# Research Papers — 2026-06 · bundle page 131 of 260 > Full-text markdown of papers #6501–6550 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/131 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/130.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/132.md) ### XAI-Grounded Explanation Generation for Speech Deepfake Detection with Training-Free Multimodal Large Language Models Authors: Yupei Li, Qiyang Sun, Xiaoliang Wu, Chenxi Wang, Berrak Sisman, Björn W. Schuller Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16137v1 Speech deepfake detection (SDD) systems require trustworthy explanations for reliable decision-making. Existing explanation ways mainly fall into two categories. Traditional explainable AI (XAI), such as gradient-based attribution, produces low-level attribution signals tightly coupled with model decisions, and harder to be understood by human than natural language explanations. Meanwhile, large language model (LLM)-based explanation generation often produces generic and ungrounded descriptions due to the lack of heuristic evidence and task-specific supervision, stemming from limited grounded explanation datasets for SDD. We therefore propose a training-free explanation framework that integrates XAI evidence with multimodal LLMs to generate grounded and specific explanations. Using the PartialSpoof dataset, we construct a grounded explanation dataset and show that methods with XAI increase inside accuracy by over 45\%, verified through human evaluation and faithfulness checks. --- ### InvDesMobility: a reliability-gated first-principles feedback framework for closed-loop materials discovery Authors: Wen-Kao Li, Ze-Feng Gao, Peng-Jie Guo, Wei Ji, Zhong-Yi Lu Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cond-mat.mtrl-sci, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16133v1 Inverse materials design starts from target functionality and searches for structures that can realize it. Its value in closed-loop discovery depends not only on prediction performance, but also on whether expensive first-principles results are independently validated, provenance-recorded, and admitted as feedback only when evidence is sufficient. This is especially important for composite properties such as carrier mobility, where a final scalar value hides intermediate quantities, fit quality, convergence history, and workflow assumptions. Here we present InvDesMobility, a reliability-gated first-principles feedback framework that integrates multi-agent automated DFT, evidence stratification, generative structure proposal, acquisition ranking, and auditable release. Using 516 2DMatPedia-derived candidates, the workflow produced 280 QC-passed materials and 573 retained carrier-direction seed channels after channel-level reliability gating. These records were split into two feedback objects: relaxed structures updated the generative model, while retained mobility channels trained the acquisition model and set validation priority. Over multiple iterations, InvDesMobility screened 2.4 x 10^6 structures, submitted 102 candidates for DFT validation, and retained 86 reliability-gated generated channels across 41 formulas. Overall, the main contribution is not a fixed list of high-mobility materials, but a transferable feedback contract that makes closed-loop inverse design both useful and auditable when learning from expensive calculated properties. All source data, retained feedback records, and workflows are available at https://github.com/DreamLufei/invDesMobility, with an accompanying evidence website at https://dreamlufei.github.io/invDesMobility/. --- ### Shift-and-Sum Quantization for Visual Autoregressive Models Authors: Jaehyeon Moon, Bumsub Ham Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16131v1 Post-training quantization (PTQ) enables efficient deployment of deep networks using a small set of data. Its application to visual autoregressive models (VAR), however, remains relatively unexplored. We identify two key challenges for applying PTQ to VAR: (i) large reconstruction errors in attention-value products, especially at coarse scales where high attention scores occur more frequently; and (ii) a discrepancy between the sampling frequencies of codebook entries and their predicted probabilities due to limited calibration data. To address these challenges, we propose a PTQ framework tailored for VAR. First, we introduce a shift-and-sum quantization method that reduces reconstruction errors by aggregating quantized results from symmetrically shifted duplicates of value tokens. Second, we present a resampling strategy for calibration data that aligns sampling frequencies of codebook entries with their predicted probabilities. Experiments on class-conditional image generation, inpainting, outpainting, and class-conditional editing show consistent improvements across VAR architectures, establishing a new state of the art in PTQ for VAR. --- ### AuAu: A Benchmark for Auditing Authoritarian Alignment in Large Language Models Authors: Andreas Einwiller, Max Klabunde, Florian Lemmerich Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16127v2 The worldwide rise of authoritarianism and the growing role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in users' everyday lives raise the question of whether specific models exhibit or promote authoritarian attitudes. We introduce AuAu, a comprehensive benchmark for assessing the risk of authoritarian tendencies in LLM responses. AuAu combines three evaluation approaches: (i) psychometric questions from 15 human-validated instruments, (ii) vignettes probing intended behavior in concrete situations, and (iii) responses to realistic user prompts. Unlike prior work, AuAu measures not only overall authoritarian alignment but also its established sub-concepts: Authoritarian Aggression, Authoritarian Submission, and Conventionalism. Evaluating 17 models from China, the EU, Russia, and the USA, we find substantial authoritarian response rates on psychometric instruments across all models, though rates drop significantly on more realistic downstream tasks. Moreover, a simple authoritarian system prompt manipulates 15 of 17 models into promoting increased authoritarianism. Our results underscore the need for continued, systematic auditing of LLM-based AI systems to detect and mitigate authoritarian tendencies in their outputs. --- ### Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Visual Grounding for Remote Sensing Images and Videos Authors: Ke Li, Di Wang, Yongshan Zhu, Ting Wang, Weiping Ni, Tao Lei, Quan Wang, Xinbo Gao Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16124v1 Remote sensing visual grounding (RSVG) aims to localize a referred target in a remote sensing image or video according to a natural language expression. Existing RSVG methods usually rely on task-specific manual annotations, which are costly to collect and inevitably limited in covering the diversity of real-world geospatial scenarios. As a result, they often struggle to generalize to open-vocabulary queries involving novel objects, fine-grained attributes, complex spatial relationships, and functional semantics. In this paper, we propose RSVG-ZeroOV, a training-free framework that leverages frozen generic foundation models for zero-shot open-vocabulary RSVG. RSVG-ZeroOV follows an Overview-Focus-Evolve paradigm, which exploits the distinct yet complementary attention patterns of vision-language models (VLMs) and diffusion models (DMs) to progressively generate precise grounding results. Specifically, (i) Overview utilizes a VLM to extract cross-attention maps that capture semantic correlations between the referring expression and visual regions; (ii) Focus leverages the fine-grained modeling priors of a DM to compensate for object structure and shape information often overlooked by VLM attention; and (iii) Evolve introduces a simple yet effective attention evolution module to suppress irrelevant activations, yielding purified object masks. To handle video inputs, we further present Video RSVG-ZeroOV, which extends image-level grounding to spatio-temporal grounding through a query-relevant key-frame selector and a temporal propagator, enabling efficient and temporally coherent video grounding without video annotations or fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on six image and video grounding benchmarks show that RSVG-ZeroOV consistently outperforms existing zero-shot baselines and achieves competitive or superior performance compared with weakly- and fully-supervised methods. --- ### Thinking with Visual Grounding Authors: Junkai Zhang, Yihe Deng, Kai-Wei Chang, Wei Wang Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16122v1 Visual thinking should not only sound right; it should show its evidence. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) can produce natural-language reasoning traces, these traces often leave the supporting image regions implicit, making them hard to verify and difficult to supervise. We introduce visually grounded thinking, a reasoning process in which models interleave natural-language thoughts with explicit point or box groundings of the visual evidence used at each step. This lets the model express intermediate reasoning in language while grounding key objects in the image regions they refer to. To train this behavior, we construct a scalable synthesis pipeline that distills correct visual reasoning traces, extracts the visual objects required by the traces, grounds them with a SAM3-based agent, and derives aligned point and box supervision from the resulting masks. We further propose grounding-aware reinforcement learning, which combines answer correctness rewards with dense grounding rewards that score whether generated object references match the correct image evidence. Across two counting benchmarks and four spatial reasoning benchmarks, adding visually grounded thinking to Gemma3-4B-IT consistently improves performance over the original model and the non-grounded thinking baseline. On spatial reasoning, the visually grounded thinking 4B models match, and in some cases surpass, Gemma3-27B-IT from the same model family. Our analysis shows that point grounding is well suited to counting, while box grounding benefits most from explicit grounding rewards on spatial tasks. Overall, our results show that VLMs think better when their intermediate thoughts are tied to the image regions that make them true. --- ### EdgeZSAD: Practical Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection on Edge Devices Authors: Taewan Cho, Andrew Jaeyong Choi Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16119v1 Industrial inspection needs zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) that remains useful under edge deployment constraints. Recent methods often rely on ViT-L foundation backbones (~300M parameters), which exceed the memory and operator budget of typical embedded hardware. We study this regime through EdgeZSAD, a compact reference system built around a TinyViT-21M-512 backbone, an asymmetric global-local readout (EdgeGLR), and a reproducible source-side training recipe (Real-IAD-DR). We train a single checkpoint in a source-trained, target-unseen protocol and evaluate it across six industrial benchmarks. Across three independent runs, the resulting model reaches an average image AUROC of 91.6 on MVTec-AD and 88.2 on VisA, while remaining directly deployable on Jetson Orin Nano Super (TensorRT FP16) and RB5 Gen2 (QNN GPU FP16). Across the six device-rescored benchmarks, image-AUROC drift stays below 0.2 points, indicating that the exported graph preserves host-side ranking behavior in the evaluated deployment setting. --- ### Know Your Limits : On the Faithfulness of LLMs as Solvers and Autoformalizers in Legal Reasoning Authors: Olivia Peiyu Wang, Sanna Wong-Toropainen, Daneshvar Amrollahi, Ryan Bai, Tashvi Bansal, Arush Garg, Leilani H. Gilpin Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16118v2 Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on reasoning tasks, but whether this reflects faithful logical inference or heuristic approximation remains unclear. We study this question in legal entailment by comparing three paradigms, including pure LLM classification, LLM-based Formal Reasoning, and solver-based Formal Reasoning using the Z3 SMT solver, on a re-annotated subset of ContractNLI across five LLMs. Our re-annotation reveals a systematic and measurable gap between pragmatic legal interpretation and strict formal entailment, where a substantial proportion of legally sound inferences are not formally grounded without additional unstated assumptions. While introducing formal structure improves accuracy, with LLM-based Formal Reasoning achieving the highest benchmark performance, we show that this gain does not imply faithful reasoning. We identify three recurring failure modes: scope laundering, where LLMs report solver-inconsistent classifications without executing the underlying formal reasoning, producing conclusions that appear logically grounded but are not; implicit constraint blindness, where LLMs overlook logical constraints present in formal representations; and program synthesis failures, where LLMs generate incorrect Z3 code despite structured prompting. Critically, scope laundering persists across all models, raising serious concerns about the faithfulness of LLM-based formal reasoning as a proxy for symbolic execution. These results reveal a fundamental gap between benchmark accuracy and logical faithfulness. --- ### RecourseBench: A Modular Framework for Reproducible Algorithmic Recourse Evaluation Authors: Zahra Khotanlou, Hashir Ahmed, Chenghao Tan, Ahmed Abdelaal, Amir-Hossein Karimi Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16113v1 Algorithmic recourse methods provide counterfactual explanations that inform individuals of the actions required to overturn an unfavorable model decision. Despite rapid methodological progress, principled comparison remains elusive; existing frameworks are often difficult to extend and lack both interoperability and systematic verification that integrated methods faithfully reproduce their originally reported results. We introduce \emph{RecourseBench}, a unified evaluation framework built around three commitments namely, modularity, reproducibility, and interactivity. The framework decomposes the pipeline into five fully decoupled layers -- Data, Preprocessing, Model, Recourse Method, and Evaluation -- governed by abstract interfaces and a dynamic registry. To address the reproducibility gap in prior benchmarks, we introduce a four-tier classification system in which every integrated method is validated by an automated test suite against its originally reported results. We further provide an interactive web interface for flexible, configuration-driven comparison across methods, datasets, and model architectures. Our framework currently integrates 28 state-of-the-art recourse methods and, to our knowledge, constitutes the first recourse benchmark to explicitly enforce method-level reproducibility through automated, quantitative testing. --- ### Scaling Adaptive Depth with Norm-Agnostic Residual Networks Authors: Tomás Figliolia, Beren Millidge Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16112v1 Residual architectures are ubiquitous in deep learning, but they suffer from a subtle structural limitation: the norm of the residual stream can grow rapidly with depth. As a result, updates from later layers become small relative to the accumulated residual state. This reduces their impact on the representation and limits the benefits of scaling models in depth. To address this, we introduce NAG, a norm-agnostic residual architecture that separates magnitude from directional information in the residual stream, preserving meaningful layer contributions throughout depth and preventing later updates from being systematically suppressed by residual-norm growth. Importantly, NAG introduces only a negligible number of additional parameters and relies on simple operations that are easily kernel-fusible, preserving training efficiency in practice. We show that this architecture outperforms baseline Transformers, with gains that increase substantially as depth grows, enabling effective training of much deeper models. The norm-agnostic formulation also leads to an interpretable Mixture-of-Depths (MoD) mechanism that adaptively skips both attention and MLP layers. Beyond serving as a post-training accuracy-compute tradeoff, this mechanism can be used as a pretraining-time scaling strategy: under iso-FLOP training, compute saved by reducing per-token forward-pass cost can be reinvested into training on more tokens while keeping the total parameter count and KV-cache budget fixed. In our experiments, moderate Mixture-of-Depths rates of approximately 20%-25% match full-depth baseline performance under equal training compute while substantially reducing the number of executed layer parameters and forward-pass FLOPs. These results identify sparsity in depth as a new scaling axis for fixed-compute training, enabling very deep yet FLOP-efficient models. --- ### Towards Pareto-Optimal Tool-Integrated Agents with Pareto Ranking Policy Optimization Authors: Junyi Li, Xiaowei Qian, Yingyi Zhang, Wenlin Zhang, Guojing Li, Sheng Zhang, Xiao Han, Yichao Wang, Xiangyu Zhao Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16111v1 Recent advances in tool-integrated language agents have significantly improved their ability to solve complex reasoning tasks. However, existing alignment methods predominantly focus on maximizing task accuracy, while overlooking auxiliary objectives such as tool-use efficiency, which are essential for practical deployment. To address this gap, we introduce ParetoPO, a two-stage multi-objective optimization framework for aligning tool-using large language models (LLMs) under competing objectives. In the first stage, ParetoPO leverages hypervolume-guided dynamic scalarization to adapt reward weights based on global Pareto frontier progress. In the second stage, it replaces scalarized learning signals with Pareto-ranking-based advantage computation, promoting nondominated trajectories through dominance-aware credit assignment. This design enables fine-grained, action-level optimization across multiple conflicting objectives. Experimental results on mathematic reasoning and multi-hop QA tasks show that ParetoPO consistently discovers policies with superior accuracy-efficiency trade-offs compared to static and heuristic baselines. --- ### Auditing Machine Unlearning: A Systematic Research on Whether Models Truly Forget Authors: Dayong Ye, Tianqing Zhu, Ruiding Huang, Xinbo Fu, Jiayang Li, Bo Liu, Huan Huo, Wanlei Zhou Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16110v1 Machine unlearning has been extensively studied in response to growing privacy concerns and regulatory requirements. However, auditing whether unlearning algorithms have truly erased the influence of specific data remains an open challenge. The lack of reliable and practical auditing mechanisms can lead to critical privacy risks, such as residual information leakage. This paper initiates a systematic investigation into whether existing unlearning algorithms can truly forget the designated data. We propose the first practical and general-purpose auditing framework for machine unlearning, inspired by the concept of proof of ignorance. Our framework addresses the key practicality limitations of existing methods by eliminating the need for retraining-from-scratch baselines, avoiding the training of large numbers of shadow models, and requiring no intrusive intervention in the original training process. To evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, we first conduct validation experiments to verify its soundness and completeness. We then perform comprehensive experiments across six datasets and ten representative unlearning methods. The results demonstrate that our framework reliably distinguishes between successful and failed unlearning. In particular, we observe that retraining-based and fine-tuning-based methods can achieve effective unlearning, even when the target data remain in the original dataset. In contrast, de-optimization-based methods fail to achieve true unlearning and instead degrade the model's performance. Fisher/Hessian-based methods also fail to unlearn requested data, even formal certification is provided. Moreover, we show that our framework is robust against fake unlearning attempts and generalizes well to large language models. --- ### Variable-Rate Deep Image Compression based on Low-Rank Adaptation by Progressive Learning Authors: Xing-Yu Xu, Chen-Hsiu Huang, Ja-Ling Wu Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16107v1 In the digital age, image compression is crucial for numerous applications, including web media, streaming services, high-resolution medical imaging, and connected vehicle networks, enabling efficient data storage and transmission. With the increasing demand for high-quality image communication, the need for advanced compression techniques becomes increasingly critical. Numerous Deep Image Compression (DIC) techniques have recently been introduced, showing impressive performance compared to traditional standards. However, variable-rate image compression remains an unresolved issue. Specific DIC methods deploy multiple networks to attain different compression rates, whereas others use a single model, which often results in higher computational complexity and reduced performance. This work proposes a progressive learning approach for variable-rate image compression based on the parameter-efficient fine-tuning method, the Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). We introduce an additional LoRA Rate-Adaptive Module (LoRAM) in DIC methods. Due to the re-parameterized merging of LoRA, our proposed method does not introduce additional computational complexity during inference. Compared to methods utilizing multiple models, comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance, saving 99\% in parameter storage, 90% in datasets, and 97% in training steps. --- ### SceneCraft: Interactive System for Image Editing via Scene Graph Authors: Duc-Manh Phan, Ngoc-Dai Tran, Duy-Khang Do, Tam V. Nguyen, Minh-Triet Tran, Trung-Nghia Le Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16103v1 Recent advances in generative AI have enabled natural language-driven image editing, yet existing systems often fail in complex scenes with multiple interacting objects because they rely heavily on users crafting precise text prompts. To address the absence of structured control, we propose SceneCraft, a novel interactive framework that bridges user intent and model execution by representing images as editable scene graphs. Instead of guessing text prompts through trial and error, users interact directly with a visual graph to perform complex spatial and relational operations. These graph modifications are automatically translated into precise, context-aware editing prompts, effectively eliminating linguistic ambiguity. To ensure robust and diverse results, structured prompts are dispatched to multiple state-of-the-art generative models. Evaluations across diverse editing scenarios show that SceneCraft provides a more intuitive control mechanism, significantly reducing the cognitive burden of manual prompt engineering while generating outputs that users consistently rate as higher in quality and fidelity. --- ### Effective and Low-cost Lane-based Map Localization for Vehicle-Centric Route Generation Authors: Hong-Shiang Lin, Jung-Hsin Chen, Yu-Luen Tzeng, Wei-Hao Chen, Yi-Chen Lee, Li-Jhe Chen, Peng-Yuan Chen Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cs.MM, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16101v1 Driver-centric route representation plays a vital role in intuitive driving guidance systems. This paper presents OLRA, a low-cost, map-localization-based framework that derives driver-view-aligned routes by matching map-based navigation routes with camera-detected lane markings. This alignment process mutually enhances vehicle localization accuracy and visual route consistency. To bridge the evaluation gap across different paradigms, we introduce practical route evaluation metrics and benchmark OLRA against OpenPilot, a representative direct-generation approach. Experimental results on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that OLRA outperforms OpenPilot in complex road segments and in route estimation at distance beyond 20 meters, achieving lower overall Euclidean error. This study is expected to promote future research in low-cost, maplocalization-based route generation methods. --- ### Your "Pro" LLM Subscription May Actually Be "Free": Exposing Fingerprint Spoofing Risks in LLM Inference Services Authors: Jiahao Zhang, Xiuyu Li, Suhang Wang Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cs.CR, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16100v1 As Large Language Model (LLM) APIs become ubiquitous, users increasingly rely on black-box fingerprinting to verify that providers are serving the advertised premium models. However, these methods may overlook adversarial providers who manipulate model weights to cheat the fingerprint process. We introduce a novel threat termed fingerprint spoofing, where a malicious provider stealthily serves a weaker model that has been parameter-efficiently fine-tuned to mimic a stronger model, thereby evading user-side fingerprinting. We first formally prove that user-side resource constraints (i.e., finite query budgets and weak fingerprinting classifiers) make current fingerprinting vulnerable to fingerprint spoofing. Guided by this theoretical analysis, we propose GhostPrint, a cost-effective attack framework leveraging surrogate modeling, reward-ranked fine-tuning, and knowledge distillation. Extensive evaluations in both static and continual fingerprinting settings demonstrate that GhostPrint allows weak models to consistently bypass representative fingerprint methods while maintaining utility at a low fine-tuning cost, exposing a critical vulnerability in current LLM fingerprinting pipelines. --- ### Long-Context Modeling via GSS-Transformer Hybrid Architecture with Learnable Mixing Authors: Kuzey Torlak, Hüseyin Arda Arslan, Anıl Dervişoğlu, Beyza Nur Deniz, Onur Boyar Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16093v1 Modeling long-range dependencies remains a central challenge in natural language processing. Transformer architectures achieve strong performance via self-attention but scale quadratically ($O(N^2)$) with sequence length, while State Space Models (SSMs) scale linearly ($O(N)$) but suffer from a selective recall bottleneck, struggling to retrieve precise information from compressed states. This creates a fundamental tradeoff between efficiency and perplexity. To tackle these challenges, we propose the \textit{Parallel Hybrid Architecture (PHA)}, which runs Gated State Spaces (GSS), Grouped Query Attention (GQA), and Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs) as independent parallel branches fused by a learnable mixing mechanism. Instead of forcing SSMs to approximate attention or serializing the two paradigms, PHA allows each branch to specialize: GSS captures global context, while attention performs selective retrieval, with FFN providing complementary processing. On WikiText-103, PHA achieves 16.51 PPL at 125M parameters, outperforming Hedgehog (16.70) and H3-125M (23.70). Scaling to 180M parameters yields 16.42 PPL, which gives comparable results with the pure attention baseline while delivering 24\% higher throughput and up to 40\% lower memory usage at long contexts. On OpenWebText, our 125M model achieves 19.72 PPL, outperforming standard Transformers (20.60) and GSS hybrid baselines (19.80). These results demonstrate that separating sequence modeling paradigms into parallel specialists enables Transformer-level perplexity with substantially improved efficiency for long-context language modeling. --- ### VinQA: Visual Elements Interleaved Long-form Answer Generation for Real-World Multimodal Document QA Authors: Young Rok Jang, Hyesoo Kong, Kyunghwan An, Jae Sub Huh, Gyeonghun Kim, Stanley Jungkyu Choi Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16092v1 Real-world documents combine text with tables, charts, photographs, and diagrams arranged in diverse layouts, yet existing research on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for document QA predominantly produces text-only responses, underutilizing these visual elements. We introduce VinQA, a dataset for long-form answer generation where cited visual elements are explicitly interleaved with their supporting text and grounded in relevant document pages. To support this task, we study two encoding methods for feeding raw document page images into an MLLM, along with their visual-element citation mechanisms: (1) Page Encoding, which directly encodes full-page images with bounding boxes of visual elements and treats these boxed regions as citable units; and (2) Modality Encoding, which parses each page to extract text and crop visual elements, encodes them separately, and uses these cropped elements as citable units. In our experiments, we propose M-GroSE, a multimodal evaluation framework extending GroUSE to assess answers along four dimensions: completeness, answer relevancy, faithfulness, and unanswerability. We additionally report Visual Source F1 to directly measure visual citation accuracy. Although proprietary frontier models still achieve the best overall scores on the VinQA test split, fine-tuning open Qwen2.5-VL models on the training split substantially improves their performance and narrows this gap. Modality Encoding is initially more robust for complex documents with long text, many visual elements, and diverse citation requirements. After training on VinQA, however, Page Encoding reaches a comparable level, competing effectively even without the explicit parsing used in Modality Encoding. Finally, Visual G-Eval, an MLLM-based judge, confirms that fine-tuned models insert visual elements at semantically appropriate positions with faithful supporting text. --- ### Enhancing Quantum Machine Learning with Anyons Authors: Da Zhang, Wen-Qiang Liu, Zhaohui Wei, Zhang-Qi Yin Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: quant-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16090v1 The power of quantum computing and quantum machine learning relies on harnessing uniquely quantum phenomena as computational resources. While superposition, coherence and entanglement have been central to this effort, the role of particle exchange statistics remains largely unexplored. Here, we introduce a quantum kernel framework that unifies bosonic, fermionic, and anyonic (fractional) exchange statistics within a single learning paradigm. We study this family of kernels from three perspectives. At the representation level, Haar-averaged effective-dimension analysis shows that fractional exchange phases access feature-space directions inaccessible to the purely symmetric or antisymmetric limits. At the level of kernel geometry, the corresponding Gram matrices show greater separation from the distinguishable-particle baseline and reduced label-dependent model complexity. Finally, on learning benchmarks, anyonic kernels consistently outperform their bosonic and fermionic counterparts, with stronger target alignment and more favorable class geometry. Together, these findings show that exchange statistics reshape the structure and geometry of quantum feature space, leading to enhanced learning performance. Our work identifies particle exchange statistics as an overlooked computational ingredient for quantum machine learning and provides the first systematic comparison of quantum learning models across exchange phases. --- ### Rhythm of the Deep: Two-Tier Combinatorial Structure in Sperm Whale Codas Revealed by Acoustic Unit Induction Authors: Mudit Sinha, Sanika Chavan Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16084v2 Sperm-whale codas are conventionally described as recurring click-count and timing patterns. We show instead that their waveforms contain a two-tier combinatorial acoustic organization. Recurring click units combine with inter-click rhythm to form coda units, and recurring coda units exhibit additional sequence-level dependence under a different acoustic carrier. Using 1,483 recordings, eight families of frozen audio encoders induce click and coda inventories. Held-out transfer, matched nulls, destructive waveform counterfactuals, expert timing baselines, and explicit abstention separate supported structure from shared encoder shortcuts. Click-token composition predicts induced coda identity with a median normalized mutual-information lift of 0.380, including when events are detected without published click times or counts. Stable click order is weak, whereas rhythm predicts coda-representation distance after the exact click-token multiset is fixed. At the second tier, coda tokens show 0.132 bits of incremental lag-2 dependence under the prespecified categorical estimator. Two expert-inspired rhythm representations do not recover the positive component. Coda identity is also more tempo-stable than click identity. These results change the acoustic description of codas from a single prescribed rhythm inventory to layered waveform organization. The controlled-induction framework provides a general method for discovering and falsifying combinatorial structure in under-annotated audio. --- ### Tool-IQA: Augmenting Image Quality Assessment with Simple Tools Authors: Guanyi Qin, Junjie Zhang, Chunming He, Yibing Fu, Jie Liang, Tianhe Wu, Lei Zhang Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16082v1 Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been increasingly adopted for Image Quality Assessment (IQA). However, current methods typically employ a static one-shot scoring paradigm, despite the fact that humans assess image quality through dynamic visual inspection, e.g., selectively adjusting views to verify details and subtle artifacts. Specifically, relying solely on a single-pass observation introduces two primary limitations: first, perceiving the image only at a global scale restricts the assessment of finer local details; second, the original intensity distribution of the image may overwhelm the visibility, leading to insufficient inspection of image quality. To address these issues, we propose Tool-IQA, shifting the assessment mechanism from passive scoring to a tool-augmented workflow. In particular, we equip VLMs with simple yet effective view tools: a Magnifier to inspect local details, and a Gamma Corrector to uncover visibility and hidden artifacts. The assessment follows a structured pipeline that consists of an initial observation with rubric notes, a tool-augmented in-depth inspection, and a final quantification for calibrated quality score. Furthermore, to ensure efficient and purposeful tool callings, we introduce a batch-aware training strategy to reward tool interactions that can yield positive contributions rather than simply encouraging usage. Experiments on a variety of IQA benchmarks demonstrate that, with effective tool calling and calibrated assessment, our proposed Tool-IQA significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models, e.g., it achieves a PLCC of 0.854 on the challenging CLIVE dataset. --- ### Polynomial-Time Mistake-Bounded Language Generation Authors: Héctor Jimenez, Alexander Kozachinskiy, Vicente Opazo Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cs.CC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16077v1 In this note, we introduce a polynomial-time version of the mistake-bounded language generation (MBLG) framework due to Kleinberg, Peale, and Reingold (2026). We observe that the family of parities of variables, and the family of conjunctions of literals, are polynomial-time MBLG. Our main result states that the family of monotone Boolean functions with polynomially-many maxterms is polynomial-time MBLG. This family includes all monotone Boolean functions, computable by polynomial-size decision trees. Our technique can be presented as a new combinatorial game about writing numbers on a board. --- ### Phys-JEPA: Physics-Informed Latent World Models for Multivariate Time-Series Forecasting Authors: Weizhi Nie, Weichao Liu, Honglin Guo, Yuting Su Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.GT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16076v1 Multivariate forecasting in physical systems requires models that predict coupled temporal variables while preserving meaningful state evolution. Deep forecasters can fit temporal correlations, and physics-informed models can regularize predictions with scientific constraints, but these directions are often connected only at the decoded-output level. As a result, the hidden predictive state that generates future trajectories may remain statistically useful but physically unstructured. We introduce Phys-JEPA, a physics-informed joint-embedding predictive architecture for multivariate time-series forecasting. Phys-JEPA learns a latent world model in which predictive states are decomposed into physical and residual components, and physical consistency is imposed directly on latent states and latent transitions rather than only on decoded forecasts. This formulation uses known physical variables to organize the representation space while retaining residual capacity for unresolved dynamics. On Jena Climate 2009--2016, Phys-JEPA reduces aggregate MSE from 0.12482 to 0.12273 and temperature MSE from 0.01892 to 0.01831 at H=24. On Traffic, full Phys-JEPA improves aggregate MSE over the supervised baseline across all tested horizons, reducing H=192 MSE from 0.800784 to 0.773873. On Electricity, the best variant depends on horizon: static latent consistency is strongest at H=24 and H=48, while full Phys-JEPA gives the best aggregate and target-variable MSE at H=192. These initial results suggest that moving physics-informed learning from output space to latent predictive state space is a promising direction for interpretable temporal world models. --- ### AME: A Multi-Type Contributor Attribution Framework in Generative AI Markets Authors: Yang Shi, Songwen Pei, Yang Gao, Bingxue Zhang Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16075v1 Generative AI enables value creation through multi-stage collaboration among heterogeneous contributors, including training data, base models, fine-tuning behaviors, and prompts. However, how to fairly allocate the data value remains largely unexplored. This paper formulates multi-stage generative AI value allocation as a new research problem and identifies three core challenges: heterogeneous data contribution valuation, data rights mapping, and trustworthy execution. We propose AME (Attribution-Mapping-Execution) framework, a unified framework that integrates data contribution valuation, data rights mapping, and trustworthy execution into a single workflow. Experimental results demonstrate that AME framework achieves data value allocation outcomes more consistent with human reference judgments while maintaining low-cost trustworthy execution. Our work provides an initial foundation for value assessment and revenue allocation in generative AI data markets. --- ### PVminerLLM2: Improving Structured Extraction of Patient Voice via Preference Optimization Authors: Samah Fodeh, Linhai Ma, Ganesh Puthiaraju, Srivani Talakokkul, Afshan Khan, Elyas Irankhah, Sreeraj Ramachandran, Ashley Hagaman, Sarah Lowe, Aimee Roundtree Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16074v1 Motivation: Patient-generated text contains critical information on patients' lived experiences, social context, and care engagement, but remains largely unstructured, limiting its use in patient-centered outcomes research. Prior work introduced the PV-Miner benchmark and PVMinerLLM models for structured extraction. However, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) alone struggles with rare, fine-grained, and unevenly distributed errors, particularly in token-critical structured outputs. Results: We present PVminerLLM2, an improved set of LLMs for structured patient voice extraction that applies preference optimization to address token-critical errors beyond the reach of supervised fine-tuning. Our method introduces (i) a preference objective with token-level gated stabilization term that prevents degradation of absolute token likelihood under preference optimization, and (ii) confusion-aware preference pair construction to better capture low-separation distinctions. We further incorporate token-importance weighting and inverse-frequency reweighing to address token imbalance and class skew. Across multiple model sizes, PVMinerLLM2 consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving gains of up to 4.43% (Code), 3.50% (Sub-code), and 1.55% (Span), and outperforms baseline LLM trained with existing preference optimization methods. Availability and Implementation: The supplementary material, code, evaluation scripts, and trained models for PVminerLLM2 are publicly available at: https://github.com/Data-Mining-Lab-Yale/PVminerLLM2 --- ### Stop the Sampler! Classifier-Based Adaptive Stopping for Sampling Kernels Authors: Kirill Korolev, Nikita Morozov, Stepan Pavlenko, Esmeralda S. Whitammer, Sergey Samsonov Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16073v2 Sampling from complex, unnormalized probability densities is a fundamental challenge in Bayesian inference and probabilistic modeling. While Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods provide asymptotic guarantees, they often suffer from slow mixing and high computational costs due to fixed or manually tuned trajectory lengths. In this work, we propose a novel framework that treats trajectory termination as a learnable component of the sampling dynamics. By framing MCMC within the theory of non-acyclic generative flow networks (GFlowNets), we train state-dependent neural classifiers to decide when a trajectory has reached a high-density region and should terminate. We theoretically establish the connection between optimal classifiers and the target density via detailed balance conditions and introduce a multilevel training scheme to facilitate exploration in complex geometries. Experimental results across various benchmark densities demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces average trajectory lengths while improving mode coverage and mixing compared to standard MCMC baselines. --- ### MASCOT-Android: A Curated Dataset and Automated Collection Pipeline for Android Malware Source Code Specimens Authors: Bojing Li, Duo Zhong, Prajna Bhandary, Raguvir S, Charles Maxa, Robert J Joyce, Charles Nicholas Published: 2026-06-15 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16072v2 Compared with binaries and decompiled code, malware source code more directly reflects the attackers' original intent. However, the scarcity of source code and the high cost of manual review make such datasets difficult to build and maintain. We propose MASCOT-Android, a curated dataset of Android malware source code and an automated collection framework for scalable malware source code discovery on GitHub. A key finding of our work is that repository-level documentation alone provides a strong signal for malware source code collection. Our model extracts character-level TF-IDF features from 8,772 malware and 25,747 benign README documents and trains a LinearSVC classifier to distinguish malware repositories. This README-only model achieves an accuracy of 96.28\% and an FPR of 1.06\% in local evaluation. In addition, the model outputs confidence scores, allowing users to adjust the decision threshold to balance FPR and coverage, which is practical in real-world malware source code collection. --- ### Decentralized Granular Access Control for Agentic AI Systems in Critical Infrastructure Authors: Arun Malik, Deepal Jayasinghe, Bradley Klemick, Prachi Shah, Nitish Talasu, Vineet Tushar Trivedi Published: 2026-06-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CR, cs.ET, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22611v1 The deployment of autonomous AI agents in production infrastructure introduces fundamental security challenges that traditional role-based access control (RBAC) models cannot address. Unlike deterministic automation, AI agents exhibit stochastic behavior, making conventional trust models insufficient for governing their access to critical systems. This paper presents a decentralized, multi-layered access control architecture designed specifically for agentic AI systems operating in critical cloud infrastructure. Our framework introduces four key innovations: (1) a compound identity model that binds agent actions to delegated human authority, (2) a hierarchical permission system spanning five granularity levels from global platform access to per-parameter constraints, (3) a decentralized policy ownership model where tool teams independently govern their authorization boundaries, and (4) progressive trust escalation with safety interlocks that prevent autonomous agents from executing high-risk operations. We ground our design in the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications (2025) threat taxonomy and demonstrate how each architectural decision mitigates specific attack vectors. Deployed in production at a major cloud provider managing network infrastructure across hundreds of datacenters, the system enforces granular access control for 20+ specialized AI agents and 60+ deterministic playbooks processing thousands of operations daily while maintaining zero unauthorized write operations over eight months of production deployment. We present empirical data on access pattern distributions, denial rates, and the effectiveness of layered authorization in preventing privilege escalation by non-deterministic actors. --- ### Tokengeist: Multi-Turn Attribution Tracing in Agentic Conversations Authors: Jessica Tang, Shraddha Barke, Sharad Agarwal Published: 2026-06-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22610v1 When a language model produces a response in a multi-turn conversation, which tokens from prior turns shaped that answer, and how did those dependencies propagate across prior turns? Existing context attribution methods process the full context in a single pass, recovering surface-level dependencies but missing the layered, non-linear structure of real-world dialogues and multi-step reasoning tasks. We introduce multi-turn context attribution (MTCA): given a target span in a model response, the task of tracing attribution backward across turns to identify not only which prior turns were directly relevant, but also how those turns themselves depended on earlier context. We propose Tokengeist, an attribution-method-agnostic and scalable framework that recovers full dependency paths by casting attribution as a recursive traversal of a directed acyclic graph (DAG) over conversation turns. We will release MTCABench, a benchmark of 3,845 target spans across 665 multi-turn conversations, annotated with gold provenance graphs reaching depths of up to 14, across four dependency types. Across four open-weight models, flat attribution methods fail to recover multi-hop dependencies, achieving under 20% source recall, while Tokengeist reaches 90%. Our results reveal systematic failure modes of single-pass attribution -- which we term provenance collapse -- and motivate attribution methods that reason recursively across turns. --- ### Evaluating LLMs as Interpretable Controllers for Dynamical Systems Authors: Aleksander Østensen, Alberto Mino Calero, Anastasios M. Lekkas, Adil Rasheed Published: 2026-06-14 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22609v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for decision-making and reasoning tasks, yet their potential as controllers for physical systems remains largely unexplored. This work investigates whether LLMs can function as interpretable controllers for a dynamic thermal environment, examining their ability to follow setpoints, interpret natural-language commands, reason about actuator effects, and incorporate prior model-based knowledge. Five LLMs of varying scales are evaluated under multiple scenarios, including settings with penalties on heater or fan usage and cases where the models have access to a physics-based prediction tool. The results show that control performance depends on model complexity: while low- and mid-scale models frequently misinterpret actuator dynamics or generate inconsistent reasoning, high-complexity models such as Qwen-3~14B and GPT-4o achieve accurate temperature tracking, stable actuator usage, and coherent explanations aligned with physical principles. Incorporating a physics-based model significantly improves control smoothness and energy efficiency by enabling anticipatory decision-making. A detailed reasoning taxonomy further reveals a clear progression from causal misinterpretation in smaller models to cohesive and temporally aware reasoning in larger ones. The findings demonstrate that LLMs can act as interpretable controllers when sufficiently capable and appropriately grounded in domain knowledge, highlighting promising opportunities for hybrid model-based and language-driven control strategies that can provide plausible explanations. --- ### Workload-Aware Caching for Multi-Agent Systems Authors: Anas Mohamed, Kaizan Haque, Azal Ahmad Khan, Chetan Sharma, Shuwen Ge, Ali Anwar Published: 2026-06-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.DC, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20495v1 Multi-agent systems decompose complex tasks into directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of specialized agent executions, creating natural opportunities for caching intermediate results across queries. However, existing cache eviction policies treat all cached entries uniformly based on access history, ignoring structural and workload signals uniquely available in agentic execution environments. We present a workload-aware eviction policy that combines three signals, namely recomputation cost, DAG dependency count, and agent invocation frequency, into a unified scoring function that retains the most valuable entries under memory constraints. Evaluated across three multi-agent benchmarks spanning diverse reuse regimes, our policy reduces latency by up to 64.7% relative to the uncached baseline and achieves on average a 31.1% latency reduction over the next best finite-capacity baseline, while approaching the performance of an unbounded cache and maintaining accuracy on par with or exceeding all competing finite-capacity methods. We further show that workload-aware content caching is complementary to other agentic system optimization methods, including plan-level caching and parallel agent execution, with each technique targeting a distinct efficiency bottleneck in multi-agent pipelines. --- ### Ablation, Statistical Inference, and Validation for KV-Cache Compression Authors: Paolo D'Alberto, Ashish Siarasao, Elliott Delaye, Rajeev Patwari Published: 2026-06-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.IT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.09683v1 This study systematically compares Turbo-Quant and SpectralQuant KV-cache compression, evaluating non-dominated schemes, including WHT rotation with Beta Lloyd-Max and QJL, through a statistical validation methodology that separates systematic codec differences from implementation variance. Key findings reveal that while eigenbasis-based methods fail on heavy-tailed data due to covariance instability, they excel in structured regimes, with the effective semantic dimension ($d_{eff}$) adapting to calibration budgets rather than true data rank. (this is an abstract of the abstract thank you ) --- ### AuditWeave: A Tamper-Evident, Auditor-Navigable Evidence Layer for AI-Assisted and Data-Transformation Workflows Authors: Vimal Nakrani Published: 2026-06-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.09682v1 AI systems are increasingly used to assist consequential decisions in regulated domains such as auditing, finance, and healthcare. This creates a recurring obligation: an organization must be able to reconstruct, after the fact, which evidence informed a given conclusion, and to show that the record of that reasoning was not altered. Existing tools address related but distinct problems - model observability, drift monitoring, governance reporting - and are built for the machine-learning engineer operating a system, not the reviewer who must trace one specific conclusion back to its supporting evidence. We present AuditWeave, a lightweight Python library, with no runtime dependencies, that records the steps of AI-assisted and data-transformation workflows into a single append-only, hash-chained ledger. A small, system-agnostic event vocabulary spans both retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and tabular/lakehouse transformations, so a conclusion that draws on both can be traced end-to-end through one record. Within a sealed ledger, any modification, reordering, insertion, or deletion of events is detectable through chain verification. We describe the design and evaluate recording overhead, scalability, and tamper-detection correctness on the reference implementation. The integrity guarantees cost tens of microseconds per event, and, as the hash-chain construction implies, verification flagged every injected mutation across four mutation classes over 2,000 randomized trials. --- ### Beyond the Reranker: Do RAG Retrieval Enhancements Help Once a Strong Reranker Is Present? Authors: Sadanand Singh, Allam Reddy, Manan Chopra Published: 2026-06-14 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28367v1 Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is routinely extended with methods meant to improve retrieval: query expansion, hierarchical and cross-document summarization, graph-based expansion, per-query routing, rank fusion, and corrective re-retrieval. The benefits reported for these methods come almost exclusively from homogeneous corpora, predominantly Wikipedia prose. Whether they hold on the mixed-format collections common in practice, where code, markdown, tables, scientific PDFs, and prose are interleaved within one corpus, has not been measured. To study this directly, we build \textbf{HetDocQA}, a heterogeneous benchmark with \emph{chunker-agnostic} span-overlap relevance labels and collection-disjoint splits, and pair it with MuSiQue and QASPER as homogeneous controls. We evaluate eight methods on a shared backbone, with bootstrap confidence intervals and multiple-comparison correction. A strong cross-encoder reranker accounts for most of the pipeline's quality; beyond it, only two methods yield reliable gains: query expansion and SSCC. SSCC, a per-source calibrated corrector introduced here, sets a separate acceptance threshold for each score source and helps only on heterogeneous data. The remaining reranking and pool-expansion methods in common use, among them hierarchical summarization, graph expansion, routing, and rank fusion, give no reliable gain once that reranker is present. --- ### CAMI: Cost-Aware Agent-Guided Multi-Indexing for Semantic Retrieval Authors: Adnan Qidwai, Anand Eswaran, Sonam Mishra, Jaydeep Sen, Sachindra Joshi Published: 2026-06-14 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28365v1 RAG ingestion pipelines frequently augment search corpus index with semantic enrichment indices (e.g., synthetic queries or summaries generated from corpus chunks) that are subsequently queried alongside the base index to improve retrieval via better alignment between document representations and user intent. While these supplementary representations substantially improve retrieval quality, they introduce a computational bottleneck: the configuration space of enrichment types and generator models is combinatorial, and the cost of exhaustive index-time evaluation scales linearly with corpus size. We introduce CAMI (Cost-Aware Multi-Indexing), a framework that formalizes multi-index construction as a budgeted, multi-objective portfolio selection problem. CAMI targets the upstream decision of which enrichment views to generate and materialize before the retrieval backend is applied. CAMI incorporates three primary mechanisms: (i) an agentic discovery phase that proposes corpus-specific representation templates; (ii) an atomic-unit search procedure that evaluates individual enrichment-model pairs and recombines them via fidelity-local closure to identify synergistic portfolios; and (iii) a confidence-aware promotion schedule that prunes unpromising configurations early, decoupling optimization spend from total corpus size. We evaluate CAMI across diverse retrieval corpora. Our findings reveal that the framework systematically isolates high-recall portfolios under strict budget constraints, outperforming standard content-only baselines in challenging settings by up to 9.4% recall@10. Further, CAMI is able to systematically identify these high-recall portfolios using up to 5x less budget compared to random search baselines, making our approach practical in real production scenarios. --- ### Specific Domain Ontology Construction Using Large Language Models Authors: Vivian Magri Alcaldi Soares, Renata Wassermann Published: 2026-06-14 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20691v1 Ontologies are useful structures to organize and maintain information that can be understood both by humans and systems. However, since their manual crafting is a laborious task, many specific domains lack reference ontologies. The outstanding ability for understanding natural language demonstrated by the Large Language Models (LLMs) has motivated their application to aid on a variety of fields, including on ontology development. This work presents the experimentation with a technique that uses LLMs in the role of domain experts to build conceptual hierarchies for a given initial concept. Twenty ontologies automatically constructed for the domain of the Brazilian maritime territory (a.k.a the Blue Amazon) using GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 were then evaluated by human experts. The models were able to construct overall coherent conceptualizations of the domain, but none of the outputs was completely satisfactory as a representation of the context without refinement. --- ### NeoJaundice-AI: Smartphone-Based Neonatal Jaundice Detection Using Dual-Input Deep Learning and Synthetic Augmentation Authors: Rahul Patel, Nirjala Jarpula Published: 2026-06-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20689v1 Neonatal jaundice (hyperbilirubinemia) is one of the most common conditions affecting newborns worldwide, with India alone recording roughly 15 million cases per year. Early detection is critical, yet standard diagnosis requires blood tests that are often impractical in rural clinics where laboratory facilities are limited. This paper presents NeoJaundice-AI, a smartphone-based screening system that uses photographs of a baby's skin and sclera (eye white) to estimate jaundice severity and predict serum bilirubin levels in under three seconds without requiring internet connectivity. The proposed system is built on a dual-branch EfficientNet-B0 architecture that independently processes skin and sclera images. Deep features are fused with handcrafted YCbCr color statistics to jointly perform four-class severity classification and continuous bilirubin regression. A key contribution is a synthetic jaundice generation method that simulates bilirubin-induced yellowing through controlled YCbCr channel modifications on normal neonatal skin images. This approach addresses data scarcity, particularly for severe jaundice cases and darker Indian skin tones (Fitzpatrick Types IV to VI). In addition, a skin-tone normalization module improves prediction consistency across diverse neonatal complexions. Experimental results demonstrate an overall classification accuracy of 91.8 percent, a clinical sensitivity of 93.5 percent, and a bilirubin mean absolute error of 1.4 mg/dL. After INT8 quantization and ONNX conversion, the model size is reduced to 8.3 MB while maintaining inference times below three seconds on standard Android devices. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first India-focused neonatal jaundice AI system that combines multimodal image fusion, skin-tone adaptation, synthetic data augmentation, and fully offline mobile deployment within a single framework. --- ### ARGUSTRACK: A Multi-View Annotation System for Multi-Object Tracking Authors: Hao Vo, Duc Nguyen, Ngan Le Published: 2026-06-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20687v1 Multi-Camera Multi-Target (MCMT) tracking has emerged as a critical capability for applications ranging from autonomous driving to animal behavior monitoring. While recent advances have yielded sophisticated tracking algorithms, the availability of annotated multi-view data remains a significant bottleneck. Existing annotation tools predominantly support single-camera workflows or rely on LiDAR sensors, making cross-view labeling tedious and impractical for camera-only setups. We present ARGUS-TRACK, a multi-camera annotation system that addresses these limitations by enabling annotators to work directly on a bird's-eye-view (BEV) plane. Given calibrated camera parameters, a single ground-plane annotation is automatically projected into 2D bounding boxes across all relevant views, inherently ensuring identity consistency without manual cross-view alignment. To further accelerate the labeling process, ARGUSTRACK incorporates two complementary mechanisms: a Temporal Aware module that propagates annotations from preceding frames to initialize new ones, requiring only minor positional adjustments; and a Multi-camera Semi-annotation module that leverages off-the-shelf 2D detectors combined with foot-point estimation to automatically generate candidate BEV positions for annotator verification. We evaluate ARGUSTRACK through a pilot study on multi-camera broiler tracking and demonstrate that it substantially reduces annotation time compared to conventional single-camera labeling workflows. --- ### JPPD: Joint Prediction_Planning Diffusion with Differentiable Safety Guidance for Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance in Intelligent Transportation Systems Authors: Jiahao Wu, Shengwen Yu Published: 2026-06-14 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20686v1 Shared-space transportation operation requires low-speed autonomous platforms to navigate safely and efficiently among pedestrians, service robots, micromobility users, carts, and other road users. Most existing systems decompose this problem into trajectory prediction followed by motion planning, which creates one-way information flow: predicted participant futures influence the robot plan, but the selected robot plan cannot influence the predicted multi-agent evolution. This paper presents a joint prediction-planning diffusion framework that treats participant prediction and robot planning as a single conditional trajectory generation problem, where the model samples the future robot trajectory and all participant trajectories from one coupled distribution using a causal Transformer with cross-trajectory attention. To replace heuristic repulsive post-processing, the framework introduces differentiable safety potential guidance, a time-varying occupancy-probability potential whose gradient directly guides the joint sampler, and conditional flow matching is used to reduce inference steps while preserving multimodal trajectory diversity. The evaluation emphasizes shared-space operational effects, including near misses, blockage time, induced participant deviation, hard-braking events, and embedded latency, rather than treating average displacement error and final displacement error as the main result. Experiments in scenario-grounded simulation, naturalistic pedestrian replay, Isaac Sim validation, and ROS/Orin deployment show that joint sampling improves tail safety and runtime efficiency over a separated prediction-then-planning baseline. --- ### Shear-Free Viewport Magnification for 360-Degree via Spherical Mobius Boosts Authors: Boyang Li, Hezhao Xu Published: 2026-06-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20684v1 Viewport-adaptive 360-degree imaging seeks to allocate a fixed sampling budget to the region a viewer is likely to observe. Existing view-biased projections increase viewport resolution through non-conformal warps, which can introduce anisotropic stretching and shear. We formulate spherical Mobius boosts as exact conformal maps for fixed-budget viewport magnification. The continuous spherical warp has quasiconformal dilatation K = 1, reallocating samples toward a target direction while preserving local angles. On a SUN360 saliency audit with 72 panoramas and 216 paired viewport targets, C1 Mobius boosting improves viewport PSNR over optimized offset cubemap on all paired cases, with case-level median gain +3.26 dB, image-level median gain +3.23 dB, and panorama-level bootstrap 95% CI (+3.15, +3.33) dB. Pareto analysis shows that this is not a free global-quality improvement: C1 trades full-sphere WS-PSNR for shear-free viewport fidelity. Prediction-error and filtering studies identify the operating envelope: strong boosts are useful for accurately targeted viewports, while large target uncertainty calls for weaker boosts or fallback. These results position Mobius boosting as a geometric primitive for prediction-conditioned foveated 360-degree resampling rather than a universal encode-once layout. --- ### From Question Answering to Task Completion: A Survey on Agent System and Harness Design Authors: Jianyuan Guo, Zhiwei Hao, Chengcheng Wang, Cheng Fan, Tingzhang Luo, Hongguang Li, Ying Gao, Hefei Mei, Jiankun Peng, Rongjian Xu, Minjing Dong, Han Wu et al. Published: 2026-06-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20683v1 LLM-based agents mark a shift from passive question answering to active task completion: they perceive environments, invoke tools, maintain state, and act over extended horizons. As agent systems have evolved from prompt engineering to workflows and context engineering, harness engineering, and agent-native training with co-evolution, a central question has become increasingly important: where does the bottleneck in agent performance reside, in the foundation model, in the execution harness, or in the coupling between them? This survey examines LLM-based agents through a model-harness lens. We first clarify the functional definition of agents and the implementation view of an LLM-based agent as a foundation model coupled with an execution harness. We then analyze the limits of model-centric scaling, trace four paradigms of agent engineering, and decompose the execution harness into six coupled runtime responsibilities: observation, context, control, action, state, and verification. Using this decomposition, we map task properties and domain pressures to harness configurations, review benchmark and evaluation practices, and synthesize model-harness evidence on how runtime design affects long-horizon task completion, efficiency, and reliability. Finally, we identify open challenges in value-aware evaluation, safety, harness generalization, and model-harness co-evolution. Rather than treating agents as models with auxiliary tools, this survey argues that agent quality -- including success, efficiency, safety, and generalization -- emerges from the interaction between model capability, runtime infrastructure, task structure, and evaluation design. A collection of papers discussed in this survey is provided in https://github.com/ggjy/Awesome-Agent-Engineering. --- ### Open Annotations and Synthetic Data for Field Localisation in Indian Bank Cheques Authors: Jaganadh Gopinadhan Published: 2026-06-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20682v1 Automated cheque processing requires localising key fields (date, legal amount, IFSC code, account number, signature, and payee name) before any recognition step. The IDRBT Cheque Image Dataset is, to our knowledge, the only public collection of Indian bank cheques, but it ships without field annotations and with no stated licence, so its redistribution terms are unclear. We address both limitations. First, we release six-field bounding-box annotations for all 112 cheques in the dataset, distributed annotations-only and keyed to the original filenames so that the IDRBT redistribution terms are respected. Second, we release 295 fully redistributable synthetic cheque images produced by a cut-paste pipeline that composites annotated field regions from real cheques onto content-erased, bank-specific canvas templates; because patches are pasted at their source coordinates, annotations carry forward unchanged. Third, we provide a ResNet-50 direct-regression baseline that predicts all six fields in a single forward pass, and use it for a controlled test of the synthetic data. The test is sobering: because cheque layouts are rigid, a no-learning baseline that simply predicts each field's mean training box already reaches 0.691 mean IoU and 80% accuracy at IoU >= 0.5, and once seed variance and training compute are accounted for, the cut-paste synthetic data yields no measurable improvement over real data alone (an equal-compute real-only model matches or beats the synthetic-augmented model on every aggregate metric). We report this negative result in full, since it cautions against assuming appearance-only augmentation helps fixed-layout documents and points instead to layout-varying synthesis. The annotations and synthetic images are released as reusable resources on the Hugging Face Hub under permissive licences. --- ### DynAMO:Dynamic Asset Management Orchestration via Topological Multi-Agent Scheduling Authors: Kanishk Kushwaha, Vikrant Vinod Bansode, Harsh Vardhan, Dhaval C. Patel Published: 2026-06-14 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19382v1 While LLM-powered agents offer end-to-end automation for industrial asset lifecycles, real-world Industry 4.0 deployment is hindered by latency, concurrency instability, and safety risks. We present DynAMO (Dynamic Asset Management Orchestration), a deployment-ready engine using a Plan-then-Execute architecture to generate verifiable workflow graphs. DynAMO supports both SequentialWorkflow (topological execution) and ParallelWorkflow (dependency-aware concurrency). By dynamically identifying independent tasks, DynAMO preserves structural correctness and safety while significantly improving efficiency through controlled reasoning overlap. Across six controlled experiments on the AssetOpsBench industrial benchmark, DynAMO demonstrates substantial performance and robustness gains. Parallel execution reduces end-to-end latency by a median of 1.6x over sequential orchestration, rising to 1.8x on highly parallelizable workflows. After instrumenting external tool calls with realistic latencies, a latency decomposition shows that LLM reasoning and orchestration still account for more than 90% of execution time, identifying model inference as the primary system bottleneck. Structured context pruning reduces inference latency by approximately 30%, and DynAMO maintains correct functional behaviour (task completion, agent sequencing, and output quality) while exhibiting graceful degradation under controlled fault injection. Reproducibility analysis further confirms stable execution under repeated runs, with parallel scheduling reducing latency variance. These findings establish DynAMO as a practical blueprint for scalable, safe, and latency-aware agent deployment in Industry 4.0 automation pipelines. Code is available at: https://github.com/kushwaha001/DynAMO --- ### Improving Code-Switching ASR with Code-Mixing Guided Synthetic Speech Authors: Yue Heng Yeo, Haoyang Li, Yizhou Peng, Shreyas Gopal, Hexin Liu, Leibny Paola Garcia-Perera, Hardik B. Sailor, Jeremy H. M. Wong, Eng Siong Chng Published: 2026-06-14 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19381v1 Code-switch (CS) Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) remains challenging due to limited availability of high quality CS text-speech pairs for training. Although synthetic data augmentation via Text-to-speech (TTS) has been explored, existing CS TTS approaches primarily optimise reconstruction fidelity and do not explicitly enforce language-boundary consistency, thereby limiting their effectiveness for CS ASR augmentation. This paper proposes a code-mixing guided preference-learning framework that steers synthetic speech generation toward improved code-switching fidelity using the Code Mixing Index (CMI). Experiments on the SEAME Mandarin-English conversational corpus demonstrate that the proposed method enhances the utility of synthetic data for ASR fine-tuning. Specifically, when fine-tuning Whisper Large, the proposed approach reduces Mixed Error Rate (MER) from 12.1%/17.8% to 8.9%/14.2% on the DevMAN and DevSGE sets, respectively. --- ### Models Take Notes at Prefill: KV Cache Can Be Editable and Composable Authors: Bojie Li Published: 2026-06-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17107v1 Prefix caching reuses prefill only across an exactly shared prefix, so one changed field invalidates the entire downstream cache. Yet overwriting the field's own key/value vectors and reusing the rest leaves the model acting on the old value. The reason, established causally across four model families: at prefill the model has already written the field-conditioned conclusion onto downstream notes; the field's own key/value drives under 1% of the decision. Read as a notebook of memoized conclusions, two capabilities follow. (1) It is editable. A salient erratum amends the notes; and with chain-of-thought, editing the field alone recovers the decision (1.00 at 8B, ~1% compute), while without CoT it is ignored. (2) It is composable. The notes are position-portable, so a precompiled skill can be RoPE-repositioned and spliced into any context, indistinguishable from full recompute (logit cosine 0.90-0.999, twelve models) at O(L) rather than O(L^2) time-to-first-token. A unified edit+compose agent stays decision-identical to recompute at up to 14.9x lower latency. The approach applies to any per-token attention KV cache, validated across scale, quantization, Mixture-of-Experts, and multimodal caches, and extends to several attention variants through small adapters. Because the erratum is append-only, it composes with production prefix caching: in an online vLLM benchmark it keeps the prefix cache-aligned (98.5% hit-rate), cutting p90 time-to-first-token by 53-398x. --- ### Informative Missingness to Generate Irregular Clinical Time Series Authors: Hadi Mehdizavareh, Gabriele Santangelo, Giovanna Nicora, Simon Lebech Cichosz, Arianna Dagliati, Arijit Khan, Riccardo Bellazzi Published: 2026-06-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17106v1 Laboratory tests in electronic health records are collected irregularly, and the absence of a test order can be as informative as the measurement itself. Such missingness reflects clinicians' decisions and patient physiology, making it important to model it directly rather than treat it as a preprocessing artifact. Here we present a diffusion-based approach for generating clinical time series that jointly models laboratory values and their observation patterns using the public Data Analytics Challenge on Missing Data Imputation (DACMI) benchmark derived from MIMIC-III. To preserve realistic sampling, we align chart times into 4-hour intervals and segment admissions into 7-day windows, producing trajectories that pair each lab value with a corresponding observation indicator. Standard transformations and normalization are applied to stabilize training. Our method extends the TimeDiff framework to learn continuous lab values and discrete missingness patterns through complementary diffusion objectives. Experiments show that the generated data closely match real patient trajectories across individual lab distributions and joint value-missingness embeddings, demonstrating that diffusion models can capture clinically meaningful dependencies between patient physiology and clinicians' testing behavior under MNAR-like (missing-not-at-random) missingness. These preliminary results indicate that our model can serve as an initial component toward developing clinical foundation models. By producing synthetic priors that preserve key physiology-missingness relationships, this work motivates the subsequent training of Prior-Data Fitted Networks capable of leveraging informative missingness, which we will investigate in the extended work. --- ### Prefill/Decode-Aware Evaluation of LLM Inference on Emerging AI Accelerators Authors: Shun Usami, Venkatram Vishwanath, E. Wes Bethel Published: 2026-06-14 Categories: cs.AR, cs.AI, cs.DC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17104v1 As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in latency- and cost-sensitive settings, inference efficiency has become a central systems challenge. While GPUs dominate current deployments, a growing number of AI accelerators claim advantages for LLM inference, yet it remains unclear under which conditions such accelerators outperform GPUs in practice. Recent inference systems decompose execution into Prefill and Decode phases, which exhibit distinct computational characteristics and latency metrics, commonly captured by time to first token (TTFT) and time per output token (TPOT). This paper presents a phase-aware evaluation of LLM inference performance across GPUs and emerging AI accelerators using a common model, Llama2-7B. By separately measuring Prefill and Decode performance, we reveal that accelerator advantages differ by phase and metric. Our results show that GPUs consistently excel in the compute-intensive Prefill phase, while GroqRack achieves significantly lower TPOT during Decode (batching not currently supported). However, GPUs regain an advantage in Decode throughput as batch size increases. These findings demonstrate that each platform exhibits distinct phase-dependent strengths. We further analyze heterogeneous Prefill/Decode disaggregation across different accelerator platforms, identifying performance gains and the workload and network conditions under which such gains are realized. --- ### Quantum Cinema: An Interactive Cinematic Exploration of Quantum Computing Hardware via Generative World Models Authors: Aoyu Zhang, Dongping Liu, Luyao Zhang Published: 2026-06-14 Categories: physics.pop-ph, cs.AI, cs.ET, cs.HC, quant-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17102v3 Quantum computing promises transformative advances across science and industry, yet the physical hardware that enables these computations remains invisible to the public: quantum processors operate inside sealed dilution refrigerators at temperatures near absolute zero, making direct observation impossible. This "imagination gap" between quantum computing's growing societal impact and the public's ability to visualize it represents a significant barrier to quantum literacy and workforce development. We present Quantum Cinema, an open-source, browser-based interactive application that closes this gap by transforming invisible quantum hardware into explorable, cinematic experiences using generative world models. Quantum Cinema guides users through a four-act narrative -- from the foundational Nobel Prize-winning science of quantum entanglement, through curated video introductions to three major quantum computing architectures (trapped-ion, neutral-atom, and superconducting systems), into immersive three-dimensional generative worlds that make invisible quantum phenomena observable, and finally to interactive radar-chart comparisons grounded in real quantum device specifications. All three-dimensional environments are generated using WorldLabs' generative world model platform and are scientifically grounded in curated metrics from Amazon Web Services (AWS) Braket quantum hardware. Quantum Cinema requires no installation, no specialized hardware, and no quantum computing background. It is designed to serve two distinct communities: scholars and developers seeking to replicate or extend the platform, and educators, researchers, and science communicators seeking an intuitive tool for explaining quantum hardware to diverse audiences. This paper describes the system architecture, the generative world model pipeline, use cases for both communities, and directions for future work. --- ### Software Delegation Contracts: Measuring Reviewability in AI Coding-Agent Work Authors: Vincent Schmalbach Published: 2026-06-14 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17099v1 AI coding agents increasingly accept assigned software tasks, modify repositories under bounded authority, and return work packages for review. Prior work proposed the software delegation contract, covering the task, authority, returned work package, and acceptance context, as the unit of analysis for delegated coding work, but did not measure its effects. This paper reports a controlled pilot study of explicit delegation contracts for coding agents. We built a dependency-free TypeScript API task environment with seeded defects and documentation gaps, authored ten tasks across five families, and ran 64 agent executions across two model tiers under three conditions: a realistic issue-style prompt, an explicit delegation contract, and a contract with a required evidence bundle. Each run was scored with hidden acceptance tests, mutation checks, and scope analysis, then reviewed by three independent condition-blinded model-based reviewers using a fixed rubric, for 192 reviews. Explicit contracts did not improve objective task outcomes: all 64 runs passed hidden acceptance checks, with zero scope violations. They did improve reviewability. Evidence sufficiency improved in 22 of 30 paired comparisons and worsened in none (+0.83 on a 5-point scale, p < 0.0001, Cliff's delta = 0.66); reviewer ambiguity decreased (p = 0.035); changed-file lists, known-limitations sections, residual-risk sections, and reviewer checklists appeared mostly or only when demanded by the contract. Contracts cost +13% agent tokens and +38% wall-clock time, with larger effects for the weaker model tier. On these small tasks, delegation contracts bought reviewability rather than correctness. --- ### Mind-Studio: Executable World Models with Lookahead Evaluation for Partially Observable Games Authors: Yifei Dong, Mingen Zheng, Linquan Wu, Jeff Z. Pan, Jiaxin Bai Published: 2026-06-14 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16070v2 World-model synthesis aims to turn interaction experience into an internal model of environment dynamics. Existing symbolic approaches often fit observed transitions or mixtures of local rules, but they do not produce a complete executable program that can run independently of the real environment. We present Mind-Studio, a framework that synthesizes executable pygame-style world models from state-action-next-state trajectories using large language models. Mind-Studio combines entropy-selected traces with a lightweight game skill file containing object, action, and static scene information extracted from screenshots. We evaluate synthesis quality with a K-step lookahead fidelity protocol that compares generated world-model rollouts against Real-ALE rollouts from the same state. On Montezuma's Revenge, Mind-Studio improves chosen-action next-state prediction from 0.3% for PoE-World to 48.7% while verifying 5 of 8 subgoals; across Alien, Assault, and Skiing, it achieves stronger branch-level fidelity than prior learned lookahead sources. ---