# Research Papers — 2026-06 · bundle page 243 of 260

> Full-text markdown of papers #12101–12150 of 12993 published in 2026-06, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 12993-paper 2026-06 archive (50 papers per file).

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### When Model Merging Breaks Routing: Training-Free Calibration for MoE

Authors: Canbin Huang, Tianyuan Shi, Xiaojun Quan, Jingang Wang, Jianfei Zhang, Qifan Wang
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03391v1

Model merging has emerged as a cost-effective approach for consolidating the capabilities of multiple LLMs without retraining. However, existing merging techniques, largely based on linear parameter arithmetic or optimization, struggle when applied to Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures. We identify a critical failure mode in MoE merging, termed routing breakdown, in which the merged router fails to dispatch tokens to suitable experts. Routing breakdown stems from the sensitivity of the non-linear softmax and discrete Top-k routing mechanisms to parameter perturbations from merging, a sensitivity further amplified by load-balancing constraints imposed during MoE pretraining. Because fine-tuned experts exhibit distinct specializations, even modest misrouting can cause severe performance degradation. To address this issue, we propose Hessian-Aware Router Calibration (HARC), a training-free framework that leverages second-order curvature information to realign the merged router. This approach admits a closed-form solution that can be efficiently solved using a matrix-free conjugate gradient method. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and code generation tasks show that HARC effectively mitigates routing breakdown across diverse MoE merging baselines and leads to substantial performance improvements. Our code is available at https://github.com/huangcb01/HARC.

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### Grasp-Then-Plan with Failure Attribution: A Closed Two-Stage Framework for Precise and Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

Authors: Jiahao Xu, Peiyuan Wang, Hanzhuo Zhang, Zihao Yu, Tianyu Fu, Hao Chen, Xuanhao Xiang, Jianbo Yu, Chenchen Fu, Wanyuan Wang
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03385v1

In robotic manipulation, the tight coupling between grasping and motion planning often obscures the true source of failure, leading to inefficient trial-and-error. To enable efficient long-horizon manipulation, we propose GTP-FA (Grasp-Then-Plan with Failure Attribution), a task-oriented two-stage grasp-then-plan framework that generates grasp candidates and performs downstream motion planning conditioned on the selected grasp. Given a failed manipulation trajectory, we learn a failure attribution model that generalizes to unseen grasps and produces a stable distribution over failure modes for diagnosis-guided optimization. Based on these attribution results, we then optimize both modules in a diagnosis-driven manner: on the grasping side, we inject task-level priors and risk penalties into grasp candidate scoring and optimization to suppress unstable or task-incompatible grasps; on the planning side, we target high-risk initial states through data collection and fine-tuning to address genuine planning bottlenecks. We evaluate the proposed framework in both simulation and real-robot experiments, and show that GTP-FA improves the corresponding base learners across RL, IL, diffusion-policy, and VLA-based settings, achieving substantially higher overall task success rates.

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### Local Guidance, Global Impact: Gaussian-Reshaped Trust Region Unlocks Behavior Transitions

Authors: Bingxu Liu, Jiashun Liu, Johan Obando-Ceron, Hao Wang, Runze Liu, Pablo Samuel Castro, Aaron Courville, Ling Pan
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03382v2

While Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) demonstrates strong performance in stationary settings, we show that its standard optimization paradigm struggles in continual and non-stationary environments. The failure does not stem from insufficient model capacity or overly restrictive clipping. Instead, PPO performs persistent, directionally inefficient local updates, which indicates a lack of geometry-aware guidance for accumulating meaningful behavioral change and ultimately hindering transitions toward new behavior patterns. Although divergence-based regularization introduces partial geometric awareness, its monotonically increasing penalties implicitly discourage large policy deviations, even when such shifts are necessary for effective adaptation. To address this limitation, we propose Gaussian Trust Region Policy Optimization (GTR), which reshapes the trust region using a Gaussian kernel. The resulting constraint is bounded and non-monotonic, providing strong local stability while progressively relaxing under sustained high-advantage updates. To further improve robustness, we introduce a Mixture Gaussian Anchor that adapts to recent policy trajectories, reducing variance induced by stale references. GTR is architecture-agnostic and achieves strong performance across games, simulated robotic control, open-world exploration, and language model post-training. These results demonstrate that geometry-aware trust-region design can be a promising direction for robust reinforcement learning in complex non-stationary environments. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GTR_demo/README.md.

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### AI Model Extraction Attacks: Bypassing Single-Client Assumptions in Defenses

Authors: Maxime Schwarzer, Johannes F. Loevenich, Gustavo Sánchez, Laurin Holz, Thies Möhlenhof, Tobias Hürten, Roberto Rigolin F. Lopes, Veit Hagenmeyer
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03381v1

Ensuring the protection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models deployed in military Command and Control (C2) systems and critical infrastructure is essential for maintaining information superiority. Model Extraction Attacks (MEAs) pose a significant threat, as they enable adversaries to replicate proprietary models, compromise protected information, and prepare offline adversarial attacks. However, current defense strategies predominantly rely on the Single Client Assumption (SCA), which is the implicit assumption that attacks originate from isolated identities. This work systematically demonstrates that the SCA is fundamentally invalid in the presence of coordinated threat actors, such as Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). We introduce a modular, open-source framework called CerberusAI for reproducible model-stealing research, and use it to simulate distributed attack scenarios. Our empirical evaluation shows that well-established defense mechanisms, such as Protecting Against Deep Neural Network Model Stealing Attacks (PRADA), can be bypassed by basic round-robin query distribution strategies, resulting in a significant reduction in detection performance. Furthermore, we demonstrate that even global aggregation approaches can be rendered operationally useless through adaptive traffic mixing. These results highlight the need for a paradigm shift towards stateful, identity-independent defense architectures in the field of model extraction attacks. This paper was originally presented at the International Conference on Military Communication and Information Systems (ICMCIS), organized by the Information Systems Technology (IST) Scientific and Technical Committee, IST-224-RSY - the ICMCIS, held in Bath, United Kingdom, 12-13 May 2026 and won the best paper award.

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### P$^2$-DPO: Grounding Hallucination in Perceptual Processing via Calibration Direct Preference Optimization

Authors: Ruipeng Zhang, Zhihao Li, Haozhang Yuan, C. L. Philip Chen, Tong Zhang
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03376v2

Hallucination has recently garnered significant research attention in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) aims to learn directly from the corrected preferences provided by humans, thereby addressing the hallucination issue. Despite its success, this paradigm has yet to specifically target the perceptual bottleneck in attended regions or address insufficient Visual Robustness against image degradation. Furthermore, existing preference pairs are often vision-agnostic and their inherently off-policy nature limits their effectiveness in guiding model learning. To address these challenges, we propose Perceptual Processing Direct Preference Optimization (P$^2$-DPO), a novel training paradigm in which the model generates and learns from its own preference pairs, thereby directly addressing the identified visual bottlenecks while inherently avoiding the issues of vision-agnostic and off-policy data. It introduces: (1) an on-policy preference pairs construction method targeting Focus-and-Enhance perception and Visual Robustness, and (2) a well-designed Calibration Loss to precisely align visual signals with the causal generation of text. Experimental results demonstrate that with a comparable amount of training data and cost, P$^2$-DPO outperforms strong baselines that rely on costly human feedback on benchmarks. Furthermore, evaluations on Attention Region Fidelity (ARF) and image degradation scenarios validate the effectiveness of P$^2$-DPO in addressing perceptual bottleneck in attended regions and improving Visual Robustness against degraded inputs.

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### See Better, Foresee Better, Act Wiser: Physically Grounded Proactive Modeling and Decision Making

Authors: Honghui Zhang, Anna Min, Chenmeinian Guo, Yujia Zhang, Yichen Yu, Zezhou Zhang, Guanyu Liu, Yongming Qin, Chongguo Song, Mengyue Yang, Lei Yu, Tianyu Shi
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03371v4

Reliable proactive agents must choose an action and judge whether current evidence is sufficient to act. We study retail service from sparse third-person video: before an explicit customer request, an agent must use limited human-object interaction evidence to intervene or remain silent. Physical grounding here means converting observations into task-relevant retail state, not modeling low-level dynamics. We introduce the Proactive Intent World Model (PIWM): See constructs the perceptual basis, Foresee models counterfactual consequences, and Act selects an action. Performance is poor when the agent must extract information from raw video and decide directly, but improves substantially with structured inputs extracted and annotated from a professional retail perspective. AIDA-stage constraints and BDI-state ablations further support role- and goal-directed selection and organization of decision-relevant cues. Counterfactual prediction performs well in standalone evaluation, yet planning methods that query these forecasts at inference time degrade sharply: locally useful consequence prediction does not reliably improve action selection. This gap may reflect incomplete process understanding, uncertainty in fine-grained single-step outcomes, and insufficient joint modeling of scenes and temporal evolution. Hold remains the hardest action in structured-state evaluation, exposing a related challenge in temporal awareness. PIWM advances static intent recognition toward intent world modeling by organizing observations under task knowledge, anticipating candidate interventions, and treating intervention and non-intervention jointly. Future work will introduce long-horizon interaction trajectories and temporal consequence supervision to improve sustained reasoning and intervention timing.

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### See, Infer, Intervene: Proactive World Modeling for Goal-Oriented Social Intelligence

Authors: Honghui Zhang, Chenmeinian Guo, Yichen Yu, Guanyu Liu, Yujia Zhang, Yongming Qin, Chongguo Song, Mengyue Yang, Lei Yu, Tianyu Shi
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03371v3

Multimodal retail agents should not only recognize what a customer is doing, but also decide whether and how to assist before an explicit request is made. We study this setting through the See--Infer--Intervene (SII) framework, where a device must see pre-interaction behavior, infer latent customer intent, and act by selecting an appropriate service intervention or choosing to wait. We instantiate SII with the Proactive Intent World Model (PIWM), which represents customer state with AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) purchasing phases and BDI (belief, desire, intention) psychological fields, predicts action-conditioned intent transitions, and selects from five response classes: Greet, Elicit, Inform, Recommend, and Hold. We further construct GuidanceSalesBench, a smart-retail benchmark containing state manifests, pre-interaction videos, candidate responses, action-conditioned outcomes, and best-action labels. When conditioned on ground-truth customer state to isolate action selection, PIWM achieves 0.641 macro F1 on 30 held-out target videos, outperforming a zero-shot Qwen2.5-VL-7B baseline and training variants without balanced action supervision; end-to-end video-only selection drops to 0.295, below the 5-class balanced random baseline of 0.414, identifying video-to-state grounding as the dominant deployment-time bottleneck. A preliminary staged real-store pilot (recorded with paid participants performing scripted customer behaviors) reaches 0.579 action macro F1 on 20 fully annotated videos, with 10 additional accessible videos released with index-level labels.

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### Link Prediction or Perdition: the Seeds of Instability in Knowledge Graph Embeddings

Authors: Guillaume Méroué, Fabien Gandon, Pierre Monnin
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03365v1

Embedding models (KGEMs) constitute the main link prediction approach to complete knowledge graphs. Standard evaluation protocols emphasize rank-based metrics such as MRR or Hits@$K$, but usually overlook the influence of random seeds on result stability. Moreover, these metrics conceal potential instabilities in individual predictions and in the organization of embedding spaces. In this work, we conduct a systematic stability analysis of multiple KGEMs across several datasets. We find that high-performance models actually produce divergent predictions at the triple level and highly variable embedding spaces. By isolating stochastic factors (i.e., initialization, triple ordering, negative sampling, dropout, hardware), we show that each independently induces instability of comparable magnitude. Furthermore, for a given model, hyperparameter configurations with better MRR are not guaranteed to be more stable. Moreover, voting, albeit a known remediation mechanism, only provides a limited enhancement of stability. These findings highlight critical limitations of current benchmarking protocols, and raise concerns about the reliability of KGEMs for knowledge graph completion.

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### EntSQL: A Benchmark for Grounding Text-to-SQL in Long-Context Enterprise Knowledge

Authors: Chengxi Liao, Tao Xu, Zulong Chen, Chuanfei Xu, Yiyan Wang, Xinyun Wang, Yanlong Zhang, Xiaojun Chen, Zhibo Yang, Zeyi Wen
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03363v3

Text-to-SQL enables natural language access to databases, and recent LLMs have substantially advanced its capabilities. Existing benchmarks such as Spider, BIRD, and Spider~2.0 evaluate schema generalization, large-scale databases, and realistic workflows, but largely overlook enterprise scenarios where SQL generation depends on private business knowledge, such as internal metrics, reporting conventions, and organizational rules. We introduce EntSQL, an enterprise-oriented Text-to-SQL benchmark for evaluating long-context grounding over proprietary business documents. EntSQL contains 1,066 aligned Chinese-English semantic examples across five business domains, with most examples requiring domain knowledge beyond the question and schema and involving complex SQL structures. On English inputs, the best evaluated system reaches only 15.9\% when long-form documents are provided, highlighting the difficulty of grounding SQL generation in enterprise knowledge.

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### Mitigating False Credit Propagation: Probabilistic Graphical Reward Aggregation for Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Can Lv, Mingju Chen, Heng Chang, Shiji Zhou
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03361v2

Rubric-based rewards are increasingly used for open-ended language model post-training, but criterion-level scores are often aggregated as independent utilities. This flat scalarization ignores rubric-specified prerequisite and activation relations among criteria, allowing reward or penalty to be counted even when the condition that licenses it is absent. We call this structural reward-aggregation failure \textbf{False Credit Propagation} (FCP). To address this limitation, we propose \ourname (\textbf{G}raphical \textbf{E}vent \textbf{A}ggregation for \textbf{R}ubric rewards), a probabilistic graphical framework for dependency-aware rubric aggregation. \ourname models each criterion outcome as a latent Bernoulli event in a typed rubric graph, propagates soft suppression from unsupported parent events to their children, and aggregates the resulting event probabilities into a normalized expected signed utility. This yields a linear-time reward computation that can be plugged into standard rubric-based RL pipelines without changing the outer optimization algorithm. Experiments on HealthBench, WritingBench, and PLawBench with two policy backbones show that \ourname consistently improves over flat aggregation and deterministic gating, achieving relative gains of up to 15.5\% over flat aggregation. FCP diagnostics further show that \ourname reduces leakage by 96.5\% relative to flat aggregation while preserving more licensed downstream utility than deterministic gating. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/LvCan926/GEAR.

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### Mitigating False Credit Propagation: Probabilistic Graphical Reward Aggregation for Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Can Lv, Mingju Chen, Heng Chang, Shiji Zhou
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03361v1

Rubric-based rewards are increasingly used for open-ended language model post-training, but criterion-level scores are often aggregated as independent utilities. This flat scalarization ignores rubric-specified prerequisite and activation relations among criteria, allowing reward or penalty to be counted even when the condition that licenses it is absent. We call this structural reward-aggregation failure \textbf{False Credit Propagation} (FCP). To address this limitation, we propose \ourname (\textbf{G}raphical \textbf{E}vent \textbf{A}ggregation for \textbf{R}ubric rewards), a probabilistic graphical framework for dependency-aware rubric aggregation. \ourname models each criterion outcome as a latent Bernoulli event in a typed rubric graph, propagates soft suppression from unsupported parent events to their children, and aggregates the resulting event probabilities into a normalized expected signed utility. This yields a linear-time reward computation that can be plugged into standard rubric-based RL pipelines without changing the outer optimization algorithm. Experiments on HealthBench, WritingBench, and PLawBench with two policy backbones show that \ourname consistently improves over flat aggregation and deterministic gating, achieving relative gains of up to 15.5\% over flat aggregation. FCP diagnostics further show that \ourname reduces leakage by 96.5\% relative to flat aggregation while preserving more licensed downstream utility than deterministic gating. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/LvCan926/GEAR.

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### Speech Emotion Recognition using Attention-based LSTM-Network with Residual Connection

Authors: Daniil Krasnoproshin, Maxim Vashkevich
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.SD, cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03359v1

Speech emotion recognition is an important component of modern human-computer interaction systems. However, many state-of-the-art approaches rely on large pretrained models with high computational and memory requirements, limiting their applicability. This paper proposes ResLSTM-SA, a lightweight architecture that integrates residual connections with soft attention within an LSTM-based framework. Evaluated on the RAVDESS dataset under strict speaker-independent partitioning, the proposed model outperforms conventional attention-based LSTM baselines and several previously reported CNN- and hybrid CNN-LSTM architectures in terms of unweighted average recall (UAR). The best-performing variant (ResLSTM-SA-h64) achieves a maximum UAR of 0.6517 with only 46.8k trainable parameters, delivering competitive accuracy with three orders of magnitude fewer parameters than large-scale self-supervised alternatives, thereby enabling efficient deployment on edge devices and real-time voice assistants. The source code is available at https://github.com/Mak-Sim/ResLSTM-SER.

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### The Impact of Temporal Granularity on Socio-Demographic Inference from Household Load Profiles

Authors: Dejan Radovanovic, Maximilian Schirl, Andreas Unterweger, Günther Eibl
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03358v1

Smart meter data can reveal sensitive socio-demographic characteristics of households, raising privacy concerns. While this risk has been demonstrated at fixed granularities, the role of temporal resolution in shaping inference performance remains insufficiently explored. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing how load profiles with granularities from 15 minutes to 7 days affect the predictability of eight socio-demographic attributes in a dataset of 1,589 households over one year. We introduce an evaluation framework where classifiers are trained on year-round data but tested on arbitrary weeks, forcing generalization across seasonal and weekly variations. Our results show three main findings. First, while coarsening granularity reduces predictive accuracy, two plateaus emerge: performance is stable between 15 minutes and 1 hour, and again between 1 and 7 days. This reveals opportunities for data minimization without sacrificing utility. Second, interpretable handcrafted and tsfresh features remain competitive with CNN-based autoencoder embeddings, while XGBoost consistently outperforms alternative classifiers. Third, feature importance analysis highlights differences between static and dynamic attributes: dwelling size can be inferred even from coarse data, whereas swimming pool usage requires fine-grained temporal signals. Overall, our study provides new insights into the privacy-utility trade-off in smart metering, showing how temporal resolution, feature extraction, and classifier choice jointly influence socio-demographic inference.

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### The Unsampled Truth: Quantifying Prompt Artifacts in LM Psychometrics

Authors: Nils Schwager, Christoph Hau, Simon Münker, Achim Rettinger
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03357v2

When prompting language models for psychometric assessment, researchers assume that the responses reflect the injected persona and the meaning of the survey item. We test this premise using a diagnostic design that crosses five semantically distinct baseline personas with five semantically equivalent variants of each of four prompt components (persona wording, task instruction, item wording, option symbol). Measuring the 1-Wasserstein distance between the resulting response distributions and partitioning the variation among the five components allows for the separation of target effects from prompt artifacts. We apply the framework to 13 open-weight small language models (0.6B to 14B) on the Big Five Inventory and the Short Dark Triad. We find that in most models, the task instruction and option symbol displace response distributions further than paraphrasing the persona description or the item itself. For a substantial share of items, the artifact share of explained variation exceeds 50%; non-semantic changes of the prompt account for more response variation than the baseline personas. Our framework lets researchers quantify these prompt artifacts before interpreting psychometric output.

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### The Unsampled Truth: Psychometrics in SLMs Measure Prompt Artifacts, Not Psychological Constructs

Authors: Nils Schwager, Christoph Hau, Simon Münker, Achim Rettinger
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03357v1

When prompting SLMs for psychometric assessments, researchers assume the outputs reflect semantic reasoning. We evaluate this premise across 13 open-weights models (0.6B to 14B parameters) using a prompt variation framework that separates semantic signals from prompt artifacts. By systematically varying personas, instructions, items, and option symbols, we find that artifactual variance frequently overpowers the semantic signal. In these cases, models predominantly reflect prompt compliance rather than simulated psychological traits. While these findings limit SLM utility in psychometrics, our framework provides a diagnostic tool to identify destructive artifacts and isolate semantic understanding for future frontier-model research.

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### APIC: Amortized Physics-Informed Calibration using Neural Processes

Authors: Aishwarya Venkataramanan, Sai Karthikeya Vemuri, Joachim Denzler
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03355v1

Physics models are inherently imperfect due to misspecified or missing mechanisms, resulting in systematic discrepancies between model predictions and real-world observations. The Kennedy-O'Hagan (KOH) framework addresses this issue through explicit discrepancy modeling. However, its non-amortized, per-instance formulation limits scalability across families of related systems. We introduce Amortized Physics-Informed Calibration (APIC), a population-level extension of KOH that leverages Neural Processes to perform scalable Bayesian inference across realizations. Our framework employs a two-branch latent architecture to disentangle instance-specific physical parameters from shared, state-dependent structural discrepancies. By integrating differentiable physics into an amortized inference backbone, APIC enables rapid calibration of unseen realizations from sparse observations while quantifying uncertainty. Experiments on the damped spring oscillator, the Lotka-Volterra system, and the advection-diffusion PDE with misspecified physics demonstrate improved parameter recovery and consistent identification of the systemic discrepancy structure compared to other calibration approaches.

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### SynCred-Bench: Benchmarking Synthetic Credibility in AI-Generated Visual Misinformation

Authors: Junxiao Yang, Minghao Zhang, Xiaoce Wang, Haoran Liu, Shiyao Cui, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03348v1

Recent generative models can now produce visual artifacts with realistic embedded text and layouts, creating a new misinformation threat: synthetic credibility. We introduce SYNCRED-Bench, a benchmark of 600 AI-generated misinformation images balanced across six credible-form categories and seven fine-grained circulation styles, together with FP450, a real-image negative set for measuring false positives. Extensive evaluation shows that existing systems remain unreliable: under a 5% false-positive-rate constraint, 15 MLLMs achieve only 10.5% true positive rate (TPR), open-source AIGC detectors achieve less than 5%, and commercial APIs reach 57.6%. Human annotators also struggled to identify synthetic credibility, reaching only 63% TPR. These findings establish synthetic credibility as a severe and underexplored visual misinformation challenge, and provide a benchmark for developing detectors that reason beyond superficial credibility cues.

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### AugMask: Training Diffusion Models on Incomplete Tabular Data via Stochastic Augmentation and Masking

Authors: Jungkyu Kim, Taeyoung Park, Kibok Lee
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03347v1

Score-based diffusion models have emerged as prominent deep generative models; however, their application to tabular data remains challenging because their backbones assume fully specified inputs, whereas real-world tabular data often contain missing values. We propose AugMask, a plug-and-play training framework that adapts missing-unaware backbones to incomplete data by separating conditioning from supervision. AugMask 1) constructs numeric inputs via conditional stochastic augmentation using lightweight auxiliary models, and 2) applies denoising supervision only to observed coordinates. In effect, augmented missing entries serve as uncertain conditioning context rather than training targets. We connect this training rule to a Rao--Blackwellized objective and show that marginalizing missing entries yields a variance-weighted sensitivity penalty, discouraging over-reliance on uncertain completions. Across diverse datasets and missingness regimes, AugMask enables standard diffusion-based tabular generators to outperform specialized missing-aware baselines.

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### Beyond Semantics: Modeling Factual and Affective Perceptual Experiences from Vision-Language Data

Authors: Youssef Mohamed, Kenneth Ward Church, Mohamed Elhoseiny
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL, cs.CY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03345v1

We present P-Topics (Perception Topics) modeling, a novel problem for understanding how images are perceived affectively and across cultures. The goal is to (1) discover and model the different perception experiences in a dataset of images and captions, where each experience is defined by an objective factual and a subjective affective aspect, and (2) associate images to their relevant perception experiences. We introduce **PercepT** (**Percep**tion topic **T**ransformer), a two-stage architecture that tackles P-Topics modeling. In the formation stage, percepT discovers *P-Topics* as visual-textual clusters using an unsupervised training objective, and dynamically selects the number of clusters to match the perceptual richness of the dataset. In the mapping stage, it learns *P-Topic mapping functions* via attention pooling to associate images to their respective clusters. On ArtELingo, PercepT achieves a silhouette score of **0.97** compared to **0.37** from the closest baseline reflecting better perceptual clusters. PercepT also achieves an AUC score of **0.94** compared to **0.77** showing better mapping to perceptual clusters. Human evaluation confirms that PercepT captures semantically meaningful perception experiences and significantly outperforms existing methods. Our implementation will be made public.

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### RogueMerge: Robust and Unified Attacks against LLM Model Merging

Authors: Jinghuai Zhang, Yetian He, Kunlin Cai, Han Zhao, Fnu Suya, Yuan Tian
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03344v1

Model merging composes specialized capabilities into a single LLM by aggregating task vectors sourced from unverified public platforms, exposing a critical supply-chain attack surface: Because any malicious behavior can be encoded into a task vector, and merging grants third-party vectors direct write access to model weights, an attacker-provided task vector can enable or amplify diverse downstream threats. Prior work studies only backdoor attacks against model merging for classifiers using static arithmetic heuristics, which fail to effectively handle diverse attacks on generative LLMs for three reasons. (i) LLMs rely on autoregressive decoding, where the minor parameter drift introduced by merging compounds across tokens and rapidly degrades the attack. (ii) Attackers have no knowledge of the victim's merging configurations, causing a static attack vector optimized in isolation to be easily diluted or destroyed. (iii) Practical threat induction must generalize to attack prompts unseen during optimization, which static vectors cannot adequately encode. We present RogueMerge, the first principled, unified framework that addresses all three challenges. To handle autoregressive generation, we replace static arithmetic with a joint optimization that explicitly enforces attack success after merging. To handle unknown merging settings, we formulate attack injection as a stochastic min-max problem and solve it via meta-learning-style simulation. To generalize across heterogeneous attack prompts, we employ distributionally robust optimization and derive a tractable first-order Taylor approximation at LLM scale, with a provable error bound. Across four threats, six merging algorithms, and over 170 merged LLMs, RogueMerge consistently outperforms existing attacks. It also remains stable across diverse merging settings and resists standard defenses.

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### Cross-Modality Feature Fusion Based on Structured State Space Duality for Multimodal Image Registration Network

Authors: Zhikang Li, Yan Wu, Xin Hu, Yi Dai, Ming Li
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03341v1

In multi-modal image registration, the primary challenge lies in shared structural information extraction. Compared to Transformers, Structured State Space Duality (SSD) offers greater global structural feature extraction with higher efficiency during training and inference. Inspired by these advantages, we propose a novel algorithm for multi-modal image registration, named RegNetMamba-2. Our algorithm incorporates SSD into coarse-to-fine matching process to extract local and global structural features effectively. Firstly, SSD is applied in three different scales for multi-modal feature extraction in our network. To strengthen local representation, we pay more attention on foreground edge and structural information by feature scaling function of SSD. Secondly, for shared feature extraction of input images and multi-modal feature fusion in all scales, we propose cross-modality feature fusion model based on SSD, consisting of Cross-Modality feature Interaction (CMI) module and Multi-Scale feature Fusion (MSF) module. CMI module is designed for cross-modality feature extraction of each scale by SSD in cross form. MSF module is designed to employ a progressive upward fusion in feature-level to obtain fine features, consisting of multi-modal features in all scales. Following coarse-to-fine, the features in 1/8 scale from CMI and 1/2 scale from MSF are collected to calculate matching probability scores. Then we respectively establish matching process by correspondences of pixel-wise. Extensive experiments demonstrate that comparing with state-of-the-art deep-learning based algorithms, RegNetMamba-2 has achieved good effects in both performance and efficiency for multi-modal image registration on the following datasets: VIS-SAR (OSDataset), VIS-IR (LGHD/RoadSence) and VIS-NIR (RGB-NIR sense).

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### IdEst: Assessing Self-Supervised Learning Representations via Intrinsic Dimension

Authors: Julie Mordacq, Vicky Kalogeiton, Steve Oudot
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03338v1

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for learning meaningful representations from unlabeled data. However, the standard protocol for evaluating these representations, linear probing, is computationally expensive, sensitive to hyperparameters, and provides limited insight into the geometric structure of the representation space. In this work, motivated by connections between neural network generalization and intrinsic dimension (ID) we propose IdEst, a method for estimating the ID of SSL representations via the Minimum Spanning Tree dimension estimator ($\mathrm{dim}_\mathrm{MST}$). Across diverse datasets, architectures, and SSL pretraining objectives, we show that IdEst strongly correlates with downstream linear probe performances. Furthermore, we demonstrate that IdEst enables efficient hyperparameter selection, significantly reducing the computational cost compared to supervised alternatives. Our results highlight intrinsic dimensionality as a principled geometric proxy for assessing SSL representations, complementing standard supervised probing protocols.

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### Lingo_Research_Group at SemEval-2026 Task 9: Evaluating Prompt Variants for Polarization Detection

Authors: Pritam Kadasi, Anuj Tiwari, Mayank Singh
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03334v1

Our submission presented in this paper is for SemEval-2026 Task 9: Multilingual Text Classification Challenge - Polarization Detection and it covers all three subtasks: (1) binary polarization detection, (2) polarization type classification and (3) polarization manifestation identification. We adopt a systematic approach of research on short designed prompts by considering twelve designed prompts that are different in terminology clarity, detail of the definition, guidance of reasoning and in-context examples use. The experiments are conducted using aya-101 and Gemma3-27B, with the latter chosen for the submission at the end of the development through performance considerations. Our system has an average macro level F1-score of 0.762 on Subtask 1, 0.587 on Subtask 2 and 0.444 on Subtask 3 with the average accuracy of 0.819, 0.678 and 0.498, respectively, on the official test set averaged among 22 languages, respectively. With cross-task and cross-lingual analysis, we demonstrate that prompt-based approaches can be used effectively to detect coarse grained polarization but encounter more and more difficulties as far as fine-grained and multi-label sociolinguistic classification is concerned.

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### Tailoring Strictly Proper Scoring Rules for Downstream Tasks: An Application to Causal Inference

Authors: Roman Plaud, Alexandre Perez-Lebel, Antoine Saillenfest, Thomas Bonald, Marine Le Morvan, Gaël Varoquaux, Matthieu Labeau
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03332v1

Probabilistic models are typically trained using task-agnostic objectives like log-loss, which can lead to significant errors in downstream estimation. This disconnect is especially critical in Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) for causal inference, where propensity score errors near $0$ and $1$ often lead to high bias and variance. We propose a principled framework for deriving task-specific strictly proper scoring rules by matching the local curvature of the downstream error metric. We apply this to the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) estimation, deriving a closed-form loss and its corresponding canonical probability mapping that can be readily integrated with any model like a neural network or a gradient boosting algorithm. Extensive evaluations on causal inference benchmarks demonstrate that our tailored objective consistently outperforms standard likelihood-based and covariate-balancing approaches.

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### Evaluating LLMs' Effectiveness on Real-World Consumer Device Repair Questions

Authors: Atm Mizanur Rahman, Md Arid Hasan, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Sharifa Sultana
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03331v1

Consumer device repair is an important but underexplored testbed for large language models (LLMs). Repair tasks require reasoning over incomplete problem descriptions, hardware-specific diagnostics, actionable troubleshooting, and safety-critical decisions, where incorrect advice can cause device damage, battery hazards, or permanent data loss. We introduce a benchmark of 991 real-world repair questions from Reddit spanning phone repair, computer repair, and data recovery, each paired with technician-written reference solutions, and provide Bangla translations to evaluate cross-lingual performance. We evaluate six state-of-the-art LLMs in English and Bangla using four repair-specific criteria: correctness, completeness, practicality, and safety. Our results show that while LLMs can provide useful repair assistance, they remain unreliable for high-risk real-world repair tasks without rigorous evaluation and explicit safety safeguards. Phone repair is the most difficult and safety-sensitive domain, and all models make substantial errors in board-level diagnosis, repair prioritization, and safe recovery procedures. Across domains and models, Bangla responses consistently perform worse than English responses. Among the evaluated models, GPT-5.4 performs best overall.

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### FLIPS: Instance-Fingerprinting for LLMs via Pseudo-random Sequences

Authors: Gurvan Richardeau, Gohar Dashyan, Erwan Le Merrer, Gilles Tredan
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03330v1

Literature reveals that a Large Language Model's (LLM) behavior is not only conditioned by its original weights but also its instance-level parameters, such as instructional prompt, sampling configuration or quantization. A model that generates safe outputs under one configuration may produce toxic content under another. However, current LLM identification techniques (such as fingerprinting) focus on intellectual property protection, and their design favors robustness to changes in these instance-level parameters. This poses a critical challenge for AI regulation in which compliance assessments target actual deployed behaviors, not model provenance. In this paper, we introduce instance-level fingerprinting, a regulator-oriented paradigm that distinguishes configurations of the same LLM. Our method FLIPS, exploits biases in generated binary random sequences to reach 96% (closed-set) and 90% (open-set, where some targets are unknown) identification accuracy across 237 model instances, versus 35% for the adapted LLMmap baseline. This shows that instance-level fingerprinting is both necessary for regulation and practically feasible. Code available at https://github.com/GurvanR/FLIPS-LLM-Instance-Fingerprinting.

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### InfoMem: Training Long-Context Memory Agents with Answer-Conditioned Information Gain

Authors: Tiancheng Han, Yong Li, Wuzhou Yu, Qiaosheng Zhang, Wenqi Shao
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03329v1

Long-context tasks require LLMs to identify and preserve answer-relevant information from large contexts. Chunk-wise memory agents address this issue by sequentially reading document chunks, updating a compact memory, and generating the final answer from the accumulated memory. However, existing RL-based chunk-wise agents either rely on sparse final-answer rewards or use lexical intermediate rewards for memory and retrieval actions. These signals supervise task success or local overlap, but do not directly evaluate whether the final memory supports the ground-truth answer. We propose InfoMem, a reward mechanism for training chunk-wise memory agents that evaluates final-memory utility using answer-conditioned information. InfoMem measures how much the final memory increases the model's per-token log-likelihood of the ground-truth answer. To stabilize RL optimization, InfoMem applies this signal only to successful trajectories and normalizes it before reward composition. Under the same GRPO framework and training budget, InfoMem improves long-context memory-agent performance over comparable memory-agent RL baselines. Analyses show that effective final-memory rewards should operate on successful trajectories, be normalized before reward composition, and be conditioned on the answer rather than the query. Our code is available at https://github.com/GenSouKa1/InfoMem.

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### Averaged Evaluation Masks Capability Trade-Offs: Multi-Source Calibration for High-Sparsity LLM Pruning

Authors: Hu Xu, Zhaolong Xing, Congcong Liu, Jiaxing Wang, Zhida Jiang, Junshi Huang, Zhen Chen, Jianfeng Xu
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03328v3

Calibration data are often treated as a minor implementation detail in post-training LLM pruning because averaged evaluations suggest only modest effects. We show that this conclusion is an averaging artifact: at 60\% SparseGPT sparsity, calibration strategies separated by only 2.85 points in averaged commonsense accuracy differ by 51.9 points in Code retention. Across 15 sources, capability-decomposed analysis reveals an opposing pattern: calibration perplexity is positively associated with General retention but negatively associated with Math or Code retention, leaving no evaluated single source uniformly strong across capabilities. This finding motivates capability-balanced multi-source calibration. Under the same calibration budget, a balanced real-data mixture outperforms every evaluated single source on LLaMA-3.1-8B, beating C4 by 18.8 points; the advantage grows with sparsity and persists on LLaMA-3.1-70B. Because the original pretraining data of advanced LLMs are often inaccessible, we further introduce Information-Guided Self-Calibration for Pruning (IGSP). Using only the base model and evaluation taxonomy, IGSP generates capability-stratified pools and selects low-redundancy samples within capability-specific perplexity ranges, outperforming Self-Cal and SGS by up to 4.8 points. Together, these results recast calibration as a capability-coverage problem and identify multi-source design as a practical principle for preserving capabilities in high-sparsity LLM pruning.

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### CAPER: Clause-Aligned Process Supervision for Text-to-SQL

Authors: Lujie Ban, Jiasheng Shi, Jinyang Li, Xiaolin Han, Tsz Nam Chan, Chenhao Ma
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.DB, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03327v1

Text-to-SQL systems are typically evaluated by query-level execution correctness, but this terminal signal provides little guidance about which intermediate SQL decision caused success or failure. Token-level dense supervision is also ill-suited: SQL tokens do not align with complete semantic decisions, can penalize execution-equivalent queries, and are difficult to label reliably at scale. We therefore propose CAPER, which automatically derives clause-level supervision via counterfactual intervention on the SQL abstract syntax tree, enabling root-cause error localization for reward modeling; the resulting data is used to train CAPER-9B, a lightweight Clause-PRM that provides clause-boundary feedback for policy optimization and candidate verification. Experiments on BIRD and Spider show that clause-aligned supervision not only improves execution accuracy, achieving up to a 15.3% relative EX improvement over GPT-5.4, but also strengthens failure-localization capability, reaching 84.53% accuracy and 90.60% MRR on held-out failures. Our project page is at https://github.com/banrichard/RL-NL2SQL.

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### The Violation Situation Pattern: Persistent Representation of Compliance Violations in Knowledge Graphs

Authors: Nima Kamali Lassem, Fuqi Song, Seyid Amjad Ali
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03326v2

Existing compliance pipelines identify violations as transient query results, leaving no persistent representation of the violation itself or its lifecycle, evidence, and audit history. We address this limitation with the Violation Situation Pattern (VSP), a reusable ontology pattern that extends the Situation pattern of Gangemi and Mika by modeling each detected violation as a persistent first-class graph entity. Each violation is associated with a rule identifier, temporal validity interval, lifecycle state, and evidence links to the affected entities, while immutable lifecycle events provide a complete and queryable audit trail. We instantiate VSP on the schema of a deployed legal knowledge graph integrating corporate governance and contract data, populated with public contract corpora containing violations with established ground truth, and operationalize four deontic compliance rules. Rather than evaluating detection algorithms, we evaluate the pattern's robustness under rule evolution. Results show that repeated rule execution creates no duplicate violations, modifications to rule definitions preserve complete audit histories, and expanding rule scope maintains violation identity and lifecycle continuity. A case study using 73 regulatory enforcement decisions further demonstrates that compliance rules can evolve to capture additional confirmed violations without compromising the integrity of stored identities, evidence, or audit histories. These findings show that VSP enables compliance knowledge graphs to evolve without sacrificing traceability, explainability, or historical consistency. The complete implementation, queries, SHACL shapes, and evaluation dataset are publicly available to support the reproducibility of the reported results.

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### Implement Kubernetes Pod-Level Remote Attestation for Confidential Workloads on dstack

Authors: Yang Yang, Kevin Wang, Yuanhai Luo, Hang Yin, Jie Cai, Shunfan Zhou, Wenfeng Wang
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03323v2

The rise of LLM-as-a-Service and other confidential cloud workloads demands cryptographic proof that user data is processed in a trusted, untampered environment. Existing solutions, notably Confidential Containers (CoCo), enforce a strict "one Pod per VM" model that attests only the Guest OS stack, leaving container-level identity unverified and incurring prohibitive per-VM resource overhead. We present dstack-capsule, a Kubernetes platform that enables Pod-level remote attestation on Intel TDX by allowing multiple Pods to share a single Confidential VM while each retains independent, hardware-backed proof of identity. Our key insight is a two-layer attestation architecture: static platform measurements are frozen in RTMR(3) via an irreversible privilege fuse, while dynamic Pod identities (pod_uid, pod_spec_hash, workload_id) are embedded in the TDX Quote's report_data field and signed by hardware on every request. dstack-capsule introduces (1) a Pod-level attestation protocol binding Pod spec digests to hardware-signed Quotes; (2) a privilege fuse mechanism that atomically transitions a node from setup mode to secure mode; (3) a multi-layer sandbox spanning storage, runtime, admission, API, and network isolation layers; and (4) a complete open-source implementation based on Kubernetes 1.32, Intel TDX, and Sysbox. We evaluate the security properties, attestation correctness, and performance characteristics of dstack-capsule, demonstrating that it achieves Pod-granularity verification without the resource overhead of per-VM isolation.

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### Multi-Modal Graph Neural Network with Transformer-Guided Adaptive Diffusion for Preclinical Alzheimer Classification

Authors: Jaeyoon Sim, Minjae Lee, Guorong Wu, Won Hwa Kim
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03322v1

The graphical representation of the brain offers critical insights into diagnosing and prognosing neurodegenerative disease via relationships between regions of interest (ROIs). Despite recent emergence of various Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to effectively capture the relational information, there remain inherent limitations in interpreting the brain networks. Specifically, convolutional approaches ineffectively aggregate information from distant neighborhoods, while attention-based methods exhibit deficiencies in capturing node-centric information, particularly in retaining critical characteristics from pivotal nodes. These shortcomings reveal challenges for identifying disease-specific variation from diverse features from different modalities. In this regard, we propose an integrated framework guiding diffusion process at each node by a downstream transformer where both short- and long-range properties of graphs are aggregated via diffusion-kernel and multi-head attention respectively. We demonstrate the superiority of our model by improving performance of pre-clinical Alzheimer's disease (AD) classification with various modalities. Also, our model adeptly identifies key ROIs that are closely associated with the preclinical stages of AD, marking a significant potential for early diagnosis and prevision of the disease.

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### Validation-Gated Multi-Agent Governance for Online Adaptation of Thermal-Hydraulic Surrogate Models under Operating-Regime Shift

Authors: Doyeong Lim, Seungyoon Lee, In Cheol Bang
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.LG, cs.MA, eess.SY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03321v1

Artificial-intelligence surrogates can support second-by-second thermal-hydraulic forecasting, but models selected and frozen offline may become condition-locked once deployed outside their pretraining envelope. This study develops a guarded continual-adaptation framework for experimental thermal-hydraulic loop data in which role-separated agents - Monitor, Diagnosis, Adaptation, Safety-Auditor, and Orchestrator - diagnose error signatures, prioritize candidate model families, and review promotions, while deterministic champion-challenger gates and background shadow learning retain final authority over model replacement. Seven surrogate families were screened by blocked three-fold cross-validation, and a temporal Fourier neural operator was selected as the initial champion for 60-s-history-to-10-s-trajectory forecasting on two held-out transients, with three seeds per adaptive mode. Static deployment gave a channel-averaged MAE of 7.06 and a 56.8% warning-exceedance ratio; rule-based adaptation reduced MAE to 6.54, whereas shadow refresh alone remained close to Static. The MA-Full mode, in which the role-separated multi-agent council reviews every evaluated stream step, achieved the lowest mean error, 5.72, and 35.8% exceedance, corresponding to a 19.0% improvement over Static. Paired bootstrap intervals against Static excluded zero, although intervals among adaptive modes overlapped and the six paired units limit broad statistical claims. Validated promotions from the neural operator to Transformer and graph neural network indicate that logged, gate-controlled adaptation can support auditable surrogate evolution while deterministic gates retain deployment authority.

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### Beyond Ideal Instruction: A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating LLMs in Realistic Interactions

Authors: Xuan Yang, Hao Xu, Tingfeng Hui, Hongsheng Xin, Kaike Zhang, Chunxiao Liu, Ning Miao
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03318v2

Despite great advances in tool-use capabilities of large language models (LLMs), existing evaluation benchmarks struggle to fully align with real-world scenarios. Such benchmarks mostly rely on simulated idealized user assumptions and lacks experience-oriented evaluation. These limitations fail to account for the ambiguity, uncooperative behaviors, and shifting intentions characteristic of real-world users. To fill this gap, we propose RUT-Bench, a dedicated benchmark designed to assess LLMs under diverse Real-world User Tool calling scenarios. RUT-Bench supports high-fidelity simulations covering both ideal rational patterns and heterogeneous non-ideal behaviors across single-turn and multi-turn dialogues. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on 19 widely adopted open-source and proprietary LLMs using our benchmark. Experimental results reveal that no tested LLMs achieve an overall success rate above 40%, and nearly all of them experience noticeable performance drops when facing more complicated non-ideal user inputs. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/Miaow-Lab/RUT-Bench.

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### SPR: Toward a Graph Foundation Model for Transferable Graph Cognition via Spectral Patterns and Relational Geometry

Authors: Ankang Yang, Jitao Zhao, Dongxiao He, Liang Yang, Di Jin, Weixiong Zhang
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03315v2

Recently, Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) have attracted increasing attention for their potential to learn unified and generalizable knowledge across diverse graphs, thereby supporting a wide range of graph scenarios. However, unlike natural language and images, graphs lack an intuitive and unified form for perceiving and organizing transferable knowledge. Therefore, despite many initial explorations, a key problem remains unresolved: the transferable cognitive mechanism for graphs. Existing GFMs usually rely on intuitively defined mechanisms to encode transferable graph patterns, such as handcrafted structural templates (e.g., cycles and trees), fixed propagation mechanisms, and predefined random-walk patterns. These mechanisms are often prescriptive and rigid, limiting their ability to flexibly characterize diverse graph patterns across domains. This motivates the exploration of a more flexible, graph-native, and transferable cognitive mechanism. To this end, we analyze graphs from the spectral perspective and propose SPR. SPR decomposes graph information into Chebyshev polynomial bases and learns shared spectral responses, enabling unified yet adaptive cognition of continuously varying spectral patterns across graphs. We further model cross-graph relational geometry to distill recurring pairwise organization from multiple graphs, providing a shared relational reference for transferring such graph cognition across domains. Extensive experiments across diverse graphs and downstream scenarios demonstrate that SPR enables effective and transferable graph cognition.

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### A Graph Foundation Model with Spectral Parsing and Prototype-Guided Spatial Propagation

Authors: Ankang Yang, Jitao Zhao, Dongxiao He, Liang Yang, Di Jin, Weixiong Zhang
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03315v1

Graph foundation models aim to learn transferable knowledge from diverse graphs for generalization to unseen graphs and tasks. Unlike text and images, graphs lack a shared vocabulary or regular spatial grid, making cross-graph transfer challenging. This challenge comes from both feature discrepancies and, more critically, diverse graph structures. Existing GFMs mainly improve transferability by unifying feature spaces or incorporating structural tokens and vocabularies. However, existing topology-aware designs still have limitations. Structural tokens are usually discrete, while structural vocabularies often rely on predefined substructures such as trees and cycles, whose limited coverage may miss richer relational patterns across graphs. Moreover, graph signals contain both high-frequency local patterns and smoother low-frequency patterns, which require different propagation behaviors. These components are often entangled in raw graph signals, while this spectral perspective is rarely explored in existing GFMs. To address these challenges, we propose SPG, a graph foundation model with spectral parsing and prototype-guided spatial propagation. SPG applies learnable Chebyshev filters to decompose node features into multiple spectral responses, reducing the mismatch between frequency-specific graph signals and propagation behaviors. It then constructs a Gromov-Wasserstein prototype geometry to distill transferable pairwise relations beyond predefined substructures into a shared structural space. The learned prototype geometry is further projected back as a prototype-guided propagation operator. Experiments demonstrate consistent improvements in cross-domain generalization.

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### TASE: Truncation-Aware Semantic Embeddings for 3D Scene Understanding and Editing

Authors: Tim-Felix Faasch, Jochen Kall, Lucas Nunes, Jens Behley, Cyrill Stachniss
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03314v4

High-fidelity semantic 3D scene representations are crucial for numerous applications, including robotics, autonomous driving, and simulation. Beyond this, the ability to edit such representations enables developers to adapt these applications more easily to specific target scenarios. Current approaches provide limited support for controllable editing. We introduce TASE, a method that projects pretrained 2D semantic features into a truncation-aware embedding space to enable flexible 3D scene editing. Our method explicitly optimizes a feature space in which progressively reducing feature channels yields increasingly abstract semantic representations, while retaining more channels preserves fine-grained detail. Additionally, we improve multi-view consistency of the features using a scale- and translation-equivariance loss. The resulting truncation-aware embedding space enables text-driven edits to 3D scenes, providing explicit control over how strongly edits adhere to the original scene content and allowing more substantial modifications than prior methods. Moreover, we propose a finetuning stage for the editing diffusion model to mitigate artifacts caused by geometric changes. Experimental results demonstrate competitive performance in 3D scene editing, substantially outperforming prior methods on edits involving large geometric modifications.

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### TASE: Truncation-Aware Semantic Embeddings for 3D Scene Understanding and Editing

Authors: Tim-Felix Faasch, Jochen Kall, Lucas Nunes, Jens Behley, Cyrill Stachniss
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03314v1

High-fidelity semantic 3D scene representations are crucial for numerous applications, including robotics, autonomous driving, and simulation. Beyond this, the ability to edit such representations enables developers to adapt these applications more easily to specific target scenarios. Current approaches provide limited support for controllable editing. We introduce TASE, a method that projects pretrained 2D semantic features into a truncation-aware embedding space to enable flexible 3D scene editing. Our method explicitly optimizes a feature space in which progressively reducing feature channels yields increasingly abstract semantic representations, while retaining more channels preserves fine-grained detail. Additionally, we improve multi-view consistency of the features using a scale- and translation-equivariance loss. The resulting truncation-aware embedding space enables text-driven edits to 3D scenes, providing explicit control over how strongly edits adhere to the original scene content and allowing more substantial modifications than prior methods. Moreover, we propose a finetuning stage for the editing diffusion model to mitigate artifacts caused by geometric changes. Experimental results demonstrate competitive performance in 3D scene editing, substantially outperforming prior methods on edits involving large geometric modifications.

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### RobotValues: Evaluating Household Robots When Human Values Conflict

Authors: Jongwook Han, Hyeongjin Kim, Yohan Jo
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03312v2

While household robots are often evaluated based on task completion, everyday domestic environments involve value-conflicting situations where robots are expected to choose actions that prioritize diverse values such as human autonomy, efficiency, or social appropriateness. Yet, there are no benchmarks for evaluating robots' value preferences in such scenarios. We introduce RobotValues, a benchmark to evaluate household robot planners in 8K value-conflict scenarios. Each instance consists of a realistic, synthetically generated household image with multiple plausible robot actions that prioritize different human values. We construct ROBOTVALUES through LLM-assisted scenario generation, stakeholder-grounded value extraction, image generation and automatic quality control. We evaluate 10 VLMs used in robotics and find that models show default value preferences, including safety and accommodation, while underselecting privacy-prioritizing actions. When models are prompted to prioritize values that conflict with their preferences, models often fail to override the default actions, choosing incorrect actions 80% of the time on average across models. These findings highlight the need to go beyond task completion or safety evaluations and assess robots' decision-making capability when human values conflict.

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### RobotValues: Evaluating Household Robots When Human Values Conflict

Authors: Jongwook Han, Hyeongjin Kim, Yohan Jo
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03312v1

While household robots are often evaluated based on task completion, everyday domestic environments involve value-conflicting situations in which robots are expected to choose actions that prioritize other values than task success, such as human autonomy, efficiency, or social appropriateness. Yet, there are no benchmarks for evaluating robots' value preferences in such scenarios. We introduce RobotValues, a benchmark to evaluate household robot planners in 10K value-conflict scenarios. Each instance consists of a realistic household image with multiple plausible robot actions that prioritize different human values. We construct RobotValues through LLM-assisted scenario generation, stakeholder-grounded value extraction, image generation and automatic quality control. Using RobotValues we evaluate VLMs used in robotics and find that models exhibit default value preferences, including safety and accommodation, while underselecting privacy-prioritizing actions. When the models are instructed to prioritize specific values that conflict with their own preferences, they often fail to override their default actions, choosing incorrect actions for 80% of the time. These findings suggest that household robot evaluation should measure not only task completion or safety compliance, but also whether robots can choose among plausible actions when human values conflict.

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### Learning Multi-Scale Hypergraph for High-Order Brain Connectivity Analysis

Authors: Jaeyoon Sim, Soojin Hwang, Seunghun Baek, Guorong Wu, Won Hwa Kim
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03310v1

Understanding complex interactions between brain regions is critical for early neurodegenerative disease classification such as Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and Parkinson's Disease (PD). While graph-based models are widely used to analyze brain networks, most existing approaches primarily focus on pairwise interactions between directly connected nodes, limiting their ability to capture higher-order dependencies across multiple regions. Although hypergraph-based methods have been proposed to model higher-order relations, many rely on predefined hyperedges or restrict learning to hyperedge weights, reducing flexibility and limiting their capacity to capture multi-resolution structural patterns. In this regard, we introduce an adaptive multi-scale hyperedge learning framework, i.e., MuHL, which constructs hierarchical node features and dynamically learns high-order interactions through continuous hyperedge construction over multi-resolution graph signals. Extensive experiments on multiple brain network benchmarks demonstrate that MuHL consistently improves disease classification performance across different stages, and further identifies key regions of interest (ROIs) and their group-wise interactions from the learned hyperedges that are associated with disease progression, highlighting its potential as a powerful tool for brain network analysis in neurodegenerative disorders.

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### Generalizing Graph Foundation Models via Hyperbolic Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Authors: Yifan Jin, Qirui Ji, Bin Qin, Jiangmeng Li, Lixiang Liu, Fuchun Sun, Changwen Zheng
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03307v2

Graph foundation models (GFMs) emerged as a dominant paradigm in graph representation learning by leveraging large-scale pre-training for cross-domain inference. However, the parameterized knowledge encoded within these models is insufficient to cope with distribution shifts, limiting their generalization ability. To mitigate this issue, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been introduced to incorporate external knowledge at inference time. Nevertheless, existing RAG frameworks operating in Euclidean space suffer from a fundamental geometric limitation: the polynomial volume growth of Euclidean space is inherently mismatched with the tree-structured external knowledge bases. This mismatch leads to the loss of semantic granularity in retrieval and gives rise to the hubness phenomenon.To address this limitation, we propose a Hyperbolic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (HyRAG) framework designed to enhance the generalization capabilities of GFMs. Specifically, the introduced Hyperbolic Knowledge Indexing module retains the tree-like hierarchies of the external knowledge base by modeling them within hyperbolic space. The Multi-granularity Retrieval module then provides GFMs with the global semantic anchors and local semantic nuances through coarse-grained and fine-grained knowledge retrieval, respectively. Finally, the Dual-path Fusion module achieves effective knowledge integration for graph tasks at both the feature and structural levels. Experiments on multiple graph benchmarks demonstrate significant improvements in the zero-shot setting, highlighting the generalization of our method for robust GFMs inference.

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### The Reliability Gap in Benchmark Auditing: Distribution Shift and Scale as Failure Modes of Contamination Detection

Authors: Wojciech Zarzecki, Jan Dubiński, Sebastian Cygert
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03305v2

Benchmark contamination, where evaluation examples appear in a model's training data, threatens the validity of LLM assessment. Statistical tools for detecting training-data membership exist, but have been validated almost exclusively in controlled academic regimes: large, homogeneous pre-training corpora and transparent, single-stage training pipelines. Whether these methods remain reliable in realistic auditing scenarios remains unclear. We identify two under-studied failure modes: distribution shift, which arises when suspect and validation sets violate the IID assumption, and scale constraints, which arise because benchmarks are orders of magnitude smaller than pre-training corpora. We systematically evaluate three leading paradigms, LLM Dataset Inference, Post-Hoc Dataset Inference, and CoDeC, across 25 models from multiple families (including Pythia, OLMo 2, and specialised cultural and medical LLMs) and scales (up to 27B). We then further extend our analysis to frontier industry models. Across 335 evaluations, only 201 yield correct outcomes. LLM Dataset Inference results in false positives under distribution shift, Post-Hoc Dataset Inference is underpowered at benchmark scale, and CoDeC provides only coarse provenance signals that are insufficient to verify individual benchmark splits. Our results reveal a systematic reliability gap between controlled validation and practical benchmark auditing, and show that statistical detection cannot yet replace transparent data provenance. We open-source our benchmark for further research.

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### From Script to Semantics: Prompting Strategies for African NLI

Authors: Anuj Tiwari, Terry Oko-odion, Hannah Nwokocha
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03304v1

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated in multilingual settings, yet their inference behavior in low-resource African languages remains underexplored especially under pure prompting without fine-tuning. We present a systematic study of prompting strategies for Natural Language Inference (NLI) in Swahili, Yoruba, and Hausa using the AfriXNLI benchmark. We evaluate five prompting strategies Baseline (zero-shot), Script-Aware, Language Specific, Contrastive, and Native-Label Self-Translation (NL-STP) across two mid-sized open weight models (Llama3.2-3B and Gemma3-4B). To isolate the effect of prompt design, the effect of few-shot examples and Chain-of-Thought reasoning is eliminated in our study. We find a significant difference in performance of class wise across strategies with highly neutral class collapse and high prediction skew in some configurations. Contrastive prompting proves to be the most reliable and steadily improving strategy over language and model and has better balance of class behavior and balance of overall accuracy gains. Notably, well-constructed prompts are sufficient to beat more powerful baselines that are provided with few-shot prompts and Chain-of-Thought prompts. We have found that prompt formulation is essential to multilingual NLI with low-resource languages and that language aware decision structuring can be used to meaningfully enhance robustness in resource challenged settings.

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### LEAP: Supercharging LLMs for Formal Mathematics with Agentic Frameworks

Authors: Po-Nien Kung, Linfeng Song, Dawsen Hwang, Jinsung Yoon, Chun-Liang Li, Simone Severini, Mirek Olšák, Edward Lockhart, Quoc V Le, Burak Gokturk, Thang Luong, Tomas Pfister et al.
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03303v2

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong informal mathematical reasoning but struggle to generate mechanically verifiable proofs in formal languages like Lean. We present LEAP, an agentic framework that enables general-purpose foundation models to achieve state-of-the-art performance on automated formal theorem proving. LEAP leverages foundation model capabilities, such as informal reasoning, instruction following, and iterative self-refinement. By decomposing complex problems into smaller units, the system bridges formal proof construction with informal blueprints through continuous interaction with the Lean compiler. To provide a rigorous evaluation beyond increasingly saturated benchmarks, we introduce Lean-IMO-Bench, a benchmark of IMO-style problems formalized in Lean, with short statements yet highly non-routine and multi-step proofs across a wide range of difficulty levels. Empirically, on the latest 2025 Putnam Competition, an annual mathematics competition for undergraduate students in North America, LEAP solves all 12 problems, matching recent breakthroughs by frontier formal mathematical models. On Lean-IMO-Bench, LEAP boosts the one-shot formal solve rate of general-purpose LLMs from below 10% to 70%, notably surpassing the 48% benchmark set by a specialized, gold-medal-caliber IMO system. Furthermore, we demonstrate LEAP's research-level utility by autonomously formalizing complex proofs for open combinatorial challenges, including a verified proof for a key subproblem in Knuth's Hamiltonian decomposition of even-order Cayley graphs.

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### SagaQA: A Multi-hop Reasoning Benchmark for Long-form Narrative Understanding in TV Series

Authors: Galann Pennec, Zhengyuan Liu, Nicholas Asher, Philippe Muller, Nancy F. Chen
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.CL, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03301v1

We introduce SagaQA, a long-form video benchmark for multi-hop reasoning over full-length TV series. Existing video reasoning benchmarks often emphasize local understanding of adjacent frames or clips. SagaQA addresses this gap by requiring high-level comprehension of extended multimodal narratives in entire TV shows. A distinguishing feature of SagaQA is the granularity of its reasoning steps. Our dataset necessitates long-range reasoning hops to connect information across completely different episodes. This requires models to reason over entire events and actions, demanding a deep understanding of the show's narration and progression at a multimodal level. Motivated by recent progress in agentic methods, we further study how different planning strategies handle such complex reasoning. We categorize these approaches into three classes-Parallel, Sequential, and Hybrid planners-and evaluate their ability to generate coherent and complete reasoning plans. Our results on SagaQA suggest that hybrid planners consistently produce higher-quality plans and exhibit stronger capabilities for complex, high-level narrative understanding in TV shows.

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### Combining Statistical Features and Deep Encodings for Rehearsal-Based Class-Incremental Time Series Classification

Authors: Pablo García-Santaclara, Bruno Fernández-Castro, Rebeca Pilar Díaz-Redondo
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03292v1

Many systems used in real-world environments require adding new categories and incorporating new information without forgetting what was previously learnt by the classification model. This is known as class-incremental continual learning, and in the case of multivariate time-series, is further complicated by the temporal structure of the data. In this paper, we present a novel approach for performing class incremental continual learning for the classification of multivariate time series data based upon the construction of a dual-stream feature extraction pipeline (using both deep temporal embedding features generated via a pre-trained frozen foundation model and application of statistical features). Evaluated on five benchmark datasets, the proposed system achieves competitive average accuracy across all datasets while maintaining low forgetting rates across all experimental configurations.

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### Multilingual Unlearning in LLMs: Transfer, Dynamics, and Reversibility

Authors: Chaoyi Xiang, Olga Ohrimenko, Benjamin I. P. Rubinstein, Lea Frermann
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03291v1

Large language models (LLMs) can memorize sensitive facts, motivating unlearning methods that remove targeted knowledge without costly retraining. However, unlearning research remains heavily English-centric. We study multilingual unlearning by extending the TOFU benchmark to five languages, and fine-tune, unlearn, and query our models with different permutations of languages. We find that unlearning transfer, the ability of an unlearned model to "forget" facts in languages other than the unlearning language, is highly variable: e.g., it is strongest between languages sharing scripts and families, and we show that the unlearning language predicts which query languages are most likely to yield the strongest transfer. Layer-wise analysis reveals that unlearning leaves the shared cross-lingual latent space largely intact in early layers, instead operating primarily in later decoding layers. This suggests that unlearning does not truly erase knowledge, but rather induces superficial suppression. Exploiting this structure, a single inference-time steering direction reverses much of this suppression across languages, recovering 50% (Qwen) and 90% (Gemma) of the unlearned knowledge.

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### Message Tuning Outshines Graph Prompt Tuning: A Prismatic Space Perspective

Authors: Yancheng Chen, Dun Ma, Shuai Zhang, Yang Liu, Xixun Lin, Xiangyu Zhao, Wenguo Yang, Wei Chen, Chuan Zhou
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03290v1

Graph Foundation Models (GFMs), built upon the Pre-training and Adaptation paradigm, have emerged as a research hotspot in graph learning. For GNN-based GFMs, graph prompt tuning has become the prevailing adaptation method for downstream tasks. Although recent methods explain why graph prompt tuning works, how to rigorously measure its adaptation capacity remains an open problem. Addressing this problem is critical for understanding the capability limits of graph prompt tuning and for developing more powerful adaptation methods. In this paper, we propose Prismatic Space Theory (PS-Theory), a novel mathematical framework to quantify the capacity of adaptation methods, while focusing on establishing the upper bound for the adaptation capacity of graph prompt tuning. Building upon the proposed PS-Theory, we further introduce Message Tuning for GFMs (MTG), a lightweight approach that injects a small set of learnable message prototypes into each layer of the GNN backbone to adaptively guide message fusion without updating pre-trained weights. Through our PS-Theory, we prove that the adaptation capacity of MTG can exceed the theoretical upper bound of graph prompt tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MTG consistently outperforms graph prompt baselines across diverse benchmark datasets, providing strong empirical support for our theoretical findings.

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### AI-Generated Traces for Novice Programmers: Learning Effects and Learner Differences in a Multi-Institutional Study

Authors: Yuri Noviello, Naaz Sibia, Anastasiia Birillo, Thomas Overklift Vaupel Klein, Michael Liut, Gosia Migut
Published: 2026-06-02
Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03288v1

Introductory programming (CS1) courses often struggle to support students' understanding of program execution. While visualizations can make execution processes explicit, their effectiveness depends on design and context, and empirical evidence for AI-generated visualizations remains limited. We propose Generated Animated Traces (GATs), AI-generated, analogy-based, narrated animations that coordinate source code, execution state, and conceptual analogies. We conduct a study at two institutions in CS1 courses (Python, N=961; Java N=151) comparing GATs to textual explanations. We measure immediate learning performance and experience, end-of-course engagement and exam performance. Results show that GATs can yield selective benefits for immediate learning, but benefits are context-dependent and short-term. We observe that GATs' influence on performance is moderated by learner engagement profiles. This finding underscores the importance of personalized approaches.

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