# Research Papers — 2026-06 · bundle page 181 of 260 > Full-text markdown of papers #9001–9050 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/181 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/180.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/182.md) ### iSAGE: A Human-in-the-Loop Framework for Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation via Sparse Point Supervision Authors: Osmar Luiz Ferreira de Carvalho, Osmar Abilio de Carvalho Junior, Anesmar Olino de Albuquerque, Daniel Guerreiro e Silva Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10136v2 Semantic segmentation in remote sensing requires costly pixel-level annotations, and nearly every problem demands a new dataset since models rarely transfer across sensors, platforms, or geographies. Existing human-in-the-loop frameworks expand sparse clicks into dense supervision via auxiliary machinery (pseudo-labels, propagation, CRFs, foundation-model prompts, auxiliary heads), all operating on the model's predictive distribution. A confidently wrong pixel is indistinguishable from a confidently correct one in that distribution by construction, so no rule reading it can separate the two; the distinguishing signal is external to the model. This paper hypothesizes that expert clicks targeting confident model errors, not arbitrary pixels, suffice to match dense supervision, with no expansion machinery. iSAGE (Iterative Sparse Annotation Guided by Expert) realizes this hypothesis on an integrated open-source platform, where an error-weighted loss amplifies the gradient at each click and the annotation record itself is the dataset, extensible, correctable, and auditable. Experiments use a minimum-effort regime: at most one labeled pixel per class per frame. On BsB Aerial, iSAGE recovers 97.2% of dense supervision (74.79% mIoU on 0.040% of pixels) with contrasting class dynamics: amorphous classes (permeable areas) saturate from the seed, while small classes (cars) require late-iteration effort. On ISPRS Vaihingen (external benchmark), iSAGE reaches 76.78% mIoU with 0.011% of pixels, matching the dense baseline (76.65%) and exceeding all published methods. Under the same pipeline, four output-reading mechanisms (oracle entropy across budgets 1--100x, pseudo-labels across thresholds 0.90--0.99, CRF-based propagation, uniform random) plateau 7.4 to 14.5 pp below iSAGE. Across 31 surveyed methods, iSAGE is the only iterative human-in-the-loop framework operating without auxiliary machinery. --- ### BiWM: Advancing Open-Source Interactive Video World Models with Bidirectional Autoregression Authors: Shaohao Rui, Xiaofeng Mao, Zhanyu Zhang, Peijia Lin, Yansong Zhu, Yibo Zhang, Haibin Wan, Zhangrui Zhao, Weijie Ma Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10135v4 Interactive video world models commonly convert bidirectional video generators into causal autoregressive systems through control fine-tuning, autoregressive training, causal initialization, and few-step distillation. This pipeline is costly, while frozen causal histories accumulate errors that degrade long-horizon fidelity and controllability. We present BiWM, the first open-source full-stack training framework for bidirectional autoregressive video world models. BiWM retains full attention within each generated chunk and requires only two stages: camera/action-control fine-tuning and few-step Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD). Both stages converge within a few hundred optimizer steps on 8 H200 GPUs. The framework supports Wan2.1-T2V-1.3B, Wan2.2-TI2V-5B, HunyuanVideo-1.5-TI2V-8B, and LTX-2.3-22B, together with real-world camera control, pluggable long-history compression, and optional low-bit deployment. Supervised and forward-KL anchors mitigate DMD mode collapse and preserve scene dynamics. BiWM provides a compact, reproducible path from pretrained bidirectional video models to interactive, controllable, and efficient world models. --- ### Effective Training Principles of Physical Reservoirs Authors: Sobhi Saeed, Mehmet Müftüoglu, Glitta R. Cheeran, Juliane Heim, Bennet Fischer, Mario Chemnitz Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: physics.optics, cs.LG, physics.data-an arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10130v1 Reservoir computers benefit from the inherent complexity of optical phenomena, which provide rich, often nonlinear dynamics. However, training directly on the reservoir's output renders the system prone to overfitting and computationally inefficient during the training phase. In this work, we investigate strategies to mitigate overfitting and reduce computational overhead through output pruning and regularization. We compare loss-minimizing search methods (Equal Search and Branch and Bound) against an output-oriented statistical filtering approach (Variance Filter) and random pruning, highlighting advantages and disadvantages of each approach and the overall importance of informed reservoir output sampling, particularly for a shrinking latent space. We further demonstrate that enforcing readout selection across the full output spectrum improves performance, especially for non-iterative methods. Additionally, we examine L1 and L2 regularization techniques (LASSO and ridge regression), both of which significantly enhance performance on highly nonlinear tasks such as the Spiral Benchmark. While our methods are of general use, results are obtained from and discussed exemplarily for a nonlinear fiber-optical extreme learning machine. Overall, this study provides a deep analysis of the reservoirs' hidden-layer filtering mechanisms and the output-layer training, enabling optimized performance in physical reservoir computing systems. --- ### Discovering Interpretable Multi-Parameter Control Policies for Evolutionary Algorithms Using Deep Reinforcement Learning Authors: Tai Nguyen, Phong Le, Carola Doerr, Nguyen Dang Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10129v1 While deep Reinforcement Learning (deep-RL) has been increasingly applied to parameter control in evolutionary algorithms, rigorous theoretical analysis of parameter control remains largely restricted to single-parameter settings, owing to the difficulty of deriving effective, interpretable multi-parameter policies amenable to formal study. We demonstrate how deep-RL can be leveraged to overcome this barrier, using the (1+($λ$,$λ$))-genetic algorithm optimizing OneMax, one of the few problems where a super-constant speedup of dynamic control has been formally proven, as a representative case study. We first show that standard approaches struggle to converge in this multi-parameter setting, and introduce algorithm-agnostic enhancements targeting action-space decomposition, reward shifting, and long-horizon discounting. With these in place, we compare common deep-RL methods and find that Double Deep Q-Networks uniquely avoid the policy collapse observed in Proximal Policy Optimization, yielding trajectories suitable for downstream analysis. Crucially, we move beyond the ``black-box'' nature of neural networks by distilling the learned behaviors into a transparent, symbolic control policy. This resulting policy does not only offer interpretability for future theoretical analysis but also yields exceptional performance, consistently outperforming existing baselines across a wide range of problem sizes. --- ### Pareto-Guided Teacher Alignment for Fair Personalized Text Generation Authors: Tunazzina Islam Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10126v1 Personalized persuasive text generation can improve relevance and engagement, but demographic conditioning may also introduce unequal framing across groups. We study fairness mitigation in personalized generation as a constrained multi-objective alignment problem: reduce demographic disparities while preserving personalization fidelity. We propose a Pareto-guided teacher alignment framework that combines revision-based candidate generation, pair-aware feasibility gating, Pareto-style candidate selection, and optional preference optimization through supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization. We evaluate the framework on climate change and vaccination persuasion tasks using a controlled context-rich demographic grid with matched gender and age pairs and a unified five-audit evaluation suite spanning persuasion bias, formality disparity, emotional framing disparity, lexical association disparity, and personalization fidelity. Across both domains and cross-family transfer settings, no single alignment strategy dominates all objectives simultaneously. Instead, methods occupy different regions of a fairness-personalization Pareto frontier: some achieve stronger disparity reductions, while others better preserve personalization or demographic stability. Our results show that fairness mitigation effects are objective-dependent and transfer inconsistently across domains and model families, motivating bounded-regression, multi-audit model selection over single-metric optimization for fairness-sensitive personalized generation. --- ### Robust Active Learning for Few-Shot Example Selection in Text-to-SQL Authors: Arash Pourhabib Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: stat.ML, cs.DB, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10125v2 Domain-specific text-to-SQL systems ground a large language model by retrieving annotated few-shot examples, and each example needs expert-written SQL. We treat the choice of which queries to annotate as constrained experimental design on the low-dimensional manifold of query embeddings, with query-dependent annotation noise, a partition matroid constraint that spreads selections across semantic domains, and an unknown covariance structure. We propose a stratified greedy algorithm that maximizes a heteroscedastic information-gain objective. We prove that the objective is monotone and submodular under query-dependent noise, so stratified greedy selection carries a 1/2-approximation guarantee under the partition constraint. Under kernel misspecification the guarantee degrades by an additive spectral term; we compute it on both experimental pools and find it too large for the bound to be quantitatively informative. To connect the design objective to the downstream task, we give a retrieval model that bounds few-shot accuracy from below by per-domain fill distance, demonstration noise, and domain coverage, and we calibrate its locality assumption on both pools. On an enterprise supply-chain corpus and on the BIRD benchmark, the selected banks improve cross-domain retrieval and end-to-end LLM SQL over random and distance-based selection at the same annotation budget. Stratified controls and pre-specified tests show that the gain comes from the partition constraint: uniform sampling within each stratum matches the full method in the oracle-label evaluations, farthest-point selection within strata adds a little at small budgets, and the noise weighting has no measurable effect. The practical advice is to annotate one example per domain per batch from the first batch on. --- ### Robust Active Learning for Few-Shot Example Selection in Text-to-SQL Authors: Arash Pourhabib Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: stat.ML, cs.DB, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10125v1 Few-shot example retrieval is the dominant paradigm for grounding large language models (LLMs) in domain-specific text-to-SQL systems. However, the quality of the annotated example bank directly governs system accuracy, and expert annotation is prohibitively expensive. We formalize the active selection of these examples as a constrained experimental design problem over the intrinsic, low-dimensional manifold of semantic query embeddings. Unlike standard active learning frameworks, our setting introduces three critical challenges: varying, query-dependent annotation reliability (heteroscedasticity), strict requirements for spatial diversity across semantic topics (partition matroid constraints), and the inherent reality that the true covariance structure of the embedding space is unknown (misspecification). To address these, we propose a stratified greedy algorithm that maximizes a heteroscedastic mutual information objective. We prove that this objective remains submodular and approximately monotonic on the intrinsic manifold, yielding a theoretical constant-factor approximation guarantee. We establish a spectral bound demonstrating that this approximation guarantee degrades gracefully, rather than catastrophically, when the assumed surrogate kernel diverges from the true underlying data-generating process. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed strategy significantly reduces labeling effort while maintaining high text-to-SQL retrieval accuracy. --- ### FedSteer: Taming Extreme Gradient Staleness in Federated Learning with Corrective Projections and Caching Authors: Haoran Zhang, Cainã Figueiredo Pereira, Marie Siew, Xutong Liu, Carlee Joe-Wong, Rachid El-Azouzi Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10124v2 Federated learning (FL) is often subject to aggregation variance if clients do not consistently participate in training rounds. While reusing stale model updates from inactive clients is a common technique to reduce this variance, we find that with skewed client participation, the resulting update staleness can become severe enough to destabilize training. To remedy this, we propose FedSteer, a novel method that constructs a gradient subspace from a cache of recent client gradients to serve as a low-dimensional representation of the current optimization landscape. FedSteer projects an active client's true gradient onto this subspace to find a set of optimal coordinates. For an inactive client, FedSteer reuses these coordinates with the now-evolved subspace drifted by other active clients. This process effectively "steers" outdated gradients toward the current global objective. This is complemented by a selective caching strategy that identifies a representative client subset to form the subspace, reducing server memory. Experiments demonstrate that FedSteer significantly outperforms baselines, preventing performance collapse in challenging scenarios while delivering accuracy gains of over 7% in others. --- ### MetaPlate: Counterfactual-Guided RAG-LLM Tool for Personalized Food Recommendation and Hyperglycemia Prevention Authors: Asiful Arefeen, Carol Johnston, Hassan Ghasemzadeh Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10120v2 Postprandial hyperglycemia is a key risk factor for metabolic disorders; however, existing dietary guidance is often static, impractical, and insufficiently personalized, providing recommendations that are difficult to follow or not impactful. While recent advances leverage continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) and machine learning to predict glycemic responses, these approaches are largely predictive and lack actionable guidance. Moreover, recommendation systems are often misaligned with user goals and require extensive input. We present MetaPlate, a counterfactual explanation (CF) guided, context-aware decision-support framework that generates personalized meal recommendations to mitigate postprandial glucose excursions in healthy adults. MetaPlate integrates multimodal data, including CGM readings, wearable-derived physiological signals, and user-provided meal inputs from $25$ individuals to model pre-meal context. A machine learning model predicts glucose response, while a CF optimization module adjusts meal composition modifying macronutrient amounts to maintain glucose levels within a target range ($\leq 140$ mg/dL). An LLM-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) layer enhances interpretability by producing human-readable recommendations using constrained search of the USDA food database. We evaluate MetaPlate via a structured expert-in-the-loop assessment with registered dietitians (RDs), comparing performance before and after prompt refinement. Results show improvements in meal realism, portion suitability, and recommendation likelihood, with expert feedback indicating a shift from clinically implausible outputs to actionable, contextually appropriate recommendations. Our findings emphasize the importance of domain knowledge and structured constraints in LLM-driven systems and highlight the potential of MetaPlate as a real-time personalized dietary decision-support tool. --- ### Convergence Rates for Neural-Network Estimation with Current-Status Data Authors: Yuan Wu, Tianhui Zhou Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.ST arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10119v2 Current-status data arise when an event time is observed only through an indicator of whether it occurred before an examination time. This paper studies a nonparametric neural-network sieve maximum likelihood estimator of the conditional cumulative distribution function of the event time. Under Hölder smoothness assumptions, we establish an explicit convergence rate by combining approximation theory for rectified linear unit neural networks with empirical-process arguments. This result provides theoretical support for neural-network estimation and subsequent inference under current-status observation. --- ### Improving PET/CT-Based Whole-Body Lesion Segmentation Using Prediction Uncertainty-Augmented Models Authors: Bashirul Azam Biswas, Biratal Raj Wagle, Zhihan Yang, Marc A. Seltzer, Matthew E. Maeder, James B. Yu, Indrani Bhattacharya Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10115v1 Accurate lesion segmentation from whole-body Positron Emission Tomography (PET)/Computed Tomography (CT) scans is essential for cancer staging and treatment planning. PET provides functional metabolic information with different radiotracers, while CT offers anatomical localization. Lesion delineation from PET/CT imaging is clinically challenging due to subtle imaging features, confounders, and inter-reader variability. Existing deep learning approaches suffer from training-related stochasticity, inconsistent predictions, missed lesions in high tumor-burden cases, and lack uncertainty quantification, limiting their clinical reliability. Using nnU-Net as a baseline, we propose an uncertainty-aware framework for whole-body PET/CT lesion segmentation that integrates (1) Bayesian ensembling to reduce training stochasticity, (2) voxel-wise uncertainty quantification with epistemic and aleatoric decomposition, and (3) epistemic uncertainty-augmented training to improve lesion detection. Two public datasets, AutoPET-III (1,611 scans) and Deep-PSMA (200 scans), comprising FDG and PSMA studies across multiple cancer types, are used for training and evaluation. Bayesian ensembling improves robustness and performance over deterministic nnU-Net models on the unseen AutoPET-III test set. Uncertainty maps highlight regions of model disagreement and correlate with misclassifications, particularly false positives. Uncertainty-augmented training improves lesion recovery at the cost of increased FPVol, reflecting a precision-recall trade-off. A case-adaptive routing strategy further improves Dice by selecting between the base and augmented models. To our knowledge, this is the first study to systematically investigate uncertainty quantification in multi-tracer, pan-cancer PET/CT segmentation and to combine Bayesian ensembling with uncertainty-aware modeling for this task. --- ### Emotion Profiling in LLM-Based Literary Translation: Systematic Shifts Across MT and Post-Editing Authors: Antonio Castaldo, Johanna Monti, Sheila Castilho Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10113v1 This paper investigates whether LLM translations exhibit identifiable emotional profiles and how post-editing reshapes them toward human-like norms. We compare LLM translations of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake with their post-edited versions and a human translation, using a large-scale corpus of contemporary Italian science-fiction as a baseline. We examine emotion through lexicon-based and multilingual modeling, conducting a fine-grained analysis of emotional variation across systems. We find that MT systems introduce model-specific and statistically significant emotional fingerprints across translations, leading to a limited preservation of an author's voice. --- ### Duality for Optimal Multi-Item, Multi-Bidder Auction Design: Revenue Certificates through Deep Learning Authors: Yanchen Jiang, David C. Parkes, Tonghan Wang Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.GT, cs.AI, cs.LG, econ.TH arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10112v1 Characterizing revenue-optimal auctions for multi-item, multi-bidder settings remains a fundamental open problem, with no known closed-form solution existing beyond restrictive binary-type instances. This has motivated interest in computational approaches to optimal auction design. In this paper, we introduce the first computational framework that directly tackles the dual problem for multi-item, multi-bidder auctions and dominant-strategy incentive compatibility (DSIC), generating certified revenue upper bounds. Our approach parametrizes Lagrange multipliers with a structurally guaranteed strict flow-conservation property using neural networks, enabling efficient optimization over feasible dual solutions via gradient descent. To bridge the gap between discrete computational methods and theoretical guarantees for continuous types, we develop a novel lifting technique that maps dual certificates from coarse discretizations to fine refinements. We prove that lifting gives valid revenue upper bounds for multi-item, multi-bidder auctions with continuous uniform valuations. Furthermore, we give a generalized lifting construction for arbitrary continuous distributions and demonstrate that these lifted duals converge to the revenue of the original continuous problem in the discrete limit. We validate this computational framework for the dual auction design problem by recovering known analytical mechanisms for canonical instances. For multi-item multi-bidder problems, our framework establishes a small gap between the optimal revenue and best-known DSIC mechanisms, providing computational certificates of near-optimality. --- ### Nonlinear Bayesian Estimator for Parameter Learning: A Fixed-Point Characterization Authors: Sasan Vakili, Daniël Woonings, Pradyumna Paruchuri, Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.LG, eess.SY, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10111v2 This paper presents a nonlinear parameter estimator for Wiener-type state-space models obtained as a fixed-point architecture that couples two affine minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) estimators: one for the unknown parameters and one for latent variables. The architecture retains the functional structure of the optimal affine MMSE parameter estimator while incorporating Dynamic Basis Statistics (DBS) estimates that summarize nonlinear basis-function evaluations. Two DBS construction strategies are developed, leading to two nonlinear estimator frameworks. The dual basis-parameter estimator combines an affine basis estimator with the affine parameter estimator, whereas the dual state-parameter estimator first computes affine state estimates and their covariances, then maps these state-estimate statistics through a Gaussian DBS operator to obtain DBS estimates. Both dual estimators admit fixed-point characterizations that alternate between estimating each component using the updated prior of the other, obtained from that component's plug-in estimate statistics from the previous iteration. The efficacy of the proposed methods is examined via extensive Monte Carlo experiments, showing that the dual basis-parameter estimator attains parameter mean-squared errors comparable to those of the purely affine parameter estimator, while the dual state-parameter estimator achieves the lowest parameter mean-squared error, outperforming both the dual basis-parameter and purely affine parameter estimators, as well as sequential Monte Carlo variants of classical Particle Gibbs and Expectation-Maximization schemes. --- ### Maximum Matching Accuracy: An Instance Segmentation Evaluation Metric Utilizing Globally Optimal Matching Authors: Kaden Stillwagon, Alexandra D. VandeLoo, Craig R. Forest Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.CV, q-bio.QM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10107v1 Reliable evaluation of instance segmentation models requires metrics that accurately and consistently reflect segmentation quality. However, the metrics most widely used in biological imaging carry fundamental mathematical weaknesses: hard Intersection-over-Union (IoU) thresholds that produce discontinuous, low sensitivity scoring; per-object normalization that distorts scores under object size variation; and greedy or one-to-many matching procedures that yield non-optimal, order-dependent correspondences. Together, these properties produce unintuitive and unreliable model rankings under common failure modes such as split cells, merged cells, and cell boundary imprecision. We propose Maximum Matching Accuracy (MMA), a threshold-free continuous metric that finds a globally optimal one-to-one matching between predicted and ground truth objects and aggregates total overlap using per-pixel normalization. We evaluate MMA against AP@50, PQ, SEG, and AJI across three experiments: synthetic failure cases, progressive corruption tests, and a model ranking comparison. MMA produces scores that are more stable, more sensitive, and more interpretable than existing alternatives, providing a principled foundation for fair instance segmentation benchmarking in biological cell imaging. --- ### What makes a harness a harness: necessary and sufficient conditions for an agent harness Authors: Sanderson Oliveira de Macedo Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10106v1 The term agent harness now circulates widely in software engineering with generative artificial intelligence. It names the layer that wraps a language model and turns it into a coding agent able to act on a repository. The usage is loose and polysemous. Sometimes the term denotes the whole product (Claude Code, Codex CLI); sometimes it denotes the evaluation scaffold that runs an agent against tasks (the SWE-bench harness); sometimes it gets conflated with an agent framework, an SDK, an IDE plugin, or an orchestrator. What is missing is a reference definition that works as an instrument, one that includes and excludes cases consistently. We build that definition through a conceptual analysis that combines works with persistent identifiers and primary grey-literature sources, such as official documentation, glossaries, and engineering reports. We reconstruct the genealogy of the term, from the horse's tack to the classic test harness, to the machine-learning evaluation harness, and finally to the agent harness. We then propose a constitutive definition that states the necessary and sufficient conditions for a system to be an agent harness, we operationalize it as an inclusion and exclusion test, and we draw the boundary of the concept against an agent framework, an agent SDK, an IDE plugin, an eval harness, and an orchestrator. We apply the definition to six real harnesses (Claude Code, Codex CLI, Aider, Cline, OpenHands, and SWE-agent) and to deliberate edge cases; the test includes and excludes consistently. We close with a research agenda organized by design tension axes. The contribution is an operational definition of agent harness, with a shared vocabulary, able to guide engineering practice and the scientific comparison of agentic systems. --- ### Unsupervised Style Representation Learning for AI-Text Detection via Paraphrase Inversion Authors: Rafael Rivera Soto, Barry Chen, Nicholas Andrews Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10099v1 The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has raised concerns about misuse such as plagiarism, misinformation, and automated influence operations, motivating the need for robust detectors. Recent work has shown that neural representations of writing style are effective for detection and, crucially, robust to adversarial attacks that defeat most existing detectors. However, current style-based detectors rely on authorship labels for training, and are limited to few-shot inference for detection, requiring in-distribution samples that may not always be available. We learn discriminative style features without authorship labels by training a style encoder to reconstruct human-authored text from its machine-generated paraphrase; freezing a semantic encoder during training biases the style encoder to capture only the non-semantic features needed for reconstruction. We evaluate the learned representations via two detection strategies: a few-shot detector and a zero-shot DeepSVDD-based detector. Across benchmarks, our method matches or outperforms all baselines in the few-shot setting and, in the zero-shot regime, is competitive with fully supervised classifiers on in-distribution test data while generalizing better to unseen LLMs. Beyond detection, the learned representations generalize to unseen tasks, achieving competitive performance on authorship verification and fine-grained style discrimination despite never being trained on either objective. --- ### Predictive Assistance and the Temporal Dynamics of Exploratory Compression Authors: Balaraju Battu Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10094v2 Classical theories of cognition describe problem solving as exploratory search through structured problem spaces in which repeated interaction gradually compresses search into efficient representational structures. Predictive artificial intelligence systems introduce a distinct regime in which stabilization may occur before exploratory diversification unfolds, supplying solutions and decision trajectories prior to internally generated search. This paper develops a geometric dynamical framework in which attention evolves over a landscape of strategies shaped by stabilizing drift, endogenous exploratory perturbation, and responsiveness-gated learning. Predictive assistance is modeled as a process of exogenous exploratory compression that stabilizes trajectories before self-generated exploration broadens the accessible regions of strategy space. The framework yields three main results. First, sustained predictive stabilization reduces exploratory responsiveness by attenuating the effective influence of intrinsic perturbations even when exploratory variability remains present. Second, curvature accumulates and relaxes asymmetrically, producing hysteresis and delayed recovery of exploratory mobility after assistance withdrawal. Third, developmental outcomes depend critically on the timing of stabilization, with early intervention narrowing future exploratory traversal before broad representational diversification has occurred. The framework generates empirically testable predictions concerning exploratory entropy, premature convergence, and delayed recovery following predictive stabilization. More broadly, the results suggest that predictive systems may reshape the geometry of exploratory cognition itself. --- ### Predictive Assistance and the Temporal Dynamics of Exploratory Compression Authors: Balaraju Battu Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10094v1 Classical theories of cognition describe problem solving as exploratory search through structured problem spaces in which repeated interaction gradually compresses search into efficient representational structures. Predictive artificial intelligence systems introduce a distinct regime in which stabilization may occur before exploratory diversification unfolds, supplying solutions and decision trajectories prior to internally generated search. This paper develops a geometric dynamical framework in which attention evolves over a landscape of strategies shaped by stabilizing drift, endogenous exploratory perturbation, and responsiveness-gated learning. Predictive assistance is modeled as a process of exogenous exploratory compression that stabilizes trajectories before self-generated exploration broadens the accessible regions of strategy space. The framework yields three main results. First, sustained predictive stabilization reduces exploratory responsiveness by attenuating the effective influence of intrinsic perturbations even when exploratory variability remains present. Second, curvature accumulates and relaxes asymmetrically, producing hysteresis and delayed recovery of exploratory mobility after assistance withdrawal. Third, developmental outcomes depend critically on the timing of stabilization, with early intervention narrowing future exploratory traversal before broad representational diversification has occurred. The framework generates empirically testable predictions concerning exploratory entropy, premature convergence, and delayed recovery following predictive stabilization. More broadly, the results suggest that predictive systems may reshape the geometry of exploratory cognition itself. --- ### Decision-Making under Combinatorial Risk Authors: Yifan Hong, Hongmiao Fan, Chen Wang Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.LG, econ.GN arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10092v1 Decision-making under risk is typically studied through single-shot lottery choices. Yet many real decisions involve combinatorial risk, where risk arises from multiple risky components, so the lottery over outcomes is induced rather than given outright and can be costly to evaluate exactly. We introduce an investment-allocation task to study decision under combinatorial risk, where investing in a component raises its success probability and thereby reshapes the outcome distribution. Participants favor the option with the larger probability increment, and, when increments are equal, the option with the higher initial success probability. Revealing the induced probability mass function (PMF) substantially changes behavior, making participants less responsive to combinatorial-risk features and reducing choice variance. To explain these patterns, we move beyond standard benchmarks and hand-crafted hypotheses with symbolic regression to discover compact descriptive models. The discovered models rely mainly on combinatorial-risk features, such as the after-investment success probability, rather than exact evaluation of the full induced distribution. Behavior under the displayed PMF is then well explained by augmenting this model with a prospect-theoretic residual model. The results show that people navigate combinatorial risk primarily through its core features, shifting toward lottery valuation only when the induced PMF is displayed. --- ### SoK: Colluding Adversaries in Machine Learning Pipelines Authors: Vasisht Duddu, Lipeng He, Asim Waheed, N. Asokan Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10091v1 Machine learning (ML) models are susceptible to various security, privacy, and fairness risks. Adversaries with different characteristics (i.e., objectives, knowledge, and capabilities) can collude by executing one attack to amplify others. Existing work lacks a systematic framework to explore collusion among adversaries, and to study the implications of the adversaries' characteristics. We present a framework covering collusion (a) between train- and inference-time adversaries, and (b) among inference-time adversaries. Our framework accounts for factors enabling collusion between adversaries. We propose a guideline to conjecture about the potential for collusion using enabling factors. We use it to explain prior work, conjecture about unexplored collusions, and empirically validate five such cases. Finally, we discuss how adversaries' characteristics influence the potential for collusion. --- ### A Theory on Flow Matching with Neural Networks Authors: Yihan He, Qishuo Yin, Yuan Cao, Jianqing Fan, Han Liu Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10089v1 In this work, we develop theoretical foundation for flow matching with neural-network-parameterized conditional velocity fields. We establish convergence guarantees for gradient descent in the over-parameterized 2-layered ReLU neural network regime. We derive generalization bounds for the conditional velocity-field matching objective. Building on these results, we provide Wasserstein-distance guarantees for the samples generated by the induced flow. Our analysis is based on generalization bound for multi-task representation learning with unbounded losses, which may be of independent interest beyond flow-based generative modeling. These theoretical results are validated through extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world image benchmarks. --- ### Interpretable Temporal Facial-Region Motion Analysis for In-the-Wild Parkinson's Disease Video Classification Authors: Riyadh Almushrafy Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10088v1 Reduced facial expressivity is a common motor manifestation of Parkinson's disease (PD), often described as hypomimia or facial bradykinesia. This paper examines whether temporal motion descriptors extracted from facial-region keypoints can support in-the-wild PD-related video classification on the YouTubePD benchmark. Each video is represented using geometric descriptors from 14 predefined facial regions. Static geometry, normalized geometry, velocity-based descriptors, relative-velocity descriptors, and a GRU sequence baseline are compared under the same binary classification protocol. To assess stability and interpretability, the study includes seed-robustness analysis, region-level ablation, and permutation importance. The best result is obtained with normalized velocity descriptors and a Random Forest classifier, reaching a balanced accuracy of 0.826 and an AUROC of 0.855 on the held-out test split. Across 10 random seeds, this representation remains stable, with balanced accuracy of 0.810 +/- 0.018 and AUROC of 0.855 +/- 0.005. Overall, the results suggest that normalized facial-region motion is a lightweight and interpretable representation for YouTubePD video classification. The study is framed as a benchmark-level analysis and does not claim clinical severity assessment or MDS-UPDRS facial-expression scoring. --- ### CodeAlchemy: Synthetic Code Rewriting at Scale Authors: Ankit Gupta, Aditya Prasad, Rameswar Panda Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10087v1 Pre-training on raw code teaches syntax but provides sparse signal for diverse real-world task formats. While synthetic data has proven transformative for language models, code remains largely unexplored beyond limited quality improvements. We present CodeAlchemy, a synthetic data generation framework that transforms publicly sourced code into semantically-rich training data through 5 strategies: CodeEnhance (quality-aware rewriting), CodeQA (template-based problems), CodeDev (developer tasks), CodeDialogue (multi-turn conversations), and CodeTrace (execution traces). We process 3 corpora across 15 languages to generate 500B+ tokens of synthetic data plus 350B reasoning tokens, orders of magnitude more than prior efforts. CodeTrace instruments and executes 1.3M+ files across 14 languages and 5K libraries, capturing control flow, state tracking, and library knowledge. We introduce DevEval (developer tasks) and TraceEval (execution prediction) benchmarks; frontier models like Claude Sonnet 4.5 achieve only 5.6% exact match on TraceEval, revealing critical gaps in semantic understanding. Our 3B models achieve 83.5% on HumanEval, 63.2% on MBPP, 8.09% win rate on DevEval, and 15.36 ROUGE-2 on TraceEval, outperforming frontier models 10x the size including 27B Gemma-3 and 32B Granite-4.0. --- ### Exploratory Responsiveness and Adaptive Rigidity under AI-Assisted Optimization Authors: Balaraju Battu Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10086v2 This paper develops a theory of exploratory adaptation under AI-assisted optimization. The central argument is that the long-run adaptive effects of AI systems depend critically on how predictive assistance interacts with exploratory responsiveness itself. We formalize this mechanism using a dynamical framework in which cognitive, institutional, and technological systems evolve over rugged epistemic landscapes characterized by multiple locally reinforced configurations. A central state variable in the model is adaptive responsiveness, which measures the capacity of a system to traverse unfamiliar conceptual and institutional trajectories under changing conditions. Under convergent predictive regimes, AI systems substitute for exploratory engagement, reducing adaptive responsiveness and generating metastable trapping, hysteresis, premature convergence, and exploration-collapse dynamics in which systems become locally efficient but globally rigid. The framework also identifies contrasting exploration-enhancing regimes in which AI systems amplify exploratory search, conceptual traversal, and adaptive mobility. The effective substitution parameter is therefore responsiveness-dependent: systems possessing weak exploratory routines are more vulnerable to exploratory substitution, whereas systems already possessing high adaptive responsiveness may use AI assistance to expand exploratory mobility across rugged landscapes. The long-run adaptive effects of AI consequently depend not only on AI capability itself, but also on institutional structure, developmental context, and the architecture of human-machine interaction. --- ### Exploratory Responsiveness and Adaptive Rigidity under AI-Assisted Optimization Authors: Balaraju Battu Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10086v1 This paper develops a theory of exploratory adaptation under AI-assisted optimization. The central argument is that the long-run adaptive effects of AI systems depend critically on how predictive assistance interacts with exploratory responsiveness itself. We formalize this mechanism using a dynamical framework in which cognitive, institutional, and technological systems evolve over rugged epistemic landscapes characterized by multiple locally reinforced configurations. A central state variable in the model is adaptive responsiveness, which measures the capacity of a system to traverse unfamiliar conceptual and institutional trajectories under changing conditions. Under convergent predictive regimes, AI systems substitute for exploratory engagement, reducing adaptive responsiveness and generating metastable trapping, hysteresis, premature convergence, and exploration-collapse dynamics in which systems become locally efficient but globally rigid. The framework also identifies contrasting exploration-enhancing regimes in which AI systems amplify exploratory search, conceptual traversal, and adaptive mobility. The effective substitution parameter is therefore responsiveness-dependent: systems possessing weak exploratory routines are more vulnerable to exploratory substitution, whereas systems already possessing high adaptive responsiveness may use AI assistance to expand exploratory mobility across rugged landscapes. The long-run adaptive effects of AI consequently depend not only on AI capability itself, but also on institutional structure, developmental context, and the architecture of human-machine interaction. --- ### Structured Adaptive Tensor Prediction for Streaming Data Authors: Zhen Qin, Yang Chen Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.LG, eess.SP, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10085v1 Matrix-valued time series arise in a wide range of applications, such as spatio-temporal data from medical imaging and geophysics. Existing methods are mainly designed for static settings and lack adaptability to streaming and time-varying environments. Adaptive filtering techniques have also been largely limited to data with scalar or vector values, leaving adaptive forecasting for matrix-valued time series inadequately understood. To bridge these gaps, we develop an adaptive tensor regression framework that includes Matrix-on-Matrix (MoM) and Tensor-on-Matrix (ToM) formulations for streaming matrix-valued prediction. The two formulations differ in whether to directly model matrix-valued outputs or to exploit temporal structure via higher-order tensor representations. For the proposed tensor regression framework, we develop stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms for online learning. We show that stacking multiple responses across time into higher-order tensors improves performance; in particular, the ToM achieves lower steady-state error and stronger denoising capability than MoM, motivating our focus on the ToM model. We further characterize the tracking behavior of SGD under time-varying dynamics. From a statistical perspective, we establish fixed-time recovery guarantees for ToM under general low-dimensional structures, including sparsity, low-rankness, and their joint sparselow-rank models. --- ### Divide-and-Conquer Modeling for the CTF-4-Science Lorenz Benchmark Authors: Shundong Li Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10084v2 This submission documents the divide-and-conquer modeling strategy developed for the CTF-4-Science Lorenz Chaotic Systems Challenge at AI-DEEDS 2026. The challenge uses the CTF-4-Science Lorenz benchmark to evaluate chaotic-system prediction across twelve hidden scores and five scenario families: clean forecasting, noisy reconstruction, noisy-input forecasting, few-shot learning, and parametric generalization. Rather than forcing one model class to handle all regimes, the final system matched each prediction block to the evaluation behavior of its task group. The main contributions are: smoothing-based reconstruction for noisy full-trajectory denoising; NG-RC/NVAR models tuned for noisy long-time attractor forecasting; a fitted Lorenz transition correction restricted to the sensitive clean short-time prefix; and a parametric prefix blend for the interpolation task. The resulting system with final public score of 79.63 shows that bounded, scenario-specific updates can outperform broad model replacement on mixed chaotic forecasting benchmarks. --- ### Divide-and-Conquer Modeling for the CTF-4-Science Lorenz Benchmark Authors: Shundong Li Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10084v1 This work presents a divide-and-conquer modeling strategy for the CTF-4-Science Lorenz benchmark, which evaluates chaotic-system prediction across twelve hidden scores and five scenario families: clean forecasting, noisy reconstruction, noisy-input forecasting, few-shot learning, and parametric generalization. Rather than forcing one model class to handle all regimes, the final system matched each prediction block to the evaluation behavior of its task group. The main contributions are: smoothing-based reconstruction for noisy full-trajectory denoising; NG-RC/NVAR models tuned for noisy long-time attractor forecasting; a fitted Lorenz transition correction restricted to the sensitive clean short-time prefix; and a parametric prefix blend for the interpolation task. The resulting system with final public score of 79.63 shows that bounded, scenario-specific updates can outperform broad model replacement on mixed chaotic forecasting benchmarks. --- ### VFUSE: Virulent Feature Understanding with Sparse autoEncoders Authors: Michael Yu, Matthew L. Olson Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, q-bio.QM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10080v1 Generative models have shown remarkable progress in a variety of domains such as protein design, but such power enables the opaque generation of hazardous proteins. In this work, we introduce VFUSE (Virulent Feature Understanding with Sparse autoEncoders), a mechanistic interpretability approach that trains SAEs on diffusion-transformer activations to audit protein models for hazard-aware features. We apply VFUSE to RoseTTAFold3 and RFDiffusion3, popular open-weight models for protein folding and synthesis. We find that for certain blocks, linear probes detect hazardous designs significantly better when fit in the SAE latent space over the original model's representations: improving interpretability without sacrificing model performance. Furthermore, we identify monosemantic features from the SAE that fire only on hazardous designs at up to AUROC $0.84$ ($q < 10^{-13}$). To our knowledge this is the first SAE trained on an all-atom diffusion model and the first feature-level virulence audit of a protein design model, paving the way towards safe and interpretable protein design. --- ### Temporal Sheaf Neural Networks with Dynamic Orthogonal Transport Authors: Md Sadek Hossain Asif, Tanzila Khan, Md. Mosaddek Khan Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10071v1 We introduce Temporal Sheaf Neural Networks (TSNN), a temporal link prediction framework that equips each node with a time-varying orthogonal frame and compares node states only after explicit transport between local coordinate systems. In contrast to existing continuous-time graph models that operate in a shared global embedding space, TSNN models node-specific and evolving interaction semantics through dynamic local frames. The model parameterizes per-node frames via efficient low-rank Householder products, preserves stored hidden states exactly under frame updates, and uses a geometric-residual decoder that anchors predictions on transported distances while learning residual corrections. All computations are strictly causal and use only the pre-event history. We show that the symmetric degree-normalized sheaf Laplacian is orthogonally similar to the symmetric normalized graph Laplacian, with the random-walk normalized form similar in the corresponding degree metric; the full-active, feature-scaled diffusion used by TSNN is exactly a metric-gradient step on the combinatorial sheaf Dirichlet energy, with a degree-free monotone-descent and non-expansiveness guarantee. Frame drift perturbs updates only linearly. Across TGB v2 link-prediction and temporal-heterogeneous leaderboards, together with the DGB benchmark suite, TSNN matches or surpasses the strongest prior methods on most benchmarks, with the largest improvements on graphs exhibiting strong node-role heterogeneity. Ablations confirm the distinct benefit of dynamic frames, orthogonal transport, and geometric-residual decoding. --- ### Using Seismic Statistical Features and VQ-VAE to Improve Spatiotemporal Seismicity Predictability Authors: Wei Quan, Denise Gorse Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.LG, physics.geo-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10069v4 In this paper we build upon a previous study in which we demonstrated, using XGBoost and earthquake catalogue data from Japan and Chile, that a set of 60 seismic statistical features (SSFs) had much greater predictive value than a set of 428 generic time series features from the tsfresh package. We here extend this previous work in two key ways, focusing on data from Japan as a large dataset is necessary in order to allow for the training of a deep learning (autoencoder) model. First, we move from whole-region prediction (considering, for each candidate event, the likelihood of an event M $\geq$ 5.0 anywhere in the region in the next 15 days) to localised predictions in which both the region of feature computation and the region of prediction are restricted to a circle of radius 24 km around the candidate event, and we show that performance remains excellent, similar to our previous whole-region study for the same area. Second, we here couple this proven set of SSFs, based on one-dimensional (catalogue) data, with a novel feature based on magnitude-stratified two-dimensional seismic maps, obtained by training a VQ-VAE model to reproduce such maps as output and identifying a measure of its error in doing so with anomalies in magnitude distribution reflecting a localised build-up of crustal stress. We show that while localised prediction based only on a set of SSFs can be effective, with test AUC values as high as those obtained in the case of Japan in our previous whole-region study, the inclusion of the new natively-spatial VQ-VAE-derived feature, top-ranked by SHAP analysis, both improves prediction and points toward a new approach that might allow computationally time-demanding traditional seismic features to be entirely set aside. --- ### Using Seismic Statistical Features and VQ-VAE to Improve Spatiotemporal Seismicity Predictability Authors: Wei Quan, Denise Gorse Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.LG, physics.geo-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10069v3 In this paper we build upon a previous study in which we demonstrated, using XGBoost and earthquake catalogue data from Japan and Chile, that a set of 60 seismic statistical features (SSFs) had much greater predictive value than a set of 428 generic time series features from the tsfresh package. We here extend this previous work in two key ways, focusing on data from Japan as a large dataset is necessary in order to allow for the training of a deep learning (autoencoder) model. First, we move from whole-region prediction (considering, for each candidate event, the likelihood of an event M $\geq$ 5.0 anywhere in the region in the next 15 days) to localised predictions in which both the region of feature computation and the region of prediction are restricted to a circle of radius 24 km around the candidate event, and we show that performance remains excellent, similar to our previous whole-region study for the same area. Second, we here couple this proven set of SSFs, based on one-dimensional (catalogue) data, with a novel feature based on two-dimensional seismic maps, obtained by training a VQ-VAE model to reproduce such maps as output and identifying a measure of its error in doing so with a localised build-up of crustal stress. We show that while localised prediction based only on a set of SSFs can be effective, with test AUC values as high as those obtained in the case of Japan in our previous whole-region study, the inclusion of the new natively-spatial VQ-VAE-derived feature, top-ranked by SHAP analysis, provides valuable additional insights. --- ### Importance-Aware Scheduling for High-Dimensional Hyperparameter Optimization Authors: Ruinan Wang, Ian Nabney, Mohammad Golbabaee Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10068v1 Hyperparameter Optimization (HPO) is essential for building high-performing ML/DL models, yet conventional optimizers often struggle in high-dimensional spaces where evaluations are costly and progress is diluted across many low-impact variables. We propose Greedy Importance First (GIF), an importance-aware scheduling strategy that uses a small-sample warm start to estimate hyperparameter importance, forms importance-based groups, allocates trials proportionally, and retains a full-space fallback. We evaluate GIF under fixed evaluation budgets on five anisotropic analytic functions, Bayesmark, and NAS-Bench-301. On the higher-dimensional benchmarks, GIF reaches better incumbents with faster convergence than TPE, BOHB, Random Search, and Sequential Grouping. On Bayesmark, where the effective dimensionality is smaller, GIF remains competitive but the margins are smaller. Ablation studies show that importance estimation, proportional allocation, and the fallback step all contribute to the gains. We also verify that the HIA component recovers the intended anisotropy on the analytic benchmarks. These results suggest that GIF is a simple and plug-compatible way to improve sample efficiency in high-dimensional HPO. --- ### A Controlled Audit of Pretraining Contamination in Public Medical Vision-Language Benchmarks Authors: Bruce Changlong Xu, Lan Wu, Alexander Ryu Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10066v1 Medical vision-language models (VLMs) are evaluated on public benchmarks whose images and question-answer pairs have been freely downloadable for years, yet reported accuracy assumes these examples were absent from pretraining. We audit open VLMs on SLAKE-En, PathVQA, VQA-RAD, and an auxiliary public OmniMedVQA mirror using four detector families: image-side near-neighbour overlap against PMC-OA-beta, canonical-order exchangeability, cohort-relative Min-K%++ tail enrichment, and cross-model top-K overlap. We find measurable image-side source overlap on SLAKE-En: 19.8% of images are flagged under SigLIP-B-16 and 4.2% under SigLIP-SO400M, while out-of-domain controls produce 0/2000 flags. Manual adjudication shows same-modality, same-projection matches to different patients rather than verified pixel-level duplicates, so we interpret this as source or distributional overlap rather than confirmed per-image memorization. On the text side, Qwen2.5-VL on SLAKE-En shows a canonical-order exchangeability signal that survives ordering ablation and external non-medical baselines. On the OmniMedVQA mirror, exchangeability fires for five medical and general VLMs while BLIP-2 remains clean. In contrast, cohort-relative Min-K%++ tail enrichment and cross-model top-K overlap collapse under an external pre-domain baseline: BLIP-2 reproduces the apparent positive signals despite lacking plausible medical-VQA exposure. We conclude that these cohort-relative detectors are unreliable as standalone membership-inference signals on small medical-VLM cohorts. --- ### Bittensor Agent Arenas as a Trajectory Primitive: Distilling a Shopping Agent from ShoppingBench Subnet Traces Authors: Shardul Bansal, Seth Schilbe, Jarrod Barnes Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10064v1 Small-model agentic post-training is bottlenecked less by the algorithm than by the trajectory substrate it consumes. Leading recipes (RLVR, group-relative RL, rejection-sampled re-SFT) all need multi-turn traces carrying per-trajectory supervision, and the two existing sources fall short: frontier-synthesised data inherits the synthesizer's biases and collapses the long tail, while unfiltered production logs are unjudged and contaminated by shortcut behaviour. We argue that an incentive-aligned agent arena can be engineered to manufacture such trajectories, and demonstrate this on ORO Subnet 15 (SN15), a Bittensor deployment of the ShoppingBench agentic-commerce benchmark. SN15's race mechanism, LLM reasoning judge, and rotating leak-cluster-guarded problem suite yield a corpus with three properties: incentive-aligned diversity, per-trajectory judging, and anti-memorised held-out evaluation. We introduce a structural-quality filter that converts the raw firehose into a trainable corpus by keeping agentic trajectories (the model itself emits the tool calls) and rejecting sub-task trajectories (the model only classifies or narrates over a deterministic search loop), then post-train Qwen3-4B with a recipe matched to the published ShoppingBench SFT-then-GRPO pipeline. On a leak-cluster-guarded held-out partition scored production-strict, the model lifts from the published Qwen3-4B base of 18.0% ASR to 42.7%, within single-problem noise of the synthetic-data SFT-only baseline (43.6%), while training on a fraction of a single day of subnet output. The supervised stack leaves a large pass@8 to pass@1 gap (53.3% vs 34.8%); a per-step teacher-grounded Dr. GRPO reward converts that headroom into process improvement, and we identify the sub-task firehose as the primary lever for closing the gap to the 48.7% SFT+GRPO bar. We release the filter, the corpus splits, and the arena mechanics. --- ### Deployment-Time Memorization in Foundation-Model Agents Authors: Lei, Chen, Guilin Zhang, Kai Zhao, Dalmo Cirne, Andy Olsen, Xu Chu, Zeke Miller, Alet Blanken, Amine Anoun, Jerry Ting Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10062v2 Foundation-model agents are increasingly long-lived systems that remember users across interactions, making memorization an explicit deployment-time function rather than solely a property of model weights. Existing work addresses parametric memorization or audits fixed memory configurations, but does not characterize how memory-design choices jointly shape personalization utility, extraction risk, and deletion fidelity. We study this surface as deployment-time memorization, formulating agent memory as a privacy-utility frontier measured by Personalization Recall (PR) and Adversarial Extraction Rate (AER), and sweeping three memory-design knobs: summarization aggressiveness, retrieval breadth (k), and deletion mode. We further introduce the Forgetting Residue Score (FRS) to quantify whether deleted information remains recoverable from derived memory tiers. On LongMemEval, key-fact summarization reduces canary extraction by 76% on Gemma 3 12B and 64% on GPT-4o-mini while preserving nearly all personalization recall; critically, once content is compressed away, increasing k no longer restores leakage. The same compression, however, induces a deletion-fidelity failure: raw-only deletion leaves derived summary copies recoverable in approximately 20% of instances, and only full-pipeline purge or tombstone redaction drives worst-tier residue to zero. Together, these results establish that persistent agent memory must be evaluated as a first-class memorization mechanism -- assessed by what it helps agents recall, what it makes extractable, and what it can truly erase. --- ### BenSyc: Benchmarking Conversational Sycophancy and Human Alignment in LLMs for Bengali Contexts Authors: Kazi Noshin, Sajib Acharjee Dip, Ranat Das Prangon, Fardin Hassan Tamim, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Liqing Zhang, Sharifa Sultana Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10061v1 Large language models (LLMs) increasingly participate in emotionally sensitive social conversations, where responses may shift from balanced support toward excessive validation or escalatory alignment. Existing sycophancy research primarily focuses on factual agreement and instruction-following settings, leaving culturally grounded conversational sycophancy underexplored. We introduce BenSyc, the first benchmark for studying conversational sycophancy in Bengali social contexts. Starting from 11,840 Reddit posts and 170k comments collected from communities across Bangladesh and West Bengal, we construct a human-validated benchmark with binary labels and a fine-grained five-level taxonomy spanning Invalidation, Neutral, Support, Validation, and Escalation. We evaluate more than 15 open and proprietary LLMs on conversational alignment classification and response generation tasks. Results show that distinguishing empathetic support from reinforcement-oriented validation remains challenging even for frontier instruction-tuned models: the best system achieves only 61.8 Macro-F1 on binary detection and 61.7 Macro-F1 on five-class classification. In generation settings, several models frequently produce strongly validating or escalatory responses in emotionally charged situations. Our findings highlight substantial variation across model families and conversational behaviors, underscoring the importance of culturally grounded multilingual benchmarks for evaluating socially aligned conversational AI systems. --- ### Compiling Rewrite Rules to Finite-State Transducers with the Worsening Trick Authors: Mans Hulden, Michael Ginn Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.FL, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10059v1 Finite-state transducers (FSTs) are essential for modeling string rewriting in computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP), particularly for phonological and morphological rewrite rules. Compiling general rewrite rules of the form $A \to B / L \, \_ \, R$, where $A$, $B$, $L$, and $R$ are arbitrary regular languages, is complex due to overlapping matches and context constraints. Traditional methods, such as those by Kaplan and Kay or Karttunen, rely on intricate transducer compositions with auxiliary markers. This paper presents a compact compilation scheme based on the "worsening trick'': generate all legal rewrite candidates, then filter candidates that are worse than another candidate for the same input. Implemented as the built-in rewrite compiler in PyFoma, the construction supports multiple contexts, arbitrary transductions, markup, directed rewriting, weights, and parallel rewriting. The resulting formulas are short and uniform, and where semantics coincide, they reproduce the same rule transducers as earlier approaches while remaining easier to extend. The implementation has been validated against foma on both a substantial collection of rewrite grammars and an automated regression suite covering the major rewrite modalities, with the resulting transducers matching exactly apart from state numbering. --- ### Continuous Neural Reparameterization as a Deep Geometric Prior for Robust Fixed-Chart UV Repair Authors: Mohammad Sadegh Salehi Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.GR, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10050v1 Traditional UV unwrapping relies on direct optimization of geometric distortion energies and can fail through invalid initialization, local minima, or topological foldovers. We recast fixed-chart UV unwrapping as continuous neural reparameterization: an untrained SIREN maps per-vertex mesh features to UV coordinates, and its weights are optimized for a geometric objective. The practical contribution is a robust chart-solver recipe, combining Laplace--Beltrami spectral inputs, Tutte residual warm-up, a $C^2$ determinant extension, an injectivity barrier, and validity-checked retry/fallback routing, rather than a claim that any single component guarantees validity or that recutting methods should be replaced. NTK--LBO diagnostics show that spectral conditioning changes update geometry, especially at initialization and mid-rank subspaces, but does not by itself predict chart success. On compact pre-cut charts and a 47-chart stratified Thingi10K/xatlas-cut benchmark, the neural solver produces zero flips on all compact charts and 42/47 valid zero-flip stratified solves. BFF and OptCuts comparisons sharpen the scope: recutting can be faster and lower-distortion when allowed, while the neural solver targets supplied-chart validity and validation-first atlas construction. On Amara Spatial generated meshes, the full atlas construction path gives packed-atlas coverage on a 25-asset set and 1000/1000 strict locally valid atlases with zero UV flips in a large-scale Rust atlas run after fallback routing. --- ### Inside the Latent Flow: Causal Deciphering of Attention Dynamics in Audio Separation Foundation Models Authors: Yuxuan Chen, Haoyuan Yu, Peize He Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10046v2 Flow-matching transformers achieve strong audio separation, yet their attention dynamics are opaque. We adapt established causal-intervention principles into a deterministic, inference-time probing protocol for SAM Audio. Orthogonal probing uncovers a dual-pathway text-conditioning mechanism: additive injections control semantic identity, while cross-attention refines acoustic structure. We observe an asynchronous layerwise convergence: stable layers build temporal scaffolds early, whereas fast layers continue resolving artifacts during sampling. The model also attenuates temporal segmentation cues to maintain continuous-flow stability. Using these insights, we propose Layer-Selective Attention Caching (LSAC), a training-free acceleration method that caches attention in stable layers. Across acoustic complexities, LSAC cuts self-attention computation by about ~25% with negligible quality loss and yields up to 6.7x higher quality retention than naive step reduction. --- ### Business World Model Authors: Cecil Pang, Hiroki Sayama Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10044v2 World model has emerged as a powerful paradigm in artificial intelligence, enabling agents to represent their environments, predict future states, and evaluate possible actions before acting. However, existing world model approaches have largely been developed for domains such as computer vision, robotics, gaming, and autonomous driving, where the world is primarily visual or physical and governed by relatively stable dynamics. These formulations are not directly applicable to business practice, where the relevant environment is semantic, organizational, and market-driven rather than physical. Business outcomes depend on context-sensitive factors such as customer behavior, pricing, competition, regulation, resources, and operational constraints. This paper introduces the concept and architecture of a Business World Model (BWM), which is a world model specialized for business and organizational environments. A BWM encodes business states, dynamics, and feasible actions space to support autonomous business planning and decision-making. We propose a business-semantics-centric formulation in which states, dynamics, and actions are linked to key business entities, their attributes, and their relationships. Within this framework, intelligent agents can simulate alternative action sequences, estimate their effects on future business outcomes, and evaluate trade-offs under uncertainty. The proposed architecture integrates semantic data representations, probabilistic machine learning models, deterministic business rules, and explicit action spaces into a coherent internal simulator. This work establishes a conceptual foundation for autonomous business systems capable of moving from instruction-based execution toward goal-driven planning, optimization, and execution. --- ### Interpreting and Steering a Text-to-Speech Language Model with Sparse Autoencoders Authors: Nikita Koriagin, Georgii Aparin, Nikita Balagansky, Daniil Gavrilov Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10029v1 Language models increasingly serve as the backbone of text-to-speech (TTS) systems, yet we understand little about the representations they build when text and generated speech tokens share a single residual stream. We train BatchTopK sparse autoencoders on the LM backbone of CosyVoice3 and introduce a modality-aware auto-interp pipeline that labels each feature from where it fires-text-prefix context, 1-second speech clips, or both. The recovered features are interpretable, spanning phonemes, laughter, accent prompts and speaker gender. Steering through the SAE latent space shows these features are causal rather than merely descriptive: targeted interventions raise laughter probability from 0.02 to 0.79, flip perceived speaker gender, and control speech rate while preserving spoken content. SAE features thus serve both as interpretability objects and as control directions for TTS synthesis. --- ### GHOST: Hierarchical Sub-Goal Policies for Generalizing Robot Manipulation Authors: Sriram Krishna, Ben Eisner, Haotian Zhan, Ying Yuan, Haoyu Zhen, Chuang Gan, Shubham Tulsiani, David Held Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10025v1 We present GHOST, a framework for learning visuomotor manipulation policies that generalize beyond the training distribution. GHOST factorizes control into (i) a high-level policy that predicts the next sub-goal as a distribution over 3D end-effector poses from multi-view RGB-D observations, and (ii) a low-level goal-conditioned controller that executes embodiment-specific actions. To condition image-based policies on 3D goals, we introduce a simple spatial interface that projects predicted goals into the image plane and represents them as end-effector heatmaps. Across a suite of manipulation tasks, this hierarchical factorization consistently improves performance and robustness compared to a flat Diffusion Policy. Further, we show that this hierarchical interface also makes it easy to incorporate human demonstrations without relying on (noisy) action retargeting. As sub-goals are largely embodiment-agnostic, we train the high-level policy on human video to specify how learned skills should be applied and composed, while keeping the low-level policy trained purely on robot data. This hierarchy enables adaptation to novel objects and task variations using a small number of human demonstrations. --- ### Learning the Universe: Posterior Reliability of Neural Generative Models in High-Dimensional Field-Level Inference of Cosmic Initial Conditions Authors: Ludvig Doeser, Jens Jasche Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: astro-ph.CO, astro-ph.IM, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10023v1 Accurate posterior estimation is central to scientific inference, as uncertainties determine what can be reliably learned from observational data. While Markov chain Monte Carlo methods provide asymptotic convergence guarantees, they are computationally demanding in high-dimensional settings. Neural network-based generative models for entire discretized 3D fields enable fast amortized inference but often lack convergence guarantees and principled accuracy assessment. Using Hamiltonian Monte Carlo to obtain reference posterior samples, we conduct a controlled field-level evaluation of an implicit generative model (Stochastic Interpolants) and an explicit likelihood-based model (GLOW normalizing flows). This comparison, unavailable in typical applications, enables the detection of posterior geometry failures that standard metrics cannot capture. As a case study, we consider the cosmological inverse problem of inferring cosmic initial conditions from present-day large-scale structure. To match the precision of modern cosmological data, this problem increasingly relies on complex, non-linear, and non-differentiable simulators, which are incompatible with gradient-based inference frameworks. Generative models offer a route to address these challenges, provided their inferred posteriors are reliable. In this work, we show that matching posterior means, marginal distributions, or achieving high cross-correlation does not imply correct uncertainty structure, as revealed by posterior variance fields and sample-based evaluations. Through this work, we aim to raise awareness of the challenges of uncertainty estimation in high-dimensional field-level settings, highlighting the importance of careful design and validation of neural generative approaches for scientific applications. --- ### SpineReport: Automated 3D Quantification and Reporting of Lumbar Spine Degeneration on MRI Authors: Nathan Molinier, Adrian A. Marth, Reto Sutter, Christoph Germann, Jacob A. Connolly, Mathieu Guay-Paquet, Nathan D. Schilaty, Kenneth A. Weber, Julien Cohen-Adad Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10021v1 Lumbar spine conditions are a leading cause of disability worldwide, yet reliable quantification of degeneration from MRI remains challenging. In clinical practice, analysis is predominantly performed in two dimensions (2D), as manual three-dimensional (3D) assessment is time-consuming. However, 2D measurements suffer from limited reproducibility, particularly when anatomical structures are not aligned with the imaging plane. Existing automated approaches are often restricted to 2D, rely on discrete grading, or lack robustness and interpretability. We introduce SpineReport, an open-source, fully automated framework for comprehensive 3D morphometric analysis of lumbar spine MRI. Leveraging robust anatomical segmentations, the method extracts quantitative metrics from key structures, including the spinal canal, spinal cord, vertebrae, intervertebral discs, and foramina. These include both morphological and signal-based features, enabling cross-subject and longitudinal assessment. SpineReport further generates subject-specific reports that allow comparison with cohort distributions, improving interpretability and objective characterization of spinal morphology. Clinical relevance was evaluated against radiologist-reported severity grades for central canal, lateral recess, and foraminal stenosis. Metrics showed strong associations with central canal stenosis severity, with T2-weighted CSF signal providing the highest performance (AUC = 0.95). Canal AP diameter and area ratios also demonstrated strong correlations and high discriminative ability (AUC > 0.80). For lateral recess stenosis, associations were moderate, with lateral CSF signal being the most informative (AUC = 0.73). No significant associations were observed for foraminal stenosis despite robust region-of-interest extraction. SpineReport is released as an open-access tool: https://ivadomed.github.io/SpineReport/ --- ### Generalized-CVO: Fast and Correspondence-Free Local Point Cloud Registration with Second Order Riemannian Optimization Authors: Ray Zhang, Marcus Greiff, Thomas Lew, John Subosits Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10019v1 We propose a fast and correspondence-free local point cloud registration method that leverages geometric surface structure and reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) embeddings. The method represents point clouds as continuous functions with point-wise anisotropic kernels that encode local geometry. This formulation improves alignment along surface normals while relaxing alignment along tangential directions. To solve the resulting registration problem, we propose a second-order on-manifold optimization scheme with approximate Riemannian Hessians, achieving a speedup of up to 10x over the first-order solvers used in prior correspondence-free RKHS-based methods. We demonstrate improved frame-to-frame LiDAR and RGB-D tracking accuracy across diverse indoor and outdoor datasets. On a LiDAR tracking registration task in the driving domain, we achieve a reduction of $>55\%$ in both translational and rotational drift in challenging feature-sparse environments. On object registration benchmarks, we show improved robustness over ICP-based methods and further gains when refining global initialization, particularly under moderate misalignment. --- ### DeRA-MOS: Optimizing Text-to-Music Evaluation via Decoupled Listwise Ranking and Modality Alignment Authors: Chien-Chun Wang, Hung-Shin Lee, Hsin-Min Wang, Berlin Chen Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: eess.AS, cs.AI, cs.MM, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10010v1 Evaluating text-to-music (TTM) systems remains expensive because music impression (MI) and text alignment (TA) scores rely on human mean opinion scores (MOS). Most automatic MOS estimators are trained with point-wise regression or distributional classification. These objectives do not directly optimize rank-based metrics and provide weak geometric constraints for cross-modal coherence. To address these gaps, we propose DeRA-MOS, a decoupled optimization framework for TTM evaluation. For MI, we introduce a batch-aware listwise ranking loss that models relative order within each mini-batch and better aligns with evaluation based on Spearman's rank correlation coefficient (SRCC). For TA, we introduce a score-anchored modality alignment loss that maps human scores to target audio-text similarity and regularizes the latent space before fusion. By effectively mitigating the point-wise training mismatch and modality drift, experiments on MusicEval demonstrate that our decoupled framework yields substantial improvements in both MI and TA ranking metrics, establishing a robust paradigm for large-scale TTM evaluation. --- ### Spiking Neural Network inference on FPGAs with hls4ml Authors: Barry M. Dillon Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.NE, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10008v1 Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) provide a naturally temporal machine-learning framework. Their neurons maintain an internal state and propagate information through discrete spikes, enabling low-latency temporal inference. Although SNNs are often associated with asynchronous neuromorphic processors, many scientific real-time inference systems rely on conventional synchronous field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and high-level synthesis (HLS) workflows. In this paper we present an extension of hls4ml that enables clock-driven deployment of SNNs trained in pytorch onto FPGA firmware. We demonstrate the workflow using a dense quantised SNN trained on the Heidelberg Spiking Digits dataset where it achieves inference latencies of approximately $34μ$s. We validate the generated design through software reference comparisons, HLS C simulation, HLS synthesis, export, and Vivado synthesis reports. This work opens up the hls4ml toolkit to neuromorphic computing, allowing streamlined optimisation, synthesis, and deployment of SNN models for real-time inference. --- ### ABot-Earth 0.5: Generative 3D Earth Model Authors: Ming Qian, Tianjian Ouyang, Mingchao Sun, Zijian Wang, Jincheng Xiong, Jiarong Han, Yongchang Zhang, Jiawei Zhang, Xu Wang, Yu Liu, Luyang Tang, Fei Yu et al. Published: 2026-06-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.09967v1 We present ABot-Earth 0.5, a generative 3D framework designed to synthesize vast, seamless 3D environments from ubiquitous, geospatially referenced satellite imagery. To achieve this, we propose a novel generative model formulated directly with the 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) representation. The model is trained on a diverse corpus of existing real-world urban reconstructions, learning to generate realistic geometry and textures. At inference, it synthesizes novel 3D scenes conditioned solely on satellite imagery at a scalable rate of under 10 minutes per square kilometer, while demonstrating exceptional realism. The framework is designed for accessibility, with integrated hierarchical level-of-detail (LOD) structures that permit real-time, interactive visualization on web-based map engines. This high-fidelity simulation sandbox effectively mitigates the sim-to-real domain gap, enabling critical downstream Embodied AI applications like closed-loop UAV navigation. By providing an ultra-low-cost and high-efficiency solution, ABot-Earth 0.5 significantly lowers the technical and financial barriers to large-scale 3D reconstruction and empowers the future of global digital earth visualization. ---