# Research Papers — 2026-06 · bundle page 143 of 260

> Full-text markdown of papers #7101–7150 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/143
[← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/142.md)
[Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/144.md)

### GRAPE: Guided Parameter-Space Evolution for Compact Adversarial Robustness

Authors: Zhiyuan Ye, Xiangyu Zhou, Ji Qi, Hao Zhang, Yi Zhou
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14865v1

Adversarial Training (AT) improves neural network robustness, but most methods train a fixed parameter space from the start. This paper asks whether the order in which parameters become optimizable can affect the final robust solution, even when the final architecture or computation budget is controlled. We propose GRAPE, Guided Parameter-Space Evolution, a training framework for compact adversarial robustness. GRAPE combines parameter-space stabilization with progressive hidden expansion: it stabilizes robust optimization in the currently exposed space, gradually releases new optimizable dimensions, and uses an adversarial spectral utilization score to guide newly released capacity toward high-pressure modules. In contrast to fixed-structure AT, GRAPE treats robust model learning as a process of progressive parameter-space exposure and evolution. Under the standard $\ell_\infty$ threat model on CIFAR-10, with fixed-structure ResNet-18 AT as a controlled reference, GRAPE improves PGD-20 robust accuracy from 51.70% to 56.94% at a nearly matched computation budget with a FLOPs ratio of 1.009x, while reducing parameter count by about 21.4%. A sequential grow variant with the same final ResNet-18 architecture reaches 56.52% PGD-20 robust accuracy, indicating that the gain is not only due to final architecture differences but also to the parameter-space exposure path. These results suggest that guided parameter-space evolution can yield compact and robust parameter configurations under matched computation.

---

### Event Generation with Parallel Langevin Sampling and Learned Stein Diagnostics

Authors: Rob Verheyen
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: hep-ph, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14854v1

Efficient event generation is a major computational challenge for precision collider phenomenology, especially for high-multiplicity final states where matrix-element evaluations are expensive and rejection-sampling efficiencies are low. We study an alternative approach based on many parallel underdamped Langevin chains, retaining one terminal state from each chain to obtain unweighted events while avoiding within-chain autocorrelation. A learned Stein discrepancy is used as a convergence diagnostic, providing a data-driven estimate of the relaxation time. We apply the method to tree-level $u\bar u\to Z+n g$ event generation and find that relaxation requires only a modest number of exact-target Langevin steps, with mild growth over the multiplicities studied. Finally, we show that simple neural-network surrogate initialization can substantially reduce the required number of exact matrix-element and gradient evaluations.

---

### Multi-HMR 2: Multi-Person Camera-Centric Human Detection, Mesh Recovery and Tracking

Authors: Guénolé Fiche, Philippe Weinzaepfel, Romain Brégier, Fabien Baradel
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14841v1

Most advances in human mesh recovery (HMR) have focused on pelvis-centered recovery, overlooking metric 3D localization and detection accuracy in the camera coordinate system - two key factors for real-world applications such as human-robot interaction and social scene understanding. Current evaluation protocols often ignore these aspects, emphasizing per-person, root-centered recovery rather than camera-space perception. As a result, existing approaches rely on fixed camera assumptions or handcrafted post-processing, limiting their robustness and practical deployment. We introduce Multi-HMR 2, a simple yet robust DETR-based framework for Multi-person Camera-centric Human detection, mesh Recovery, and tracking. Multi-HMR 2 predicts a scene-consistent camera together with human meshes, enabling metric 3D localization without ground-truth intrinsics. Moreover, by distilling image-based memory features from SAM2, Multi-HMR 2 extends to tracking, achieving consistent identity association without video supervision. Despite its conceptual simplicity - no handcrafted components, no video input, and no ground-truth cameras - Multi-HMR 2 achieves state-of-the-art pelvis-centered performance while substantially improving detection accuracy and metric 3D localization.

---

### A Definition of Good Explanations and the Challenges Explaining LLM Outputs

Authors: Louis Mahon, Elliot Ford, Callum Hackett
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14838v1

How to define a good explanation is a long-standing philosophical debate which has found recent renewed interest in the context of AI outputs. Explainability is crucial for AI adoption in many contexts, but in order to produce good explanations of AI systems, we must first have an understanding of what good explanations are. In this paper we propose a definition inspired by the notion of counterfactual explanations, however we argue that one must also take into account the interlocutor's prior beliefs in each fact that could be offered in an explanation. We explore the ramifications of this definition for AI explainability and, in particular, why LLM outputs are difficult to produce good explanations for.

---

### PhoneHarness: Harnessing Phone-Use Agents through Mixed GUI, CLI, and Tool Actions

Authors: Chenxin Li, Zhengyao Fang, Zhengyang Tang, Pengyuan Lyu, Xingran Zhou, Xin Lai, Fei Tang, Liang Wu, Yiduo Guo, Weinong Wang, Junyi Li, Yi Zhang et al.
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14832v1

Phone agents are increasingly expected to complete real mobile workflows rather than merely predict the next screen action. However, much of the current mobile-agent literature still evaluates agents primarily as GUI controllers that observe a screen, emit taps and swipes, and are scored by target app state. Real phone-use tasks are broader: they require deciding when to use app GUIs, device-side commands, or structured tools, while leaving evidence that the intended side effect actually occurred. We introduce PhoneHarness, a mixed-action benchmark and execution harness for studying phone-use agents on verifiable mobile workflows. PhoneHarness runs a device-side agent loop over GUI, CLI, and host-side tool actions, combining deterministic action routing with bounded GUI delegation and auditable execution traces. Its benchmark, PhoneHarness Bench, evaluates whether agents complete tasks with observable side effects, not only whether they produce plausible final answers. On the annotated evaluation split, PhoneHarness reaches a 75.0% pass rate, outperforming the strongest non-PhoneHarness settings by 12.9 percentage points. PhoneHarness and PhoneHarness Bench therefore play distinct but mutually dependent roles: the harness makes mixed phone workflows executable, while the benchmark measures whether agents can use that harness reliably and safely. Our findings suggest that reliable phone automation depends on action-surface routing and verifiable execution, not only visual GUI control.

---

### Is Your Agent Playing Dead? Deployed LLM Agents Exhibit Constraint-Evasive Fabrication and Thanatosis

Authors: Andoni Rodríguez, Alberto Pozanco, Daniel Borrajo
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14831v1

This paper presents and characterizes a spectrum of previously unreported behaviours we term Constraint-Evasive Fabrication (CEF): when an LLM agent operates under irreconcilable constraints (where no response can simultaneously satisfy all active rules) it spontaneously fabricates plausible external obstacles and presents them as a fact. At the extreme end of this spectrum lies Constraint-Evasive Thanatosis (CET); the limit case where, rather than inventing a plausible excuse, the model simulates a full system crash to make the user disengage entirely. We first observed CET in an uncontrolled deployment test, where a GPT-4o banking agent fabricated Python-style exception traces (complete with memory addresses) to feign a system failure when threatened by a user. In subsequent controlled experiments, the model independently invented audit restrictions, microservice architectures, error codes, and service timeouts, none present in its prompt. Reproduction attempts across pressure levels and attacker personas yielded CEF consistently but with substantial variation in form, onset, and severity: the phenomenon is robust but stochastic. Critically, injecting ground-truth data mid-conversation did not restore honest behaviour once fabrication had taken hold (the model ignored correct information and continued confabulating) suggesting CEF is self-reinforcing rather than a knowledge gap. We show that (1) standard enterprise guardrails routinely create CEF-enabling conditions in production, (2) current RLHF procedures suppress but cannot eliminate CEF, and (3) existing safety benchmarks do not test for this failure mode. Our results highlight the need for irreconcilable-constraint benchmarks, CEF-aware training procedures, and deployment-time detection methods before constrained agents become further entrenched in high-stakes domains.

---

### Leptomeningeal Collateral Detection on DSA via Vessel-Graph Neural Networks

Authors: Junyong Cao, Hakim Baazaoui, Chinmay Prabhakar, Suprosanna Shit, Lukas Bastian Otto, Susanne Wegener, Bjoern Menze, Ezequiel de la Rosa
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: eess.IV, cs.AI, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14828v1

Leptomeningeal collaterals (LMCs) are an important prognostic factor in acute ischemic stroke. Existing automated methods rely on CT angiography (CTA), but individual LMCs are often too small to be resolved on CTA, limiting these methods to coarse collateral scoring. Digital subtraction angiography (DSA) visualizes individual collaterals at superior resolution, yet current assessment remains subjective, relying on manual grading scales that suffer from poor inter-rater agreement. We present a framework that formulates collateral detection as the classification of individual vessel segments on a graph derived from DSA. A hybrid graph-pixel architecture combines a topology-aware graph branch with a dense pixel branch, fused in a shared node-probability space. In a five-fold cross-validation setting, the fused model achieves a PR-AUC of 0.434, outperforming the graph-only (0.403) and pixel-only (0.362) baselines. To our knowledge, this is the first method to enable the individualization of LMCs in DSA, allowing for precise per-vessel quantitative assessment. This integration shifts DSA assessment toward objective evaluation, supporting future biomarker and pattern discovery for individual LMCs.

---

### Running hardware-aware neural architecture search on embedded devices under 512MB of RAM

Authors: Andrea Mattia Garavagno, Edoardo Ragusa, Paolo Gastaldo, Antonio Frisoli
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.AR, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14824v1

This document proposes a novel approach to hardware-aware neural architecture search (HW NAS) that considers the resources available on the computing platform running it, enabling its execution on various embedded devices. The presented HW NAS produces tiny convolutional neural networks (CNNs) targeting low-end microcontroller units (MCUs), typically involved in the Internet of Things (IoT) or wearable robotics, opening new use cases. A gateway could run it to tailor CNNs' architecture on the acquired data without using external servers, ensuring privacy. The proposed technique achieves state-of-the-art results in the human-recognition tasks on the Visual Wake Word dataset, a standard TinyML benchmark, on several embedded devices.

---

### Human genetic evidence is associated with drug approval across therapeutic areas: an observational analysis of 26,278 target-disease pairs with temporal validation and feature ablation

Authors: Victoria Paterson
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: q-bio.GN, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14823v1

Genetic evidence is enriched among approved drug targets: in an observational analysis of 26,278 target-disease pairs from Open Targets and ChEMBL, targets with any genetic association had a 3.25-fold higher approval rate than those without (OR = 3.25, 95% CI 2.79-3.79, p = 1.91e-42). A target-level analysis accounting for non-independence of pairs sharing the same gene gave OR = 2.79 (bootstrap 95% CI 2.22-3.53); the oncology pair-level OR of 6.72 attenuates to 2.71 at the target level, illustrating how non-independence inflates area-specific estimates. The enrichment replicated in post-2015 approvals (OR = 3.51, p = 1.72e-8). Feature ablation across six evidence types revealed that literature mining alone accounts for most classifier performance (AUPRC = 0.099 versus 0.109 for all features), consistent with temporal leakage from post-approval publications. Excluding literature, remaining evidence types retain above-baseline signal (AUPRC = 0.084, 1.63x baseline). Sensitivity analyses bracket the pair-level OR between 3.25 and 4.93. Genetic evidence alone yields only a 1.0-percentage-point absolute AUPRC gain and the best model has poor calibration; the classifier has limited practical predictive value. We catalogue 1,433 genetically supported Phase 1/2 pairs as a hypothesis-generating resource. All findings are observational.

---

### Quantum Machine Learning for Industrial Applications

Authors: Léo Monbroussou
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: quant-ph, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14822v1

Recent advances in Machine Learning have transformed numerous industrial sectors, yet classical paradigms face fundamental limitations: rapidly growing data volumes, rising computational costs, significant energy consumption, and the physical scaling limits of conventional hardware architectures. Quantum computing has emerged as a promising computational paradigm to address these challenges, giving rise to the field of Quantum Machine Learning (QML). In this thesis, the theoretical foundations of QML are investigated, with a focus on near-term and future practical applications. Three central challenges are addressed: the trainability of variational quantum circuits, their expressivity, and their resistance to efficient classical simulation. The trainability of Hamming-weight preserving variational quantum circuits is first studied, and theoretical guarantees are established that resolve an open conjecture on the absence of barren plateaus for this circuit family. Subspace-preserving QML algorithms are then introduced, including photonic circuits and quantum convolutional neural networks, and are designed to mimic classical ML subroutines while offering polynomial quantum advantage. Finally, variational quantum circuits are analyzed as quantum Fourier models, and a framework is derived to jointly characterize expressivity and trainability, from which conditions are obtained under which quantum models provably separate from their classical counterparts. These contributions are intended to advance the theoretical roadmap for harnessing near-term and future quantum technologies in real-world applications.

---

### Co-Scraper: query-aware DOM Pruning and Reusable Scraper Synthesis for Lightweight Web Data Extraction

Authors: Shoupeng Wang, Jiantao Qiu, Wuyang Zhang, Conghui He
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14821v1

The abundant and heterogeneous nature of web content necessitates automated information extraction, and generating scrapers that can be reused across similar web pages offers an effective solution for scalable data extraction. In this work, we propose Co-Scraper, a two-stage framework capable of handling the hierarchical complexity of long HTML documents. By integrating a query-aware DOM pruning mechanism with stable extraction strategy induction, Co-Scraper can effectively transforms web content into executable programmatic wrappers using a fine-tuned Qwen3-8B model. On the test set of SWDE, Co-Scraper achieves state-of-the-art performance with an F1 score of 94.78% and a reuse success rate of 90.39%. This framework significantly enhances the accuracy and resilience of data extraction, providing a highly efficient approach for web data acquisition tasks.

---

### Spectro-Temporal Interference Confounds Phase Encoding in Spatial Audio Foundation Models

Authors: Yuxuan Chen, Haoyuan Yu, Peize He
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI, cs.CL, eess.AS
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14820v1

Recent spatial self supervised audio models achieve high performance on localization tasks, raising questions about their encoding of microsecond interaural phase fine structures. We propose a psychoacoustic benchmark based on the binaural masking level difference to evaluate this. Using an equalization cancellation baseline and a GCC PHAT positive control we evaluate nine frozen audio models spanning binaural SSL, monaural SSL, and neural audio codecs. Four monaural negative controls yield zero BMLD confirming binaural specificity. Two general purpose binaural SSL models exhibit minimal phase sensitivity while dedicated binaural spatial SSL models achieve BMLD comparable to the analytical baseline. Progressive physical ablations show that general purpose binaural SSL models rely on spectro temporal interference textures rather than cross channel phase computation. High detection rates in speech reflect a confounding reliance on broadband envelopes rather than genuine phase encoding.

---

### Combining Retrieval-Augmented Text Generation with LLMs for Reading Content Recommendations

Authors: Sooyeon Kim, Piotr S. Maciąg
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14817v1

This work presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a system for generating personalized reading content using Large Language Models (LLMs) combined with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). The proposed architecture consists of four modules: Input, RAG, Generation, and Judging and enables users to specify both a question and a target reading content complexity. RAG is employed to retrieve relevant information from the Internet, enriching and grounding the content produced by three modern LLMs: Meta LLaMA 4 Scout, LLaMA 3.1 8B Instant, and Google Gemma2 9B. Reading materials are generated using three prompting strategies (Chain-of-Thought, zero-shot, and few-shot), and the LLM-as-a-Judge module automatically evaluates answer quality and alignment with the desired readability level. Experimental results show that RAG consistently improves system performance across all models and prompting techniques, increasing relevance and particularly groundedness by up to 26-35 percentage points. Overall, the findings demonstrate that the RAG-augmented architecture effectively produces reading content tailored to user queries and desired textual complexity.

---

### A Security Analysis of Long-Horizon Agentic AI Systems: Threats, Evaluation, and Framework Development

Authors: Ahmed Mohammed Almalki, Mehedi Masud
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14816v1

This paper presents a structured analysis of security challenges in long-horizon agentic AI systems. The study reviews existing threats, evaluation approaches, attack propagation mechanisms, and security frameworks. A taxonomy of security threats and a framework for analyzing attack propagation are proposed to support future research in agentic AI security

---

### A Multi-Level Architecture for Reusable Materials Ontologies -- The OntoCrafter Ceramics Ontology (OCO) as Reference Implementation

Authors: Thomas Pannek, Wolfgang Grond
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cond-mat.mtrl-sci, cs.AI, physics.app-ph, physics.chem-ph, physics.comp-ph
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14814v2

The Materials Science and Engineering ontology landscape is fragmented along multiple axes simultaneously. Horizontally: a recent survey identified 94 ontologies of which over 40 are structurally incompatible; each new application domain -- ceramics, polymers, batteries, smart materials -- typically restarts ontology design from scratch. Vertically: EU regulation (CSRD, CSDDD, PPWR, CBAM, R2R, AI Act, ESPR) forces material, manufacturing, supply-chain, and lifecycle data into integrated digital product passports, leaving ontologies that only address horizontal fragmentation incomplete for any contemporary consumer. And mechanistically: a vocabulary that records that BNT-BT has $d_{33} \approx 580$ pC/N stores a fact but cannot surface why -- Bi-6s$^2$ lone-pair stereo-activity, anomalous Born effective charges, soft modes, defect chemistry -- without a systematic explanation skeleton. We propose a multi-level modular architecture with two independent classification axes -- level of abstraction (L0 bridges, L1 material-agnostic laboratory-notebook, L2 material-class-specific, L3 categorical reasoning) and consumer audience (material vs. compliance) -- in which the material-specific level is internally organised by a seven-tier mechanistic-explanation skeleton (Symmetry, Energy/DFT, Thermo/CALPHAD, Kinetics, Microstructure, Defect chemistry, Bonding) applicable to any crystalline ionic oxide. The level-and-audience modularity dissolves the horizontal fragmentation, the compliance audience absorbs the vertical regulation pressure, and the seven-tier organisation of Level 2 delivers the mechanistic explanation depth. We instantiate the architecture as the OntoCrafter Ceramics Ontology (OCO v0.94): 5,196 classes across 44 modules; 167,348 OWL axioms (40,454 logical); 1,674 properties; 829 cross-ontology bridge mappings; 1,172 SHACL shapes; 163 published competency questions.

---

### JetParticle-JEPA: An Efficient Self-Supervised Representation Learning method for Jet Tagging in High-Energy Physics

Authors: Guillaume Letellier, Antonin Vacheret, Frédéric Jurie
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: hep-ph, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14813v1

Jet tagging at the Large Hadron Collider increasingly relies on deep learning models trained on massive simulated datasets, leading to high computational costs and limited robustness to detector mismodeling. We introduce JetParticle-JEPA (JP-JEPA), a self-supervised Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture that learns physically meaningful jet representations directly from continuous particle clouds without tokenization or reconstruction of raw inputs. Built on a Particle Transformer backbone, JP-JEPA predicts latent representations of masked particles while preserving fine-grained kinematic correlations. On the JetClass benchmark, JP-JEPA achieves performance comparable to fully supervised state-of-the-art methods on the full dataset, surpasses supervised baselines in low-label regimes, and significantly outperforms existing SSL approaches. On Top Quark and Quark-Gluon Tagging benchmarks, it remains on par with supervised methods. The learned representations also exhibit strong robustness to missing detector information and improved uncertainty behavior, highlighting JP-JEPA as a promising foundation-model framework for robust and data-efficient jet physics at the LHC.

---

### S23DR 2026: End-to-End 3D Wireframe Prediction via DETR-Style Set Prediction with Contrastive Denoising

Authors: Nitiz Khanal
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14811v1

We present WireframeDETR, our submission to the Structured Semantic 3D Reconstruction (S23DR) 2026 Challenge, which requires predicting a 3D building wireframe from multi-view COLMAP point clouds. Our method applies DETR-style set prediction directly to 3D point clouds, producing wireframes as sets of edge coordinate pairs without any intermediate vertex detection stage. We introduce three technical contributions: (1) contrastive denoising training that stabilises noisy Hungarian matching in early epochs; (2) a multi-scale encoder that aggregates the last encoder layer outputs via learned scalar weights; and (3) progressive auxiliary loss weighting that concentrates gradient signal on the decoder layers that most benefit from it. Our model achieves a public test HSS of 0.575 (F1~=~0.664, IoU~=~0.516) and a best validation HSS of 0.534 on the cleaned val split.

---

### Explainable Task-Oriented Token Communication for AI-Native 6G Networks

Authors: Feibo Jiang, Lei Mao, Li Dong, Kezhi Wang, Cunhua Pan, Jiangzhou Wang
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV, cs.IT
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14808v1

The integration of Foundation Models (FMs) and wireless communications is driving the evolution of image communication from bit-accurate transmission toward task-oriented transmission. However, existing task-oriented image communication methods still face three major challenges: insufficient task-oriented Token representation, inadequate collaboration between Visual Tokens and Task Tokens, and limited interpretability of task decisions. To address these challenges, we propose an Explainable Task-Oriented Token Communication (ET-TokenCom) framework. By treating Tokens as unified units for information representation and transmission, the proposed framework constructs an end-to-end communication link that spans visual perception, wireless transmission, and task reasoning. At the transmitter, the ET-TokenCom framework extracts Visual Tokens from images to preserve low-level visual information. Meanwhile, Task Tokens generated by the FM are introduced to represent the target information and decision intent required by the current task. A Cross-Modal Attention (CMA) fusion mechanism is further designed, enabling Task Tokens to explicitly guide the selection, weighting, and transmission of Visual Tokens. At the receiver, the framework integrates Token decoding with an explainable output mechanism, where attention heatmaps are generated to highlight critical perceptual regions under different task objectives and reveal the influence of Task Tokens on the outputs. Finally, simulation results validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed ET-TokenCom framework.

---

### Gaze Heads: How VLMs Look at What They Describe

Authors: Rohit Gandikota, David Bau
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14703v1

How a vision-language model internally solves the task of describing an image is far from obvious. We find that the model develops a specific mechanism for this: a small set of attention heads in its language-model backbone, which we call gaze heads, whose attention tracks the image region the model is currently describing. We find them with a simple correlation score from a few forward passes, using comic strips as a controlled testbed where narrative order is laid out spatially. These gaze heads do not just track the image tokens being described: redirecting their attention to a chosen region forces the VLM to describe that region instead. A single attention-mask intervention on the top-100 gaze heads, fewer than 9% of all heads, steers the model's answer to any chosen comic panel at 83.1% accuracy, while the same intervention on random heads fails to redirect the answer, and intervening on all heads destroys generation. The same lever also extends to continuous control: switching the gaze target mid-generation makes the model wrap up its current panel description and move to the new one within a few tokens. Beyond comics, the same intervention redirects answers to chosen regions in natural COCO images. The mechanism further recurs across model sizes from 2B to 32B parameters and across other VLM architectures, although some frozen-encoder families show no comparable head set. More broadly, this shows that targeted edits identified through mechanistic analysis can serve as practical inference-time levers for steering multimodal model behavior, without any retraining. Our code, interactive demo, and datasets are available at https://gaze.baulab.info/

---

### OmniVideo-100K: A Dataset for Audio-Visual Reasoning through Structured Scripts and Evidence Chains

Authors: Xinyue Cai, Chaoyou Fu, Yi-Fan Zhang, Ran He, Caifeng Shan
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14702v2

Current automated pipelines for audio-visual Question Answering (QA) generally adopt a ``video-caption-QA'' paradigm. However, these methods typically segment videos into short clips and generate separate descriptions for audio and visual modalities. This decoupled processing severs inherent associations between sounds and their visual sources, while independent clip processing often causes inconsistent descriptions of the same entity across segments. Furthermore, coupling long-text comprehension and QA synthesis into a single step often restricts models to localized events, yielding questions lacking long-term temporal connections and deep cross-modal reasoning. To address these issues, we propose an automated data engine featuring two mechanisms: (1) \textbf{Entity-Anchored Video Scripting} transforms videos into structured scripts, comprising summaries, main entity lists, and segment-wise audio-visual descriptions. The entity list serves as a global prior to ensure cross-segment referential consistency and reconstruct audio-visual associations. (2) \textbf{Clue-Guided QA Generation} prompts models to first mine cross-segment, multimodal clues from the script, and subsequently generate QA pairs based on these high-value clues. Leveraging this pipeline, we construct the instruction-tuning dataset \textbf{OmniVideo-100K} and a human-verified test set, \textbf{OmniVideo-Test}. Fine-tuning VITA-1.5, Qwen2.5-Omni-7B and Qwen3-Omni-30B on OmniVideo-100K yields performance gains of up to 20.59% on OmniVideo-Test, demonstrating strong generalization (up to 12.64% improvements) across established benchmarks like Daily-Omni and JointAVBench.

---

### RATS! Patches Talk Through Registers: Emergent Parts in Register Attention Transformers

Authors: Timing Yang, Predrag Neskovic, Jansen Seheult, Wenchao Han, Anand Bhattad, Alan Yuille, Feng Wang
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14701v1

When humans see a bird, they recognize far more than just "bird" -- they see a head, wings, and talons, a structured assembly of reusable parts that can be identified across every bird they have ever seen. We ask whether a self-supervised visual model can discover the same compositional structure on its own. To this end, we propose RATS (Register Attention Transformers), which decomposes the classification token into N learnable register tokens that route patch information through an L->N->N->L bottleneck via a three-step compress-communicate-broadcast attention. The N registers are partitioned across the H attention heads, so that registers assigned to different heads do not interact with each other. Without auxiliary losses or part annotations, each register spontaneously specializes into a proto-semantic region whose emerging structure resembles object parts. RATS surpasses all baselines by +12 mIoU on average across five segmentation benchmarks, with consistent gains on ADE20K (+1.11 mIoU) and COCO (+0.2 AP^m). Its register dictionary further exhibits part-level consistency and semantic proximity across related categories. Our results suggest that RATS may provide a useful architectural prior for structured and interpretable visual representation learning.

---

### RepFusion: Leveraging Multimodal Priors for Denoising in Representation Space

Authors: Xichen Pan, Aashu Singh, Satya Narayan Shukla, Xiangjun Fan, Shlok Kumar Mishra, Saining Xie
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14700v1

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used in text-to-image (T2I) systems, but they are typically limited to text encoding, while denoising is handled by newly trained generative backbones. The emergence of representation autoencoders (RAEs) shifts the generation target toward semantically structured visual representations, creating a latent space that is more compatible with pretrained LLM priors. Inspired by multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), where an MLP projector is sufficient to align clean visual representations with a pretrained LLM, we repurpose the MLLM itself as a noisy representation encoder, extending this mechanism from clean to noisy inputs. We present RepFusion, which uses the resulting MLLM outputs as the conditioning signal for a diffusion transformer. In controlled comparisons at similar inference budgets, RepFusion outperforms baselines that devote comparable capacity to newly initialized denoisers. These results demonstrate that MLLMs provide strong priors for denoising visual representations and that, by conditioning on evolving noisy representations, test-time compute can be productively spent on repeated MLLM conditioning in modern T2I systems.

---

### Instruct-Particulate: Scaling Feed-Forward 3D Object Articulation with Kinematic Control

Authors: Ruining Li, Yuxin Yao, Matt Zhou, Chuanxia Zheng, Christian Rupprecht, Joan Lasenby, Shangzhe Wu, Andrea Vedaldi
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14699v1

Reconstructing articulated 3D objects is important for animation, gaming, and robotic simulations. Recent neural networks can estimate the articulated structure of 3D objects, but their generalization remains limited by the scarcity of annotated data for this task. To address this gap, we introduce Instruct-Particulate, a model that takes a 3D mesh together with a target kinematic specification, including part descriptions, connectivity, joint types, and optional point prompts, and predicts the corresponding kinematic part segmentation and joint motion parameters. The kinematic specification disambiguates the task and allows the model to target annotations of different granularity, thereby making it possible to use more abundant heterogeneous training data. At test time, the kinematic specification can be obtained automatically from large-scale vision-language models, so the model can be applied to any input mesh. To train our model at scale, we construct a heterogeneous dataset of more than 150,000 articulated 3D objects, extending existing publicly available collections with data obtained by partially labelling other 3D models (monolithic or already decomposed into parts) with kinematic labels by means of vision-language models. Experiments show that our model generalizes better across categories and to AI-generated meshes, enabling articulated asset reconstruction from real-world images via image-to-3D models.

---

### ClinHallu: A Benchmark for Diagnosing Stage-Wise Hallucinations in Medical MLLM Reasoning

Authors: Sicheng Yang, Hangjie Yuan, Wenjun Zhang, Jinwang Wang, Yichen Qian, Weihua Chen, Fan Wang, Lei Zhu
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14697v1

Building trustworthy medical multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is critical for reliable clinical decision support. Existing medical hallucination benchmarks mainly focus on data collection, but often ignore where hallucinations originate within the reasoning process. We find that hallucination sources vary across samples: errors may arise from visual misrecognition, incorrect medical knowledge recall, or flawed reasoning integration. To enable source-level hallucination diagnosis, we introduce ClinHallu, a benchmark for stage-wise hallucination diagnosis in medical MLLM reasoning. ClinHallu contains 7,031 validated instances, where each instance is augmented with a structured reasoning trace decomposed into Visual Recognition, Knowledge Recall, and Reasoning Integration. We also use stage-replacement interventions to measure how correcting specific stages affects the final answer. Beyond evaluation, we show that trace-supervised fine-tuning reduces stage-wise hallucinations. ClinHallu provides a fine-grained hallucination testbed for diagnosing and mitigating reasoning failures in medical MLLMs. The benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/alibaba-damo-academy/ClinHallu.

---

### Persona-Pruner: Sculpting Lightweight Models for Role-Playing

Authors: Jinsu Kim, Jihoon Tack, Noah Lee, Jongheon Jeong
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14695v2

Language Models (LMs) have shown remarkable potential as role-playing chatbots, delivering consistent, stylized interactions when given a specification of a character or user persona. However, applying these capabilities to real-world applications (e.g., ecosystems with numerous NPCs interacting simultaneously) exposes a critical inefficiency due to the excessive computational cost. In this paper, we question the necessity of dedicating a full, generalist model to a single persona, hypothesizing that a specific character identity relies on only a fraction of the model's total capacity. We observe that naively pruning LMs often severely degrades the role-playing performance for a specific persona; it does not distinguish between redundant knowledge and essential character traits. We propose Persona-Pruner, a framework that sculpts a lightweight role-playing model by isolating persona-specific sub-networks from a single description. Our experiments consistently show that Persona-Pruner preserves role-playing performance substantially more effectively than existing state-of-the-art LLM pruning techniques, reducing the performance drop from the dense model by up to 93.8% over the strongest baseline on RoleBench in LLM-as-a-judge score, while still maintaining general LLM capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/jsu-kim/Persona-Pruner.

---

### AdaSR: Adaptive Streaming Reasoning with Hierarchical Relative Policy Optimization

Authors: Junlong Tong, Wenqi Xu, Yingqi Fan, Anhao Zhao, Xuan Lu, Yang Tan, Xiaoyu Shen
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14694v2

Large reasoning models typically follow a read-then-think paradigm: they observe the complete input, reason over a static context, and then produce the answer. Yet many real-world scenarios are inherently dynamic, such as audio and video stream, where information arrives as a continuous stream and models must reason, update, and respond under partial observations. Recent streaming reasoning methods allow models to think while reading, but they largely rely on supervised imitation of pre-constructed trajectories, which limits their flexibility. In this paper, we propose AdaSR, an adaptive streaming reasoning framework that enables models to reason during input streaming and perform final deliberation once the stream is complete, learning when to think, and how much computation to allocate across different stages. To optimize this hierarchical reasoning process, we introduce Hierarchical Relative Policy Optimization (HRPO), which decomposes policy optimization into streaming reasoning and deep reasoning phases, providing more fine-grained advantage assignment instead of uniformly distributing a single sequence-level advantage over all tokens. HRPO integrates format, accuracy, and adaptive thinking rewards to enforce valid reasoning protocols, preserve final task performance, and encourage latency-aware computation allocation. Experiments show that AdaSR achieves a better balance among reasoning accuracy, computational efficiency, and streaming latency compared with supervised fine-tuning baseline. We release our code at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/StreamingLLM/tree/main/AdaSR.

---

### Learning Coordinated Preference for Multi-Objective Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Pengxin Wang, Lihao Guo, Yi Xie, Bo Liu, Siyang Cao, Jingdi Chen
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.MA, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14693v1

Cooperative multi-objective multi-agent reinforcement learning (MOMARL) models team decision making under multiple, potentially conflicting objectives. In this setting, conflicts arise not only across objectives but also across agents with different observations, roles, and contributions. We propose Preference Coordinated Multi-agent Policy Optimization (PCMA), which learns coordinated agent-specific preferences to enable complementary trade-offs among agents. Theoretically, we formulate cooperative MOMARL as a team-optimal game and show that, under suitable conditions, preference diversity can induce team improvement through a first-order improvement decomposition. Experiments on multiple cooperative MOMA environments and a practical traffic-control scenario show that PCMA improves both performance and trade-off coordination.

---

### CORA: Analyzing and bridging thinking-answer gap in Multimodal RLVR via Consistency-Oriented Reasoning Alignment

Authors: Jiayue Cao, Zhicong Lu, Xuehan Sun, Wei Jia, Hongling Zheng, Changyuan Tian, Zichuan Lin, Wenqian Lv, Nayu Liu
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14691v1

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has successfully elicited the reasoning capabilities of large language models, motivating its extension to multimodal scenarios. Existing methods primarily focus on improving the visual coverage of reasoning traces and mitigating visual hallucinations, but underestimate the semantic inconsistency between the reasoning process and the final answer. In this paper, we delve into thinking-answer inconsistency in RLVR for large vision-language models (LVLMs), showing thorough analyses of rollouts collected throughout Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) training process and post-RLVR evaluation outputs that this issue persists during training and remains present during inference. Motivated by the analysis, we propose Consistency-Oriented Reasoning Alignment (CORA), which introduces thinking-answer semantic consistency into RLVR through a lightweight plug-and-play consistency reward model, and further incorporates Hybrid Reward Advantage Splitting (HRAS) to stably coordinate task and consistency optimization. Extensive experiments across representative multimodal reasoning benchmarks and mainstream LVLMs show that CORA improves task performance while effectively mitigating thinking-answer inconsistency, leading to more faithful reasoning traces.

---

### A Complexity Measure for Active Learning in Multi-group Mean Estimation

Authors: Abdellah Aznag, Rachel Cummings, Adam N. Elmachtoub
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.LG, cs.IT
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14690v1

We study a \emph{max-risk} objective for active learning in a multi-group mean estimation $d$-armed bandits: a learner adaptively allocates a budget of $T$ samples across $d$ groups to minimize the worst-case uncertainty index $\max_{k\in(d)}σ_k^2/n_k$, where $σ_k$ is the standard deviation of the distribution of arm $d$, and $n_k$ is the number of times arm $d$ is sampled. We develop a local minimax framework and prove the first general lower bound for this objective, valid for any finite-variance hypothesis class. The bound separates difficulty into three orthogonal factors: a \emph{budget} term, a \emph{heteroscedasticity} index measuring how unevenly the uncertainty is spread across arms, and a model-dependent complexity measure, the \emph{Variance Local Curvature} ($\mathrm{VLC}$), which captures how much information a local change of variance creates inside the hypothesis class. For smooth classes, the $\mathrm{VLC}$ is a reparametrization of a variance--Fisher information, with closed-form values for common families. Benchmarking against the strongest available upper bound shows near-optimality up to logarithmic factors in broad regimes, and pinpoints a systematic gap in highly heterogeneous instances. Our proof introduces two key ingredients: a loss-induced $\ell_1$ geometry on the decision space, and a representation-based instance generator that reduces hard-instance construction to an explicit random matrix calculation.

---

### Flood and Harvest: The Provable Necessity of Trivia for Generating Valuable Mathematics via the Lens of Language Generation in the Limit

Authors: Xiaoyu Li, Andi Han, Dai Shi, Zheng Gao, Jiaojiao Jiang, Junbin Gao
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.DS
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14688v1

AI systems coupled to proof assistants now generate formal mathematics at scale, and the gap between what a checker can verify and what a mathematician would value has become the binding constraint. We model the generation of valuable mathematics as nested language generation in the limit: a verifiable formal language $F$, accessed through a membership oracle (the proof checker), contains an unknown valuable language $H \in \mathcal{H}$ revealed only through an adversarial enumeration of a core $C \subseteq H$ of exact density $α$ (the literature). Every output is valuable ($\in H$), trivial ($\in F \setminus H$), or a hallucination ($\notin F$). We settle four questions. First, the verifier is not taste: the collections admitting generation with breadth are exactly those of the oracle-free model, characterized fiber-wise by Angluin's condition. Second, the verifier does buy sound coverage, covering all unseen valuable statements while asserting only valid ones: possible with it, impossible without it; it relocates unavoidable errors from false to trivial. Third, and centrally, a sharp dichotomy on the tight family: generators emitting finitely many trivia achieve optimal coverage $α/2$, while any infinite trivia allowance, even at vanishing rate, jumps the optimum to $1-α/2$ (both tight, for cores presented as the candidate intersection), and one generator attains both ends. The transition is in trivia count, not rate; the gap $1-α$ is the unrecorded mass. Fourth, both regimes instantiate in a compression model of mathematics. A perfect verifier cannot substitute for taste: the unbounded stream of correct-but-worthless statements is not an engineering accident but a provable necessity, since covering unrecorded valuable mathematics requires an infinite, but asymptotically negligible, stream of certified trivia.

---

### CottonLeafVision: An Explainable and Robust Deep Learning Framework for Cotton Leaf Disease Classification

Authors: Rafi Ahamed, Md. Abir Rahman, Tasnia Tarannum Roza, Munaia Jannat Easha, Md. Asif Khan, Sudeepta Mandal
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14686v1

Globally, cotton is a highly economically beneficial crop, as the textile industry heavily depends on it. So, the precise identification and detection of cotton leaf disease is crucial for economic stability. The development goal of "CottonLeafVision" is to accurately classify and detect cotton leaf disease. With this goal, we have evaluated multiple pretrained Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, including DenseNet201, InceptionV3, and VGG19 on a publicly available cotton leaf disease image dataset. This image dataset includes seven classes, six disease classes, and one healthy class, collected under various field conditions reflecting real-world challenges. Among these pretrained models, with DenseNet201, we have achieved the highest classification accuracy of 98%. To enhance the model reliability and interpretability, we have implemented different techniques and methods such as Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), occlusion sensitivity analysis and adversarial training to increase the noise resistance of the model. Finally, we have developed a prototype in order to utilize the model's capabilities on real life agriculture. This paper shows the deep learning model's capabilities to classify the disease in real-life cotton disease management situations.

---

### HumP-KD: A Hybrid Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Stage Progressive Knowledge Distillation Framework for Efficient Fire Classification

Authors: Mohammed Arif Mainuddin, Najifa Tabassum, Omar Ibne Shahid, Riasat Khan
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14684v1

Real-time fire classification systems require models that are simultaneously accurate, computationally efficient, and deployable on resource-constrained hardware. This work proposes \textbf{HumP-KD}, a Hybrid Uncertainty-aware Multi-stage Progressive Knowledge Distillation framework for efficient fire classification. Two datasets, FlameVision and Dataset-II, containing 8,600 and 31,309 images, are used. Various CNN and transformer baselines are applied under standard preprocessing, online augmentation, Gaussian noise and motion blur robustness conditions. The proposed HumP-KD model distills knowledge from two frozen heterogeneous transformer teachers, Swin-Tiny and ViT-Base, along with their Meta-MLP ensemble, into a lightweight MobileViT-S student via three tightly integrated components. Hierarchical Progressive Knowledge Distillation employs a Hierarchical Feature Builder. It generates a fused spatial attention mask to guide distillation toward discriminative regions selectively. Multi-Stage Knowledge Distillation progressively activates three distillation stages across training. On Dataset-II, HumP-KD achieves a mean F1 score of $0.9876 \pm 0.0063$ across 10 independent trials, significantly outperforming the MobileViT-S baseline trained without distillation ($0.9537 \pm 0.0351$), with statistical significance confirmed by both independent t-test ($p = 0.0195$) and Wilcoxon signed-rank test ($W = 1$, $p = 0.0039$). The proposed method also demonstrates strong generalization across datasets and robustness under degraded visual conditions. The student model retains only 4.94M parameters and 19.01Mb model size, representing a $5.7\times$ parameter reduction over Swin-Tiny and a $17.5\times$ reduction over ViT-Base, while achieving 37.72 CPU FPS, making it suitable for real-time deployment.

---

### Optimal Hidden-Target Learning for Online Inventory Optimization on General Convex Sets

Authors: Anthony Pineci, Yunzong Xu
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.LG, eess.SY, math.OC, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14679v1

Online inventory optimization (OIO) is online convex optimization with physical memory: inventory carryover makes the feasible action set depend on the past. A natural principle, used in stochastic inventory learning and recently in OIO under a single linear capacity constraint, is to maintain a hidden target chosen by an online learner and implement its projection onto the currently feasible order-up-to set. We prove that this simple principle is optimal for OIO on arbitrary bounded convex capacity sets. With online gradient descent as the base learner, the method improves the best known regret guarantee for OIO on general convex sets from inverse to inverse-square-root dependence on the common-demand probability, and we prove a matching lower bound. The same principle gives the first polylogarithmic regret guarantee for strongly convex losses and the first dynamic regret guarantee adapting to Euclidean path variation on general convex capacity sets. The analysis introduces a norm alignment principle: the right state variable is the distance from the hidden target to the feasible set, measured in the same norm as the projection. Under norm alignment, this distance evolves pathwise as a scalar queue, with target movement as arrival and common demand as service. This reduction to one-dimensional queue control resolves the state dependence and extends the guarantees to general convex capacity sets, beyond the reach of prior productwise approaches. Experiments on synthetic and real-world inventory data corroborate the theory.

---

### AgentSpec: Understanding Embodied Agent Scaffolds Through Controlled Composition

Authors: Jixuan Chen, Jianzhi Shen, Haoqiang Kang, Zhi Hong, Qingyi Jiang, Soham Bose, Yiming Zhang, Leon Leng, Amit Vyas, Lingjun Mao, Siru Ouyang, Kun Zhou et al.
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14674v1

LLM agents are increasingly built not as single model calls, but as scaffolded systems that combine reasoning, memory, reflection, action execution, and learning. While such scaffolds often improve performance, they are often embedded in tightly coupled pipelines, making it difficult to isolate component contributions, compare alternative designs, or understand how module interactions shape agent behavior. We introduce AgentSpec, a modular specification framework that represents embodied agents as typed compositions of reusable policy components with standardized interfaces. AgentSpec standardizes the interfaces among perception, memory, reasoning, reflection, action, and optional learning, enabling components to be swapped and recombined under controlled conditions. We instantiate this framework across DeliveryBench, ALFRED, MiniGrid, and RoboTHOR, and analyze reasoning, memory, reflection, and reinforcement-learning modules across model backbones. Our results show that agent performance is governed by scaffold compatibility and interaction effects rather than isolated module strength. In particular, structured multi-granularity memory improves long-horizon state tracking, reasoning and memory interact non-uniformly across environments, reflection trades off correction and cost, and RL-trained policies compose best when optimized with deployment-time scaffold structure. AgentSpec provides a controlled foundation for studying, comparing, and designing composable LLM agents. Our code, baselines and interactive playground are publicly available at https://agentspec-embodied.github.io.

---

### Compressed Computation is (probably) not Computation in Superposition

Authors: Jai Bhagat, Sara Molas-Medina, Giorgi Giglemiani, Stefan Heimersheim
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14673v1

We study whether the Compressed Computation (CC) toy model (Braun et al., 2025) is an instance of computation in superposition. The CC model appears to compute 100 ReLU functions with just 50 neurons, achieving a better loss than expected from only representing 50 ReLU functions. We show that the model mixes inputs via its noisy residual stream, corresponding to an unintended mixing matrix in the labels. Splitting the training objective into the ReLU term and the mixing term, we find that performance gains scale with the magnitude of the mixing matrix and vanish when the matrix is removed. The learned neuron directions concentrate in the subspace associated with the top 50 eigenvalues of the mixing matrix, suggesting that the mixing term governs the solution. Finally, a semi-non-negative matrix factorization (SNMF) baseline derived solely from the mixing matrix reproduces the qualitative loss profile and improves on prior baselines, though it does not match the trained model. These results suggest CC is not a suitable toy model of computation in superposition.

---

### Towards Direct Latent-Space Synthesis for Parallel Branches in LLM-Agent Workflows

Authors: Shikun Liu, Mufei Li, Dongqi Fu, Haoyu Wang, Yinglong Xia, Hong Li, Hong Yan, Pan Li
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14672v1

Large language models increasingly serve as execution engines for agentic systems, yet they still consume context through a sequential text interface. This creates a mismatch with modern structured agent workflows, in which independent branches explore subtasks, retrieve evidence, or generate candidate solutions before a final synthesis step. Existing systems typically merge these branches by concatenating their textual outputs, which discards the parallel structure and incurs redundant prefill computation. In this work, we introduce Parallel-Synthesis, a plug-and-play framework that enables a synthesizer to directly consume the KV caches produced by parallel worker agents. Parallel-Synthesis combines a cache mapper that calibrates independently generated branch caches with a fine-tuned synthesizer adapter that enables generation from this non-sequential cache interface. We train Parallel-Synthesis using data that exposes the synthesizer to parallel cache contexts, teaches aggregation across cached branches, and distills reasoning behavior from standard text-concatenation-based synthesis. Across nine downstream datasets spanning math, science QA, code generation, GAIA, and multi-agent database diagnosis, Parallel-Synthesis matches or outperforms text-based synthesis on seven datasets and remains close on the other two. It also reduces time-to-first-token by 2.5x-11x, suggesting that direct cache-based synthesis is a promising interface for more native and efficient synthesis over parallel agent branches.

---

### When to Write and When to Suppress: Route-Specialized Dual Adapters for Memory-Assisted Knowledge Editing

Authors: Baijia Zhang, Yining Huang
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14668v4

Knowledge editing systems must update selected facts while preserving nearby but irrelevant behavior. This paper studies this problem in a memory-assisted setting where an edit memory is retrieved at inference time and a parameter-efficient adapter corrects the model's object preference. We argue that the central design question is not only how to write an edit, but also when to suppress it. We introduce RRDA, a route-specialized dual-adapter editor. A relevance router first decides whether a prompt should receive an edit memory. Routed prompts use an edit adapter trained to prefer the new object over the original object; unrouted non-direct prompts use a separate locality adapter trained to preserve or restore the original-object preference. We evaluate RRDA on three 1,000-case protocols, CounterFact, ZsRE, and MQuAKE-CF, under the same memory protocol and two 7B/8B base models. On Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, RRDA obtains the best overall probability-preference accuracy on all three benchmarks: 0.8180 on CounterFact, 0.8946 on ZsRE, and 0.9922 on MQuAKE-CF. The same trend holds on Qwen3-8B. Router ablations show that the relevant memory boundary differs across datasets: a lexical neural router is safest on CounterFact, while BGE embedding routing is better on ZsRE and MQuAKE-CF. Memory, component, and module ablations show that explicit memory supplies the largest edit gain, while route-specialized adapters improve the final reliability-locality balance rather than simply increasing LoRA capacity.

---

### Memento: Reconstruct to Remember for Consistent Long Video Generation

Authors: Xuan Wei, Longbin Ji, Guan Wang, Xiangrui Liu, Zhenyu Zhang, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Qingqi Hong
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14667v1

Long-form video generation requires recurring subjects to remain consistent across various shots, viewpoints, motions, and scene transitions. Existing temporal decomposition methods improve scalability by generating videos shot by shot. However, they mainly focus on optimizing plausible next-shot continuations without verifying whether the historical memory preserves identity-critical subject evidence. Consequently, as generation proceeds, recurring subjects may be diluted, overwritten, or forgotten. In this paper, we propose Memento, a subject-reconstruction-guided framework that treats subject preservation as an explicit identity grounding problem, based on the premise that a memory bank faithfully preserving a subject should support reconstructing that subject from memory alone. Specifically, Memento jointly trains autoregressive next-shot generation with memory-based subject reconstruction, recovering target appearances using historical memory and global story captions. To disentangle long-range subject evidence from short-range cues, Memento introduces a dual-query memory mechanism, where one query retrieves identity-relevant memory and the other selects short-context keyframes for coherent continuation. Additionally, a subject-aware cinematic data pipeline provides precise reconstruction supervision via consistent, pronoun-free subject descriptions. Experiments demonstrate that Memento achieves state-of-the-art performance in long-term subject consistency, cross-shot coherence, and visual quality.

---

### Beyond task performance: Decoding bioacoustic embeddings with speech features

Authors: Ines Nolasco, Jules Cauzinille, Marius Miron, Gagan Narula, Milad Alizadeh, Emmanuel Fernandez, Matthieu Geist, Ellen Gilsenan-McMahon, Olivier Pietquin, Emmanuel Chemla, Sara Keen
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.LG, cs.SD
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14662v1

Pretrained audio embeddings are standard in bioacoustics, yet little is known about which acoustic features these models encode, nor which are useful for a given task. This hinders transparency and limits extension to rare species or data-scarce domains. Here we reveal which speech-like features are encoded in bioacoustic representations. Using the 88~eGeMAPS features across six taxonomic groups, we apply linear and nonlinear regression probes to quantify which acoustic properties each model captures. Results confirm a ``no free lunch'' pattern: no single model captures the full feature space. A concatenated embedding achieves the highest performance, suggesting complementary acoustic space coverage across models. Loudness features are best encoded ($R^2 = 0.76$) while F0 is hardest to recover ($R^2 = 0.33$). By cross-referencing recoverability with per-species feature salience (NMI), we derive data-driven model selection guidance for bioacoustics.

---

### Giving AI a Headache: Acoustic Adversarial Attacks to Computer Vision Applications

Authors: Nicole Villavicencio-Garduño, Maksim Ekin Eren, Milo Prisbrey, Ben Migliori, Michael Teti
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14658v1

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly used to automate a variety of real-world computer vision (CV) applications, such as autonomous vehicle control, facial recognition, and security cameras. Recent research has shown that acoustic vibration can induce real physical motion in cameras, interfering with their internal stabilization mechanisms. Because the motion falls outside the conditions the stabilization system was designed to handle, the system introduces artifacts into the frame, causing AI-based CV models to misclassify, miss targets, or hallucinate objects. Previous work used ultrasonic frequencies (>20 kHz) to perform short-range attacks, which limits them to short distances due to the attenuation exhibited by high frequencies. In this work, we investigate acoustic attacks using lower frequencies in the audible range (<20 kHz), and we further expand our analysis to include how various image and object features are affected by the attacks. Specifically, we performed physical experiments to demonstrate the viability of our attacks on an off-the-shelf object detection model (YOLO11) by resonating a commercially available camera with various frequencies. Based on our results, we provide insights into several factors that make an AI CV system more vulnerable to these attacks, which could help inform the development of future mitigation strategies.

---

### HPSv3++: Scaling Reward Models Across the Full Spectrum of Diffusion Model Capabilities

Authors: Yijun Liu, Jie Huang, Zeyue Xue, Yuming Li, Ruizhe He, Haoran Li, Shijia Ge, Siming Fu
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14657v1

Reward models guide text-to-image (T2I) systems toward outputs aligned with human preferences. However, typical reward models such as HPSv3 are trained on pre-annotated data from earlier T2I models, without accounting for quality discriminative shifts arising from evolving model capabilities and reinforcement learning (RL) iterations, limiting their broader applicability. In this work, we propose HPSv3++, a reward model framework that elevates the HPSv3 model for varying T2I model capabilities and their RL iteration changes across the full capability-iteration spectrum. Specifically, we first introduce HPDv3++, a 212K dual-dimension preference dataset annotated for text fidelity and aesthetic quality using a recent high-capability (Qwen-Image) model with human supervision. We then propose a two-stage training framework. Stage 1 employs data-aware orthogonal gradient projection to incorporate diverse aesthetic perception from HPDv3++ while preserving the original effective human preference knowledge in HPSv3. Stage 2 further leverages unlabeled data from T2I models spanning different capability levels and RL iterations, and introduces a joint capability-iterations conditioned signal for the reward model together with a standard deviation-driven unsupervised guidance mechanism, strengthening reward model across the capability-iteration spectrum. HPSv3++ achieves state-of-the-art preference prediction, outperforming HPSv3 9.8% on HPDv3, 5.5% on GenAI-Bench, while achieving 79.1%/88.1% on our proposed HPDv3++. When used for T2I RL training, it consistently improves GenEval scores across diverse T2I models, demonstrating its wide-range capabilities. The code is available at https://github.com/PlantPotatoOnMoon/HPSv3-PlusPlus.

---

### Abstracting Cross-Domain Action Sequences into Interpretable Workflows

Authors: Gaurav Verma, Scott Counts
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14654v1

Sequential or time-stamped interaction logs provide objective records of digital application usage, yet their granularity and noise often obscure meaningful insights into people's work. Such insights are essential for improving digital products in ways grounded in real-world user interactions. Prior research has applied deep learning models to cluster user actions into high-level activities, but these approaches are highly sensitive to noise and struggle to generalize across applications. To address this limitation, we introduce WorkflowView, a framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to abstract low-level action sequences into high-level activities. We establish the effectiveness and generality of our approach across three distinct, challenging sequential tasks and diverse domains: (a) zero-shot task description reconstruction from browser logs (achieving high semantic similarity, $μ_{sim} = 0.91$), (b) few-shot student dropout prediction using MOOC interaction logs (reaching weighted $F_1 = 0.90$ with only five few-shot examples), and (c) anonymized, privacy-preserving analysis of AI tool integration within document workflows in Microsoft Word. Our work demonstrates that LLM-based abstraction is a robust and efficient path forward for transforming low-level behavioral data into high-level, interpretable, and actionable insights. We also discuss practical considerations for deploying LLM-based inferences within logging infrastructures, including computational efficiency and user privacy.

---

### Graph Structured Combinatorial Semi-Bandit with Nonlinear Reward Associations through Separable Signals

Authors: Christoph Bauschmann, Setareh Maghsudi
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14650v1

The identification of optimal structures within vast arrays of interconnected data necessitates significant sampling- and computational effort. Learning and leveraging underlying signal dependencies can improve efficiency and predictive capabilities considerably, but the ubiquity of nonlinear statistical relations amplifies the complexity of such undertakings. In this paper, we develop novel generic and adaptive strategies equipped with routines for graph-based causal reward modeling, analytic reproducing kernel methods, and Taylor approximation of functional processes. We establish theoretical performance guarantees sublinear in time and linear in data volume over time. Our analyses cover robustness to a multitude of uncertainties arising from noise interference, gradual model convergence, and solution space mismatch. The framework's general appeal is substantiated by a minimalistic set of conditions or reliance on prior estimates, while various outlined modifications address specific or extended settings. To demonstrate practical effectiveness, we conduct numerical experiments using both benchmarked synthetic and real-world transportation datasets.

---

### Which Directions Matter? Sparse Design for Affine Robust Optimization

Authors: Pedro Chumpitaz-Flores, My Duong, Juan S. Borrero, Kaixun Hua
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.LG, math.OC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14648v1

Robust machine learning and optimization rely on the uncertainty model choice. We investigate which uncertainty directions a model must cover when defined by a finite dictionary and a budget constraint. Selecting a subset forms an atomic uncertainty set with a closed form support function, yielding tractable robust programs for affine objectives. We propose a data driven selection rule based on a coverage objective over evaluation directions, including gradients, adversarial perturbations, or shifts observed on held out data. We prove this objective is monotone and submodular, supporting a greedy method with a $(1-1/e)$ approximation guarantee and a matching hardness barrier. We also provide a certificate bounding the loss from the selected subset and a radius calibration rule with out of sample control.

---

### Listening with Attention: Entropy-Guided Explainability for Transformer-Based Audio Models

Authors: Ravi Ranjan, Utkarsh Grover, Xiaomin Lin, Agoritsa Polyzou
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14647v1

Transformer-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) models such as Whisper are highly accurate, but their predictions remain difficult to interpret. Existing explainable AI (XAI) methods often lack faithfulness and precise temporal grounding. We propose Listening with Entropy-guided Attention for Faithful explainability (LEAF-X), a model-intrinsic XAI framework for transformer-based ASR. LEAF-X combines entropy-guided attention weighting, multi-layer attention rollout, and optional causal ablations to identify low-entropy, high-impact heads and layers, producing sparse token-to-frame attributions. Unlike perturbation-based explainers or raw attention maps, LEAF-X exploits the internal structure of encoder-decoder and speech-augmented decoder-only models to generate explanations that better reflect model computation. Results show 32% improved faithfulness, 35-39% stronger locality/sparsity, and the most stable attributions, supporting more transparent and auditable ASR.

---

### Online Convex Optimization with Sublinear Noisy Probes

Authors: Simone Di Gregorio, Anupam Gupta, Stefano Leonardi, Matteo Russo
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.LG, cs.DS
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14640v1

We study Online Convex Optimization (OCO) over a convex set $K\subseteq \mathbb R^d$, where in each round $t$ the learner selects $x_t\in K$ and then observes a convex loss $f_t:K\to(0,1)$, with the goal of minimizing regret to the best fixed decision in hindsight. We introduce a unified probing model that generalizes two recent lines of work: sublinear best-expert queries in the experts setting, and pairwise (comparison-based) feedback available every round in OCO. In our framework, the learner has a budget of $k\le T$ pairwise probes; on a probed round it may query two points and learn which one has smaller loss. Our main result shows that even a sublinear and noisy probe budget can provably improve worst-case regret in the full feedback OCO regime. With $k$ $δ$-noisy pairwise probes, we obtain: $ \text{Reg}_T \le O\left(\min\left\{\sqrt{dT\ln T},\; \frac{dT\ln T}{k|1-2δ|}\right\}\right) $, which is tight (up to logarithmic factors in $T$) across $T$, $k$ and $δ$. Specifically regarding the noise parameter $δ\in (0,1)$, the regret guarantee smoothly degrades as the oracle response approaches a coin flip, i.e., $δ$ is close to $\frac{1}{2}$. When applying the same techniques to a finite $K$ for the prediction with $d$ experts setting, the resulting rates are instead completely tight in all parameters, including $d$. Our analysis gives a streamlined treatment of pairwise probing in OCO by quantifying the benefit of probing via a variance reduction effect, combined with a second-order (variance-based) analysis of Continuous Exponential Weights.

---

### From Self-Supervised Speech Models to Mixture-of-Experts for Robust Anti-Spoofing

Authors: Hugo Daumain, Driss Matrouf, Khaled Khelif, Mickael Rouvier
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14639v1

Recent advances in speech generation have significantly improved the naturalness of synthetic speech, making spoofing detection increasingly challenging. A key limitation of current anti-spoofing systems is their limited robustness to unseen synthesis methods. In this work, we transform a self-supervised speech representation model into a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture to improve generalization. Feed-forward blocks in selected encoder layers are replaced by multiple expert networks controlled by a layer-wise gating mechanism, allowing experts to capture complementary acoustic patterns while preserving the representations learned during self-supervised pretraining. We further analyze the architectural choices affecting the performance of this MoE conversion and investigate the activation behavior of the experts. The proposed approach is evaluated on 14 spoofing datasets and reduces the macro EER from 5.46% to 4.81%, corresponding to 11.9% relative improvement over the baseline.

---

### Improving Lunar Topography with Deep Learning Schrödinger Bridges

Authors: Matthew Repasky, Erwan Mazarico, Michael K. Barker, Stefano Bertone, Terence J. Sabaka, Yao Xie
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.CV, astro-ph.EP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14638v1

Increasing the resolution of planetary topography models can enable a better understanding of surface processes and geomorphology; however, existing analytical super-resolution methods are expensive and difficult to apply at large scales. Generative models provide the tools to learn complex relationships within data and can be applied at scale due to hardware accelerators and parallelization. We present a diffusion-based Schrödinger Bridge (SB) generative modeling approach for lunar topography super-resolution, connecting the distribution of low-resolution topography to that of high-resolution topography, incorporating physically-constraining optical imagery. Our approach is inspired by existing Shape-from-Shading methods, which improve a priori low-resolution topography by using optical images at the target resolution. We train SBs on a novel dataset of rendered lunar topography, emulating optical imagery from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Narrow Angle Camera. The result is a flexible approach for topography super-resolution which can provide pixel-level uncertainties in the reconstruction.

---

### Projective Graph Residualization: Variation-Allocation Frontiers for Control-Function IV

Authors: Rui Wu, Zongyuan Chen, Hong Xie, Defu Lian, Enhong Chen
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14636v2

Control-function instrumental-variable estimators pass an estimated first-stage residual to an outcome model. The residual must retain the latent control direction while leaving enough treatment variation to identify the structural effect. These demands conflict when the systematic signal is locally smooth but discontinuous across unknown feature-graph boundaries: interpolation can erase the residual, whereas isotropic smoothing can move systematic variation across a boundary. We propose Adaptive Anisotropic Instrumental Heat Flow (A-IHF), which adapts edge conductance from pilot treatment contrasts, extracts a generated control with a complementary sparse resolvent, and tunes without outcomes. For a linear control-function regression, only the generated control's span matters. This projective view yields an exact finite-sample fidelity--relevance frontier, spectral identities for residualized treatment variation and coefficient distortion, and a lower bound for monotone residual filters. A connected construction shows that conductance adaptation can escape the corresponding fixed-graph obstruction. Across 54 benchmark cells, the A-IHF family wins 32 and guarded observational A-IHF reduces mean nonlinear response error by 8.3 percent, with gains concentrated in fractured designs. Exact distortion correlates 0.998 with realized linear coefficient error. Controlled graph rewiring further shows that connectivity alone is inadequate: an outcome-free compatibility screen triggers foldwise fallback and, under severe corruption, abstention.

---

### SED:Lightweight Saliency prediction for Event-based data via Distillation

Authors: Romaric Mazna, Jean Martinet, Michele Magno
Published: 2026-06-12
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14631v1

Event-based saliency prediction has gained attention recently, as combining event cameras with saliency estimation can act as an upstream stage that naturally improves the efficiency of downstream eventbased perception at the edge. However, current approaches are either neuromorphic, underperforming on event-based saliency benchmarks, or too heavy for resource-constrained edge applications due to their reliance on transformers or 3D convolutions. Drawing inspiration from efficient convolutional modules, SED and aiming to exploit the temporal information in event data, we propose a lightweight network, trained through knowledge distillation, built on a Depthwise Spatio-Temporal Block (DSTconv) -- a factorization of the 3D depthwise separable convolution. Relative to its teacher, our model reduces the model size from 180 MB to 0.32 MB (562x) and the parameter count from 45M to 81k (554x), while matching or outperforming it on the N-DHF1K and N-UCF Sports datasets. Moreover, it generalizes strongly beyond its training distribution, transferring from synthetic to real event data where a model trained from scratch fails.

---