CheckMIABench: Firm Foundations For Membership Inference Attacks on Language Models Authors: Jeffrey G. Wang, Jason Wang, Marvin Li, Seth Neel Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17464v1 Membership inference attacks (MIAs) are a canonical way to assess a machine learning model's privacy properties. Although several attempts have been made to evaluate MIAs on language models, the extant literature has suffered numerous difficulties in constructing clean evaluations to test new techniques. In particular, subtle distribution shifts between member and non-member sets can undermine the statistical validity of MIAs; recent work has underscored this by showing that "blind" methods with no access to the underlying model can perform far better than published methods on the same benchmarks. This paper constructs a benchmark for principled evaluation of MIAs against LLMs, by leveraging the insight that training data before and after a fixed point during training are drawn from the same distribution. Therefore, all open-source models with intermediate checkpoints and public training data can be converted into MIA testbeds. We apply our framework to a half-dozen published attacks on the Pythia and OLMo family of models, from 70M to 7B parameters. To facilitate further privacy research, we open-source a modular library for designing and implementing attacks in this setting: https://github.com/safr-ai-lab/pandora_llm. --- ### WeaveLA: Event Driven Cross-Subtask Latent Memory Weaving for Repetitive Robot Manipulation Authors: Shoujing Zhu, Zhenyang Liu, Fungmiu Wang, Jiafeng Wang, Bo Yue, Guiliang Liu, Simo Wu, Xiangyang Xue, Taiping Zeng Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17463v1 Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies have achieved remarkable single-step manipulation, yet they remain brittle precisely where each stage depends on what was just completed. The core issue is structural: short-window VLAs lack an explicit channel for rouxting information across sub-task boundaries, and existing memory-augmented variants either write at every frame, retrieve from demonstration-time stages, or fire at sub-goal events without performing an explicit sub-task-to-sub-task hand-off into the action expert. We identify the sub-goal completion event as the natural temporal unit for cross-subtask memory hand-off, and present WeaveLA (Weave Latent memory for Vision-Language-Action policies), a cross-subtask memory interface that, on top of a frozen VLA backbone, compresses each completed segment into latent tokens via query-driven attention pooling and routes them directly into the action-generation path of the next sub-task. This event-triggered, action-side design preserves the base policy's short-window interface while adding a lightweight cross-subtask channel. Through stratified evaluation on RoboMME with a $π_{0.5}$ backbone, WeaveLA's gains land exactly where the channel is needed: on the hardest repetition slice (SwingXtimes, $N{=}3$), success rises from $0\%$ to $47.8\%$, while single-execution episodes remain unchanged. Per-episode paired analysis confirms the gains are confined to tasks whose causal structure requires cross-subtask information. --- ### ResAware: Cross-Environment Website Fingerprinting via Resource-Privileged Distillation Authors: Chongru Fan, Wei Wang, Wentao Huang, Zhenquan Ding, Jinqiao Shi, Lei Cui, Zhiyu Hao, Xiaochun Yun Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.NI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17462v1 While Website Fingerprinting (WF) attacks achieve high accuracy in controlled laboratory settings, they often degrade substantially in real-world environments due to spatio-temporal drift, browser heterogeneity, proxy obfuscation and etc. This limitation stems from their sole reliance on low-level traffic features that are noisy and highly sensitive to environmental perturbations. To address this problem, we propose \textbf{ResAware}, a cross-environment resource-aware distillation framework under a \textit{training-rich/inference-poor} asymmetric setting. Specifically, ResAware trains a teacher model on resource-level features, and then distills the resulting privileged knowledge into a student model through heterogeneous knowledge distillation. At deployment time, the student model performs inference using only encrypted traffic, incurring zero additional cost. We evaluate ResAware on a large-scale dataset collected over five months from six globally distributed vantage points, comprising more than $160{,}000$ paired samples. The results show that ResAware significantly enhances the cross-environment robustness of diverse WF baselines. Under a 150-day temporal drift, for example, ResAware improves the F1-score of Var-CNN from $72.77\%$ to $81.49\%$ and the open-world $TPR@1\%FPR$ from $22.40\%$ to $27.20\%$. Our results demonstrate that resource-level supervision improves WF robustness without expanding online observation capabilities. --- ### AUTOGATE: Automated Clock Gating via Toggling-Aware LLM-based RTL Rewriting Authors: Yiting Wang, Chenhui Deng, Chia-Tung Ho, Yanqing Zhang, Zhuo Feng, Cunxi Yu, Ang Li, Gang Qu, Brucek Khailany Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.AR, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17461v1 Fine-grain clock gating (FGCG) is among the most effective techniques for reducing dynamic power, yet current FGCG optimization flows remain largely manual. Recent LLM-based RTL optimization approaches remain limited by two key drawbacks: (1) the inability to process long waveform traces spanning millions of cycles, and (2) the difficulty of scaling optimization to large hierarchical codebases while preserving correctness. In this work, we present AUTOGATE, the first agentic framework for industry-grade RTL power optimization, enabling workload-aware clock-gating optimization across large hierarchical codebases. AUTOGATE introduces a Machine Learning (ML)-LLM co-design that bridges waveform-level analysis and RTL rewriting. Specifically, we design an ML-based clustering algorithm that distills raw toggling traces into compact, structured representations that guide LLM-based RTL rewriting. This enables accurate identification and application of clock-gating opportunities without requiring LLMs to directly process raw waveform data. To enhance scalability, AUTOGATE employs a hierarchical multi-agent architecture that decomposes large designs into independently optimizable modules, enabling coordinated optimization across deep design hierarchies. We evaluate AUTOGATE on a diverse set of designs ranging from small RTL designs to large industrial-grade codebases. Experimental results show that AUTOGATE consistently reduces dynamic power relative to baselines. Across the small-design suite, AUTOGATE reduces dynamic power by 49.31% on average. On industry-scale designs, it achieves 19.34% and 7.96% dynamic power reductions on NVDLA and BlackParrot, respectively, and up to 6.86% on highly optimized proprietary production designs. --- ### Operator Boosting Produces Pareto-Efficient PDE Surrogates Authors: Lennon J. Shikhman Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG, math.NA, physics.comp-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17460v2 Neural operators are widely used as surrogate solution maps for partial differential equations (PDEs), but full-size models can be costly to store, deploy, and evaluate in many-query scientific workflows. This work introduces Operator Boosting, a stagewise residual-learning framework for constructing compact neural-operator surrogates directly, rather than training a large model and compressing it afterward. Starting from the empirical mean predictor in normalized output coordinates, the method trains a sequence of tiny same-family neural operators on residual fields and incorporates each correction through validation-selected shrinkage. We instantiate the framework with Fourier neural operators (FNOs), DeepONets, and convolutional neural operators (CNOs), and compare boosted tiny stacks against full-size monolithic baselines across one-, two-, and three-dimensional PDE benchmarks from PDEBench, APEBench, and The Well. Across 30 dataset-architecture pairs, 21 show positive mean accuracy gains and 17 have positive confidence intervals, while all boosted stacks reduce trainable parameter count by approximately 72-95%. Best-model comparisons show empirical Pareto improvements on 7 of 10 completed PDE benchmarks, including two-dimensional Navier-Stokes, shallow-water dynamics, Darcy flow, one-dimensional transport and reaction systems, and three-dimensional compressible Navier-Stokes. These results show that Operator Boosting often improves the empirical accuracy-parameter Pareto frontier of neural PDE surrogates, while also exposing PDE- and architecture-dependent regimes where residual boosting fails to offset compression. --- ### Can LLMs Be CEOs? Benchmarking Strategic Resource Reallocation with Multi-Role Agent Simulation Authors: Yuyang Dai, Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Zhuohan Xie Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17459v1 Evaluating the decision-making capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is a growing research priority, yet existing benchmarks focus on isolated cognitive tasks such as reasoning, knowledge retrieval, and economic rationality in stylized settings. These evaluations overlook the defining challenge of real executive decision-making: integrating conflicting recommendations from specialized stakeholders under information asymmetry, organizational constraints, and temporal dependencies. We introduce \textsc{CEO-Bench}, a multi-agent benchmark that evaluates LLMs on CEO-level strategic resource reallocation -- the process of redirecting capital across business units in a multi-round, constraint-rich organizational environment. In \textsc{CEO-Bench}, LLM agents receive conflicting advice from four role-conditioned C-suite advisors (CFO, CTO, COO, CMO), each with private signals and distinct priorities, and must synthesize these into a concrete allocation plan evaluated along four dimensions: role integration, conditional boldness, history-sensitive judgment, and plan validity. Experiments across five frontier models on 13 scenarios reveal that all models achieve high structural validity but diverge sharply on strategic calibration -- the hardest capability layer. We identify systematic failure modes including single-advisor capture, conservative default under ambiguity, and historical amnesia, and uncover a structural integration-boldness tradeoff: models that engage more deeply with conflicting perspectives tend to produce less decisive action. These findings delineate the current capability boundary of LLMs as organizational decision-makers and inform the design of future AI-assisted executive systems. --- ### Dissecting model behavior through agent trajectories Authors: Gaurav Gupta, Vatshank Chaturvedi, Jun Huan, Anoop Deoras Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17454v2 AI agent performance is not just a modeling problem, it is fundamentally a systems problem. The advanced capabilities of models are realized through agent harnesses. Therefore, a gap between model assumptions and harness behavior can easily prevent the model's full capabilities from translating into agent performance. We formalize this as the `intent-execution' gap: the mismatch between what the model intends and what the harness executes, and vice versa. We argue that minimizing this intent-execution gap is as important as other aspects of harness design such as tools and execution loops. To illustrate the impact of this harness-model alignment, we develop a simple and customizable harness called `Simple Strands Agent' (SSA). SSA aims to find the bulk of common patterns which generalize across different model families (such as Claude, Gemini, GPT, Grok, Qwen), as well as a small number of model-specific preferences. We make two contributions: (i) we reproduce or improve on the pass@1 performance reported by diverse model-provider families on popular agentic benchmarks (SWE-Pro, SWE-Verified and Terminal-Bench-2), and (ii) building on an analysis of 138k trajectories generated by SSA, we look beyond the pass@1 numbers which tend to be relatively even across frontier models. By representing agent trajectories in code state-spaces, we observe model-level differences in problem-solving behavior. Finer-grained metrics such as edit frequency, testing activity, and phase-transitions reveal how individual models allocate effort across different stages of autonomous problem solving. --- ### MapSatisfyBench: Benchmarking Satisfaction-Aware Map Agents through Behavior-Grounded Implicit Decision Factors Authors: Lubin Bai, Mengyu Cao, Sixue Wang, Zhongwei Wan, Yue Pan, Jiale Hou, Xiang Li, Xiuyuan Zhang Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17453v2 Large language model agents are increasingly integrated into map services. Since map services are embedded in everyday-life scenarios rather than professional task settings, users often express their needs informally, resulting in underspecified queries with many unspoken needs, namely, implicit decision factors that are critical for user satisfaction. Although clarification is an effective way to mitigate this issue, it increases user burden in daily interaction, and a capable agent should first proactively recover such factors from available information sources. However, evaluating this ability is challenging. The first challenge is to determine which implicit decision factors are suitable for evaluation. A factor is evaluable only if it affects user acceptance and can be recovered from information available to the agent before it responds. Second, user satisfaction cannot be reliably represented by a single reference answer, requiring a benchmark that converts satisfaction-relevant factors into objective and quantifiable evaluation targets. To address these challenges, we propose a restore-identify-filter framework that reconstructs complete user needs from behavior-chain evidence, identifies implicit decision factors, and retains only those supported by pre-query evidence. Building on this methodology, we construct MapSatisfyBench from large-scale, real-world anonymized user data and annotate ground truth from five dimensions and enables full-chain evaluation of satisfaction-aware map agents. Experiments show that current agents generally perform well on explicit task completion, but remain limited in satisfying implicit decision factors and proactively acquiring the evidence needed for satisfaction-aware decisions. These findings establish MapSatisfyBench as a benchmark for shifting map-agent evaluation from task completion toward satisfaction-aware spatial decision making. --- ### Credibility-Weighted Pricing of Autonomous Vehicle Liability Under Operational Design Domain Shift Authors: Doyeon Jang Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17451v1 Automated Driving System deployments create a foundational ratemaking challenge: sparse experience, shifting operational design domains, and non-stationary risk across software releases. We propose a hierarchical Bayesian credibility framework pooling across cities, software versions, and territories via a learned ODD-similarity kernel, nesting Buhlmann-Straub as a limiting case. Demonstrated on 648 verified-engaged Waymo crashes across four U.S. metros from the NHTSA Standing General Order database against 116 million matched miles, city-aggregate credibility weights are moderate (0.12-0.46), partial pooling decisively outperforms no pooling, and a power analysis shows the learned kernel's advantage becomes detectable at approximately twelve deployed cities. --- ### A Machine-Learned Comorbidity Index Authors: Suleman Baloch, Kishlay Jha, Alberto M. Segre, Philip M. Polgreen, Bijaya Adhikari Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17450v1 Traditional comorbidity scores (e.g., Charlson and Elixhauser) are widely used for risk adjustment and patient stratification, but they have two key limitations: (i) they are largely mortality-centric and do not align well with other clinical outcomes, and (ii) their linear, rule-based structure cannot capture nonlinear, outcome-specific risk relationships. We propose a Machine-Learned Comorbidity Index (MLCI) that maps diagnosis codes to a single scalar by maximizing the normalized Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (nHSIC) between the learned score and multiple clinical outcomes. MLCI captures nonlinear risk-outcome dependence and is supported by a theory that characterizes when a unified, informative admission-level ordering can be achieved across outcomes. Empirical results on multiple benchmark electronic health record (EHR) datasets show that MLCI outperforms strong baselines across multiple evaluation metrics. --- ### MODE-RAG: Manifold Outlier Diagnosis and Energy-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation Evaluation Authors: Zehang Wei, Jiaxin Dai, Jiamin Yan, Xiang Xiang Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17449v1 While Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (M-RAG) enhances Large Vision-Language Models, it remains highly susceptible to cross-modal hallucinations, causal fabrications, and sycophancy. Furthermore, existing mitigation pipelines often face an intervention paradox: static rules tend to unnecessarily disrupt accurate generations, whereas leaving the multi-modal reasoning completely unguided allows existing mismatches to cascade into severe logical fabrications. To quantify and mitigate these hallucinations, we propose a Multi-Agent system, MODE-RAG, driven by Variational Free Energy (VFE) and internal attention states to dynamically gate interventions. High-risk queries are routed to five stage-specific agents, integrating Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for rigorous causal derivation and logit perturbations to penalize sycophancy. Dedicated Correction and Overseer agents ensure formatting stability and perform post-hoc factual verification. To objectively evaluate our approach, we introduce ModeVent, a challenging subset derived from the MultiVent dataset. Extensive experiments indicate that our system effectively reduces hallucination rates and logical fabrication, significantly improving the robustness of M-RAG systems. --- ### AnnotateAnything: Automatic Annotation of 3D Assets for Robot Manipulation Authors: Haoran Lu, Mutian Shen, Shuyang Yu, Yu Xiao, Songling Liu, Jianshu Zhang, Shang Wu, Yue Chen, Guo Ye, Jiayi Wang, Zhaoran Wang, Han Liu Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17446v1 Simulation enables scalable robot data collection, but raw 3D assets provide only geometry, lacking the semantic, interactive, and physical knowledge needed to specify where and how robots should act. In this work, we present AnnotateAnything, a general automatic annotation framework that converts passive 3D assets into manipulation-ready assets with structured, diverse, and executable manipulation labels. AnnotateAnything is built around two complementary pipelines. First, a unified visual-language annotation pipeline using vision-language reasoning to infer object semantics, interaction constraints, and 3D-grounded cues, providing human-prior guidance for identifying meaningful interaction regions. Second, a fully automatic and massively parallel physics annotation pipeline grounds these priors in each asset's geometry and physical constraints through candidate generation, geometry optimization and trajectory generation. This pipeline produces diverse and executable action annotations, including grasp poses, dexterous contacts, articulation waypoints, insertion directions, hanging affordances, and navigation targets. Using the generated annotations, we further build an asynchronous parallel simulation data-collection system across diverse objects, tasks, and robot embodiments. Experiments demonstrate that AnnotateAnything achieves superior annotation efficiency, data-collection efficiency, and task success rates over existing annotation and data-generation pipelines, while also supporting downstream tasks such as affordance detection, robotic VQA, and visual instruction finetuning. We provide project materials on the project page and plan to release the full code, annotations, and benchmark to facilitate future research. Videos, code, demo assets, and annotations are provided in supplementary materials Project page: https://tourmaline-caramel-169490.netlify.app. --- ### Toward Controllable Catalyst Inverse Design via Large-Scale Autoregressive Pretraining Authors: Dong Hyeon Mok, Jonggeol Na, Seoin Back Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG, cond-mat.mtrl-sci, physics.chem-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17445v1 Inverse design of heterogeneous catalysts remains challenging because catalyst surfaces exhibit substantial structural complexity with coupled surface-adsorbate interactions across a vast chemical space that is difficult to explore efficiently through conventional screening alone. Although machine learning-based high-throughput screening has accelerated catalyst discovery, its efficiency inevitably declines as the search space grows, motivating the development of generative models that can directly construct catalysts with target properties. Here, we present a conditional catalyst generative model based on the Generative Pretrained Transformer architecture with a numerical embedding layer that enables the generation of catalyst structures conditioned on both categorical and continuous properties within a single autoregressive framework. The model was pretrained on 133 million catalyst structures and subsequently fine-tuned on approximately 460,000 optimized structures with associated categorical properties and binding energies for conditional generation. The resulting model achieved 98% structural validity, 95% optimization validity, and high categorical condition fidelity, with a 93 % joint match rate for adsorbate type and composition. For binding energy conditioning, the match rate of approximately 20% represents a four-fold improvement over the baseline training distribution, and the generated distributions shift systematically toward the target values, enabling a 1.5 to 4-fold improvement in screening efficiency for reaction-targeted catalyst discovery without additional fine-tuning. These results show that large-scale autoregressive pre-training, combined with explicit property conditioning, provides a practical route toward controllable catalyst generation and accelerated catalysts discovery. --- ### Incumbent Advantage: Brand Bias and Cognitive Manipulation Dynamics in LLM Recommendation Systems Authors: Xi Chu, Yupeng Hou Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17443v1 Large language models (LLMs) are becoming a major way for consumers to find products, but we do not yet understand how brands compete in this new channel. We study brand dynamics in LLM recommendations using skincare products -- a category where consumers cannot easily judge quality before buying and must rely on brand reputation -- across three commercial LLMs (GPT-4o-mini, Claude Sonnet, Gemini 3 Flash), with a robustness check on search goods. In three experiments, we find: (1) a Conditional Monopoly where well-known brands get recommended 100% of the time (IAI = 10.0) when all products have the same specifications, but this dominance disappears with less than a +0.1-star rating advantage for a competitor; (2) authority-style marketing language, including fabricated clinical-evidence claims, breaks this monopoly at a Bias Surplus Value equal to +0.17 rating points, with each model responding differently; and (3) a social dilemma in multi-brand GEO competition: when all brands adopt the same optimization strategy, individual payoff falls from +0.802 to +0.007 in our payoff proxy, and non-participating brands receive zero recommendations in our tests. Our results suggest that generative engine optimization (GEO) should be studied not only as a security risk, but also as an emerging marketing practice that shapes market competition. --- ### Contact-Based Fringe Projection Profilometry for High-Resolution 3-D Surface Measurement of Reflective and Transparent Objects Authors: Ingu Yeo, Hyung-Gun Chi, Jae-Sang Hyun Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17438v1 This paper presents a contact-based 3-D surface measurement method based on a Digital Fringe Projection (DFP) system, belonging to the vision-based tactile sensing family pioneered by the commercially successful GelSight sensor. Such sensors have proven effective for robotic fingertip manipulation and contact sensing. However, because GelSight employs photometric stereo with RGB LEDs, it does not measure absolute depth directly but instead infers it by integrating estimated surface gradients, which can accumulate reconstruction errors; in addition, it becomes increasingly difficult to calibrate as the sensing area grows, and its depth accuracy is challenged on highly reflective or transparent objects. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a fringe-projection-based contact measurement technique that performs triangulation-based 3-D reconstruction on a coated silicone contact surface, providing dense per-pixel surface geometry and full-field 3-D shape measurement over the contact region. By integrating high-accuracy digital fringe projection into the sensor, our approach simplifies calibration over larger areas and enhances depth precision for complex surfaces. Experimental results, including a direct comparison with a GelSight Mini sensor, a sphere-fitting accuracy evaluation, and an uncertainty analysis, confirm that the proposed method significantly improves the accuracy and stability of structured-light-based 3-D measurements, allowing reliable reconstruction of objects with diverse optical properties. --- ### Spatio-Temporal Fusion Model for Standard View Classification of Echocardiographic Videos Authors: Bo Gou, Jicheng Zhang, Jianlong Xiong, Tao He, Bentian Liu, Hai Wu, Yijiao Wang, Yu Zhang, Yujia Yang, Yun Dai, Jian Liu, Jie Wang Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17437v1 Automated classification of standard echocardiographic views is crucial for efficient clinical workflow but faces three main challenges. First, publicly available datasets are scarce and limited in scale and view coverage. Second, the performance of some modern video-level architectures for echocardiographic view classification remains underexplored. Third, some view categories exhibit highly similar spatial appearances, making single-frame features insufficient for discrimination, while heterogeneous frame quality complicates robust temporal information fusion. To address these challenges, we release the Echocardiographic Videos of Nine Views (EV9V) dataset, comprising 5,138 videos, 910,579 frames, and 9 standard views, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the largest publicly available echocardiography video dataset. Using EV9V, we systematically benchmark representative video classification architectures, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and Transformers. Furthermore, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Fusion Model (STFM), an efficient dual-stream CNN-LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) framework that jointly captures spatial anatomical structures and temporal cardiac dynamics. The proposed framework leverages uncertainty-aware learning to preferentially sample representative video segments during training and evidence-based fusion during inference, improving robustness to variations in frame quality across echocardiographic videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance across diverse video classification models, validating the effectiveness of uncertainty-aware spatio-temporal learning for echocardiographic view classification. The code is available at https://github.com/bgx666/stfm. --- ### UoU: A Universal Fingerprint Foundation Model Based on Large-Scale Unsupervised Learning Authors: Xiongjun Guan, Jianjiang Feng, Jie Zhou Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17436v1 Fingerprint recognition is still dominated by task-specific pipelines, where enhancement, structural parsing, alignment, and matching are optimized in isolation. Although effective in narrow settings, this design limits representation reuse across sensors, qualities, and downstream applications. We therefore present UoU, short for ``a \textbf{U}niversal fingerprint foundation model based \textbf{o}n large-scale \textbf{U}nsupervised learning,'' which reframes fingerprint feature extraction as a domain-specific foundation-model problem. UoU is organized around a multi-level representation hierarchy spanning image restoration, structural fields, semantic tokens, point-level biometric entities, and compact global descriptors. Its training recipe combines a supervised cold start on precise annotations, large-scale weakly supervised refinement, and large-scale unsupervised consolidation, with the latter two stages iterated during large-scale training so that weak supervision broadens semantic coverage while unsupervised learning stabilizes correspondences, invariances, and representation geometry. Rather than treating fingerprint imagery as generic texture, UoU exploits domain-specific symmetries and intermediate structure, including orientation flow, periodic ridge patterns, sparse biometric entities, and spatial equivariance. The framework is intentionally architecture-agnostic: while the present study includes an initial transformer-based structured-prediction instantiation, the broader design supports multi-task learning, scalable model configurations, and downstream specialization for matching, alignment, enhancement, registration, and related fingerprint applications. This paper presents the technical motivation, system design, and validation protocol of UoU, and part of the baseline implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/XiongjunGuan/UoU. --- ### MorphStrata: Layer-Specific Perturbations for Generating Morphence Students in Time-Series Moving Target Defense Authors: Abhishek Bhardwaj, Arnav Doshi, Anusri Nagarajan, Thanh Quynh Nhu Ta, Mohammad Masum, Robert Chun, Jaydip Sen, Saptarshi Sengupta Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17435v2 Time-series forecasting models remain vulnerable to gradient-based adversarial attacks while existing defense mechanisms typically incur a trade-off in robustness for bounded response and compute cost. The problem is pronounced in Moving Target Defense where maintaining multiple randomized model instances substantially exacerbates the training overhead. In this work, we introduce MorphStrata, a student generation strategy with selective, layer-specific stochastic noise injection that extends the traditional Morphence defense. MorphStrata uses a Transformer backbone as the teacher and perturbs randomly selected architectural blocks to create structured heterogeneity across student models in response to varied data distributions and threat models. We evaluate against vanilla Transformer and Morphence backbones on a suite of benchmarks including the Jena Climate, Electricity Load Diagrams, and Appliances Energy Prediction using FGSM, BIM and PGD attacks across multiple attack strengths. Across datasets and attack regimes, the proposed ensemble maintains comparable adversarial RMSE. Specifically, for high entropy, periodic datasets as in the case of the AEP data, MorphStrata achieves the lowest RMSE across all attacks and perturbation budgets, improving over the static baseline by up to 24.11% and 97.97% under FGSM and BIM respectively at an epsilon value of 0.5 over 30 randomized trials. Targeting the layers to generate MorphStrata students accounts for less than 1% increase in train-times over the Morphence MTD baseline for most of the experiments, while accounting for double digit gains in adversarial RMSE reduction. We also observe a positive correlation between higher pairwise L2 distance (among generated students) and overall defense effectiveness. In summary, MorphStrata maintains adversarial robustness as an MTD defense at marginal cost deltas when compared to existing baselines. --- ### LADBench: A Benchmark for Logical Fault Detection in Images Authors: Sahasra Kondapalli, Lara Radovanovic, Aadi Palnitkar, Mingyang Mao, Xiaomin Lin Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17433v1 Large Vision Language Models (VLMs) excel at visual question answering and semantic grounding, but their capacity for autonomous logical reasoning remains underexplored. Existing anomaly benchmarks emphasize visual errors or direct prompting rather than the physical and social common sense needed for open-world deployment. To address this, we introduce LAD-bench, a benchmark of more than 1,000 curated synthetic images with logical anomalies across four domains: Residential, Urban, Collaborative, and Nature. We further propose a Tiered Prompting Protocol based on progressive disclosure, which measures how much explicit assistance a model needs to localize and reason about a logical fault. Evaluating leading foundation models reveals substantial weaknesses: even the best achieves only 70.11% overall accuracy, showing that implicit logical fault detection remains unsolved. Crucially, models often fail to identify anomalies even after receiving explicit hints in deeper tiers. By surfacing these limitations in sequential multimodal reasoning, LAD-Bench offers a rigorous framework for advancing the safety, reliability, and cognitive alignment of autonomous visual systems. Dataset and Code: https://huggingface.co/datasets/SahasraK/LADBench --- ### Edit3DGS: Unified Framework for Dynamic Head Editing via 2D Instruction-Guided Diffusion and 3D Gaussian Splatting Authors: Duy-Dat Tran, Trung-Nghia Le Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.GR, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17432v1 We present Edit3DGS, a unified framework for dynamic 3D head editing that integrates 2D instruction-guided diffusion with 3D Gaussian splatting. Unlike prior approaches that separately address frame-based edits or static 3D reconstruction, our method couples semantic controllability in the image domain with photorealistic, temporally consistent 3D representations. Given an input video, editable facial regions are masked and modified using a text-conditioned diffusion model to support fine-grained operations such as expression transformation, attribute modification, and appearance refinement. The edited frames are then aggregated through 3D Gaussian splatting to produce a coherent, high-fidelity avatar that preserves both identity and motion dynamics. To enforce consistency, Edit3DGS incorporates multi-view batch editing and lightweight inpainting strategies that recover lost expressions across timesteps. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework enables controllable, artifact-free head editing with smooth temporal transitions, offering practical applications in virtual avatars, immersive communication, film production, and interactive media. --- ### Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Silhouette-Guided Animal Art Authors: Quoc-Duy Tran, Anh-Tuan Vo, Trung-Nghia Le Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17431v1 Generative AI has advanced the ability to render photorealistic or artistic images, yet it remains limited in a key aspect of human creativity: interpreting ambiguous shapes. This phenomenon, rooted in pareidolia, allows humans to perceive meaningful forms in random patterns such as clouds, stones, or leaves. To computationally replicate this imaginative process, we introduce Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Visual-RAG), a framework that generates animal art directly from natural silhouettes. Our method retrieves structurally similar animal shapes from a curated corpus of 28,586 high-quality silhouettes and uses them as reference exemplars to guide diffusion-based generation with ControlNet and IP-Adapter. Ablation studies confirm that shape Context with RANSAC provides the most accurate alignment, while removing shape standardization reduces the inlier ratio to just 13.4\%, underscoring the importance of structural fidelity in Visual-RAG. A user study with 12 participants evaluated the outputs in terms of aesthetics, silhouette fidelity, and overall impression. Results reveal that while Visual-RAG provides plausible interpretations, challenges remain in achieving high perceptual impact. This work lays the foundation for computational pareidolia, showing how machines can contribute to the early stages of imaginative discovery. --- ### CIAN: Multi-Stage Framework for Event-Enriched Image Captioning via Retrieval-Augmented Generation Authors: Trinh Thi Thu Hien, Trung-Nghia Le Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17430v1 Event-enriched image captioning describes not only visible content but also the broader context of events, including timing, location, and participants, capabilities missing in most pixel-bound models. We propose the Contextual Image-Article Narrator (CIAN), a multi-stage framework that enriches captions with external narratives. CIAN retrieves relevant articles using SigLIP, summarizes them to guide a Narrative Generation stage with a LoRA-fine-tuned Qwen model, and applies N-Gram-based Refinement for fluency and coherence. On the OpenEvents-V1 benchmark, CIAN achieves high retrieval performance (mAP 0.979) and improves caption quality, increasing CIDEr from 0.030 to 0.094. These results highlight the effectiveness of retrieval-augmented reasoning combined with linguistic refinement for generating context-aware, human-like captions. --- ### Impact of Hand Impairment and Occlusions on Hand Pose Estimation Accuracy in Augmented Reality Applications Authors: Damian M. Manzone, Mathew Szymanowski, Olga Taran, Shuo Cai, Melissa Marquez-Chin, Tammy Zeng, Hardeep Singh, Cesar Marquez-Chin, José Zariffa Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.CV, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17427v1 Mixed reality applications can be designed for hand rehabilitation. Augmented reality (AR) head mounted displays (HMDs) specifically allow for ecologically valid tasks because individuals can see their real environment and interact with real objects while receiving additional cues on the HMD. While these applications rely on accurate hand pose estimation, there is a gap in investigating the influence of hand impairment or occlusion from real-object interactions on pose estimation accuracy. Further, comparisons between AR HMD predictions and state-of-the-art pose estimation methods have not been established. The current study assessed pose estimation accuracy of the HoloLens 2 HMD and state-of-the-art pose estimation algorithms (WiLoR, HaMeR, WildHands, and MediaPipe) while individuals with cervical spinal cord injury (cSCI; n = 13, Neurological Level of Injury: C3-C6; American Spinal Injury Association Impairment Scale: A-D) and 15 uninjured controls interacted with clear and opaque objects. Ground truth estimates of 3D joint positions were generated via triangulation from a multi-camera setup. Pose estimation accuracy did not differ between the cSCI and uninjured control groups suggesting that 3D joint predictions from the HoloLens 2 and pose estimation algorithms can generalize to populations with hand impairment. Further, clear objects provided a small accuracy advantage over opaque objects (0.1 mm) and predictions from both WiLoR and HaMeR were slightly more accurate than the HoloLens 2 (2 mm). Overall, these results suggest that the HoloLens 2 may be viable for hand rehabilitation applications and the dataset generated can be used to refine pose estimation methods for hand-impaired populations. --- ### Bounded Difference Concentration for Infinitely Exchangeable Sequences with Applications to AI Benchmark Uncertainty Authors: Fangyuan Lin, Spencer Frei, Victor H. de la Pena Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.PR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17426v1 We consider the concentration properties of functions of infinitely exchangeable random variables. By conditioning on the de Finetti directing measure, we show that the deviation of any function with bounded-difference constants $c_1, \dots, c_n$ decomposes into a conditional sampling fluctuation and a latent mixture fluctuation. When this latent mixture is $σ_{\mathrm{mix}}^2$-subgaussian, we establish a concentration inequality with an effective variance proxy of $\frac{1}{4}\sum_i c_i^2 + σ_{\mathrm{mix}}^2$. Crucially, we demonstrate that for zero-sum linear contrasts, such as the difference between a subsample mean and a full population mean, the latent mixture term cancels exactly. This cancellation yields a tight, mixture-free Hoeffding-type bound that provides a direct de Finetti mechanism for the infinite-extendibility limit of recent finite-exchangeable concentration results. We apply this framework to quantify uncertainty in composite AI benchmarks, such as MMLU, where question items naturally exhibit exchangeable dependence across domains. Our results provide both a domain-stratified hierarchical model for bounding the uncertainty of accuracy scores, and a distribution-free, cost-saving statistical guarantee for accurately estimating full benchmark scores from random subsets. --- ### Martingale Doppelgänger-Eval: An Identification Framework for Auditing Candlestick Understanding in Vision-Language Models Authors: Ziyao Wang Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: q-fin.CP, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17423v1 We introduce Martingale Doppelgänger-Eval, a public shadow-market benchmark for auditing whether vision-language models (VLMs) use candlestick evidence rather than extrapolate past trends. The central difficulty is identification: on real market histories, chart evidence and trend are strongly coupled, so an observational score cannot determine whether a fluent technical-analysis narrative is grounded in local visual evidence. We prove this limitation formally: no evaluation functional computed from observational chart--label data can distinguish a grounded responder from a trend-shortcut responder under strong coupling, whereas matched evidence interventions separate the same responders at an exponential rate and trend--label swaps provide an independent shortcut stress test. The benchmark therefore evaluates frozen VLMs on rendered OHLCV charts under four controlled mechanisms: a martingale-null market, injected-alpha counterfactual pairs, trend-confounder swaps, and regime shifts. A structural behavioral model identifies null-market bias, trend sensitivity, evidence sensitivity, prompt/renderer fragility, and evidence faithfulness; the accompanying statistical toolkit provides minimum detectable effects, block-aware sequential testing for metered APIs, and an overlap-weighted artifact check. Across frozen commercial and open VLMs, the identified regression assigns large positive coefficients to past trend but evidence coefficients that are zero or opposite to the rule-implied sign. Matched-pair analyses show that models either ignore injected candlestick semantics or move opposite to the rule-implied direction conditional on responding. The benchmark isolates a failure mode that standard observational chart benchmarks cannot detect and gives a reusable audit template for time-series imagery with controllable label mechanisms. --- ### Feynman Kac Reweighted Schrödinger Bridge Matching for Surface-Based Tau PET Harmonization Authors: Jianwei Zhang, Xinyu Nie, Jiaxin Yue, Yonggang Shi Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: eess.IV, cs.AI, q-bio.QM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17420v2 Tau positron emission tomography (PET) is widely used for the in vivo characterization of disease stage and progression in Alzheimer's disease (AD). With the adoption of multiple tau PET tracers including AV-1451, PI-2620, MK-6240 with different binding behaviors in various large-scale studies, there is a great need of effective harmonization methods to enable the cross-tracer integration of tau PET datasets. While previous methods such as CenTauR were proposed to standardize scalar tau PET measures, they are limited in accounting for the heterogeneity of tau pathology. In this work, we propose Feynman-Kac Reweighted Schrödinger Bridge Matching (FKRSBM), a surface-based framework for cross-tracer tau PET harmonization. FKRSBM learns a direct stochastic transport between tracer domains using Schrödinger Bridge matching, avoiding the Gaussian-prior routing used in diffusion-based translation. To promote biologically consistent transport, FKRSBM introduces an endpoint penalty favoring bridge pairings with matched tau-pathology status and implements it through a Feynman-Kac reweighted endpoint proposal. To preserve cortical organization, FKRSBM uses a spherical convolutional network for vertex-level harmonization on cortical surface meshes. In our experiments, we demonstrate our method by harmonizing Tau PET images acquired with the AV-1451 (n=1480) and PI-2620 (n=2458) tracers from two large-scale datasets. Compared to previous methods including ComBat, CycleGAN, Diffusion Model(DF), and unregularized Schrödinger Bridge Model(DSBM), the proposed FKRSBM method outperforms these baselines in subgroup-level alignment, tau-positivity consistency, and diagnostic classification while preserving subject-specific cortical topography of tau pathology. The code is available at: https://github.com/jianweizhang17/FKRSBM. --- ### Generalization Guarantees for Multi-Input Neural Operator Learning in Sobolev Spaces Authors: Yahong Yang, Zecheng Zhang, Wei Zhu, Wenjing Liao, Hao Liu Published: 2026-06-16 Categories: cs.LG, math.NA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17419v1 We develop approximation and generalization error estimates for multi-input neural operators, with the output error measured in Sobolev norms. In contrast to standard operator-learning settings with a single input function, our framework allows multiple input functions defined on possibly different domains, with different dimensions and Sobolev regularities. The derived rates explicitly quantify the contribution of each input space to the final error bound. In particular, in the balanced regime, the approximation and generalization rates are governed by the interaction between the input dimensions, regularities, and Sobolev orders, while the dependence on the model complexity retains a \(\log\log/\log\)-type structure. Our analysis provides a general theoretical framework for multi-input operator learning, including Sobolev training, and is applicable to operator learning problems arising from partial differential equations and scientific computing. ---