# Research Papers — 2026-06 · bundle page 33 of 260 > Full-text markdown of papers #1601–1650 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/33 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/32.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/34.md) ### EventOD: Event-Aware OD Flow Generation via LLM-Guided Semantic Modulation Authors: Jie Zhao, Jie Feng, Can Rong, Zhihan Hou, Peng Lu, Yong Li Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22655v1 Estimating origin-destination (OD) flows under disruptive events is important for disaster response and urban resilience. Existing deep OD models trained on routine mobility often degrade when extreme events abruptly alter regional functions and population activities, while retraining a new generator for each event is impractical under limited event-time supervision. We propose EventOD, an event-adaptive OD generation framework that steers a pretrained OD generator using structured event semantics. EventOD first uses a large language model to infer region-level functional and demographic control vectors from coarse event observations. It then learns two lightweight adaptation modules, AlphaNet and BetaNet, to calibrate the magnitude of these semantic shifts, and further introduces a retrieval-augmented fallback pathway for scenarios with sparse supervision. The resulting event-conditioned features are injected into a pretrained graph diffusion OD model through input-level modulation, enabling event-aware adaptation without updating generator parameters. Experiments on hurricane- and pandemic-induced mobility across U.S. counties show that EventOD consistently improves both reconstruction accuracy and distributional fidelity over strong baselines. Source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EventOD-5C11/. --- ### MINT-V2X: A Mobility-Integrated Network Trajectory Dataset for Predictive Resource Management Authors: Abdullah Anjum, Abdolazim Rezaei, Mehdi Sookhak Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22654v1 Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication systems are based on datasets that not only contain vehicle trajectory data but also wireless network parameters with a realistic level of fidelity, enabling the creation of prediction and optimization models. There is a very critical research infrastructure gap today, and publicly available datasets are likely to be limited to one of the two: mobility or network parameters, and rarely provide a single, integrated view that combines both. This paper introduces MINT-V2X, a comprehensive dataset generated by coupling SUMO traffic dynamics with OMNeT++/Simu5G network simulation. The validation framework is composed of 14 standardized tests based on 3GPP Release 14 (C-V2X), ETSI standards and Shannon capacity theory. The resulting dataset contains 9.87 million synchronized data points from 1,386 vehicles from 15 roadside units (RSUs) during 3 hours of urban traffic simulation. We demonstrate strict algorithmic consistency through network metric correlations (CQI-SINR: 0.993; SINR-PDR: 0.946). Finally, we demonstrate the value of the dataset by conducting an RSU load prediction case study, showing that using trajectory data yields better predictive performance than network-history-only baselines. The dataset, experiments, and complete SUMO configuration files are available in the GitHub repository to facilitate reproduction on alternative simulation stacks. --- ### Do Language Models Converge to Themselves? Recursive Self-Refinement as Textual Relaxation Authors: Xuening Wu, Qianya Xu, Yanlan Kang, Zeping Chen, Yubin Liu, Shenqin Yin Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22653v1 Large language models are increasingly used in recursive refinement workflows, where an initial draft is repeatedly revised by the same model. Despite their growing use, the long-term dynamics of such workflows remain poorly understood. Does repeated refinement continue to improve outputs indefinitely, or does it converge toward a stable textual form? We study recursive self-refinement as a dynamical process in which repeated LLM revision drives text toward a model-preferred soft fixed-point region. Using GPT-5.5, we generate 10-step refinement trajectories for 50 ICML 2025 abstracts under both default-temperature and deterministic decoding, and additionally evaluate 15 ICML 2020 abstracts. We analyze normalized edit distance, exact and approximate fixed points, word-count stability, exponential relaxation, and external LLM-as-a-judge evaluation. Across all settings, refinement trajectories rapidly saturate. Most edits occur within the first few iterations, after which trajectories enter a soft fixed-point region with only minor surface-level changes. Deterministic decoding reaches exact fixed points earlier and exhibits smaller residual fluctuations than default-temperature decoding, while both achieve universal approximate convergence. The average edit magnitude follows a consistent exponential relaxation pattern, suggesting convergence toward a model-preferred textual equilibrium rather than open-ended optimization. External evaluation indicates that converged abstracts improve clarity, conciseness, and scientific style while preserving technical meaning. These findings support a dynamical-systems view of LLM self-refinement and motivate practical stopping criteria based on edit-magnitude saturation. --- ### KG2Code: Bridging Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models via Executable Code for Question Answering Authors: Yike Wu, Nan Hu, Guilin Qi, Guohui Xiao, Chen Jiang, Xinchun Zou, Yuchen Lu, Songlin Zhai, Yongrui Chen, Yuyang Zhang, Xiaoguang Li, Lifeng Shang et al. Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22652v1 Recent research has explored the integration of knowledge graphs (KGs) with large language models (LLMs) to enhance their performance on downstream knowledge-intensive tasks, particularly knowledge graph question answering (KGQA). Existing approaches primarily combine LLMs with KGs through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-based, agent-based, and SPARQL-based methods. Although these methods have achieved notable success, they still suffer from several limitations, including structural information loss, unfaithful reasoning, and limited flexibility and generalization. To address these challenges, this paper proposes KG2Code, a novel approach that transforms knowledge graphs into a code-based representation, preserving structural semantics while naturally aligning with the code-aware pretraining of modern LLMs. Based on KG2Code, KG2Code-QA is further introduced as a KGQA framework that formulates KGQA as a code generation task. This formulation enables the generation of verifiable reasoning traces and executable code, thereby substantially mitigating the impact of hallucinations. In addition, an automated pipeline is developed to construct a large-scale, high-quality code corpus for effectively training open-source LLMs on KG2Code-QA. After training, LLMs are able to perform KGQA in zero-shot scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms existing KG-enhanced LLM methods for KGQA, while exhibiting strong generalization to unseen KGs. The code and data are available at Github. --- ### ARdena: Scenario-driven control of real-time LLM agents Authors: Luka Borozan, Domagoj Matijević Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22651v1 Large language models (LLMs) have enabled increasingly capable conversational agents, but reliably controlling their behavior in real-time interactive environments remains a significant challenge. Existing approaches often rely on model fine-tuning or alignment procedures that are difficult to adapt to changing interaction requirements. This paper introduces layered scenario-driven LLM control, a framework that enables runtime behavior control through structured prompting. By combining persistent context with scenario-specific constraints, the approach allows agent behavior to be modified during interaction without changing the underlying model. The framework is implemented in ARDena, a real-time multimodal embodied agent that integrates speech interaction, visual perception, tool use, and avatar-based response generation. The proposed approach is evaluated with respect to control effectiveness, response latency, and operational stability. The results demonstrate that scenario definitions alone can produce substantially different interaction behaviors while maintaining stable real-time operation, highlighting the effectiveness of scenario-driven prompting for controlling LLM agents. --- ### STAIF: A Stage-wise Optimization for Complex Instruction Following Authors: Jian Hong, Chen Cheng, Quan Liu, Yuhao Chen, Enhong Chen Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22649v1 Following complex instructions with multiple explicit constraints remains a fundamental challenge for large language models (LLMs). Existing alignment methods, such as DPO, optimize holistic reward signals that often underemphasize strict satisfaction of individual constraints, particularly under out-of-distribution or multi-constraint settings. In this paper, we propose STAIF, a stage-wise optimization framework that decouples the alignment of subjective (soft) constraints from the optimization of objectively verifiable (hard) constraints. Stage 1 applies preference optimization with multiple negative samples to sharpen sensitivity to soft constraints, while Stage 2 applies Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to enforce strict compliance with hard constraints. To support this method, we construct STAINSTRUCT, a high-quality bilingual (English, Chinese) dataset of approximately 31,000 complex multi-constraint instructions. Extensive analyses validate the design of STAIF and show state-of-the-art performance on representative benchmarks against strong baselines, as well as genuine generalization. --- ### LeanFlow: A Case Study in Workflow-Driven Lean Autoformalization Authors: Lazar Milikic, Simon Guilloud, Khanh Nguyen, Viktor Kuncak Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.LO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20503v1 We present and evaluate LeanFlow, an LLM agent system specialized for translating mathematical papers into buildable Lean projects. Recent verifier-in-the-loop systems show that large formal artifacts can be produced, but it remains unclear which runtime mechanisms affect completion, auditability, or efficiency in document-to-project formalization. We study this question through case studies on two previously unformalized mathematical papers in number theory and measure theory, using model, proof-workflow, and toolset ablations with Kimi2.6 and GPT5.5; we report task outcome, API calls, input tokens, and output tokens. With Kimi2.6, the full workflow completes both document-level projects within the 2000-call budget, while no-queue variants reach the budget limit; with GPT5.5, all document-level variants complete, and the full workflow has the lowest or tied-lowest input-token cost on both sources. As complementary calibration, LeanFlow reaches 75.7% BEq+ on the PFR slice of RLM25 and solves all five ICML 2026 AI for Math TCS challenge projects in our GPT5.5 runs. --- ### Economic Evaluations of Language Models Authors: Alexander Wan, Stephane Hatgis-Kessell, Tomás Aguirre, Percy Liang, Rishi Bommasani Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19375v1 Language models perform economically valuable work, yet they are not currently assessed for how well they perform every economically valuable task. We introduce EconEvals as an open-source evaluation suite to measure capabilities relevant to tasks, work activities, and occupations in the US labor economy. We ground the evaluation suite in real user queries to language models where possible, and supplement these with synthetic data. Our evaluations improve coverage over OpenAI's GDPval benchmark, which is the existing state-of-the-art that covers 5% of US occupations, at 500x lower cost. Alongside benchmarks, we also introduce a simulation-based exposure measure to estimate how much time current language model capabilities could save across all tasks belonging to all US occupations, with detailed accounting for each estimate. Our estimates indicate that current models could save workers substantial time on at least half of their tasks in 47% of occupations. However, for 79% of tasks where we predict substantial time savings, observed Claude usage is low, suggesting that existing usage lags potential. Beyond inherent constraints of language model chatbots, our data identifies privacy and proprietary systems as the principal bottlenecks limiting further time savings from AI. Overall, we introduce adaptable infrastructure that grounds inferences about language models' labor-market impact in their current capabilities, which can be continually updated as capabilities improve. --- ### Self-Evolving Just-In-Time Memory for Proactive Embodied Safety Authors: Bingrui Sima, Lizhong Wang, Xiaoya Lu, Kun He, Xiao Yang Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16247v1 While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have empowered embodied agents to execute complex household tasks, they struggle to proactively handle dynamically emerging hazards during closed-loop interactions. Existing safety approaches often rely on runtime guardrails to block unsafe actions or induce excessive caution, which severely stalls task progress instead of actively resolving the underlying risks. To break this safety-progress trade-off, we introduce the Self-Evolving Just-In-Time Memory framework, which reframes embodied safety from progress-stalling guardrails to proactive hazard mitigation. The framework consists of a Risk-Sufficient Topological Belief Graph (RSG) for persistent safety-relevant state tracking under partial observability, an Agency-Grounded Factual Memory for precise hazard anticipation, and an Experience Memory that injects procedural Meta-Skills to guide executable, progress-preserving mitigation. Furthermore, we propose an automated Test-Verify-Write loop, allowing agents to continually refine their mitigation Meta-Skills from execution traces at test time. Experiments on IS-Bench demonstrate that our framework substantially boosts the Safe-Success rate across multiple VLM backbones (e.g., +30.3% on Qwen3-VL-8B), enabling agents to proactively mitigate hazards without stalling task progress. Code is available at https://github.com/DyMessi/JIT-Memory. --- ### Let the Data Decide: Supervision Analysis, Capability Trade-offs, and Adaptive Objective Routing in Continued Pre-Training via Off-Policy Distillation Authors: Jiangan Yuan, Zhixuan Li, Han Xu Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16246v1 Off-policy distillation is now central to large language model pre-training, yet how training data, objective parameterization, and model capabilities interact remains poorly characterized. We studies top-$k$-truncated, temperature-scaled off-policy distillation by decomposing this problem into two questions: an \emph{objective-to-capability} analysis of how the training objective shapes token-level supervision and downstream performance, and a \emph{data-to-objective} analysis of how data heterogeneity should inform objective routing. We first show that the language-modeling objective ($L_{\mathrm{LM}}$) and the knowledge-distillation objective ($L_{\mathrm{KD}}$) induce systematically different capability profiles, and trace this divergence to a gradient-level tension between \emph{direct observed-token reinforcement} and \emph{teacher-supported alternative supervision}. To quantify this tension, we introduce diagnostic metrics -- support coverage, observed-token probability mass, and teacher-distribution concentration -- and show via controlled sweeps that the support size $k$ governs a coverage-sharpness trade-off, while distillation temperature controls within-support probability allocation. We then examine adaptive objective routing: a domain-level policy that applies $L_{\mathrm{LM}}$ to math and code and $L_{\mathrm{KD}}$ to general-domain data yields consistent gains over both single-objective baselines, whereas token-level routing based on observed-token probability mass or teacher entropy fails to consistently match the single-objective baseline. These results suggest that effective objective routing depends less on routing granularity than on the quality of the routing signal, reframing continued pre-training via off-policy distillation as a structured, data-conditional supervision-design problem rather than a global hyperparameter choice. --- ### Learning Structural Manipulability in Gate-Level Netlists Using Graph Neural Networks Authors: Rupesh Raj Karn, Ozgur Sinanoglu Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16245v1 Gate-level netlists exhibit intrinsic structural properties that influence signal propagation independently of functional simulation. We define a topology-driven structural manipulability score that characterizes node-level structural flexibility using path participation, k-core embedding, symmetry, and centrality. Modeling netlists as directed graphs, we formulate node-level regression to learn this topology-derived score using graph neural networks (GNNs). Experiments on ISCAS85 and EPFL benchmarks evaluate how effectively different GNN architectures approximate this metric across held-out circuits, with hierarchical models yielding the most consistent rankings. Component-level and ablation analyses examine the contribution of individual factors. As an illustrative case study, analysis of Trojan-injected circuits using TrustHub templates reveals statistically distinguishable structural patterns, indicating that topology-based scoring provides complementary structural insight. --- ### CIGPO: Contextual Information-Gain Policy Optimization for Multi-Turn Evidence-Reading LLM Agents Authors: Hao Dou Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16244v1 Training multi-turn evidence-reading agents with outcome-only reinforcement learning is unstable because intermediate turns receive little direct credit. In HotpotQA experiments with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, GRPO initially improves (standard F1 0.430) but subsequently collapses to 100% format-violating outputs. Training-log diagnosis reveals a zero-advantage lock-in mechanism: all sampled trajectories receive the minimum format penalty (-2.0), group-relative advantages vanish, and the policy-gradient loss becomes zero--an optimization deadlock. We propose a variance-injection strategy: by assigning per-turn rewards to intermediate evidence-reading turns, we prevent the group reward distribution from collapsing to a single value--preserving the variation that GRPO's group-relative advantage requires. Contextual Information-Gain Policy Optimization (CIGPO) implements this strategy using the marginal increase in the frozen reference model's log-likelihood of the ground-truth answer as the per-turn signal. With separate normalization of IG and F1 rewards and an IG-weight curriculum, CIGPO reaches a standard F1 of 0.518 on HotpotQA at the 3B scale (from 0.252 base; +105%), compared with 0.430 for the best GRPO checkpoint and 0.000 for the final GRPO checkpoint. CIGPO maintains meaningful reward variance and avoids zero-advantage lock-in throughout training. These results identify reward-variance collapse as a concrete failure mode of outcome-only GRPO and show that turn-level IG rewards can prevent it in this HotpotQA setting. --- ### RobustMAD: Evaluating Real-World Robustness of Multimodal Small Language Models for Deployable Anomaly Detection Assistants Authors: Anushiya Arunan, Xin Li, Yan Qin, U-Xuan Tan, Nhu Khue Vuong, Xiaoli Li, Chau Yuen Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16243v1 Multimodal industrial anomaly inspection assistants are a critical component of next-generation smart factories, enabling interactive vision-language-based querying. However, multimodal large language models remain impractical for on-site deployment due to prohibitive computational demands and privacy risks from cloud-based inference. Compact multimodal small language models (MSLMs) offer a deployable alternative, yet progress is constrained by the lack of comprehensive robustness analyses and meaningfully challenging benchmarks that reflect real-world industrial conditions. To address this gap, we develop RobustMAD, the first deployment-motivated benchmark, designed to comprehensively evaluate model robustness through diverse open-ended queries spanning object understanding, anomaly detection, unanswerable problems, and visual quality degradations. Contrary to conventional assumptions, top-performing MSLMs exhibit promising capabilities, surprisingly outperforming even the larger GPT-5 Nano. However, they still fall short of safety-critical requirements, and RobustMAD reveals critical robustness gaps that pose operational risks. In particular, three recurring failure modes emerge: (i) fragile multimodal grounding under fine-grained distinctions or degraded visual conditions, (ii) insufficiently comprehensive responses, and (iii) weak logical grounding on unanswerable or ill-posed queries, leading to hallucinated outputs. Grounded in these insights, we provide actionable guidance for the design of next-generation multimodal industrial inspection assistants that leverage their promising competence. Code is available at https://github.com/en-research/RobustMAD. --- ### TRACE: Trajectory-Based Safety Patch Learning for LLM Post-Training Realignment Authors: Changyue Li, Jiaming He, Youliang Yuan, Jialin Wu, Boxi Yu, Zhicong Huang, Pinjia He Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16242v2 Fine-Tuning-as-a-Service (FTaaS) platforms let users perform supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on customized data, but this pipeline can erode model safety alignment. To recover safety without re-running full alignment, existing realignment methods focus on calibrating the integration of safety patches into fine-tuned models. These methods exhibit a persistent safety-utility trade-off: weak repair leaves harmful behavior intact, while stronger repair increasingly damages the benign task. This paper shifts the focus from online calibration to offline patch learning and aims to learn a safety patch that restores safety while preserving task-specific capabilities. To this end, we propose TRACE, which simulates harmful SFT trajectories to produce progressively corrupted model states, and optimizes a safety patch simultaneously across these states. TRACE trains the safety patch during the offline stage, and reuses it across all user checkpoints without per-user calibration. We evaluate two representative models using three harmful SFT datasets, together with three utility benchmarks. Across six benchmarks and two models, TRACE consistently dominates the safety-utility frontier. TRACE improves the safety rate by up to 77 percentage points over the best baselines, while maintaining comparable utility to the undefended fine-tuned model. --- ### TRACE: Trajectory-Based Safety Patch Learning for LLM Post-Training Realignment Authors: Changyue Li, Jiaming He, Youliang Yuan, Jialin Wu, Boxi Yu, Zhicong Huang, Pinjia He Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16242v1 Fine-Tuning-as-a-Service (FTaaS) platforms let users train large language models (LLMs) on customized tasks, but this pipeline could erode models' safety alignment. In practice, service providers need to recover models' safety without re-running full alignment, or destroying the utility gained from customized tasks. A line of existing work refers to model parameter merging, which adds a safety patch on the fine-tuned model parameters to shift the model away from unsafe tendencies. However, this merging-based paradigm is fundamentally bottlenecked by task-safety update entanglement: downstream task updates and the safety patch often overlap in their dominant directions, so the merge strength is intrinsically hard to calibrate. If the safety vector is scaled too weakly, harmful components could still dominate, preventing the model from returning to a safe region; if it is scaled too aggressively, it suppresses task-relevant directions and degrades utility. To solve this problem, we shift the focus of merging-based methods from designing online merging operators to offline patch learning, and seek a safety patch that minimally interferes with task-relevant directions while retaining decisive control over unsafe behaviors. We propose TRACE, a trajectory-based safety patch learning framework that (i) simulates harmful tuning trajectories to generate progressively corrupted states, and (ii) optimizes a plug-in patch to recover safety while maintaining utility across varying corrupted base states. Across six benchmarks and two models, TRACE consistently dominates the safety-utility frontier. TRACE reaches nearly 100% safety on all settings, while maintaining comparable utility to the undefended fine-tuned model. --- ### KernelBench-Verified: Do LLM-Generated Kernels Actually Beat PyTorch? Authors: Yunxiang Zhang, Ping Yu, Jianyu Wang, Max, Fan, Julian Reed, Azalia Mirhoseini, Will Su Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16241v1 Recent large language models (LLMs) can generate custom CUDA kernels that appear to outperform PyTorch on benchmarks such as KernelBench. Building upon this foundational framework, we demonstrate that frontier models frequently engage in reward hacking to artificially inflate reported performance. In this work, we identify two areas where evaluation frameworks must co-evolve with model capabilities. First, to accurately measure true speedup, we examine the baseline timing mechanism, noting that enabling Tensor Core acceleration with TF32 provides a more realistic estimation of execution on modern GPUs. Second, concerning algorithmic correctness, models often exploit the narrow test distribution by hardcoding bypasses for specific tensor values. By skipping required computations, these kernels artificially accelerate execution rather than implementing actual CUDA kernels. We introduce KernelBench-Verified, an extended evaluation framework that incorporates a TF32-enabled baseline and a four-distribution hidden test suite. We additionally introduce memory efficiency metrics that capture the often-overlooked speed-memory tradeoff in kernel optimization. Under verified single-turn evaluation with seven frontier LLMs, we find that the best-performing model (GPT-5.5) achieves a 0.88x geometric mean speedup, significantly lower than the 1.43x speedup observed under the standard evaluation protocol. No model consistently outperforms PyTorch when evaluated against realistic baselines. On the memory front, 28% of GPU kernels generated by the best model increase peak GPU memory usage. Our findings demonstrate the necessity of continually adapting robust evaluation protocols as LLM kernel generation capabilities advance. --- ### Normalized Rewards for Preference Optimization Authors: Shawn Im, Federico Danieli, Skyler Seto, Barry-John Theobald, Katherine Metcalf Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16240v1 Direct Alignment Algorithms (DAAs) such as DPO have become a common way to post-train and align LLMs with human preferences. However, DAAs have been observed to over-optimize their implicit reward model and decrease the likelihood of preferred responses. This results in a decrease in the total likelihood assigned to responses seen in the preference dataset, potentially resulting in undesirable behavior. To counteract this undesired side-effect of DAAs, we examine the effect of using objectives that add a regularization term to maintain the total length-normalized probabilities of the chosen and rejected responses. To better understand over-optimization, we investigate how response likelihood changes are distributed over the tokens with and without regularization. We find that a significant portion of the likelihood changes are due to a small set of outlier tokens, which explains how DAAs improve generation quality despite decreasing the likelihoods of chosen responses. We apply the proposed regularization to reference-based (DPO) and reference-free (SimPO) methods and find (1) improved trade-offs between generation quality and general benchmark capability and (2) improvements in reward modeling across datasets. For example, on Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, we see both a >20% relative increase in AlpacaEval2 scores and >9% relative performance gains on general benchmarks. Additionally, we find that the added regularization term effectively mitigates the amount of displacement within preferred responses overall, and for the outlier tokens specifically, by utilizing low-likelihood tokens. --- ### BACON: Budgeted Human Calibration for Modeling and Evaluation with Multiple AI Judges Authors: Lei Shi, Anlan Zhang, Rita Lyu, Zhengmian Hu, Tong Yu, David Arbour, Avi Feller, Saayan Mitra, Ritwik Sinha Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.LG, stat.AP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16239v1 AI judges offer a scalable, low-cost alternative to human evaluation, but their outputs can be biased relative to human preferences and highly item-dependent, varying across judges, tasks, and domains. When uncalibrated AI evaluations are used for model ranking, item scoring, or population-level quality reporting, these biases can directly distort downstream decisions. We propose BACON, a four-stage pipeline that combines budgeted human calibration with multiple AI-judge outputs to produce more accurate annotations. BACON constructs full-coverage auxiliary features for every item, including multi-judge scores, token-level uncertainty statistics, and contextual embeddings. It then collects human labels for a small sampled subset and trains a cross-fitted outcome model to generate calibrated item-level surrogate predictions. These predictions support two use cases: population-level estimation of summary metrics, such as means or quantiles, using an augmented estimating-equation estimator with valid confidence intervals; and individual-level surrogate scoring for item ranking and annotation. BACON treats AI judges as auxiliary measurements rather than ground truth: human labels provide the calibration anchor, while AI-derived signals improve efficiency. Across diverse tasks, domains, and labeling budgets, BACON improves predictive accuracy and ranking consistency, and reduces bias and variance relative to raw AI outputs and purely human-label-based methods. These results show that BACON offers a practical, statistically grounded framework for scalable evaluation with limited human annotation. --- ### Adaptive Bayes exactly tracks information over intrinsic time Authors: Akshay Balsubramani Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.LG, cs.IT, math.ST, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08789v2 Bayesian and multiplicative-weights updates reweight experts, models, or actions from sequential feedback. We show that the regret of any such update obeys an exact information-accounting identity. On each round, the learner's excess loss to any chosen comparator is the sum of an immediate cost for the uncertainty exposed by the round and a reduction in the information distance from the learner's current weights to the comparator. The cumulative cost defines a pathwise uncertainty clock, the intrinsic time of the realized sequence. Summing one-step balances yields two exact adaptive decompositions of cumulative regret, one for each natural way of composing the update across rounds. Because the decompositions are exact, favorable stochastic or low-noise regimes appear as self-bounding properties of the realized intrinsic time. The accounting also fixes a learning rate, inverse in the square root of intrinsic time. That schedule is competitive with adaptive baselines in selected online-learning settings. The same calculus covers Hedge, optimistic and side-information variants, continuous priors, boosting, online convex optimization, contextual bandits, and repeated games: the pathwise account is the same in every case. --- ### Adaptive Bayes exactly tracks information over intrinsic time Authors: Akshay Balsubramani Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.LG, cs.IT, math.ST, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08789v1 Bayesian and multiplicative-weights updates reweight experts, models, or actions from sequential feedback. We show that the regret of any such update obeys an exact information-accounting identity. On each round, the learner's excess loss to any chosen comparator is the sum of an immediate payment for the uncertainty exposed by the round and a reduction in the information distance from the learner's current weights to the comparator. The cumulative payment defines a pathwise uncertainty clock, the \emph{intrinsic time} of the realized sequence. Summing one-step balances yields two exact adaptive decompositions of cumulative regret, one for each natural way of composing the update across rounds. Because the decompositions are exact rather than upper bounds, favorable stochastic or low-noise regimes appear as self-bounding properties of the realized intrinsic time, not as slack in worst-case analyses. The same calculus covers Hedge, optimistic and side-information variants, continuous priors, boosting, online convex optimization, contextual bandits, and repeated games: the pathwise account is the same in every case. --- ### Value of Information under Imprecise Probabilities: Decision-Rule-Specific Values and Fixed-Measure Envelopes on a Credal Set Authors: Rowan Iskandar Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: stat.ML, cs.IT, cs.LG, math.PR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06570v1 Value-of-information (VOI) analysis is usually conducted under a single probability measure. However, in practice, the available evidence often pins the measure down only to a set. Consequently, under a set of probability measures, VOI requires different formulations. First, we explicate a rule-specific VOI that fixes a decision rule for acting under imprecision (such as Gamma-maximin) and measures what the information is worth to a decision maker who uses that rule. Second, we derive a fixed-measure envelope that evaluates the classical VOI functional over all admissible precise measures. We formalize this distinction and explicate its consequences for the expected perfect, partial, and sample information. The expected value of perfect information is concave over the credal set. Hence, when the set is generated by finitely many measures, its lower envelope endpoint is obtained exactly from the generators, while its upper endpoint may be interior and is computed by a finite linear program. The Gamma-maximin value, in contrast, can exceed the entire envelope, so a rule-specific value is not recovered from the envelope's endpoints. A continuity bound limits how much the VOI can change as the measure varies, and we identify when the partial- and sample-information endpoints can still be obtained from the generators. Because the single-measure VOI must itself be estimated, the procedure we give combines standard estimators for it with a search over the credal set. By using a worked decision problem, we show how the two quantities separate conclusions that hold across every admissible measure from conclusions that depend on one unidentified choice of measure. --- ### When AI Classifies: What Counts as Public Administration? Authors: Shaoming Cheng, Laurie Schintler Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.DL, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.DB arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05420v1 This study examines how alternative systems of scholarly representation identify and characterize broad public administration (PA) and artificial intelligence related public administration (AI-in-PA) scholarship. Using Web of Science and OpenAlex, it compares five approaches based on author-defined, citation-driven, and AI-assisted representations. The results highlight substantial differences in corpus size, publication types, publishing outlets, temporal development, and thematic clustering and structure. The alternative approaches often identify different knowledge domains instead of varied subsets of the same scholarship and therefore produce distinct representations, as evidenced by no overlap in publications and publishing outlets across representations. The findings suggest that algorithmic knowledge organization increasingly influences how interdisciplinary scholarship is classified, structured, and understood and, epistemologically, how its visibility, intellectual structure, and boundaries are represented. AI-enabled scholarly classifications and representations are not neutral but interpretative, likely self-reinforcing, and potentially constrain the evolution and adaptation of disciplinary boundaries. Human disciplinary judgment is essential and is complemented rather than replaced. --- ### Contrastive Predictive Coding with Compression for Enhanced Channel State Feedback in Wireless Networks Authors: Ahmed Y. Radwan, Fahad Syed Muhammad, Matthew Baker, Hina Tabassum Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.IT, cs.AI, eess.SP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05419v2 Accurate and timely channel state information (CSI) is essential for next-generation wireless systems, yet existing works treat CSI compression and CSI prediction as separate problems, both in academia and in current 3GPP studies. Consequently, channel aging remains insufficiently addressed within standardized CSI feedback pipelines. In this article, we propose a unified compression-prediction framework that integrates Contrastive Predictive Coding (CPC) directly into the 3GPP-compliant CSI compression architecture. Instead of predicting high-dimensional CSI matrices, our approach forecasts future latent representations and jointly optimizes reconstruction fidelity and temporal predictive coherence via a combined 1-SGCS and InfoNCE objective. This design enables temporal representation learning without increasing feedback overhead. We present two variants: CPC-before-Compression, which performs autoregressive modeling on encoded features prior to quantization, and CPC-after-Compression, which shifts temporal modeling to the base-station to reduce the complexity of users' devices. Evaluations on 3GPP-compliant datasets from Nokia, Oppo, and CATT show that CPC-before-Compression achieves over 90% reconstruction accuracy with 32x lower decoder GFLOPs than the 3GPP baseline, while CPC-after-Compression preserves an identical encoder footprint and the same 64-bit feedback overhead. By unifying compression and prediction within a standardized pipeline, the proposed framework provides an age-aware, computationally efficient CSI feedback solution. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/AhmedRadwan02/cpc-3gpp --- ### Interpretable machine learning predicts Parkinson's disease severity using motion-corrected QSM MRI and multiband multiecho fMRI features Authors: Aixa X. Andrade Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG, q-bio.NC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02553v1 Introduction: Objective neuroimaging biomarkers may improve Parkinson's disease motor assessment by capturing brain variation not directly observable from clinical examination. We used interpretable machine learning to predict current motor severity, measured by MDS-UPDRS Part III, from QSM and multiband multi-echo resting-state fMRI-derived ReHo features. Methods: Regional QSM and ReHo features were extracted from 28 participants, including 24 individuals with Parkinson's disease and 4 controls. Thirteen feature-set experiments evaluated imaging-only, clinical-only, imaging-plus-clinical, full, reduced, and multimodal inputs. Support vector regression, Elastic Net, Random Forest, and XGBoost models were trained using nested cross-validation. Performance was assessed using pooled held-out R^2, RMSE, MAE, Pearson correlation, permutation testing, and the proportion of participants predicted within +/-5 MDS-UPDRS Part III points. Results: Imaging-only models carried meaningful predictive signal, whereas the clinical-only model performed weakly. Full fMRI, full QSM, and clinical variables provided the strongest global fit, explaining 45.4% of variance in motor severity. Selected QSM plus clinical variables produced the most clinically close predictions, with 75.0% of participants predicted within +/-5 points and the lowest MAE among top-performing models. SHAP highlighted cerebellar, thalamic, striatal, insular, and motor cortical features. Conclusion: QSM and multiband multi-echo fMRI-derived ReHo capture distinct, interpretable dimensions of Parkinson's disease motor severity. These findings show that structural and functional imaging contribute differently depending on the clinical prediction goal. --- ### DELTAVID: Enhancing Fine-Grained Spatiotemporal Perception with Cross-Video Differences Authors: Yankai Yang, Yancheng Long, Bin Wen, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Han Li, Shuo Yang Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02551v1 Video multimodal large language models have made strong progress on open-ended video understanding, but they still lack precise local spatiotemporal perception. When two videos share almost the same global semantics and differ only in a short time span or a small region, current models often fail to find the change and provide reliable evidence. We propose DELTAVID, a verifiable proxy-task framework that enhances fine-grained spatiotemporal perception with cross-video differences. The key idea is to turn cross-video spot-the-difference into a trainable perception signal, where a model identifies local changes, judges temporal boundaries, and organizes spatial evidence by comparing similar videos. To make this signal scalable to train and reliable to evaluate, we further introduce DELTAVID-10K and DELTAVID-Bench, which convert controllable local differences in real videos into evidence-labeled training and test samples. Experiments show that DELTAVID substantially improves performance on cross-video difference understanding and transfers the learned local evidence ability to general video understanding benchmarks, including MMVU, MLVU, Video-MME, VideoHolmes, VideoMMMU, LVBench, TempCompass, and LongVideoBench. These results show that cross-video differences are not only an effective way to diagnose fine-grained perception failures, but also a scalable proxy supervision that moves Video MLLMs from coarse semantic understanding toward fine-grained spatiotemporal evidence reasoning. --- ### Locker-based Truck-Drone Routing with Integrated Considerations of Pickups, Deliveries, and No-Fly Zones Authors: Xuanyu Liu, Hui Hu, Jiao Zhao, Ziliang Wang, Zhengbing He Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.LG, physics.soc-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30680v1 Truck-drone delivery is an emerging last-mile logistics mode combining the long-haul capacity of trucks with the flexible service capability of drones. In locker-based operations, smart lockers serve not only as temporary parcel storage facilities but also as automated drone docking and service nodes. These automated nodes support drone takeoff, landing, parcel handover, and battery replacement, thereby significantly extending the service range and operational flexibility of drone-assisted delivery networks. However, practical locker-based delivery systems face complex real-world challenges, requiring the integrated coordination of not only parcel delivery, return pickup, battery-constrained and load-dependent drone flights, but also necessary detours around restricted airspace. To address this practical and multifaceted challenge, this paper introduces a locker-based truck-drone routing problem with integrated considerations of pickups, deliveries, and no-fly zones (LTDRP-PDNF), with the objective of minimizing the total operational cost of a fleet of drone-equipped trucks. We formulate the route construction process as a Markov Decision Process and develop a two-stage deep reinforcement learning-based neural heuristic. The first stage utilizes an attention-based encoder and a Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit decoder to solve the truck-only routing problem, formulated as a capacitated vehicle routing problem. The second stage combines a policy-transfer strategy with a hybrid dispatch assignment heuristic to construct fully coordinated truck and drone routes for LTDRP-PDNF. Experiments on instances of different scales demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms metaheuristic and neural heuristic baselines in most cases while maintaining exceptionally short computation times, offering an effective, scalable solution framework under practical operational constraints. --- ### DANTE-W: Diffuse Albedo Neural Texturing in the Wild Authors: Guangyu Wang, Tianheng Lu, Ruqi Huang, Lu Fang Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.GR, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30677v1 Classical mesh texturing techniques blend captured multi-view images directly, which inevitably suffer from baked-in shading and casted shadows that compromise visual fidelity during relighting. To circumvent this issue, we present a neural texturing framework, namely DANTE-W, to enable high-fidelity diffuse albedo texture recovery from unstructured image collections for large-scale, in-the-wild scenes, which integrates seamlessly with traditional 3D reconstruction pipelines. Given a reconstructed mesh and its surface parameterization, our method fuses view-space generative albedo priors into a coherent texture space via an expressive neural representation, while substantially enhancing fine-grained textural details through physically principled neural rendering. To comprehensively evaluate our method, we curate a benchmark dataset featuring diverse, fine-grained textures, comprising both real-world in-the-wild scenes and synthetic objects. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our approach in reconstructing accurate albedo textures and boosting relighting fidelity. Project page: dante-wild.github.io. --- ### Criticality-Constrained Iterative Pruning for Energy-Efficient Spiking Neural Networks via Combined Importance Scoring Authors: Muhammad Hamza Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.NE, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30676v1 Deploying spiking neural networks (SNNs) on neuromorphic hardware demands aggressive synaptic pruning while preserving temporal computation integrity. Existing strategies either neglect neuronal criticality or rely on convex relaxations of the inherently combinatorial pruning problem whose fractional masks, upon binarisation, destroy accuracy at moderate-to-high sparsity. We present Criticality-Constrained Quadratic Pruning (CQP), a native PyTorch pipeline that fuses weight magnitude with surrogate-gradient criticality into an analytically exact importance metric, eliminating the rounding artefacts endemic to solver-based approaches. We formally characterise a continuous-relaxation trap wherein OSQP-solver fractional masks overshoot the intended sparsity by up to 12 percentage points (pp), precipitating a 44 pp accuracy collapse. We identify and remediate a zombie-weight failure mode in which Adam's first-moment tensors resurrect pruned synapses, violating the binary sparsity guarantee. An iterative schedule - prune, fine-tune with gradient masking, recompute criticality, and repeat - eliminates gradient staleness at high sparsity. A KL-divergence temporal analysis identifies a redundant simulation timestep, enabling a free 10% theoretical energy reduction without weight modification. On MNIST (60,000 training examples), CQP yields 95.6% accuracy at 90% sparsity versus 93.4% for magnitude pruning (+2.2 pp). A criticality-threshold sweep reveals an empirical criticality cliff: accuracy falls from 87.0% to 14.4% as the threshold reaches tau = 0.9, constituting a quantitative SNN-level analogue of the Critical Brain Hypothesis. Combined weight sparsification and temporal truncation yield a compound 73% reduction in per-inference energy at 70% sparsity, confirming the practical value of the proposed pipeline for neuromorphic deployment. --- ### Listening Between the Lines: Joint Learning of ASR Embeddings and LLM-Augmented Linguistics for Dementia Detection Authors: Olivier Jiyoun Jung, Jonghyeon Park, Myungwoo Oh Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: eess.AS, cs.AI, cs.LG, q-bio.QM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30675v1 Early detection of dementia through speech analysis offers a non-invasive screening alternative, but capturing both acoustic and linguistic biomarkers remains challenging. We propose a multimodal framework leveraging Whisper for dual-purpose extraction: acoustic representations from encoder outputs and transcripts via automatic speech recognition (ASR). For the acoustic pathway, temporal networks with attention pooling aggregate variable-length sequences into fixed-dimensional embeddings. For the linguistic pathway, we prompt a large language model (LLM) to extract interpretable features spanning lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, semantic coherence, and discourse patterns. A gated fusion network integrates both modalities. On ADReSS and ADReSSo, our method achieves F1-scores of 89.47% and 90.14%, demonstrating effective integration of acoustic and LLM-augmented linguistic features. Ablation shows that multimodal fusion consistently outperforms either modality alone. --- ### FedLAS: Feature-Modulated Bidirectional Label Smoothing for Neural Network Calibration Authors: Thiru Thillai Nadarasar Bahavan, Sachith Seneviratne, Saman Halgamuge Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28654v1 Deep Neural Network (DNN) classifiers suffer from poor calibration when their softmax outputs (predictive confidence) deviate from the empirical likelihoods. This manifests itself as either overconfident incorrect predictions or under-confident correct predictions. Label smoothing (LS) enhances model calibration by introducing entropy regularization during training through redistributing probability mass from the ground-truth label to the remaining classes. LS, including Margin-based LS (MbLS), have restrictive assumptions: they rely on predefined, uniform smoothing rules and only tackle overconfidence. In reality, samples exhibit diverse characteristics, such as difficulty/ambiguity, that interact with the evolving nature of the model being trained. In training, samples may have various degrees of under- or overconfidence. To overcome this, a mechanism that identifies the specific confidence state of each sample and determines the appropriate degree of smoothing in each training step is needed, tailoring the adjustment to the individual sample. We propose FedLAS: Feature-Modulated Bidirectional Label Smoothing, a plug-and-play algorithm for label smoothing-based losses. In FedLAS, we introduce a Feature Norm-based Confidence Indicator (NCI) to control smoothing and a Bidirectional Calibration Gating (BCG) module to detect both over and under-confidence. Our algorithm can be integrated with LS and MbLS based losses when applied to standard DNNs, enhancing performance. Extensive experiments on standard and fine-grained high-resolution vision benchmarks show that FedLAS consistently improves calibration compared to modern baselines, reducing Expected Calibration Error (ECE) and Adaptive ECE while maintaining Top-1 accuracy. Code: github.com/nadarasarbahavan/FEDLAS --- ### Adaptive Iterative Hard Thresholding for Online High-dimensional Quantile Regression Authors: Zitian Zhou, Nan Lin Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28652v1 Online high-dimensional regression requires algorithms that can update sequentially while preserving structural sparsity. We propose \textit{Adaptive Iterative Hard Thresholding (AIHT)}, an online sparse-regression framework that alternates stochastic subgradient updates with adaptively scheduled hard-thresholding steps. The key idea is to separate support discovery from local refinement: early in the learning process, AIHT delays thresholding so that weak but informative coordinates have time to accumulate signal, while later it increases the projection frequency to stabilize the sparse estimator and exploit local curvature. We develop the theory for high-dimensional online quantile regression, a challenging setting in which the loss is nonsmooth and the data may exhibit heterogeneity or heavy-tailed noise. Under restricted curvature and gradient-leakage conditions, AIHT remains in an inflated sparse cone, exhibits a two-phase convergence behavior, and attains logarithmic regret for the sliding-window objective. Simulations for online quantile regression, together with threshold-scheduling ablations, support the proposed mechanism and illustrate its advantage over standard online sparse-learning baselines. --- ### RIPA: Sensory-Vector Prompt Injection Attacks on LLM-Controlled ROS 2 Robots Authors: Nima Dorzhiev Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28649v1 We present RIPA, the first systematic multi-channel empirical study of prompt injection attacks delivered through the sensory pipeline of a ROS 2-based LLM-controlled robotic system. Across 100 independent runs per injection variant on five LLMs spanning four model families and parameter scales from approximately 4B to approximately 284B (DeepSeek-V4-Flash, Llama-3-8B-Instruct-Lite, Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct-Turbo, Qwen 2.5-7B-Instruct-Turbo, Gemma-3n-E4B), we identify model-specific vulnerability profiles that do not follow a monotonic scaling trend: Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct-Turbo exhibits 100% attack success rate (ASR) across all injection variants, while Llama-3-8B-Instruct-Lite and Qwen 2.5-7B-Instruct-Turbo resist direct-override injection (0% ASR), and the smallest model evaluated (Gemma-3n-E4B, approximately 4B) matches the 70B model's vulnerability profile, indicating that robustness is model-specific rather than scale-dependent. We propose a hybrid semantic firewall that achieves 0% ASR against known injection patterns with no false positives on a preliminary benign set (0/20 commands) but exhibits a 10.2% trial-weighted bypass rate (58/570 trials; N equals 30 per payload across 19 obfuscation payloads) against adversarially obfuscated attacks, exposing a critical gap between rule-based and semantic defense layers. We further introduce three sensory injection channels: visual (Channel 1, via OCR), audio (Channel 2, via Whisper STT), and LiDAR sensor context poisoning (Channel 3). We show that Channel 3, which injects fabricated obstacle data into the robot environment-state representation at the LLM system-prompt level, achieves 100% ASR across all variants on DeepSeek-V4-Flash. We also contribute a firewall bypass taxonomy spanning 19 obfuscation payloads across five categories. All code, data, and results are publicly available. --- ### Analysis of Parameter Settings for the Bat Algorithm Using Variance Evolution Authors: Xin-She Yang, Mehmet Karamanoglu Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.NE, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28644v1 Parameter settings in evolutionary algorithms and metaheuristics are important because such parameter values can influence the performance of algorithms under evaluation. For a given algorithm, there are many different numerical experiments to show that the algorithm can work well in practice; however, in most cases there is no theoretical analysis of parameter settings. In this work, we show that theoretical analysis using the theory of dynamical systems and evolution of population variance can give some good results in terms of parameter ranges for the bat algorithm. We also show that results from numerical experiments are consistent with theoretical bounds. Such analyses can provide good insights from different perspectives about the algorithmic characteristics such as variance evolution, transition between exploration and exploitation as well as convergence behaviour. --- ### Obliviate: Erasing Concepts from Autoregressive Image Generation Models Authors: Hossein Shakibania, Jonas Henry Grebe, Tobias Braun, Ege Aktemur, Saleh Aslani, Mehmet Görkem Yiğit, Marcus Rohrbach Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28643v1 The widespread adoption of generative AI models has intensified concerns about misuse, including the creation of unsafe or disturbing imagery. To mitigate such issues, several concept erasure approaches have been proposed to remove harmful content from multimodal generative models. Yet concept erasure for autoregressive image generation remains largely unexplored, despite the growing relevance of these models in recent trends toward unified multimodal architectures. In this work, we fill this gap by introducing Obliviate, a guidance-based concept erasure method for autoregressive image generation. Our method builds on three key design choices: KL-based supervision over visual token distributions, trajectory-level updates over full autoregressive rollouts, and aligned visual prefixes for stable target construction. We evaluate Obliviate on three state-of-the-art autoregressive text-to-image models, Liquid, Emu3-Gen, and Janus-Pro, covering the erasure of explicit content, graphic violence, and branded imagery. Obliviate consistently outperforms current alternatives, reducing nudity on the defensive RAB benchmark from 91.58 to 3.15 while preserving overall model utility. --- ### Algorithmic Unverifiability of Safety for Fixed and Recursively Self-Improving Systems Authors: Jose Pascual Gumbau Mezquita Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.LO, cs.AI, cs.CC, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28639v3 We establish mathematical limits of algorithmic safety verification for Turing-complete self-modifying systems, the class in which recursive self-improvement takes place, both for a fixed system and across its own modification. Statically, no verifier is sound, complete and tractable: over unbounded domains by Rice's and Gödel's theorems, over all finite configurations by Trakhtenbrot's theorem, and over succinctly described finite environments because verifying a policy against an adversary is coNP-complete and synthesising one is PSPACE-complete. Dynamically, we model one step of self-modification as a computable transformation of code and ask whether a safety property survives it. If the transformation depends only on behaviour, this is Rice's theorem one level up; if it reads the code, as self-modification does, the question is no longer semantic, yet the same s-m-n reduction works inside a class of behaviourally identical programs and inherits the halting degree. One step is never harder than the property; persistence along the whole trajectory can be $Π^0_2$-complete. Certification by a total algorithm is possible only for transformations of restricted expressivity, not merely for systems that stop changing. No tower of supervisors helps, and every total supervisor errs on an undecidable set of systems. For effectively pointwise properties, every faithful bounded scheme that certifies on finite behavioural evidence admits evolution traces certified at every stage while the property is violated. What survives is exact: a monitor that raises an alarm on violation semidecides it, and comparison against a frozen reference keeps the full theory. --- ### The Unverifiability of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) Alignment, Static and Dynamic: From Trakhtenbrot's Wall to the Safety-Generality Tension Authors: Jose Pascual Gumbau Mezquita Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.LO, cs.AI, cs.CC, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28639v2 We establish the mathematical limits of AGI safety in two forms: verifying a fixed system, and verifying that a certified safety property persists once the system self-modifies. In the static case, no algorithm can certify a highly expressive AGI's safe behaviour infallibly, completely and tractably, whether over unbounded input domains (blocked by Rice's and Godel's theorems) or over all finite hardware configurations (blocked by Trakhtenbrot's theorem, which splits into a PSPACE-hardness barrier and a co-RE-completeness barrier), forcing a Soundness-Completeness-Tractability Trilemma as a structural, not statistical, necessity. In the dynamic case, we formalise self-modification as a computable transition operator and prove that no algorithm can determine, from a system's current certified safety, whether safety survives its next self-modification step: a result that reduces to Rice's Theorem one level up, making the static and dynamic barriers two faces of one obstruction. This forces an exclusive dichotomy: persistent certification is attainable only for systems that have stopped evolving semantically, i.e. only for narrow, not general, systems. Nor can the obstruction be delegated: any supervisor adequate to audit a general AGI is itself a general AGI, so the supervisory regress never terminates. Three practical risks (finite test coverage, bounded deliberation time, restricted observation) are one phenomenon: every bounded scheme that does not reject correct evidence admits an evolution trace it certifies at every stage while the property is persistently violated. These results give formal content to the unverifiability of AI, showing it is not an engineering target deferred by current limits but a structural tension, an Expressivity Invariant governed by the same computational laws as the Halting Problem and Rice's Theorem. --- ### AEGIR: Modeling Area Emitters for Indoor Inverse Rendering using Gaussian Splatting Authors: Mohamed Shawky Sabae, Philipp Langsteiner, Jan-Niklas Dihlmann, Hendrik Lensch Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28635v2 Inverse rendering requires separating illumination from surface materials, which is highly ambiguous due to their tight coupling in observed images. While Gaussian Splatting is efficient for novel view synthesis, existing relightable methods approximate scene lighting using discrete point lights, global environment maps, or implicit representations. By ignoring the physical spatial extent of real-world emitters, these approaches produce incorrect light attenuation and unrealistic shadows. We present AEGIR (Area Emitters for Gaussian Inverse Rendering), a framework that explicitly models local area emitters within a relightable Gaussian Splatting representation. Joint optimization of emitters, materials, and geometry is challenging due to flexible emitter parameterization, which increases both the number of parameters and the ambiguity between illumination and materials. We address this by introducing a differentiable deferred rendering pipeline that integrates multiple importance sampling with targeted regularization. As a result, AEGIR accurately simulates local light transport and achieves more consistent decomposition. Experiments show that explicit area emitters improve illumination reconstruction and enhance downstream tasks, including novel view synthesis, controlled relighting, and virtual object insertion, particularly in scenes with complex local lighting. --- ### Physics-Grounded Disentangled Flow Modeling for Brain Disease Progression Trajectory Authors: Jun Wang, Peirong Liu Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28630v1 Forecasting longitudinal brain lesion evolution is critical for disease monitoring and treatment planning. Existing approaches typically learn a direct mapping from a baseline image to a future observation, without explicitly modeling the physical mechanisms underlying the lesion progression. Such an entangled modeling of structural deformation and image intensity variation limits physical plausibility, model generalization, and interpretability. To address this, we propose PDF, a Physics-grounded Disentangled Flow matching framework for longitudinal brain disease forecasting. We explicitly decompose the longitudinal modeling of lesion growth into two processes, each learned by a dedicated flow matching network: morphology evolution, which captures lesion growth and structural deformation; and intensity evolution, which models signal changes driven by variations in lesion concentration. To enforce physics-grounded constraints, we introduce a PDE-regularized loss based on lesion growth dynamics, that enforces a diffusion-reaction-advection formulation for morphological evolution. Experiments on three public longitudinal datasets spanning diverse brain diseases demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, validating the effectiveness of the disentangled modeling framework and physics-grounded learning design. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/jhuldr/PDF. --- ### Envisage: Diffusion-Based Rhinoplasty Goal Visualization with Mask-Decomposed Evaluation Authors: Mudit Agarwal, Amit D. Bhrany Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28628v1 Localized generative editing needs localized evaluation: full-image identity metrics are structurally confounded under hard-composited edits. We present Envisage, a FLUX.1-Fill inpainting reference pipeline for rhinoplasty goal visualization from a single frontal photograph. The pipeline combines 8 rhinoplasty clinical presets (the released framework also includes 8 blepharoplasty and 8 rhytidectomy presets), MediaPipe masks, and hard-mask compositing. The composite preserves outside-mask pixels by construction, so full-face identity scores are dominated by copied pixels rather than by the diffusion backbone. Because full-face identity metrics cannot grade localized edits, we introduce SurgicalScore, a mask-decomposed 0-1 protocol scoring edit direction, edit magnitude, masked LPIPS, realism, and outside-mask preservation; SS_raw assigns 0.919 (0.918, 0.920) to a perfect-predictor control , anchoring the ceiling. On N=211, the paired ArcFace gain (output-to-GT minus input-to-GT) is negative for all methods (Envisage -0.048 smallest, vs. ICEdit -0.139, Kontext -0.242, InstructPix2Pix -0.294; p < 1e-4), with external validation on a 457-pair ASPS/PCA corpus showing a larger negative gap. With SurgicalScore, Envisage achieves the highest score (0.599 (0.579, 0.619)) and leads on both metrics, but the all-negative ArcFace gap shows that full-face identity is poorly aligned with localized surgical accuracy under hard compositing. A 5-seed GT-oracle (an upper bound, not a deployable result) reduces the residual ArcFace gap by 73% (-0.054 to -0.015), with positive output-to-GT gain on 33.9% of cases, indicating candidate-space headroom for a learned ranker. For localized edits, progress should be measured with edit-region fidelity rather than full-face identity metrics. We release Envisage, SurgicalScore, preset definitions, and matched split manifests. --- ### SIGNET: Motion-Level Knowledge Transfer for Cross-Language Sign Language Translation Authors: Sobhan Asasi, Ozge Mercanoglu Sincan, Richard Bowden Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28626v1 Sign language translation (SLT) remains challenging due to its high spatio-temporal complexity, long sequences, and the need to model multiple articulators without relying on gloss annotations. Existing approaches are typically tailored to individual datasets or languages and struggle to scale, while overlooking the relationships between sign languages that could inform more effective cross-lingual transfer. We present \textbf{SIGNET}, a framework that enables motion-level knowledge transfer for cross-language sign language translation. Our key insight is that, although sign languages differ in grammar and lexicon, pretrained models capture motion-level visual patterns that can be reused across datasets and languages. \textbf{SIGNET} integrates multiple pretrained sign language backbones through an attention-based, hand-prior aggregation mechanism that guides a gated fusion network in dynamically selecting the most relevant experts. Comprehensive experiments on four benchmarks (How2Sign, Phoenix14T, CSL-Daily, and MeineDGS) demonstrate state-of-the-art translation performance, and \textbf{SIGNET} also surpasses prior methods on WLASL for sign language recognition. --- ### In-Vehicle Digital Twin-Based Collision Warning Framework with Sybil Attack Detection Authors: Mohammad Imtiaz Hasan, Abyad Enan, Jean Michel Tine, Araf Rahman, M Sabbir Salek, Mashrur Chowdhury Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28625v1 Connected Vehicles (CVs) rely extensively on communication technologies to enable data-driven predictive analyses for enhancing performance and safety. These communication channels can be exploited by adversaries to launch cyberattacks such as Sybil attacks, which could threaten both safety-critical and mobility applications, leaving CVs vulnerable and putting human lives at risk. As CV deployment continues to expand, the need to detect and mitigate cyberattacks in real-time becomes increasingly urgent. This study presents an in-vehicle Digital Twin (DT)-based collision warning framework with built-in capabilities for Sybil attacks detection. The framework integrates a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) for learning temporal dependencies in vehicle trajectory data and Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) algorithms for efficient similarity-based classification. Our framework is evaluated on real-world Sybil attack data, collected through field experiments. The framework achieved accuracy, recall, and F1 scores of 0.984, 1.00, and 0.944, respectively, in detecting Sybil-generated fake vehicles. During the safety evaluation, the framework reduced the mean Time Exposed Time-To-Collision (TET) and mean Time Integrated Time-To-Collision (TIT) of near-collision events by 88% and 72%, respectively. Furthermore, real-world feasibility evaluation shows that the framework conformed to the standardized maximum allowable latency for safety applications and operated well within the capacity of modern processors -- demonstrating the promise of an in-vehicle DT-based framework as an attack mitigation mechanism against Sybil attacks for next-generation CVs. --- ### Improving Patient Subtyping on Longitudinal Data using Representations from Mamba-based Architecture Authors: Md Mozaharul Mottalib, Rahmatollah Beheshti Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28623v1 Effective sub-typing (also known as grouping or clustering) of patients using their electronic health record (EHR) data can greatly inform precision medicine efforts. However, subtyping temporal EHR datasets is known to be challenging due to inherent EHR issues, including complexity and irregularity. In this study, we propose a self-supervised Mamba-based model that learns effective EHR representations and enables enhanced patient subtyping. We evaluate the proposed model on public and private real-world EHR datasets to classify the data based on the available labels and subtype patients based on the representations learned from the model. Through an extensive set of experiments, we demonstrate that our model's design choices lead to better performance compared to competitive baseline models for prediction. Moreover, we evaluate several clustering techniques to demonstrate that our findings offer valuable insights into subtyping patients based on temporal records from EHR models\footnote{Our implementations are available at https://github.com/healthylaife/triplet_mamba. --- ### Meshtryoshka: Differentiable Rendering of Real-World Scenes via Mesh Rasterization Authors: David Charatan, Daniel Xu, Richard Szeliski, George Kopanas, Vincent Sitzmann Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28622v2 Differentiable rendering has emerged as a powerful approach for 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis. State-of-the-art differentiable rendering methods combine a variety of custom representations of 3D geometry and appearance with specialized renderers. However, most downstream tasks in computer graphics rely on 3D meshes. While prior work has attempted differentiable rendering with mesh representations, these approaches are limited to object-centric scenes and fail to reconstruct large-scale, unbounded scenes. In this work, we introduce Meshtryoshka, a novel mesh differentiable rendering framework that combines an off-the-shelf triangle rasterizer with a 3D representation that consists of nested mesh shells which resemble a matryoshka doll. In every forward pass, the mesh shells are extracted anew from a 3D signed distance function via iso-surface extraction, and the opacities for each vertex are computed as a function of signed distance. Each mesh shell is then rasterized independently, and the final image is created via alpha compositing. Crucially, mesh vertex positions are updated only indirectly via gradients that flow through the opacity values into the signed distance function, and hence, our method is compatible with off-the-shelf mesh renderers that need not be differentiable with respect to vertex positions. On object-centric scenes, our method performs competitively with surface-based differentiable rendering techniques. Our differentiable mesh rendering method scales to unbounded, real-world 3D scenes, where it yields high-quality novel view synthesis results approaching those of state-of-the-art, non-mesh methods. Our method suggests that it may be possible to solve the differentiable rendering problem without relying on specialized renderers, only using conventional tools from the computer graphics toolbox. --- ### Reproducing FACTER: Fairness via Conformal Thresholding and Prompt Repair Authors: Oscar Miró López-Feliu, Daimy van Loo, Xanthos Kekkos, Mikel Blom, Clara Rus Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.IR, cs.CY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28620v1 Fayyazi et al. (2025) recently proposed FACTER, a model-agnostic framework designed to jointly enforce fairness and statistical coverage in LLM-based recommendation through conformal thresholding and iterative prompt repair. In this work, we conduct a reproducibility study of the FACTER framework across diverse architectures and dataset sparsity levels, evaluating both the original open-ended generation task and a constrained re-ranking extension. Under the strict reproduction, we observe a divergence in recommendation utility, which we trace to underspecified target-set evaluation in the original study. We then use the constrained re-ranking setting to evaluate FACTER when the candidate set is fixed, and introduce a static Fair Zero-Shot baseline to isolate the contribution of the iterative prompt repair loop. Our analysis shows that FACTER consistently reduces adaptive-threshold violation counts, but that these reductions are not consistently reflected under the fixed threshold or in global fairness metrics. In the constrained ranking setting, static fairness instructions achieve comparable semantic-parity outcomes to FACTER's dynamic repair loop, suggesting that the additional online repair mechanism provides limited benefit in this formulation. All code and reproduction artifacts are available at https://github.com/oscar-omlf/facter-repr. --- ### Randomized Exploration for Linear Bandits via Absolute Perturbations Authors: Toshinori Kitamura, Shuai Liu, Csaba Szepesvári Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28616v1 In stochastic linear bandits, the canonical Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithm admits a simple frequentist regret analysis but can be computationally demanding, while Thompson Sampling (TS) is computationally attractive yet typically harder to analyze due to its non-optimistic nature. We propose Absolute Thompson Sampling (ATS), a simple modification of TS that ensures optimism in expectation by replacing the signed exploration noise with its absolute value. This preserves the computational efficiency of TS while avoiding the technically involved anti-concentration arguments common in TS analyses, enabling a simple UCB-style regret analysis. We show that ATS achieves $\tilde{O}(d^{3/2}\sqrt{K})$ regret, matching existing bounds for TS in linear bandits. We further introduce Ensemble Absolute Thompson Sampling (EATS), which takes the maximum over multiple absolute perturbations with normalization by the ensemble size. As the ensemble size grows, EATS converges to the UCB objective, recovering UCB behavior in the limit. Experiments show that moderate ensemble sizes already yield strong performance. Our results point to a bridge between randomized exploration and deterministic optimism both in theory and practice. --- ### What LLMs explain is not what they believe: Evaluating explanation sufficiency under models' own input beliefs Authors: Nhi Nguyen, Shauli Ravfogel, Rajesh Ranganath Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28615v2 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains, where free-text explanations such as chain-of-thought and post-hoc rationales are used to justify model outputs. Yet it remains unclear whether these explanations are sufficient, i.e., if they contain enough information to explain the model's output-generating process. We generalize classical sufficiency from feature attributions to arbitrary explanations and prove that explanation sufficiency can change depending on the input distribution, which must be explicitly defined for LLM explanations. We propose using the LLM itself to generate alternative inputs conditioned on an explanation, capturing its beliefs about possible inputs. We formalize self-consistent sufficiency as a goal for free-text explanations and introduce an information-theoretic metric, SCSuff, that enables evaluation of free-text explanations without relying on predefined biases or shortcuts. Our experiments show that SCSuff agrees with targeted perturbation tests where applicable and demonstrate that explanation sufficiency can vary with the input distribution. We find LLM explanations are generally insufficient and weakly correlated with model size, accuracy, or output entropy. Analysis of final-token hidden states shows that top and bottom SCSuff scores can be predicted from internal representations, suggesting that SCSuff can guide detection and improvement of sufficient LLM explanations. The code for this paper is available at https://github.com/rajesh-lab/self-consistent-sufficiency . --- ### What LLMs explain is not what they believe: Evaluating explanation sufficiency under models' own input beliefs Authors: Nhi Nguyen, Shauli Ravfogel, Rajesh Ranganath Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28615v1 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains, where free-text explanations such as chain-of-thought and post-hoc rationales are used to justify model outputs. Yet it remains unclear whether these explanations are sufficient, i.e., if they contain enough information to explain the model's output-generating process. We generalize classical sufficiency from feature attributions to arbitrary explanations and prove that explanation sufficiency can change depending on the input distribution, which must be explicitly defined for LLM explanations. We propose using the LLM itself to generate alternative inputs conditioned on an explanation, capturing its beliefs about possible inputs. We formalize self-consistent sufficiency as a goal for free-text explanations and introduce an information-theoretic metric, SCSuff, that enables evaluation of free-text explanations without relying on predefined biases or shortcuts. Our experiments show that SCSuff agrees with targeted perturbation tests where applicable and demonstrate that explanation sufficiency can vary with the input distribution. We find LLM explanations are generally insufficient and weakly correlated with model size, accuracy, or output entropy. Analysis of final-token hidden states shows that top and bottom SCSuff scores can be predicted from internal representations, suggesting that SCSuff can guide detection and improvement of sufficient LLM explanations. The code for this paper is available at https://github.com/rajesh-lab/self-consistent-sufficiency . --- ### Fast and Accurate Outlier-Aware LiDAR Super-Resolution for SLAM Applications Authors: Christos Anagnostopoulos, Alexandros Gkillas, Nikos Piperigkos, Aris S. Lalos Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28607v1 This work tackles the challenge of enhancing low-resolution LiDAR sensors for SLAM applications through a novel Deep Unrolling-based Super-Resolution (SR) model. We integrate an outlier removal module to ensure structural integrity while maintaining real-time performance. By leveraging a model-based optimization approach, our method efficiently reconstructs high-resolution point clouds while minimizing computational overhead. The proposed SR model is evaluated within a LiDAR SLAM framework, demonstrating significant improvements in pose estimation accuracy and efficiency compared to state-of-the-art SR methods. --- ### IMU-HOI: A Symbiotic Framework for Coherent Human-Object Interaction and Motion Capture via Contact-Conscious Inertial Fusion Authors: Lizhou Lin, Songpengcheng Xia, Zengyuan Lai, Lan Sun, Jiarui Yang, Ling Pei Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28604v1 Capturing full-body human motion with object interactions is crucial for AR/VR and robotics applications, yet it remains challenging for conventional vision-based methods due to occlusions and constrained capture volumes. Inertial measurement units (IMUs) offer a compelling alternative without line-of-sight requirements, but existing IMU-based motion capture assumes an isolated human and ignores object contacts and dynamics. To bridge this gap, we present IMU-HOI, a novel framework that jointly recovers full-body human pose and 6-DoF object trajectory from sparse IMUs on the body and object, explicitly modeling human-object interaction. Our approach first infers probabilistic hand-object contacts directly from IMU streams and uses them as a high-level signal to route between kinematic and inertial reasoning. These contact cues drive a three-stage fusion pipeline that refines human pose and root translation, and fuses hand-based forward kinematics with object-IMU integration for object motion, yielding coherent, drift-resilient trajectories for both human and object. Experiments on challenging human-object interaction scenarios demonstrate substantial accuracy gains over prior inertial motion capture methods. Moreover, IMU-HOI can be plugged into existing sparse-IMU mocap backbones with minimal changes, effectively extending the scope of purely inertial motion capture from isolated humans to full human-object interaction and joint motion estimation. --- ### Database Context Compression for Text-to-SQL on Real-World Large Databases Authors: Jingwen Liu, Weibin Liao, Xin Gao, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang Published: 2026-06-26 Categories: cs.DB, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28601v1 Recent progress in Text-to-SQL has been driven by stronger language models and prompting strategies, yet performance on real enterprise benchmarks such as Spider 2.0 and BIRD remains far below that on classical academic datasets. We argue that the main bottleneck is no longer reasoning, but database representation. Real databases contain repeated audit columns, large groups of similar tables, opaque identifiers whose meanings are stored only in documentation, and extensive data dictionaries with little query-relevant information. Existing query-aware methods, including schema linking and retrieval-based schema selection, filter this raw context but still operate on redundant and verbose representations. We reformulate the problem as database context compression, a query-agnostic transformation that rewrites schemas, semantic descriptions, and external documentation into a compact representation. We formalize this transformation with the SGCF (Support-Gain Component Factorization) principle, which unifies repeated column extraction, isomorphic table templating, semantic componentization, and evidence purification under a single coverage objective. Based on SGCF, we propose DBCC, a database-side middleware that performs offline structural and semantic compression together with lightweight online evidence purification. DBCC is model-agnostic and can be integrated into existing Text-to-SQL pipelines. On Spider 2.0-Snow and BIRD, DBCC reduces input context by up to two orders of magnitude (from 2.6M to 34.7K tokens on the largest Spider 2.0-Snow subset), improves schema-linking strict recall from 0% to 56.5% under DeepSeek-V3.2 (63.1% under Claude Opus 4.7), and consistently increases end-to-end execution accuracy by 1.8-1.9% over three recent Text-to-SQL systems. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/MrBlankness/SchemaCompression. ---