# Research Papers — 2026-06 · bundle page 147 of 260 > Full-text markdown of papers #7301–7350 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/147 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/146.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/148.md) ### Curvature-Guided Geometric Representation for Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction Authors: Shuai Li, Chuan-Xian Ren, Yuhao Li, Ziqi Huang, Yue Pan, Mingzhe Tang, Hong Yan Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.LG, q-bio.BM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14159v1 Protein-ligand binding affinity (PLA) prediction is critical in drug discovery. Despite the notable advancements in machine learning-based approaches, existing methods struggle to jointly characterize local geometric organization and globally coordinated cross-molecular interactions, limiting their ability to model complex binding mechanisms. Here, we propose RicciBind, a geometric representation framework that integrates curvature-guided hierarchical structure learning with optimal transport (OT)-based cross-domain alignment to model molecular interactions. Specifically, RicciBind leverages Ricci curvature to capture local interaction tightness within molecular structures, enhancing structural awareness and organizing atomic interactions into curvature-aware hierarchical representations. An OT-based cluster matching mechanism then aligns protein and ligand clusters across heterogeneous domains under geometric constraints, enabling globally consistent correspondences and revealing higher-order interaction patterns beyond local neighborhoods. By coupling curvature-guided structure encoding with OT-driven cross-domain alignment, RicciBind effectively models complex interaction semantics and substantially improves both the accuracy and interpretability of binding affinity prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RicciBind achieved superior predictive performance and generalization across PLA benchmarks and virtual screening tasks. Ablation studies further confirmed the essential role of Ricci curvature in enhancing molecular interaction representations. --- ### Learning Urban Access Costs from Origin-Destination Flows via Inverse Optimal Transport Authors: Paula Joy B. Martinez Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14157v1 Cities deliver basic services through mixed public-private facility networks, including schools, clinics, transit providers, and subsidized service points. In these systems, planners often observe where households go, but not the latent cost function through which they trade off factors such as distance, price, and institutional access. We study this urban problem through school choice in the Philippines, where the country's largest national education subsidy is intended to redirect learners from congested public schools to participating private schools. Treating school-to-school enrollment flows as an entropic optimal transport plan, we recover latent choice costs using two complementary inverse optimal transport models: an interpretable distance-banded model with a subsidy term, and a neural cost model trained through a differentiable Sinkhorn forward pass. Applied to 283{,}016 learner trips across 23{,}820 observed flows in the most populated region, the framework estimates a subsidy-equivalent distance, $λ^{(k)}$, interpreted as the kilometers of perceived travel cost offset by the subsidy. The case demonstrates how administrative origin-destination data can be transformed into interpretable planning metrics for accessibility-aware subsidy design, facility siting, and urban service allocation. --- ### Learning High Coverage Discriminative Parsimonious Rulesets Authors: Mariamma Antony, Raman Sankaran, Chiranjib Bhattacharyya, Uma Satya Ranjan Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14156v1 Learning systems based on IF-THEN rule representations readily offer interpretability, making them a crucial focus in contemporary AI research. A key objective for such rule sets is to achieve both high discriminative power and interpretability. While existing state-of-the-art algorithms implicitly prioritize predictive accuracy, they often fall short on one or more quality metrics that ensure interpretability, such as coverage and parsimony of rule sets. Motivated by this, this paper propose the development of CDPR, which aims to create highly accurate and interpretable rule sets for classification problems. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first attempt to establish such an approach. In this study, we introduce two algorithms rooted in submodular maximization, which not only provide provable guarantees on coverage but also yield rule sets that are both discriminative and parsimonious. We empirically demonstrate that rule sets learned through our approaches achieve higher accuracy and interpretability and has more than a 2.5-fold improvement in average coverage rates when compared to the next best algorithm. --- ### Graph-based Target Back-Propagation for Context Adaptation in Multi-LLM Agentic Systems Authors: Tan Zhu, Tong Yao, Kananart Kuwaranancharoen, Amit Singh, Yushang Lai, Deepa Mohan, Shankara Bhargava Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14155v1 Context adaptation automates prompt engineering in LLM-based systems by iteratively revising tunable prompts from task feedback, without modifying model weights. Extending this paradigm to multi-LLM agentic systems is crucial: existing methods suffer from inaccurate credit assignment and lack convergence guarantees. We propose \textbf{G}raph-based \textbf{T}arget \textbf{B}ack-\textbf{P}ropagation (GTBP), a context adaptation framework for agentic workflows modeled as directed acyclic graphs. GTBP propagates local target outputs backward through the workflow graph and uses target--output discrepancies to guide a stage-wise prompt update mechanism. Theoretically, we show that GTBP's stage-wise prompt updates become stable over iterations, and that a sufficiently capable LLM optimizer can decrease the overall objective. Empirically, GTBP consistently outperforms strong baselines across three benchmarks while maintaining comparable computational cost. --- ### Encoder Winners Do Not Reliably Transfer Across VLA Backbone Scale: A Frozen-Backbone Grafting Diagnostic Authors: Qingping Zeng, Fei She Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14153v1 Vision-language-action (VLA) policies typically inherit their vision encoder from upstream VLM releases, but it is unclear whether an encoder choice validated on a small VLA transfers to a larger backbone. We introduce a frozen-backbone grafting diagnostic: the vision tower of a released VLA is replaced by a candidate encoder under a fixed protocol (adaptive average pooling, LayerNorm, and a single trainable linear projector), with the language model and action expert frozen. Across four encoders, two LIBERO suites, two backbones (SmolVLA-450M and $π_{0.5}$-3.3B), and two-to-three seeds per cell (40 main grafting runs plus native, LoRA, pooling, and zero-/shuffled-image controls, all scored by offline action MSE), the small-backbone winner does not reliably select the large-backbone top tier: SigLIP is best on SmolVLA across both suites, while on $π_{0.5}$ DINOv2-small leads the spatial suite and the object suite is a seed-sensitive near-tie band; three of the four backbone-suite comparisons (and 11 of 12 seed-level cells) support backbone-dependent rankings. The grafting wrapper is itself non-neutral with opposite sign across backbones (+45-56% MSE on the SmolVLA native tower, -50-52% on $π_{0.5}$), so all conclusions are conditional on the fixed grafting protocol. We position frozen grafting as a cheap target-backbone diagnostic to run before committing to an encoder at scale, not as a closed-loop deployment claim. --- ### Small LLMs: Pruning vs. Training from Scratch Authors: Yufeng Xu, Taiming Lu, Kunjun Li, Jiachen Zhu, Mingjie Sun, Zhuang Liu Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14150v3 Pruning promises a shortcut to strong small language models. In this work, we examine this promise by pruning Llama-3.1-8B at pruning ratios of 0.5--0.8 with six methods spanning depth, width, and sparse granularities, under two controlled token-matched settings. (1) With the same training token budget, pruned initialization consistently outperforms random initialization. This shows that the parent model provides a strong starting point, although the advantage narrows as the training token budget grows and as the pruning ratio rises, nearly vanishing at the highest pruning ratio we study. (2) When training from scratch is instead given the full token budget consumed by the whole pipeline, pruning at finer granularities still retains an advantage, while coarser structured pruning can be matched or surpassed. This suggests that the parent model transfers knowledge that additional training tokens alone cannot fully recover, but only at fine granularity. Taken together, our results yield a clear recommendation: with a large pretrained model in hand and a limited training token budget, pruning is better than training from scratch; when the training budget is not limited, training from scratch can be competitive for coarser pruning, so a large pretrained parent is not always necessary. --- ### Trust but Verify: Mitigating Medical Hallucinations via Post-Hoc Adversarial Auditing and Multi-Agent Feedback Loops Authors: Muhammad Osama, Maheera Amjad, Zartasha Mustansar, Arslan Shaukat, Muhammad U. S. Khan Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14149v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in healthcare settings, yet their tendency to hallucinate poses risks when clinical decisions are involved. This study examine whether LLMs recommend recently banned or withdrawn pharmaceuticals when answering clinical questions and tests an agent-based method for reducing such errors. We developed a five-agent "Trust but Verify" system using a single LLM backbone. To measure regulatory knowledge obsolescence, we created an adversarial dataset of 103 clinical MCQs where historically correct answers now refer to banned substances. This scale ensures statistical significance across various therapeutic classes. We evaluated three open-access model families (GPT-OSS, Llama-3, Falcon-3) under vanilla and agentic conditions. Performance was measured via pointwise score, label accuracy, Hallucination Error Rate (HER), and Component Fidelity (CF) score. We also observed clinical safety regression in proprietary models. In default configurations, all models showed high hallucination rates, consistently selecting banned drugs that matched training data patterns. Our proposed agentic architecture reduced HER by approximately 53% across models. Pointwise scores shifted from -0.25 (unsafe recommendation) toward 0.0 (appropriate refusal). The safety audit intercepted dangerous outputs even when models' parametric knowledge favored the banned substance. The proposed multi-agent framework offers a model-agnostic method for enforcing regulatory compliance that prioritizes patient safety over fluent text generation. Our work demonstrates a practical approach for deploying autonomous AI systems in safety-critical healthcare settings. It shows how real-time regulatory data can be integrated into LLM pipelines to support clinical decision-making. --- ### A Programmer's Guide to Cascaded Adaptive Combiners: Online Learning by Biologically Accurate Models of Multilayer Neuron Networks Authors: Martin Nilsson, Denis Kleyko Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14146v1 Learning in biological multilayer neuronal networks offers insights that extend beyond the classical weighted-sum neuron model commonly used in artificial neural networks. This article presents an accessible guide to a mechanistic neuronal network model that more accurately captures aspects of biological computation while enabling a simple yet powerful mechanism for learning in multilayer neural networks. The proposed approach supports efficient online streamed learning and provides a practical alternative to backpropagation. We demonstrate its potential in an image classification task, achieving competitive classification performance. The approach's simplicity, biological grounding, and broad applicability highlight a promising path toward algorithms that unify mechanistic neuron models and machine learning. --- ### Personal Care Utility: Health as Everyday Infrastructure Authors: Mahyar Abbasian, Elahe Khatibi, Saba A. Farahani, Nitish Nagesh, Arshia Ilaty, Hooman Sajjadi, Amir Rahmani, Ramesh Jain Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14145v1 Healthcare is essential, expert, and episodic by design - built around the roughly one hour per year a person spends with a clinician. The 8,759 hours outside clinical settings, where eating, sleeping, movement, medication, and stress actually shape long-term health, have no comparable infrastructure. The bottleneck for personalized health is not raw data or reasoning capability; it is the absence of that infrastructure layer. This paper introduces the Personal Care Utility (PCU): a layered, event-driven architecture proposed as the missing utility for everyday health, in the way that payments, networks, and power are utilities for their domains. PCU organizes continuous personal signals into semantically meaningful life events through a Personicle, estimates dynamic health state against personal baselines, reasons about cause and context, and routes guidance through an orchestrator that separates clinical decision logic, behavioral strategy selection, and natural-language expression. This separation lets large language models support reasoning and communication while keeping safety-critical clinical decisions grounded in validated evidence. We instantiate PCU for Type 2 Diabetes - turning CGM, meal, activity, medication, sleep, stress, and clinical data into glycemic events, individualized state estimates, causal explanations, and knowledge-grounded interventions. A day-in-the-life scenario shows the same infrastructure producing real-time nudges, weekly summaries, medication check-ins, silence, or deterministic safety alerts depending on context and risk. We close with how PCU generalizes to other chronic conditions and the governance questions any always-on personal health utility must address. The result is a blueprint that treats personalization not as a final messaging layer, but as an architectural property of everyday health guidance. --- ### Implicit Reasoning for Large Language Model-based Generative Recommendation Authors: Yinhan He, Liam Collins, Bhuvesh Kumar, Jundong Li, Neil Shah, Donald Loveland Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14142v3 Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as backbones for Generative Recommendation (GR), promising access to pretrained world knowledge. Yet reliably invoking this knowledge for GR remains poorly understood. A key obstacle is that LLM-based GR typically represents items with Semantic IDs (SIDs), disrupting LLMs' natural-language reasoning interface because these tokens are unseen by the LLM during pretraining. Existing approaches address this with expensive multi-stage pipelines that ground SIDs and elicit explicit rationales, but offer limited insight into when and why each stage is necessary. In this work, we systematically decompose explicit reasoning training pipelines for LLM-based GR, revealing three key limitations: weakened world-knowledge verbalization, misalignment between SID and natural-language token embedding spaces, and sensitivity to rationale quality, all of which hurt explicit reasoning performance. To circumvent these issues, we propose PauseRec, a lightweight implicit reasoning paradigm tailored for GR. PauseRec is exceptionally practical, avoiding costly reasoning trace acquisition and reasoning alignment training, leading to a multitude of benefits: (1) it outperforms standard explicit CoT methods by up to 6.22%, (2) it reduces training cost by up to 65% GPU hours, and (3) it speeds up inference by up to 71.3%. These results position PauseRec as a lightweight alternative to explicit rationale generation, enabling more effective and efficient LLM-based GR. --- ### Spatio-Temporal Audio Language Modeling for Dynamic Sound Sources Authors: Oh Hyun-Bin, Kazuki Shimada, Yuhta Takida, Kim Sung-Bin, Toshimitsu Uesaka, Takashi Shibuya, Kyeongyoon Lee, Tae-Hyun Oh, Yuki Mitsufuji Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14141v1 Sound events are entities with semantic identities, locations, and trajectories, but current audio-language models usually reason about clips as global event content. Conversely, sound event localization models track source directions over time but offer limited semantic coverage for language reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce ST-AudioQA, a spatio-temporal audio QA dataset and benchmark built from first-order ambisonic (FOA) renderings of static and moving sound sources. Each scene provides source identity, activity, direction, distance, and motion metadata, enabling dense trajectory supervision and questions about what is sounding, where it is, how it moves, and how sources relate. We further propose ST-Audio Encoder, a time-resolved FOA audio encoder that learns event semantics together with source trajectories, and ST-AudioLM, which connects the audio tokens from the encoder to an LLM for spatio-temporal audio QA. Experiments show that this representation improves the semantic-localization tradeoff and yields stronger reasoning performance than static spatial and localization-oriented baselines. --- ### Decoupled Latent Optimization of Diffusion Models for Full Waveform Inversion Authors: Chen Min, Zheng Ma Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14139v1 Full waveform inversion (FWI) recovers subsurface velocity from seismic recordings by solving a severely ill-posed, nonconvex PDE-constrained optimization. Classical regularizers stabilize the inversion but fail to reproduce realistic geological structures; recent diffusion-prior methods improve realism at the cost of a fragile trade-off between data fidelity and prior consistency. We propose Decoupled Latent Optimization (DLO), which relaxes the standard latent-optimization formulation into a quadratic-penalty objective over an auxiliary physical variable and a latent variable. The data-fidelity gradient acts in physical space, the diffusion sampler contributes only through a decoded prior sample, and the standard smoothed-velocity initialization of classical FWI is preserved. On the OpenFWI benchmark, DLO outperforms classical regularizers and existing diffusion-based methods under clean, noisy, and missing-trace acquisitions. The prior, trained on 70*70 OpenFWI models, transfers directly to the Marmousi and Overthrust benchmarks, where DLO recovers intricate fault structures and remains robust to initialization smoothing and measurement noise. --- ### Contract-Based Compositional Shielding for Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Authors: Omar Adalat, Edwin Hamel-De le Court, Francesco Belardinelli Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.LG, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14130v2 Safe coordination problems surface in multi-agent reinforcement learning when global safety cannot be enforced by any agent unilaterally: the admissibility of one agent's action may depend on the dynamics of other agents. Decentralised shields can enforce safety at runtime, but purely factorised permissions often exclude optimal team behaviour that is safe only through coordination. We study deterministic safety guarantees for agents trained and deployed under decentralised execution, recovering team-optimal safe behaviour without centralised runtime control. Agents have a shared global specification $φ$ in the safety fragment of Linear Temporal Logic ($\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ ), and select among tuples of local $\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ obligations whose conjunction implies the global specification $φ$. Each agent may rely on the other agents' local obligations as assumptions because the whole contract tuple is certified simultaneously and allows projection into local action masks. At learning time, a non-stationary multi-armed bandit chooses among a library of local $\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ obligations to select the tuple that optimises team reward, all without forgoing end-to-end safety. We evaluate the approach across 6 environments and 15 algorithmic variants. --- ### BoRAD: Bootstrap your Own Representations for Multi-class Anomaly Detection Authors: Duy Hoang Khuong, Tri Nguyen Minh, Ngu Huynh Cong Viet Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14129v1 Reconstruction-based anomaly detection is attractive for industrial inspection, but scaling it from category-specific training to a one-for-all setting is challenging. A single model must reconstruct diverse normal appearances without copying abnormal details, which exposes two coupled failure modes: identical shortcut, where anomalies pass through the reconstruction path, and mis-reconstruction, where normal categories are confused with one another. We propose \textbf{BoRAD}, a label-free training framework that treats this as a representation-capacity allocation problem. BoRAD uses a shared learnable prototype bank to impose two complementary regularizers: spatial prototype alignment contracts local within-prototype variation to suppress anomaly copying, while prototype-relative global alignment preserves between-prototype structure and improves sensitivity to abnormal angular deviations. The prototype bank and prediction heads are used only during training; inference remains a standard teacher-student feature discrepancy pass, with no class labels, negative pairs, memory retrieval, or prototype lookup. BoRAD achieves competitive one-for-all anomaly detection performance, including 86.2\% mAD on MVTec AD, 80.7\% mAD on VisA and 73.1\% mAD on Real-IAD. Diagnostic analyses further show reduced anomaly leakage, improved normal-category separability, and stronger anomaly-normal score separation. --- ### CoRe: A Continuously Reward-Finetuned LLM Query Rewriter for Multi-Stage Context-Aware Relevance in Web-Scale Video Search Authors: Yilin Wen, Rong Yang, Xiaojia Chang, Hong Sun, Gefu Tang, Chunhui Liu, Jeffrey Chen, Zeyu Ma, Lisong Qiu, Xiaochuan Fan, Congjia Yu, Quan Zhou et al. Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.IR, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14127v1 LLM-based query rewriters in production face a tension: the training reward must reflect how the rewrite is consumed by the production ranker, yet the training procedure must be cheap enough to support continuous redeployment as data drifts. We present CoRe (Context Relevance), such a system, redeployed weekly for over five months in a major short-video search engine. Our reward uses the deployed multimodal relevance model as its source and a multiplicative ratio form mirroring the production fusion algebra, closing the simulation-production gap that offline reward proxies leave open. A semi-online Mixed Preference Optimization loop makes this reward affordable at multi-million-instance weekly scale: a DPO-style pairwise objective restricts the gradient pass to a small top-k/bottom-k subset of sampled trajectories, and a phase structure reduces trainer/inference-server parameter syncs from per-step to per-phase. An automated promotion gate over reward-like and stability metrics detected and recovered from a real reward-hacking incident in production. Rewriter output is consumed as parallel relevance signals at recall, rawrank, and finerank without displacing the original signals, bounding rewriter-failure blast radius. Online A/B from two sequential production launches, first deploying the rewriter at finerank, then extending consumption to recall and rawrank, delivers statistically significant reductions in change-query rate on rewrite-impacted queries, with all headline relevance and engagement metrics moving in the expected direction. --- ### Conditioning Matters: Stabilizing Inversion and Attention in Diffusion Image Editing Authors: Zheyuan Zhan, Hongchen Li, Can Wang, Yinfei Ma, Mingzhen Huang, Ruoshi Bai, Jiawei Chen, Siwei Lyu, Defang Chen Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14125v1 Inversion-based image editing offers flexible and training-free control but still struggles with inversion accuracy and the trade-off between editing fidelity and background preservation. While recent methods improve inversion formulations or attention interactions, the role of textual conditioning in shaping diffusion dynamics and editing behavior remains underexplored. We show both empirically and theoretically that the precision of textual conditioning influences inversion stability by modulating the geometry of the diffusion velocity field, while also affecting the consistency of cross-branch attention during editing. These effects directly impact background preservation and semantic fidelity. Building on this analysis, we propose SimEdit, a conditioning-aware framework with two complementary components: (a) conditioning refinement, which constructs conditioning signals with improved semantic precision and structural alignment to facilitate stable inversion and consistent attention manipulation, and (b) token-wise cross-branch attention control, which separates edit-relevant and structure-preserving components and modulates them asymmetrically during attention manipulation. Extensive experiments on PIE-Bench demonstrate that SimEdit consistently improves both inversion reconstruction quality and editing performance over previous attention-manipulation approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/zju-pi/SimEdit. --- ### Recovering Stranded Discrimination in Knowledge Tracing: Per-Item Bias Correction via Empirical-Bayes Shrinkage Authors: Xiaoran Yan, Cheng Tang, Atsushi Shimada Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14123v1 Deployed knowledge-tracing models are typically frozen after training, yet systematic per-item logit bias arises, from limited per-item expressivity in backbone architectures and from post-deployment shifts in item properties, degrading prediction quality. Global post-hoc calibrators such as Platt scaling, temperature scaling, and isotonic regression improve probability estimates but leave discriminative ability, as measured by AUC, unchanged. This AUC invariance is a structural consequence of monotone score-only transforms; recovering the stranded discrimination requires conditioning on item identity. We propose SLC (State-space Logit Correction), which converts binary observations to Gaussian pseudo-observations via Laplace/IRLS, applies empirical-Bayes shrinkage through a Kalman smoother, and fits an offset-Platt link. The state-space formulation also yields a detectability bound that characterizes the Bernoulli information floor, explaining why temporal tracking provides no benefit at current data densities. Across four datasets, five backbones, and three seeds, SLC improves AUC on all four datasets and NLL on three, with the advantage concentrating on sparse items. Cross-domain controls suggest that the same phenomenon can arise beyond education when the deployed backbone leaves entity-level bias. --- ### Beyond Perplexity: UTF-8 Validity in Byte-aware Language Models Authors: Sangwhan Moon, Daisuke Oba, Youmi Ma, Tatsuya Hiraoka, Naoaki Okazaki Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14122v2 Byte-level tokenization enables language models to handle any Unicode input, but models can generate invalid UTF-8 sequences when encountering rare or unseen characters. We investigate the relationship between training scale and UTF-8 generation reliability with a 355M parameter model trained on 80B tokens from a balanced multilingual corpus of English, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. We introduce multiple evaluation protocols that isolate UTF-8 structural validity from language modeling. UTF-8 validity convergence lags perplexity by a roughly a factor of two: perplexity stabilizes after 2.1B tokens, but UTF-8 validity requires 4.2B tokens. In context-free generation, rare characters achieve higher structural validity than common characters, suggesting over-specialization of frequent character representations. Through experiments, we observed that reliable UTF-8 generation is a distinct capability requiring evaluation beyond perplexity. --- ### FAConformer: Frequency-Aware Convolutional Transformer for Auditory Attention Decoding Authors: Ziwei Wang, Xingyi He, Tianwang Jia, Hongbin Wang, Dongrui Wu Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: eess.SP, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.SD, eess.AS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14120v1 Auditory attention decoding (AAD) aims to infer the attended speaker from neural responses in multi-speaker acoustic environments and is a key problem for neuro-steered hearing systems. Although recent studies have achieved encouraging progress, existing AAD models still do not fully exploit frequency domain electroencephalography (EEG) information. In particular, most approaches introduce multi-band information through handcrafted feature extraction or direct cross-band feature concatenation, which mainly exploit frequency information at a shallow level and may overlook band-specific patterns and cross-band interactions. To address these limitations, this paper proposes FAConformer, a frequency-aware CNN-Transformer framework for AAD that explicitly integrates band-specific encoding and adaptive cross-band interaction. Specifically, FAConformer first decomposes EEG signals into multiple frequency bands and assigns each band to an independent CNN-Transformer encoder for band-specific modeling. The resulting band-wise features are then adaptively fused by a carefully designed frequency-aware attention (FAA) module that models cross-band dependencies by treating band-wise features as tokens. Further, band-wise auxiliary supervision (BAS) is introduced to prevent weakly contributing branches from being under-optimized during joint training. In this way, FAConformer performs frequency-aware modeling that more effectively exploits frequency domain information. Extensive experiments on two public AAD datasets with three decision-window lengths demonstrated that FAConformer consistently outperformed 12 competitive baselines, surpassing the current state-of-the-art model by 4.9%. Further analyses of band importance, ablation, and parameter sensitivity verify the effectiveness, robustness, and interpretability of the proposed framework. Code is available at https://github.com/wzwvv/FAConformer. --- ### FactoryLLM: A Safe and Open-Source AI Playground for Evaluating LLMs in Smart Factories Authors: Yash Pulse, Yong-Bin Kang, Abhik Banerjee, Abdur Forkan, Prem Prakash Jayaraman Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14119v1 Fault diagnostics and recovery in smart factories is challenging because critical information is dispersed across manuals of multiple machines which are interconnected through the manufacturing process. Large Language Models (LLMs) can provide a promising approach. In this paper, we propose FactoryLLM, a safe and open-source AI playground designed for evaluating different LLM-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models by analysing documents from multiple machines across the manufacturing process. FactoryLLM enables the user to configure the LLM, and assess performance when reasoning over multiple documents, through a dual evaluation setup using both RAGAS and NVIDIA's LLM-as-a-Judge metrics. FactoryLLM is safe because it allows users to run local or open-source LLMs without sharing sensitive industrial data, providing a controlled environment for experimentation. We demonstrate the efficacy of FactoryLLM through a case study which involves an Autonomous Intelligent Vehicle and its Mobile Planner software, evaluating three LLMs across 30 maintenance queries derived from approximately 600 pages of cross-machine documentation. The results suggest that FactoryLLM is effective in cross-machine document reasoning: every model achieved a groundedness score above 0.88. The full code and documentation for community to test FactoryLLM with their manufacturing specific scenarios are publicly available. --- ### A Two-Stage Statistical Framework for Evaluating Associative Interference in Large Language Models Authors: Achraf Cohen, Andrew Kincaid Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: stat.ME, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14117v1 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated for bias using adaptations of human psychological paradigms, yet methodological limitations-particularly the conflation of refusal behavior with task performance-have hindered clear interpretation. Here, we adapt the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to a controlled, forced-choice framework and introduce a two-stage modeling approach that separates response compliance from task-consistent classification. Across three contemporary LLMs (Claude Sonnet-4, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and GPT-5), we evaluate associative interference, defined as reduced task-consistency in incongruent relative to congruent conditions. While compliance with the structured response format was uniformly high, interference effects varied substantially across models and domains. Claude Sonnet-4 exhibited strong interference in the Gender--Career domain (DeltaP = 0.086, 95% CrI (0.026, 0.173)) and smaller but credible effects in Gender--Science. Gemini 2.5 Pro showed attenuated interference, and GPT-5 exhibited minimal or no detectable interference across domains. These findings demonstrate that IAT-style associative asymmetries are not a universal property of LLMs, but instead depend on model-specific characteristics. By isolating interference from compliance and modeling item-level variability, this study provides a principled framework for evaluating structured response patterns in LLMs. The results highlight the importance of model-specific assessment and suggest that associative interference can be substantially mitigated in modern systems. --- ### DTVEM-RE: A Hierarchical Random-Effects Extension of the Differential Time-Varying Effect Model for Person-Specific Multi-Lag Estimation in Intensive Longitudinal Data Authors: Amartya Bhattacharya Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14116v1 The Differential Time-Varying Effect Model (DTVEM) of Jacobson et al. (2019) is a popular tool for finding the best time lag in intensive longitudinal data, but it assumes everyone shares the same lag structure. The original authors named fixing this as future work, and it clashes with the premise of modern clinical research, which is that people differ. We present DTVEM-RE, an extension that lets each person have their own lag coefficients, with two versions of the confirmatory step: a discrete-time hierarchical Bayesian VAR in Stan, which pools across people and gives calibrated uncertainty, and a continuous-time per-person Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model in ctsem, which handles unevenly spaced beeps directly. We report four results. A simulation shows the Bayesian version recovers the between-person spread tau_a with bias below 0.01 and coverage of 90 to 93 percent. On the Fisher et al. (2017) EMA dataset (N=40), person-specific lag-1 effects vary by an order of magnitude across three mood items, the Bayesian and GAMM estimates agree closely (r=0.87 to 0.92), and DTVEM-RE gives the best one-step-ahead prediction among four discrete-time methods. A multi-lag version shows all nine tau_k values have credible intervals excluding zero, and the lag where people differ most changes across items, something lag-1-only methods like mlVAR cannot detect. Finally, the two versions agree almost exactly on person-specific lag-1 estimates (r >= 0.995), differing only as shrinkage predicts. DTVEM-RE is, to our knowledge, the first person-specific implementation of DTVEM-style lag detection, and it contains standard DTVEM as a special case. --- ### Simulating Students' Java Programming Errors with Large Language Models Authors: Ali Keramati, Jie Cao, Iman Mohammadi, Mark Warschauer, Yang Shi Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.SE, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14113v1 Understanding student errors in the programming is a cornerstone of programming education, yet obtaining a representative set of student errors for any newly designed task remains slow and costly, since authentic submissions only accumulate after extensive classroom deployment. This paper explores whether large language models (LLMs) can serve as scalable proxies for students by simulating realistic logical errors in code submissions. Using the CodeWorkout dataset of 74,000+ unique student Java submissions across 37 problems, we evaluate five LLMs under three mainstream prompting strategies: Input-Output (IO), Chain-of-Thought (CoT), and iterative Self-Refine. We assess performance along two key dimensions: diversity (the range of distinct error patterns) and alignment (alignment with authentic student mistakes), and examine how these vary by struggling level of programming tasks. Our quantitative findings reveal that while all models generate diverse errors, their alignment to human submissions diverges: Claude Sonnet 4 achieves the most balanced performance. In addition, we conducted a blinded expert annotation study (N = 401) comparing synthetic and authentic errors. This qualitative analysis confirms that the generated errors are functionally indistinguishable from authentic student errors. Moreover, higher-struggling-level problems elicit more diverse but less student-like errors. These results highlight trade-offs in using LLMs to simulate human learners and suggest design considerations for integrating synthetic errors into teachable agents, intelligent tutoring systems, and large-scale learning analytics. --- ### Temperature transferable Machine Learned Coarse Grained model for proteins Authors: Jacopo Venturin, Cecilia Clementi Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: physics.bio-ph, q-bio.BM, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14111v1 Coarse-grained (CG) molecular simulations offer an efficient alternative to atomistic molecular dynamics to study large and complex biological systems. The accuracy of CG simulations has been increased dramatically by the introduction of machine-learned coarse-grained (MLCG) models. However, these models are typically designed to be used at a single thermodynamic point, lack temperature transferability, and can not be used to predict temperature dependent quantities like the heat capacity. Here we introduce a thermodynamically informed, temperature-transferable MLCG framework for proteins that explicitly decomposes the CG potential of mean force (PMF) into its energetic and entropic components. The model architecture enforces an exact thermodynamic relation between the energetic and entropic components of the PMF and guarantees physically consistent extrapolation and interpolation across temperature regimes. We validate this framework on an extensive dataset spanning a total of 250 $μ$s of molecular dynamics simulations across five temperatures between 300 K and 400 K for the Chignolin protein, and demonstrate that it reproduces the temperature dependency of the reference atomistic free energy surfaces, correcting the temperature-unaware baselines. Furthermore, we show that it is possible to apply an inexpensive, post-hoc temperature-dependent correction that does not require retraining the MLCG potential, accurately recovering the atomistic heat capacity at different temperatures. Overall, this work provides a physically grounded pathway toward thermodynamically transferable MLCG simulations of complex biomolecular systems. --- ### Numbers Already Carry Their Own Embeddings Authors: Suhyun Bae, Donghun Lee Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14108v1 We introduce Adelic operation-preserved embeddings (AOE), a training-free representation that captures both a number's real value and its modular (p-adic) signatures. This construction preserves additive and multiplicative structure by design, turning numerical input into embeddings that "speak in the language of mathematics." Unlike prior approaches that rely on task-specific retraining, AOE is plug-and-play and drops seamlessly into existing architectures. On algebraic combinatorics benchmarks, it delivers consistent gains including the first-ever perfect accuracy on the Weaving Pattern task-while suggesting a principled path forward for overcoming the long-standing "number problem" in AI. --- ### Naive Visual Memory is Not Enough: A Failure-Mode Study of GUI Agents Authors: Seoyoung Choi, Minseok Ko, Hyunseok Lee, Kunwoong Kim, Woomin Song, Chanseok Jeon, Jinwoo Shin Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.MA, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14106v1 Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents are increasingly used to automate complex computer tasks across applications, websites, and operating systems. To improve their reliability, recent work has introduced experiential memory, where agents retrieve prior trajectories to guide decision-making in similar states. More recent approaches further extend this idea to visual memory by storing and retrieving screenshots from past interactions, providing agents with richer contextual information than text-only memories. However, the effect of visual memory in GUI agents remains insufficiently understood: it is unclear which failures visual memory mitigates, or which failures it exacerbates. To systematically analyze the effect of visual memory, we introduce a taxonomy of four GUI agent failures (i.e., cognitive failure, visual state misunderstanding, hidden operation blindness, and grounding error) that map to distinct stages of the perception-reasoning-action pipeline. We find that prepending full-image memory has a divergent effect on the failure distribution: it reduces state-level failures but worsens action-level ones, and increases hidden operation blindness and grounding error. Motivated by this finding, we propose Action-Grounded Visual Memory (AGMem), an action-grounded memory framework for GUI agents. The core idea of AGMem is to store image crops that capture the local GUI region closely related to a successful action or a recovery, rather than storing full screenshots. Experiments on OSWorld show that AGMem improves task success rates by 33.3 % over full-image memory. These results demonstrate that AGMem is an effective representation for visual memory in GUI agents. --- ### A New Multi-Domain Benchmark for Micro-Action Recognition and Detection Authors: Yanbin Hao, Pengyu Liu, Xing Wei, Xun Yang, Dan Guo, Meng Wang Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14096v2 Micro-actions are short-duration, low-amplitude subtle body movements at the whole-body level that can reveal latent intentions, involuntary reactions, and fine-grained affective changes. Our previous MA-52 benchmark has provided an important foundation for micro-action recognition, but it remains limited in scale, scene diversity, task coverage, and evaluation protocols. To advance micro-action analysis toward more realistic and comprehensive settings, we introduce MMA-82, a large-scale multi-domain extension of MA-52. MMA-82 expands the label space from 52 to 82 fine-grained micro-action categories and covers four distinct domains, including laboratory interviews, street interviews, psychiatric patient interviews, and emotion-rich television videos, resulting in 77,856 annotated instances from 454 subjects. Built upon MMA-82, we establish two core tasks: Micro-Action Recognition and Multi-label Micro-Action Detection. For recognition, we further define in-domain and cross-domain protocols, including few-shot and zero-shot settings, to evaluate model robustness, transferability, and generalization. Extensive experiments show that current methods still struggle with realistic micro-action understanding, especially under domain shift, long-tailed category distributions, and complex temporal localization. Beyond benchmarking, we investigate the relationship between micro-actions and emotion, showing that micro-actions are strongly associated with emotional states and provide complementary cues to facial micro-expressions for improved emotion recognition. These results demonstrate that MMA-82 serves as a comprehensive and challenging benchmark for realistic micro-action analysis and a valuable resource for human-centered AI. MMA-82 is available at https://lpynow.github.io/MMA-82-AIM/. --- ### Lyapunov-Based Sample Complexity Analysis for Weakly-Coupled MDPs Authors: Tianhao Wu, Matthew Zurek, Weina Wang, Qiaomin Xie Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.LG, math.OC, math.PR, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14095v2 We study the sample complexity of learning in average-reward weakly-coupled Markov decision processes (WCMDPs) and Restless Bandits (RBs) under a generative model. Naive reduction to a tabular MDP leads to high complexity bounds as the state-action space is exponentially large in the number of arms $N$. By exploiting the weakly coupled structure, we show that near-optimal policies can be learned with sample and computational complexities that are polynomial in $N$. Specifically, we analyze the plug-in approach, which applies an efficient planning algorithm to an empirical model estimated from data. For fully heterogeneous WCMDPs, we establish the first finite-sample PAC guarantee with polynomial complexity and an $O(1/\sqrt{N})$ optimality gap. For homogeneous RBs, we further prove that a smaller optimality gap is achievable under mild structural assumptions. A primary technical contribution of our work is a novel Lyapunov-based analysis framework. Unlike classical approaches that rely on the difficult-to-control bias function, our framework uses an explicitly constructed Lyapunov function along with a drift transfer technique between the true and empirical models. A key step of independent interest in our framework is a fine-grained perturbation analysis for the underlying linear programming (LP) relaxation, which provides a general tool for analyzing LP-based policies and weakly-coupled systems. --- ### FEMOT: Multi-Object Tracking using Frame and Event Cameras Authors: Shiao Wang, Xiao Wang, Chao Wang, Yitao Li, Menghao Liu, Bo Jiang, Yaowei Wang, Yonghong Tian, Jin Tang Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14094v1 Conventional RGB cameras have been widely used in multi-object tracking due to their ability to capture rich appearance and semantic information. However, their performance is often degraded under complex real-world challenges, such as motion blur, low illumination, and overexposure. Bio-inspired event cameras offer high temporal resolution and high dynamic range, providing complementary cues under extreme scenarios. Nevertheless, RGB-event multi-object tracking remains underexplored due to the lack of large-scale and well-annotated datasets. To address this issue, we propose FEMOT, a large-scale RGB-event multi-object tracking dataset that covers diverse real-world scenarios and 14 challenging attributes. With both RGB and event data as well as high-quality annotations, FEMOT provides a reliable platform for systematically evaluating RGB-event multi-object tracking methods. Based on FEMOT, we retrain and evaluate over ten strong trackers, thereby establishing a comprehensive benchmark for future research. Furthermore, we propose FEMOTR, a multimodal tracking framework that decouples RGB and event features and fuses them in the frequency domain, thereby effectively exploiting their complementary characteristics for robust object localization and identity association. Extensive experiments on FEMOT and DSEC-MOT datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The source code and benchmark dataset have been released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/FEMOT. --- ### Clay-CNN Hybrids: Leveraging Geospatial Foundation Models as Auxiliary Context for Landslide Detection Authors: Huong Binh Vu Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG, eess.IV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14081v3 Rapid post-event landslide mapping is essential for disaster response but remains difficult to automate due to extreme class imbalance. This study evaluates whether Clay v1.5, a Geospatial Foundation Model (GFM), can improve pixel-level landslide segmentation on the Landslide4Sense (L4S) benchmark, which contains 3,799 training chips with 14 Sentinel-2 and terrain bands and approximately 2% positive pixels. We compare three strategies: Clay as the primary encoder with multi-scale residual terrain fusion, a U-Net backbone augmented with Clay semantic context at the bottleneck, and a standard U-Net baseline. The hybrid U-Net + Clay model with two-stage Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) achieved the best test F1 of 64.5 +/- 1.8% over three seeds, surpassing the Clay-only backbone (55.2 +/- 3.6%) and the U-Net baseline (59.9%). Clay as a standalone encoder underperformed the U-Net due to the absence of multi-scale skip connections, but its pretrained representations consistently improved performance when injected as auxiliary context. These findings suggest that GFMs are most effective for landslide detection when they complement spatially detailed convolutional architectures rather than replace them. --- ### Deep Spectral Learning of Embedded Latent Transfer Operators for Stochastic Dynamical Systems Authors: Ryogo Tanaka, Yoshinobu Kawahara Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14079v1 We propose a spectral learning method for stochastic nonlinear dynamical systems represented with embedded latent transfer operators in deep feature spaces. We instantiate the method as Deep Spectral Encoder (DSE), an operator-based latent state-space model in which a time-invariant neural encoder implements learnable nonlinear feature maps from observations, and these features define Markovian latent states whose temporal evolution and observation mapping are described by the transfer and observation operators, respectively. Functional canonical correlation analysis in a learnable Galerkin-projected feature space provides state coordinates from past and future observations, and the two linear operators are estimated on the state coordinates as ridge-regularized closed-form solutions that coincide with Galerkin projections of the associated covariance operators. On this representation, we generalize sequential Bayesian filtering and Koopman spectral mode decomposition in feature space. Experiments on several scenarios show stable and superior performance with sequential Bayesian filtering and dynamic mode decomposition baselines even under noise and partial observability. --- ### Rethinking Backdoor Adversarial Unlearning through the Lens of Catastrophic Forgetting in Continual Learning Authors: Zhenqian Zhu, Yamin Hu, Yujiang Liu, Luping Wei, Wenbo Hou, Bin Li, Haodong Li, Wenjian Luo Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14078v1 Existing studies reveal that current backdoor defenses exhibit limited robustness and often fail against specific types of attacks. More concerningly, prevailing safety tuning strategies tend to provide only superficial safety protection, as they fall short of completely eliminating the backdoor effects. In this work, we present a novel formulation of backdoor learning and unlearning as a sequential, three-stage process from a continual learning perspective. Within this framework, we formally define complete backdoor unlearning and further derive the necessary conditions for achieving it based on the mechanism of catastrophic forgetting. Guided by these insights, we propose Blind Inversion-Backdoor Adversarial Unlearning (BI-BAU), which formulates the generation of adversarial examples satisfying the unlearning conditions as a blind inversion problem. We solve this by integrating the bi-level optimization process of adversarial training into an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm framework to optimize the maximum a posteriori (MAP) objective. Furthermore, BI-BAU is extended to untargeted adversarial scenarios with unknown target classes, as well as to multi-modal contrastive learning tasks, enhancing its applicability to real-world deployment scenarios where pre-trained models may be compromised. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method exhibits general applicability across a wide spectrum of backdoor attacks and can effectively and thoroughly eliminate the backdoor effects from a backdoor model. --- ### Diffusion-Refined Segmentation and Vision-Language Interpretation for Pediatric Brain Tumor MRI Authors: Wentao Ke, Jianche Liu Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14072v1 Accurate pediatric brain tumor segmentation remains challenging due to limited annotated data, heterogeneous imaging phenotypes, diffuse tumor boundaries, and class imbalance across tumor subregions. Here, we present a two-stage deep learning framework for improving multi-modal pediatric brain MRI segmentation and clinical interpretation. First, we evaluate 3D Res U-Net and Swin-UNETR baselines on BraTS-PEDs MRI scans, using four co-registered modalities to predict tumor core, whole tumor, and enhancing tumor regions. Second, we introduce diffusion-based refinement models conditioned on coarse Swin-UNETR predictions, including a 3D DDPM refiner and MedSegDiff. Conditioning substantially improves diffusion stability and performance, particularly for enhancing tumor boundary segmentation. Conditioned MedSegDiff achieves the strongest boundary agreement with the lowest HD95. Finally, predicted tumor volumes and representative segmentation overlays are integrated with a multimodal language model to generate structured radiology-style reports. Together, our results suggest that coarse-to-refined diffusion segmentation can improve pediatric tumor boundary delineation and support end-to-end interpretable AI-assisted neuro-oncology workflows. --- ### ShearFuse-UNet: Hadamard, DCT, and Shearlet Transform Fusion for Next-Day Wildfire Spread Prediction Authors: Ene Meco, Yingyi Luo, Emadeldeen Hamdan, Adam Watts, Ahmet Enis Cetin Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14071v1 We propose ShearFuse-UNet, a lightweight and computationally efficient deep learning model for next-day wildfire spread prediction from multi-modal satellite data. The model integrates three complementary transform-domain branches inside each encoder block of a U-Net backbone: a 2D Fast Walsh-Hadamard Transform (WHT) branch, a 2D Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) branch, and a cone-adapted digital Shearlet residual branch. The WHT and DCT branches establish orthogonal latent spaces with learnable spectral scaling and fixed soft-thresholding, while the Shearlet branch provides anisotropic, multi-directional feature decomposition that explicitly encodes the elongated edge structures characteristic of fire fronts. A learned SpectralFusion gate adaptively combines the WHT and DCT responses, and the Shearlet reconstruction is added as a residual. This three-branch design bears a loose structural analogy to transformer self-attention: the WHT and DCT branches provide complementary spectral representations that are adaptively fused, while the Shearlet branch contributes directional content through a residual pathway. Unlike self-attention, the proposed design relies on fixed mathematical transforms rather than learned projection operators, reducing parameter count and computational cost. Evaluated on the WildfireSpreadTS dataset, ShearFuse-UNet achieves an F1 score of 0.596 with only 267k parameters, outperforming a ResNet18-based U-Net (14M parameters, F1 = 0.589) and demonstrating a highly favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off. Results on the Google Next-Day Wildfire Spread dataset further validate these findings across a different benchmark. --- ### Harsher on Male? Evaluating LLMs on Gender-Asymmetric Moral Framing Across Diverse Conflict Scenarios Authors: Guangzong Si, Dong Wang, Zhenhao Li, Yifan Yu, Panwang Pan, Wentao Zhu Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14068v1 Existing studies on gender bias in LLMs have largely focused on stereotypes, occupational associations, or explicit harmful outputs. In this work, we ask whether LLMs apply consistent response standards to the same negative behavior under matched male-actor and female-actor conditions. We introduce GAMA-Bench, a gender-mirrored benchmark of 1,298 scenarios covering intimate relationship and public social conflicts. It constructs gender-neutral misconduct templates through controlled grids and cross-model review, then compiles them into paired first-person prompts with matched actor-gender and role-reference variations. We further design a structured response-framing protocol to measure how models allocate punishment, empathy, escalation, instruction, and blame. Experiments on 10 representative LLMs reveal a consistent male-disadvantaging asymmetry: male actors receive more punitive, escalatory, and blame-centered framing, whereas female actors receive more therapeutic and empathy-oriented framing for the same misconduct. Further analyses show that this pattern persists across model families, scenario tracks, model scale, and explicit thinking-style reasoning. The official code is available at https://github.com/xufeiqiong/GAMA-Bench. --- ### Non-Parametric Machine Text Detection via Multi-View Gaussian Processes Authors: Aleem Khan, Nicholas Andrews Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14060v1 Adversarial conditions such as paraphrasing and targeted style transfer sharply degrade the accuracy of machine text detectors. A document, however, carries multiple complementary signals (e.g., stylistic features, likelihood and rank-order features, and structural features), and an attack that suppresses one may leave others intact. While a parametric classifier can learn to combine these features given sufficient supervision, classifiers are prone to making confidently incorrect predictions when the distribution shifts (e.g., novel attacks or unseen language models). To address this, we propose a multi-view, non-parametric detection framework that extracts complementary feature views from the same document and aggregates per-view evidence through a Gaussian process ensemble. By aggregating evidence across views, an adversary must simultaneously defeat multiple independent axes of detection, substantially raising the cost of evasion. The Gaussian process formulation additionally provides calibrated probabilities and principled abstention on out-of-distribution inputs, supporting reliable deployment in high-stakes settings. We evaluate on three benchmarks spanning diverse generators and attacks: the DetectRL and RAID benchmarks, and the PAN2025 shared task and demonstrate that our multi-view detector maintains strong performance under the considered attacks, outperforming existing approaches against held out attacks. --- ### Hybrid Uncertainty Sensitivity Analysis Based on the HSIC for High-Dimensional Responses with Aleatory--Epistemic Separation Authors: Shijie Zhong, Jiangfeng Fu, Pengfei Wei Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14053v1 Quantifying the influence of hybrid aleatory and epistemic uncertainties on high-dimensional system responses remains a major challenge in global sensitivity analysis (GSA). Existing Hilbert--Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC)-based approaches are primarily restricted to single-output settings and lack a rigorous decomposition of heterogeneous uncertainty sources and their interactions. To address this limitation, a novel double-space tensor-product RKHS framework is proposed for sensitivity analysis under hybrid uncertainty. By constructing factorized kernels over both the latent input space and the multidimensional output space, a concurrent double Möbius inversion is derived to orthogonally decompose the global dependence measure into pure aleatory effects, pure epistemic effects, and their interaction contributions. The resulting dimension-wise sensitivity indices preserve the uncertainty attribution structure across all output dimensions. To satisfy the independence assumptions required by the decomposition, an auxiliary-variable representation based on the inverse probability integral transform is introduced, enabling the treatment of hierarchical uncertainties and Copula-induced correlations within a unified latent space. A fully vectorized single-loop implementation is further developed to avoid the computational burden of nested Monte Carlo simulation. Statistical significance and estimation uncertainty are quantified through permutation testing and Bootstrap confidence intervals. Numerical studies on a modified multi-output Ishigami function and an aerodynamic pressure-field problem demonstrate the accuracy, scalability, and practical applicability of the proposed framework. --- ### FoleyGenEx: Unified Video-to-Audio Generation with Multi-Modal Control, Temporal Alignment, and Semantic Precision Authors: Shiyao Wang, Xijuan Zeng, Hui Wang, Shiwan Zhao, Feng Deng, Chen Zhang, Yong Qin Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.SD, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14049v1 We present FoleyGenEx, a unified video-to-audio (VTA) framework integrating multi-modal control, frame-level temporal alignment, and fine-grained semantics, enabling synchronized, versatile audio synthesis for diverse tasks. Existing VTA methods either have multi-modal control but weak temporal alignment or strong alignment but lack reference audio conditioning and semantic precision. FoleyGenEx fills this gap via three core innovations: a conditional injection mechanism for audio-controlled VTA and Foley extension, a multi-modal dynamic masking strategy preserving training synchronization, and an adverb-based data augmentation algorithm leveraging signal processing and large language models to enhance textual supervision with nuanced semantics. Experiments on AudioCaps, VGGSound, and Greatest Hits demonstrate its competitive controllable VTA performance against existing methods. Demo samples are available at https://foleygenex.github.io/FoleyGenEx. --- ### WAM4D: Fast 4D World Action Model via Spatial Register Tokens Authors: Ying Li, Xiaobao Wei, Jiajun Cao, Hao Wang, Xiaowei Chi, Chengyu Bai, Qianpu Sun, Jiajun Li, Xiaojie Zhang, Peidong Jia, Jian Tang, Sirui Han et al. Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14048v3 World action models (WAMs) have recently shown promise in jointly modeling future observations and executable robot actions. However, most existing WAMs still operate in 2D video or latent spaces, where visually plausible rollouts miss the 3D spatial constraints and occluded contact geometry required for precise manipulation. While geometric foundation models offer strong priors for recovering dense 3D structure and motion from visual observations, forcing WAMs to predict the dense 4D representation introduces costly geometric decoding and slows down causal action generation. To address the trade-off, we present WAM4D, a fast 4D world action model that uses lightweight spatial register tokens as training-time future-depth readouts to transfer pretrained geometric priors into a causal video-action transformer, then removes the register branch for lightweight action inference. To prevent non-causal shortcuts, we further design causal mixture attention for the Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) WAM backbone, defining modality-specific visibility among video, action, and geometry tokens. Comprehensive experiments on RoboTwin 2.0 and challenging real-world manipulation tasks show that WAM4D improves spatial consistency and achieves competitive action prediction while maintaining efficient inference. --- ### Knowledge Graph Enhanced Memory-Augmented Retrieval for Long Context Modeling Authors: Ghadir Alselwi, Basem Suleiman, Hao Xue, Shoaib Jameel, Hakim Hacid, Flora D. Salim, Imran Razzak Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14047v1 Long-context language modeling requires not only extending context windows but maintaining coherent understanding of entity states and relationships across thousands of tokens -- a challenge that semantic similarity alone cannot address. KGERMAR addresses this by constructing dynamic, context-specific knowledge graphs from input text during inference, enabling domain-adaptive retrieval that leverages both semantic similarity and explicit entity relationships. The framework performs real-time entity and relation extraction to build contextual knowledge graphs, then integrates graph-structural embeddings with textual semantics through a multi-component memory architecture. Three memory banks -- contextual, semantic, and structural -- are maintained with retrieval signals fused via learned weights to capture both surface-level semantics and deeper relational patterns. Evaluated on SlimPajama (84.7K training examples), WikiText-103 (4,358 examples), PG-19 (100 examples), and Proof-pile (46.3K examples), KGERMAR achieves up to 8.5\% lower perplexity and 2--2.5x better memory efficiency than memory-augmented baselines across context lengths from 1K to 32K tokens, with superior in-context learning performance across five NLU tasks. The dynamic knowledge graph construction approach advances memory-augmented language modeling by enabling domain-specific knowledge representation that adapts to input contexts rather than relying on fixed knowledge bases. --- ### Rethinking One-Step Image Editing through ChordEdit: Reproduction, Simplification, and New Insights Authors: Minghan Li, Jeremy Moebel, Mengyu Wang Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14042v1 One-step image editing is important for making text-guided editing fast, practical, and easy to deploy, but its underlying mechanism is still not fully understood. We revisit ChordEdit through reproduction, ablation, and simplification. Our analysis shows that a) the chord window $δ$ largely acts as an effective timestep shift from $t$ to $t - δ$; b) chord transport acts on high-noise images and mainly performs low-frequency semantic editing; and c) proximal alignment acts on low-noise images and complements it by adding high-frequency target details. In this view, ChordEdit naturally decomposes editing into a coarse low-frequency transport stage and a fine high-frequency alignment stage. These findings suggest a path toward prompt-conditioned dynamic timestep selection for adaptive image editing. All code and results can be found at \href{https://github.com/Harvard-AI-and-Robotics-Lab/ChordEdit-Reproduction}{link}. --- ### Decompose Sparsely Where You Should, Absorb Densely Where You Should No Authors: Ruixuan Deng, Zehao Jin, Zekun Wang, Zihan Dong Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14040v1 Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are typically trained to reconstruct the \textbf{entire} residual stream through a sparse dictionary, implicitly assuming that all activation content is amenable to sparse, monosemantic decomposition. We question this assumption and hypothesize that activations contain a low-rank, dense component that is computationally important to the model yet inherently unsuitable for sparse representation, which serves as a major source of the persistent dense latents widely observed in trained SAEs. To test this, we add a small rank-$r$ linear bottleneck in parallel with standard SAEs (BatchTopK and Matryoshka), allowing dense structure to be absorbed before sparse reconstruction. On Gemma-2-2B layer 12, a rank-24 bottleneck reduces dense latent count by up to 84\% while improving sparse probing and targeted probe perturbation on both architectures at matched sparsity. The absorbed component is (i) \textbf{structurally identifiable} as the top principal components and outlier dimensions; (ii) \textbf{causally necessary}, with removing it raising next-token cross-entropy by 7.5$\times$, far exceeding the 2.8$\times$ from removing the geometrically near-identical top-24 PCA directions; and (iii) \textbf{redundantly encoded by sparse dictionaries}, with ablating 787 maximally aligned sparse features raising cross-entropy by only 2.9$\times$ and ablating 2,048 topic-aligned features leaving MMLU topic classification virtually unchanged, whereas removing the scaffold drops it from 98.7\% to chance. Together, our findings identify a compact, semantically informative and causally important component of residual stream activations (which we term a \textbf{computational scaffold}) that standard sparse dictionaries represent inefficiently, suggesting that the scope of sparsity-based interpretability methods warrants careful re-examination. --- ### Right or Wrong, Models Comply: Directional Blindness in LLM Moral Judgment Authors: Jihye Kim, Jeffrey Flanigan Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14037v1 As language models take integrated roles across many domains, the response of LLMs to user pushback becomes a critical alignment property. Yet many existing evaluations treat compliance as unidirectional, measuring whether models resist pressure but not whether they resist it selectively. We introduce Compliance Asymmetry (A = BCR/HCR), a bidirectional diagnostic that compares beneficial output change under helpful nudges with harmful change under misleading nudges. Across 9 models and 972,000 nudge-condition responses, we find that this selectivity differs in factual and moral judgments: models follow helpful nudges more than harmful ones on factual questions (A = 1.58), but follow both directions at nearly identical rates on moral questions (A = 1.04). This phenomenon persists across model families, capability levels, and nudging types. Interestingly, we also find that chain-of-thought prompting amplifies helpful and harmful compliance together, while identity-based prompting suppresses both by nearly identical margins. These results identify direction-blind moral compliance as a distinct failure mode in current LLMs and suggest that alignment should target directionally calibrated updating rather than lower compliance alone. --- ### Toward 360-Degree Indoor Panorama Editing via Tuning-Free Diffusion Model with Refocusing Cross-Attention Authors: Dinh-Khoi Vo, Nhut-Thanh Le-Hinh, Viet-Tham Huynh, Tam V. Nguyen, Minh-Triet Tran, Trung-Nghia Le Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14035v1 Zero-shot text-guided diffusion has significantly advanced image editing; however, its practical usability remains constrained by three persistent challenges: prompt brittleness that requires meticulous prompt engineering, spillover edits that unintentionally affect non-target regions, and failures on small or cluttered objects caused by limited fine-grained supervision in training data. We propose FocusDiff (Target-Aware Refocusing for Tuning-Free Diffusion Editing), a tuning-free framework for precise and region-specific image manipulation based on refocusing cross-attention. Given a target region obtained through automated segmentation or manual selection, FocusDiff applies selective blurring to non-edit areas to guide attention toward the masked region while accurately transferring the object's identity, structure, and appearance to the edited output. Integrated context-preserving modules further ensure background fidelity and global coherence, enabling accurate edits from simple text prompts in a single pass. We also extend FocusDiff to 360-degree indoor panorama editing and demonstrate its effectiveness within virtual reality environments. Extensive experiments on our localized editing benchmark LIMB, comprising 30 multi-object images and 100 annotated examples including challenging small-object cases, show that FocusDiff outperforms existing zero-shot editors in text-image alignment and background preservation, achieving superior precision, photorealism, and usability. The project page is available at https://vdkhoi20.github.io/FocusDiff. --- ### Applicability Condition Extraction for Therapeutic Drug-Disease Relations Authors: Guanting Luo, Noriki Nishida, Yuji Matsumoto, Yuki Arase Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14031v2 Identifying conditions that a certain drug takes therapeutic effect on a target disease is crucial for clinical decision-making support. However, most existing biomedical information extraction methods have focused on identifying only relations between drugs and diseases, while largely overlooking the context-specific conditions where such relations can apply. To address this problem, we introduce the task of applicability condition extraction for therapeutic drug-disease relations from biomedical research literature. We create the first dataset that has manually annotated triples of drugs, diseases, and applicability conditions on biomedical paper abstracts with 1,119 drug-disease pairs. Using this dataset, we systematically evaluate the performance of a range of existing methods. In addition, we propose a new method that enhances LoRA to consider relations between drugs and diseases. Our method consistently outperforms strong baselines across different evaluation settings. --- ### Efficiency-Performance Trade-offs in Neural Speaker Diarization via Structured Pruning and Low-Bit Quantization Authors: Rishit Chatterjee, Tahiya Chowdhury Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.SD, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14030v1 Streaming speaker diarization is crucial for time-critical medical dispatch, but deploying it on resource-constrained hardware requires smaller, faster models. Using SIMSAMU, a dataset of simulated medical-dispatch conversations, we evaluate streaming behavior before compressing the segmentation model with pruning and low-bit quantization. We characterize performance across a range of streaming latency budgets and find that additional buffering is not consistently beneficial, while very low-latency operating points can substantially degrade performance. Our study shows that model compression trades performance for memory footprint, and we highlight an operating point where FP16 reduces model size by half with essentially unchanged real-time factor, at a cost of a 40\% relative DER increase against the baseline. This work characterizes the trade-offs for real-time deployment and contributes to speech technology that can enable reliable human communication in time-critical contexts. --- ### Utility-Constrained Policy Optimization Authors: Mehrdad Moghimi, Bernardo Avila Pires Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14029v1 Constrained MDPs (CMDPs) are a widely adopted framework for incorporating safety into RL agents; however, the framework does not support risk-sensitive constraints. This can be problematic: For example, CMDPs allow for optimal solutions that, in order to satisfy the risk-neutral constraints, mix infrequent catastrophic behaviors and frequent, overly conservative ones. Moreover, prior empirical results suggest that enforcing stricter, risk-sensitive constraints can improve performance even under risk-neutral evaluation. The natural framework to incorporate risk-sensitive constraints is utility-constrained MDPs (UCMDPs), but no practical solutions for this problem existed. In this work, we introduce a simple yet powerful methodology for UCMDPs and constrained RL. Besides allowing for risk-sensitive constraints, our framework does not require us to fix constraint limits in advance of training the agent, provided that a sensible range is known. This increases policy flexibility and, in practice, allows for adjustments to these limits at no extra training cost. Besides benefiting from the generality of the framework, our agent shows strong performance in practice, consistently matching or outperforming existing baselines in several Safety Gymnasium benchmark tasks. --- ### Anytime-Valid Confirmation of Label-Shift Corrections Authors: Seungjin Choi Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14028v1 In small-batch scientific deployments, labeled target outcomes may be too scarce for reliable shift estimation even when unlabeled target inputs are available. We address the complementary setting where the practitioner has a pre-specified label-shift correction from domain knowledge and asks whether incoming labeled outcomes support it. We show that the per-observation likelihood ratio between a label-shift-corrected predictive and the source predictive is a conditional e-value, so its running product is a nonnegative martingale and Ville's inequality yields an anytime-valid confirmation rule. The log martingale equals the cumulative negative log-predictive density (NLPD) gap between the source and the corrected predictive, converting routine model monitoring into a formal sequential test. Rejection means the incoming data support the posited correction relative to the source predictive, but it is not a precise estimate of the degree of shift. Closed forms are available for GP sources with Gaussian label-shift ratios. GP regression simulations validate Type I control, finite-sample power, miscalibration sensitivity, and the small-batch advantage of a reliable prior over label-based re-estimation. --- ### Same-Origin Policy for Agentic Browsers Authors: Xilong Wang, Xiaoxing Chen, Patrick Li, Dawn Song, Neil Gong Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.CL, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14027v3 Agentic browsers integrate autonomous AI agents into web browsers, enabling users to accomplish web tasks through natural-language instructions. The same-origin policy (SOP) is a fundamental browser security mechanism that prevents unauthorized automated cross-origin data flows induced by scripts. However, whether SOP remains effective in agentic browsers is an open question that has not been systematically studied. In this work, we bridge this gap. We first observe that an agentic browser can itself serve as an automated channel for cross-origin data flows, potentially leading to SOP violations. To investigate this phenomenon, we construct SOPBench, a benchmark for evaluating SOP violations in agentic browsers. Our evaluation shows that existing agentic browsers frequently violate SOP, both in benign settings and under attacks. To address this problem, we propose SOPGuard, an SOP enforcement mechanism tailored to agentic browsers. We implement SOPGuard in BrowserOS, an open-source agentic browser. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that SOPGuard effectively enforces SOP while preserving utility and incurring only a small runtime overhead. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/wxl-lxw/BrowserOS-SOPGuard. --- ### GarmentSketch: Large-scale Sketch-to-Fashion Benchmark Authors: Duong-Duy-Khang Bui, Minh-Tan Pham, Tam V. Nguyen, Minh-Triet Tran, Trung-Nghia Le Published: 2026-06-12 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14025v1 Fashion sketching is a cornerstone of design workflows, allowing rapid visualization of creative concepts prior to physical prototyping. Yet, progress in sketch-based fashion image synthesis has been hindered by the absence of large-scale, high-quality paired resources. To bridge this gap, we present GarmentSketch, a novel dataset comprising 26,249 fashion sketches across 21 garment categories, each paired with detailed textual descriptions. Captions were produced through a multi-stage pipeline that integrates multiple multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with human-in-the-loop refinement, ensuring both semantic accuracy and descriptive richness. We benchmark GarmentSketch on state-of-the-art generative models, providing baseline performance for sketch-guided text-to-image generation. Our experiments reveal both the promise and the current limitations of existing methods. By offering a comprehensive and richly annotated resource, GarmentSketch establishes a foundation for advancing sketch understanding, fine-grained fashion image generation, and creative human-AI collaboration in design. The dataset will be available at: https://khangbdd.github.io/garmentsketch. ---