# Research Papers — 2026-06 · bundle page 77 of 260 > Full-text markdown of papers #3801–3850 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/77 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/76.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/78.md) ### Full-Body Golf Swing Kinematic Reconstruction From a Smartwatch IMU Authors: Yuanshuo Tan, Kezhe Zhu, Xiujie Sun, Chunping Liang, Shuoyang Zhu, Chenquan Xu, Xinda Jia, Licheng Zhong, Huiming Pan, Yinri Jin, Chang Liu, Bo Xiao et al. Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22876v2 Quantitative measurement of the golf swing is critical for evaluating technique and enabling individualized feedback. However, existing methods are impractical to use on the golf course: optical motion capture is laboratory-bound, camera-based methods require impractical camera placement, and multi-sensor inertial measurement unit (IMU) systems require multi-segment setup and calibration. We thus propose a single wrist-worn IMU approach for estimating full-body joint angles during golf swings. The proposed Wrist-IMU Temporal Kinematic Network (WIT-KinNet) combines IMU embedding, feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM), and temporal convolutional encoding. Thirty-six golfers, comprising beginner and skilled players, performed full, half, and quarter swings using seven club types: driver, 3-wood, 5-hybrid, 5-iron, 7-iron, 9-iron, and sand wedge. The proposed WIT-KinNet was evaluated under subject-wise cross-validation using synchronized smartwatch IMU data and ground-truth kinematics derived from an optical motion capture (OMC) system, with OMC-free IMU calibration and IMU-based swing segmentation. The proposed approach achieved a mean absolute error of $8.53\pm2.05^\circ$ across full-body joint angles. High temporal correlation was observed for pelvic rotation and upper torso rotation ($r=0.99$ for both), with X-factor and S-factor also showing strong correlations ($r=0.97$ for both). Linear mixed-effects models of the error revealed that swing amplitude significantly affected estimation error across all five trunk--pelvis variables ($p<0.05$). The results demonstrate the feasibility of full-body golf swing kinematic estimation from a commercial smartwatch, providing a potential solution for post-swing biomechanical analysis. --- ### Full-Body Golf Swing Kinematic Reconstruction From a Smartwatch IMU Authors: Yuanshuo Tan, Kezhe Zhu, Xiujie Sun, Chunping Liang, Shuoyang Zhu, Chenquan Xu, Licheng Zhong, Huiming Pan, Yinri Jin, Chang Liu, Bo Xiao, Shenglong Le et al. Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22876v1 Quantitative measurement of the golf swing is critical for evaluating technique and enabling individualized feedback. However, existing methods are impractical to use on the golf course: optical motion capture is laboratory-bound, camera-based methods require impractical camera placement, and multi-sensor inertial measurement unit (IMU) systems require multi-segment setup and calibration. We thus propose a single wrist-worn IMU approach for estimating full-body joint angles during golf swings. The proposed Wrist-IMU Temporal Kinematic Network (WIT-KinNet) leverages modality-specific IMU embeddings and temporal kinematic encoding to learn wrist-to-body motion dependencies and estimate full-body joint angles during golf swings. Thirty-six golfers spanning beginner and skilled players, performed full, half, and quarter swings using seven club types: driver, 3-wood, 5-hybrid, 5-iron, 7-iron, 9-iron, and sand wedge. The proposed WIT-KinNet was evaluated under subject-wise cross-validation using synchronized smartwatch IMU data and ground-truth kinematics derived from an optical motion capture system. The proposed approach achieved a mean absolute error of 8.11 $\pm$ 1.84$^\circ$ across full-body joint angles. High temporal correlation was observed for pelvic rotation and upper torso rotation (r = 0.98 and 0.97, respectively), with X-factor and S-factor also showing strong correlation (r = 0.96 and 0.96). Linear mixed-effects models of the error revealed that swing amplitude, skill level, and club type all significantly affected measurement differences (p $<$ 0.05). The results establish the first single wrist-worn IMU approach for estimating full-body golf swing kinematics, enabling practical swing analysis during real gameplay. --- ### FedOT: Ownership Verification and Leakage Tracing via Watermarks for Federated LDMs Authors: Wenlong Cheng, Yuan Gan, Yunqiu Xu, Jiaxu Miao Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22875v1 Training Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) within Federated Learning (FL) has attracted increasing attention due to its ability to combine the powerful generative capacity of LDMs with the privacy-preserving properties of FL. However, FL requires sharing the global model with multiple participants, which risks unauthorized model distribution or resale by malicious clients. While an intuitive approach is to adopt existing VAE-based watermarking techniques for LDMs in FL, this strategy falls short in addressing such threats due to two fundamental challenges: (1) Existing methods support ownership verification but lack the ability to trace model leakage to a specific malicious client; (2) VAE-based watermarks are vulnerable, as they can be removed simply by replacing the decoder with a clean counterpart. In this paper, we propose FedOT, the first framework for ownership verification and leakage tracing in federated LDMs. Specifically, to address the first challenge, we design a chunked watermark, where the first part is for ownership verification, and the second part is used for client identification. Furthermore, to overcome the second challenge and secure the model against VAE replacement attack, we introduce Latent Vector Transformation (LVT), which strengthens the connection between the VAE and U-Net latent spaces by modifying the original latent distribution of the VAE. Consequently, any attempt to replace the VAE for watermark removal leads to significant image quality degradation, making the LDM model unusable. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedOT achieves superior performance in both ownership verification and traceability. Project page: https://spyzixuan.github.io/FedOT/. --- ### SpotAttention: Plug-In Block-Sparse Routing for Pretrained Long-Context Transformers Authors: Huzama Ahmad, Se-Young Yun Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22874v1 Long contexts have become standard in pretrained LLMs, yet they remain expensive to run: prefill compute grows quadratically with sequence length, and every decode step re-reads a key-value cache that grows linearly with it. Sparse attention cuts these costs by attending only to a relevant subset of past tokens, but selecting that subset is itself expensive. We present SpotAttention, a lightweight selector that attaches to a frozen pretrained transformer and learns by KL distillation to estimate its attention distribution. The selector picks the top-K keys each query attends to, and because its estimate is a calibrated distribution, a dual top-p rule reads the per-query, per-layer budget directly from it. Across Qwen3 (dense, 4B-32B) and Qwen3.5 (hybrid linear/full attention, 4B-9B), SpotAttention matches dense accuracy at contexts up to 128K tokens, eight times the training length. Decode at L=128K runs 3.9x faster than FlashAttention and 1.8x faster than Twilight, the strongest training-free baseline. Quantizing the selector's K-cache to INT4 or FP4 microscale shrinks it 3.5x at no accuracy cost. --- ### SingGuard: A Policy-Adaptive Multimodal LLM Guardrail with Dynamic Reasoning Authors: SingGuard Team Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22873v3 Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in consumer, medical, financial, and enterprise applications. This broad deployment expands the safety surface: risks can arise from multimodal question answering, assistant responses, and cross-modal composition, while moderation policies may vary across products, regions, and deployment stages. Most existing guardrails either rely on fixed taxonomies or target only a narrow set of interaction settings, which limits their adaptability when safety rules change at deployment time. We present \textbf{SingGuard}, a policy-adaptive multimodal guardrail model family for safety assessment in multimodal conversations. SingGuard treats the active policy as a runtime input: given natural-language rules, it checks the target content against the active policy rule by rule and predicts both the safety label and the triggered rule. To balance efficiency and interpretability, SingGuard supports fast, hybrid, and slow inference regimes along a fast-to-slow reasoning spectrum, ranging from direct safety judgments to policy-grounded deliberation. We further optimize this behavior with fast--slow decoupled reinforcement learning. We also introduce \textbf{SingGuard-Bench}, a multimodal guardrail benchmark with 56{,}340 examples spanning 80+ fine-grained risk types across multimodal QA, adversarial attack, and dynamic-rule evaluation settings, including cross-modal joint-risk cases where each modality is harmless in isolation but their composition implies unsafe intent. Across six benchmark families (35 datasets), SingGuard achieves state-of-the-art average F1 in every family. Dynamic-rule evaluation further shows improved policy-following accuracy from 0.6465 to 0.7415 under runtime policy shifts. Our code is available at https://github.com/inclusionAI/Sing-Guard. --- ### Fursee: Hybrid YOLO-DINOv3 Framework for Fursuit Identity Retrieval and Clustering Authors: Jundi Wu Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22872v1 Global furry conventions produce massive fursuit photographs, while manual sorting brings heavy labor costs and calls for automatic identity retrieval and clustering solutions. General multimodal models lack dedicated optimization for complex fursuit scenes, and no public benchmark dataset exists for this task. To fill this gap, we build a specialized fursuit image dataset and present a three-stage hybrid pipeline Fursee for fursuit identity retrieval and clustering. First, YOLO detects and crops high-resolution fursuit head patches to improve localization of small and overlapping targets. Second, ArcFace optimizes DINOv3 embeddings to enlarge angular separation between different identities on the feature hypersphere. Third, DBSCAN performs unsupervised clustering, with silhouette-coefficient-driven search automatically selecting optimal hyperparameters rather than fixed manual radius. Retrieval and clustering experiments verify that our pipeline outperforms mainstream multimodal models including GPT5.5, Claude Opus 4.8 and Qwen3.7-Plus on all evaluation metrics, achieving competitive performance for fursuit head retrieval and grouping. --- ### VideoLatent: Video-Language Learning via Latent Self-Forcing Authors: Zi-Yuan Hu, Zicong Tang, Shijia Huang, Yanyang Li, Michael R. Lyu, Liwei Wang Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22870v1 Recent advancements in chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning have shown promise in enhancing video understanding and reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing CoT-based MLLMs require labor-intensive CoT annotations and incur substantial training and inference overhead. While visual latent reasoning has emerged as a more efficient alternative, existing methods primarily focus on image tasks and heavily rely on additional supervision signals for visual latent generation (e.g., CoT traces, auxiliary images, or fine-grained annotations), limiting their scalability and transferability to video tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce VideoLatent, a novel MLLM equipped with a latent injection module tailored for video understanding and reasoning. Specifically, VideoLatent learns to perform visual latent reasoning using a new latent self-forcing training paradigm, which comprises latent alignment and latent diversity objectives, and relies solely on standard video-question-answer triplets. Extensive experiments across 14 benchmarks demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms existing standard and latent MLLMs on general video understanding and complex video reasoning. Compared with Video-R1, our VideoLatent achieves superior computational efficiency, reducing training/inference overhead by $\sim$6$\times$/$\sim$68$\times$. Moreover, experiments demonstrate that our method has strong generalizability to different MLLM backbones and different model scales. --- ### Tensor Train Decomposition-based 3D Implicit Full Waveform Inversion with Multi-scale Structural Similarity Authors: Liangsheng He, Chao Song, Tiansheng Chen, Tao Liu, Cai Liu Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: physics.geo-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22867v1 Three-dimensional full waveform inversion (3DFWI) is a powerful technique for reconstructing high-resolution subsurface velocity models. However, its application is often limited by high memory requirements, computational costs, and sensitivity to cycle skipping. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel tensor train (TT) decomposition-based 3D implicit full waveform inversion framework (TT-3DIFWI) combined with a multi-scale structural similarity (M-SSIM) objective function. In this framework, the 3D velocity model is represented by TT decomposition as a product of a series of low-rank core tensors. Then, three axis-specific implicit neural network representations (INR) based on one-dimensional vector coordinates as input are constructed to predict these core tensors, rather than directly predicting the velocity model. This INR reparameterization method based on TT decomposition can significantly reduce the memory consumption of INR training while maintaining the accuracy and resolution of the 3D velocity model reconstruction. Meanwhile, the low-rank structure of TT decomposition also ensures the structural consistency of the reconstruction velocity, thereby improving the accuracy and continuity of the inversion result. Furthermore, the M-SSIM objective function can compare the multi-scale structural differences between predicted and observed data, and utilize the ultra-low frequency features to reduce cycle skipping. Numerical experiments on synthetic and challenging land datasets demonstrate that TT-3DIFWI with M-SSIM achieves accurate and continuous velocity reconstruction, even with poor initial models or missing low-frequency data. --- ### Discovering Crystal Structure Prediction Algorithms with an AI Co-Scientist Authors: Kiyoung Seong, Nayoung Kim, Sungsoo Ahn Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22866v1 We introduce Human-AI Co-discovery system (HACO) for scientific algorithm discovery through cross-domain search and sparse human steering. Starting from the goal of generating crystal structures from chemical compositions, HACO searched across generative modeling methodologies from multiple fields and identified MaskGIT, a masked generative model from vision, as a promising framework for crystal structure prediction (CSP). HACO instantiated this masked formulation as a discrete token model of crystal structure; guided by sparse high-level human objectives, it then added crystallographic symmetry tokens, space group stratified sampling for polymorph coverage, and sub-bin coordinate refinement, yielding the Masked Generative Crystal Transformer (MaskGXT). On the MP-20 polymorph split, MaskGXT reaches 79.06% match-everyone-to-reference (METRe) accuracy, compared with 70.87% for the strongest evaluated baseline. MaskGXT also attains the best match rate on standard MP-20 and MPTS-52 CSP benchmarks. These results provide evidence that, in domains offering cheap, fast, and well-aligned validation, transfer-guided interactive AI co-scientists can contribute to scientific algorithm discovery by identifying transferable modeling principles and combining them with targeted human domain guidance. --- ### When AUC 0.998 Is Not Enough: A Candidate Evaluation Protocol for Hidden-State Probes of Indirect Prompt Injection in Multimodal Computer-Use Agents Authors: Yanhang Li, Zhichao Fan, Zexin Zhuang Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22864v1 Hidden-state probing -- a linear classifier on a frozen vision-language model's internal activations -- has emerged as an attractive evaluation tool for flagging indirect prompt injection (IPI) in multimodal computer-use agents before the agent emits a corrupted action. We argue, on a single-backbone cautionary case study (Qwen2.5-VL-7B on Mind2Web, teacher-forced replay), that a high probing AUC on a clean-vs-attack split is not, on its own, evidence of malicious-content detection. Two post-hoc diagnostics -- a paired-construction scalar baseline on text-side injections, and same-step nuisance-matched visual controls on the overlay surface -- do not license an unqualified malicious-content interpretation of the headline while leaving room for partly-semantic readings. We package the diagnostics as a candidate control set with reporting heuristics for what a high clean-vs-attack AUC does and does not license. Labels are injection-surface-present, not attack success; generalisation beyond this backbone and benchmark is a conjecture. --- ### Chains That See, Answers That Don't: A Multi-Aspect Evaluation Recipe for Forced Chain-of-Thought on Video-MME Authors: Zhichao Fan, Yanhang Li, Zexin Zhuang Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22862v1 Forced chain-of-thought (CoT) is widely assumed to make vision-language models more reliable on video question answering. We propose a small three-probe evaluation recipe to test that assumption: paired accuracy across direct, CoT, answer-first, and no-video conditions; a counterfactual video-swap diagnostic over the CoT chains; and a four-rung visual-degradation ladder. Each probe is reported under both a strict and a permissive regex scorer, with multiplicity correction over a manuscript-declared primary family. Applied to Qwen2.5-VL on Video-MME subsets, the recipe returns a two-part finding. The CoT chains are strongly video-conditioned: swapping the input video collapses chain overlap and flips most final letters, the opposite of what a "boilerplate-chain" null would predict. Yet on the same data, forced CoT does not improve MCQ accuracy, and on the smaller 7B model it produces a small but statistically supported drop under a post-hoc primary scorer choice. We do not claim this generalizes beyond the Qwen2.5-VL / Video-MME instantiation; the raw responses and a single recomputation script will be released with the supplementary material so every number can be re-derived. --- ### AI Scientists as Engines of Discovery: A Case for Development within Reformed Institutions Authors: Raul Jimenez, Boris Bolliet, Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro, Rabih Zbib, Benjamin Wandelt, David N. Spergel, Thomas Meier, Jessica Montgomery, Hana Aliee, Licia Verde Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.AI, astro-ph.IM, physics.soc-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22859v1 Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems are beginning to assist, accelerate, and partially automate scientific discovery, performing tasks that span literature synthesis, code generation, data analysis, hypothesis proposal, and model criticism. We argue that this transition is qualitative rather than incremental, and that suitably designed multi-agent systems may evolve from passive computational tools into ``AI scientists'' that can expand the hypothesis-generating and verification capacity of science. Such systems must be developed and deployed within a scientific ecosystem fit for purpose: institutions must be redesigned for verification, accountability, interpretability, and dual-use safety. We sketch how multi-agent architectures, illustrated by the prototype framework \textit{Denario}, accelerate the discovery cycle and traverse model spaces beyond human reach; examine what this implies for authorship, peer review, and the enduring role of human scientists; and close with recommendations for governing AI as an epistemic actor rather than a mere instrument. --- ### The Unseen Hand: Manipulating Model Fairness and SHAP with Targeted Identity Re-Association Attacks Authors: Sannaan Khan, Muhammad U. S. Khan Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22858v1 As machine learning models grow more influential and opaque, algorithmic fairness and explainability are critical for ensuring accountability. However, we demonstrate that these auditing mechanisms are themselves vulnerable to subtle manipulation, camouflaging the influence of protected features. While prior work on data-agnostic attacks has exposed this vulnerability, they leave behind detectable artifacts that compromise their stealth. We introduce Targeted Identity Re-Association (TIRA) attacks, a novel family of attacks that iteratively and probabilistically manipulate a model's outputs without requiring access to the model's internals or feature representations. We formalize two algorithms: Probabilistic Micro-Shuffling (PMiS), which applies localized adjacent swaps, and Probabilistic Rank-Shift Micro-Perturbation (PRSMP), which introduces small, randomized rank shifts. We empirically demonstrate that TIRA attacks are highly effective at pushing fairness metrics towards ideal values. Crucially, TIRA attacks successfully confound SHAP-based explanations, leaving effectively zero residual attribution for protected features, a major improvement over prior work. --- ### G-MASt3R-SfM: Graph-based View Pruning and Multi-stage Optimization for Robust SfM Authors: Toshiki Watanabe, Shintaro Ito, Natsuki Takama, Koichi Ito, Takafumi Aoki Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22856v1 Structure from Motion (SfM) is essential for multi-view 3D reconstruction, however, its accuracy heavily relies on the accuracy of image matching. While the recent correspondence matching method, MASt3R, enables robust matching even under challenging conditions, it tends to generate incorrect correspondences for non-overlapping image pairs. Consequently, existing SfM methods using MASt3R, such as MASt3R-SfM, suffer from significant degradation in pose estimation accuracy as they incorporate these unreliable matches directly into optimization. To address this issue, we propose G-MASt3R-SfM, a novel SfM pipeline that enhances robustness through two key modules. First, the Graph-based View Pruning (GVP) module constructs a scene graph from matching confidence and geometrically prunes outlier views. Second, the Multi-Stage Optimization (MSO) module progressively refines camera parameters by expanding the optimization scope from local consistency to the global consistency. Experiments on the ETH3D dataset demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in both camera pose estimation and 3D reconstruction, effectively suppressing noise caused by outliers. --- ### RaMem: Contextual Reinstatement for Long-term Agentic Memory Authors: Wei Yang, Bryce Kan, Shixuan Li, Li Li, Yuehan Qin, Jiate Li, Paul Bogdan, Jesse Thomason Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22844v1 Long-term memory has become increasingly important for LLM agents that operate across extended interactions and evolving task contexts. Recent memory systems have made past experiences more persistent, compact, and retrievable, but retrieval alone does not ensure that a memory provides valid evidence for the current query. When experiences are compressed into reusable fragments, memories from different situations may appear equally relevant if they involve recurring entities or user states. We refer to this failure as context collapse: memories lose the surrounding context needed to judge whether they provide valid evidence for the current query. To address this problem, we propose Contextual Reinstatement for Agentic Memory (RaMem), a framework that turns retrieved memory fragments into contextually verifiable evidence. RaMem operates through four coordinated stages: (i) evidence anchoring grounds each memory in its original episodic conditions, especially event time, mention time, session span, and participants; (ii) recall condition induction derives the evidence conditions implied by the query; (iii) validity-aware retrieval uses these conditions to prioritize context-compatible memories while retaining content-relevant candidates as fallback evidence; and (iv) context-preserved synthesis keeps the selected memories' structured context available to the generator. Experiments on long-term memory benchmarks show that RaMem consistently improves performance over strong memory baselines, with average F1 gains of more than 10% across several backbones. --- ### IndicGuard: A Multilingual Safety Guard Model and Dataset for Indic Languages Authors: Parth Bramhecha, Smit Deshmukh, Sairaj Bodhale, Adwait Borate, Raviraj Joshi Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22841v1 As Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve widespread integration across diverse linguistic landscapes, ensuring their safety and alignment with regional normative values remains a critical challenge. Current safety mechanisms are predominantly optimized for English-centric frameworks, often failing to capture the unique socio-cultural sensitivities and localized categories of harm inherent to the Indic region. To address this gap, we introduce IndicGuard, a multilingual safety guard model and dataset for Indic languages. We construct a high-volume, culturally nuanced safety dataset encompassing ten major Indic languages, systematically curated to capture regional harms, sensitive socio-political contexts, and adversarial jailbreaks. Leveraging this corpus, we fine-tune a 4B-parameter instruction-tuned model based on Gemma-3-4B-IT to serve as a multilingual safety guardrail for real-time content moderation and policy compliance checking. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that IndicGuard significantly enhances LLM robustness against localized vulnerabilities, achieving high moderation consistency across different conversational turns. Crucially, IndicGuard consistently outperforms the existing baseline model, CultureGuard, across evaluated languages. Finally, we demonstrate that our model effectively generalizes to low-resource Indic languages excluded from training, substantiating the structural robustness and cross-lingual transfer capabilities of the framework. --- ### RLM-Cascade: Response-Level Speculative Decoding for Cost-Efficient LLM API Serving Authors: Haifeng Wu, Srinivasan Manoharan, Fangbo Tu, Junhua Zhao, Jian Wan Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22840v1 We present RLM-Cascade, a proxy-layer system that applies speculative decoding at the response level to reduce LLM API costs without requiring model architecture access or a shared vocabulary. A fast, inexpensive draft model generates a candidate response; a capable verify model accepts, enhances, or is bypassed entirely depending on a lightweight complexity router. On a real-world agentic coding workload (Claude Code), RLM-Cascade achieves a draft-use rate of 88.8% across 125 production requests, reducing API cost by 45.8% relative to a direct Opus baseline. Counter-intuitively, the proxy also reduces end-to-end latency: median response time is 2,026 ms versus 3,698 ms for Native Opus -- a 1.83X speedup at p50 -- because the SKIPPED path (DeepSeek only, no Opus call) dominates the workload distribution. Quality matches or exceeds the Opus baseline: 100% pass rate on a 20-task Code/Math/Instruct benchmark versus 95% for Native Opus. We further describe a rule-based complexity router that selects the SKIPPED path for simple agentic turns and a hybrid tool-call strategy that bypasses the speculative pipeline for schema-critical tool-selection turns. RLM-Cascade is deployed in production as an enterprise AI infrastructure component and published as open source with a live metrics dashboard and Prometheus endpoint. --- ### CLIP-guided Diffusion Model for Backdoor Generation in Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition Authors: Toby Briston, Illya Kosyk, Kuniyih S Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22837v1 Sensors are critical components of modern intelligent devices. The proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable mobile devices has enabled the integration of such sensors to monitor the environment and enable users to take predictive actions. Human activity recognition (HAR) is a popular application in which Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)-based sensors, such as accelerometers and gyroscopes, are used to provide insights into health, training, and medical diagnosis. However, the accuracy of such a model is hindered by the lack of data. The diffusion model-based technique has proven successful in generating synthetic data for training HAR models. In this paper, we propose a backdoor training technique, IMU-DM-CLIP, that leverages a diffusion model to enable trigger-based attacks on HAR models. Our empirical analysis shows that the attack is successful even with a very small backdoor injection rate of 10\% and 10\% of the data guided for the diffusion model. --- ### OrthoMotion:Disentangling Camera and Subject Motion via Geometry Semantics Orthogonal Attention Authors: Zijie Meng Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22835v1 Controllable video generation demands independent command of the camera and the subject, yet 2D conditioning entangles them: camera- and object-induced optical flow share the same inverse-depth (1/Z) scaling and cannot be separated from image evidence alone. We first prove that this entanglement is representational, not architectural -- the 2D camera/object split is a non-identifiable inverse problem -- and therefore reframe decoupling as a question of operator design. We resolve it at the level of the attention operator. OrthoMotion routes camera motion into a geometric channel, a norm-preserving rotation of the rotary position embedding (RoPE) phase, and subject motion into a semantic channel, a gated value injection in cross-attention. Because these sub-operators are algebraically complementary -- a rotation versus a translation of the affine action on tokens -- a lightweight decoupling regularizer provably drives their response subspaces to orthogonality, so the two controls stop interfering. To our knowledge OrthoMotion is the first method to guarantee disentanglement by construction rather than hope for it to emerge. It attains state-of-the-art camera and subject accuracy at once while minimizing cross-talk, which we quantify with a new Cross-Talk Error (CTE) metric, cutting cross-talk by more than 2.4x with no loss in fidelity and generalizing across backbones. --- ### Homographic Navigation: Geometry-Driven Camera Guidance for Deterministic Planar Capture Authors: Dominik Kroupa, Marek Vaško, Muh Yuzril Ihza Baharuddin, Adam Herout Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22834v1 We present homographic navigation, a geometry-centric framework for guiding camera acquisition toward precise capture of planar regions. Rather than treating homography as an output, we use it as an organizing variable that unifies learning, alignment, and evaluation. From a single annotated reference image, we generate unlimited synthetic training data via homographic augmentation and train a single-shot model for joint recognition and localization of multiple artifacts (physical objects with a rectangular planar target) through sparse keypoint prediction. To address precision under limited model input resolution, we introduce a two-pass inference scheme with global detection followed by localized refinement, and a Stable Warp training strategy that significantly improves accuracy, particularly in the high-precision regime. The model also predicts confidence estimates per predicted keypoint and per the whole sample. Experimental results demonstrate that accurate planar alignment can be achieved from minimal supervision, providing a foundation for geometry-driven camera guidance and future learning from in-the-wild video data. --- ### Learning-Augmented Algorithms for Online Vertex Cover Authors: Tianhang Lu, Runtian Ren, Shengcai Liu Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22831v2 This paper studies learning-augmented online weighted vertex cover with local advice and a tradeoff parameter $λ\in (0,1)$. We consider two graph settings: bipartite graphs and general graphs. In both settings, the online algorithm must maintain a feasible vertex cover under irrevocable decisions. We show that these problems admit the same robustness--consistency tradeoffs as learning-augmented ski rental. For the bipartite graph model, we give a randomized algorithm that is $\frac{1}{1-e^{-λ}}$-robust and $\fracλ{1-e^{-λ}}$-consistent. For the general graph model, we give a deterministic algorithm that is $(1+\frac{1}λ)$-robust and $(1+λ)$-consistent. We prove that the tradeoffs above are optimal in both settings. We also validate the proposed algorithms through experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets. --- ### Finding the Evidence: Discovering Decision-Supporting Tokens for On-Policy Reasoning Distillation Authors: Jinwei Xiao, Zhuowen Han, Yueqing Sun, Zhengxi Lu, Yuxin Liu, Zhiyuan Yao, Wentao Chen, Qi Gu, Xunliang Cai Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22830v1 On-policy distillation transfers reasoning ability through dense token-level supervision, yet the nature of the transferable signal remains unclear. We discover that reasoning chains contain two types of knowledge that require different discovery mechanisms: decisions (where to branch), which surface through student uncertainty, and evidence (intermediate steps that justify decisions), which hides in positions where the student is confident yet wrong. Current methods capture only decisions; the substantive knowledge in evidence tokens remains untransferred. We propose DEAR(Decision-Evidence Aware Reasoning Distillation), which first identifies decisions via student entropy, then discovers their supporting evidence through hidden-state cosine similarity to decision anchors, boosted by teacher-student divergence to prioritize the largest knowledge gaps. Across three student-teacher configurations on math and code benchmarks, DEAR consistently outperforms standard OPD, with up to +2.5pp on competition math and +5.7pp on code generation. --- ### DBT-Bleed: Dual-Branch Temporal Modeling with Key-Frame Selection for Surgical Bleeding Detection Authors: Sudhanshu Mishra, Jialang Xu, Jensen Ang, Evangelos B. Mazomenos, Beng Ti Ang, Yueming Jin Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22829v1 Intraoperative Adverse Events (IAEs) detection is critical for improving surgical safety, with bleeding being among the most frequent events across many surgery types. Existing methods struggle to distinguish bleeding IAE from visually similar residual blood due to limited temporal reasoning. Moreover, modeling long surgical videos while preserving fine-grained temporal dynamics remains computationally challenging. We propose DBT-Bleed, a dual-branch multi-scale temporal modeling framework disentangling bleeding and normal representations using layer-wise temporal adapters for short- and long-term bleeding progression. To efficiently process long surgical videos without sacrificing fine-grained temporal information, we introduce HiRED, a Hierarchical Entropy-Driven frame selection strategy that retains temporally informative segments while removing redundancy. Experiments on the MultiBypass dataset demonstrate gains of 6.53% in F1, 5.62% in Recall and 9% in MCC values for bleeding IAE detection, consistently outperforming video-level baselines. Additionally, we evaluate cross-procedure generalization on a newly curated dataset from a different surgical procedure type, where DBT-Bleed demonstrates robust transferability by achieving gain of 6% in F1 and 8% in MCC under zero-shot setting. To support this evaluation, we introduce EndoPit-IAE, an Endonasal Pituitary Surgery dataset annotated for IAEs, representing the first IAE-annotated dataset in neurosurgery. Code will be made publicly available upon acceptance. --- ### MINCE: Shrinking LLM Evaluation Datasets via Few-Model Monte Carlo Calibration Authors: Devleena Das, Rajeev Patwari, Vikram Kumar Bukka, Nithin Kumar Guggilla, Elliott Delaye, Ashish Sirasao Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22826v1 Evaluating LLMs across many model variants -- quantized, fine-tuned, or deployment-specific -- requires running large benchmarks repeatedly, a process that can take tens of hours per model on edge hardware such as NPUs. Existing subset selection methods reduce this cost but depend on large calibration pools or learned prediction layers. We introduce MINCE (Monte Carlo Informed N-sizing for Compact Evaluation), which uses Monte Carlo simulation over per-item logs from a small set of calibration models to find the minimum subset size that bounds accuracy drift and then fixes a randomly sampled subset at that size, with no prediction layer needed. MINCE reduces IFEVAL by 54\%, MMLU by 89\%, and GSM8K by 70\% with maximum drift $\leq$2.62\,pp on BF16 models and mean drift of 0.77--3.59\,pp on held-out NPU models, while delivering median GPU evaluation speedups of 2.7--8.1$\times$ and NPU evaluation speedups of 1.7--2.0$\times$. The method is robust to calibration pool size and achieves lower drift than tinyBenchmarks (12$\times$ lower on MMLU, 3.3$\times$ on GSM8K) while using 57$\times$ fewer calibration models. --- ### BranchShine: Compact Raw-Audio-to-IPA Transcription with a RoPE E-Branchformer Encoder Authors: Nikhil Navas, Sergio Chevtchenko, Talisson Damiao, Saeed Afshar Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22824v1 Speech-to-IPA transcription is useful when the desired output is pronunciation rather than orthographic text, but competitive multilingual systems are often large and evaluation is sensitive to normalization choices. This paper presents BranchShine, a 33M-parameter raw-audio CTC recognizer with a lightweight convolutional front end and a 19-block RoPE E-Branchformer encoder. We find that BranchShine provides a compact and competitive operating point for IPA transcription under matched normalization and scoring. On a 16,660-utterance multilingual test set covering 41 language labels, BranchShine obtains 9.19% whitespace-insensitive IPA character error rate, compared with 9.78% for the 575.00M-parameter PhoneticXEUS baseline. A secondary child speech reading analysis shows a complementary operating profile: BranchShine is more conservative on incorrect readings, while Whisper-Medium is stronger on exact acceptance of correct readings. Overall, the results indicate that a compact raw-audio-to-IPA model can approach much larger baselines on character-level IPA transcription. --- ### Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Learning for Enzyme-Substrate Interaction Prediction Under Low-Homology Shift Authors: Chen Liu, Bingxin Zhou, Xinyuan Wang, Ming Li, Guisheng Fan, Liang Hong Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG, q-bio.QM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22823v1 Enzyme substrate interaction (ESI) prediction is a fundamental computational task for biocatalyst discovery and reaction screening in large biochemical spaces. In practical settings, ESI prediction is challenged by sparse positive supervision and low-homology distribution shift, where test enzymes share limited sequence identity with those observed during training. To address these challenges, we propose RAMMESI, a retrieval-augmented multimodal framework for robust ESI prediction. RAMMESI learns explicit pairwise enzyme-substrate representations through directional cross-modal interaction modeling and adaptive fusion. To enhance robustness, RAMMESI retrieves neighboring enzymes at inference time, recombines them with the query substrate, and aggregates the resulting pairwise predictions as contextual evidence. To improve learning under sparse positive supervision, we further adopt an imbalance-aware weighted-BCE objective. Experiments on two ESI benchmarks under sequence-identity-aware splits demonstrate that RAMMESI achieves consistently strong performance, with particular advantages in more challenging low-identity regimes. In addition, the retrieval module improves multiple ESI backbones in a plug-and-play manner, suggesting that retrieval provides a general mechanism for improving robustness under homology shift. --- ### Active Inference as the Test-Time Scaling Law for Physical AI Agents Authors: Omar Hashash, Christo Kurisummoottil Thomas, Walid Saad, Merouane Debbah, Karl Friston, Adeel Razi Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22813v1 In this paper, a novel test-time scaling law for physical artificial intelligence (AI) agents is introduced. This scaling law enables physical AI agents to reason with their world models to generalize in unforeseen scenarios at test time. The derived scaling law is grounded in the first principle of active inference, which equips agents with the general objective to survive in the real world, under which their specific task objectives are subsumed. Active inference achieves this by providing the reasoning to resolve prediction errors that arise when the agent encounters unforeseen situations outside its training distribution, enabling generalization in non-stationary environments. The proposed scaling law captures this by dynamically updating the agent's policy with this reasoning at test time. This policy update is modeled as a soft Bayesian inference process in which beliefs about the policy are updated using the reasoning that reduces expected prediction errors under allowable policies as a likelihood. The resulting posterior policy admits a biological interpretation, recovering the scaling mechanism that engages the brain's basal ganglia and prefrontal cortex at test time. To solve this analytically intractable problem, a variational inference solution minimizing free energy bounds is developed. This solution extends to enable learning beyond training by reinforcing new instances, resolved at test time, in both the policy and world model. Unlike existing scaling laws constrained by model size and training data, the derived solution scales with the continuous real-world experience of a physical AI agent. Simulation results on an autonomous driving task demonstrate that the proposed solution outperforms model-free Q-learning and model-based Bayesian reinforcement learning, achieving robust generalization to unforeseen scenarios while improving inference efficiency by over 36%. --- ### Bagpiper-TTS: Natural Language Guided Universal Speech Synthesis Authors: Jinchuan Tian, Haoran Wang, Siddhant Arora, Takashi Maekaku, Keita Goto, Jin Sakuma, Yusuke Shinohara, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Shinji Watanabe Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22811v1 Classical TTS systems typically rely on rigid input formats and predefined metadata slots, limiting their ability to fulfill flexible user requirements. This paper introduces Bagpiper-TTS, a universal speech synthesis system that deals with diverse natural language user requests. Given a natural language prompt, Bagpiper-TTS first reasons over the users' intent to derive a rich caption, i.e., a comprehensive textual blueprint encompassing both transcription and nuanced metadata. Subsequently, this caption guides the synthesis of the target speech. Our model inherently supports a broad spectrum of tasks besides classical TTS applications, including multi-talker, intent-to-speech, role-play synthesis, singing voice synthesis, and more. Experimental results demonstrate that Bagpiper-TTS achieves an 1.7% Word Error Rate (WER) on the Seed-TTS-Eval benchmark and match the performance of dedicated models in both LLM-as-a-judge and human subjective evaluations across multiple applications. --- ### AI-Assisted Help-Seeking Trajectories in Programming Education from an SRL-Informed Perspective Authors: Boxuan Ma, Huiyong Li, Gen Li, Li Chen, Atsushi Shimada, Shin'ichi Konomi Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22809v1 Generative AI tools provide novice programmers with instant, personalized support, but also raise concerns about whether AI use supports or bypasses students' regulation of problem-solving. Existing work has largely focused on correctness, usability, or overall usage frequency, with less attention to how student--AI help-seeking unfolds. This study addresses this gap by analyzing AI-assisted help-seeking trajectories in university-level programming. Using an SRL-informed analytical framework that links prompt-level help-seeking codes to conceptual, implementation, debugging, and reflective forms of support, we analyzed 1,290 task-specific student prompts linked to 17,190 code submissions from 71 students in introductory Python programming courses. Specifically, we examined how help-seeking interactions were structured across turns and attempts, and how trajectory patterns related to task scores and the number of code submissions. Results indicate that many students primarily used AI for reactive troubleshooting rather than for planned, self-regulated problem-solving. Although trajectory patterns were not associated with significant differences in task scores, they differed substantially in the number of code submissions required. These findings suggest that the educational significance of AI support lies not only in whether students use AI, but in how their help-seeking trajectories develop during programming problem-solving. --- ### KaLM-Reranker-V1: Fast but Not Late Interaction for Compressed Document Reranking Authors: Xinping Zhao, Jiaxin Xu, Ziqi Dai, Xin Zhang, Huiyao Chen, Shouzheng Huang, Xianhao Xiong, Danyu Tang, Xinshuo Hu, Guohong Fu, Meishan Zhang, Baotian Hu Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22807v3 As retrieval systems scale, effective and efficient reranking becomes increasingly important. However, most existing encoder- and decoder-based rerankers jointly process every query--passage pair, tightly coupling their online computation and limiting deployment efficiency and flexibility. We present KaLM-Reranker-V1, a fast but not late-interaction FBNL reranker that decouples query and passage computation while retaining expressive relevance modeling. Built on an encoder--decoder architecture, KaLM-Reranker-V1 pre-encodes passages using Matryoshka embedding pooling, while its decoder models system and user instructions together with query intent; cross-attention then captures fine-grained relevance between the resulting query context and passage representations. Together, these designs offer four key advantages: (i) efficiency from offline passage encoding, (ii) expressiveness from cross-attention, (iii) compactness from Matryoshka embedding pooling, and (iv) test-time compute through an adjustable compute budget. We instantiate KaLM-Reranker-V1 in three sizes, Nano, Small, and Large, with 0.27B, 1B, and 4B activated parameters, respectively. Extensive experiments on BEIR, MIRACL, and LMEB demonstrate strong reranking performance with superior efficiency. On BEIR and MIRACL, our models achieve competitive performance in multi-domain and multilingual reranking, on par with strong industrial rerankers such as the Qwen3/BGE-Reranker series. On LMEB-Dialogue, a compact embedding model paired with our Nano reranker, which has only 0.27B activated parameters, remains competitive with 7--12B embedding models. Data and models are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/KaLM-Embedding/lychee-kalm-reranker-and-jev. --- ### KaLM-Reranker-V1: Fast but Not Late Interaction for Compressed Document Reranking Authors: Xinping Zhao, Jiaxin Xu, Ziqi Dai, Xin Zhang, Shouzheng Huang, Danyu Tang, Xinshuo Hu, Meishan Zhang, Baotian Hu, Min Zhang Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22807v2 As retrieval systems scale, high-quality reranking becomes increasingly important. However, most existing rerankers, whether encoder-based or decoder-based, jointly encode the query and passage, tightly coupling their computation and limiting deployment efficiency as well as flexibility. We present KaLM-Reranker-V1, a fast but not late-interaction (FBNL) reranker that decouples query and passage computation while retaining expressive relevance modeling. Built on an encoder-decoder architecture, KaLM-Reranker-V1 uses the encoder to pre-encode passages with Matryoshka embedding pooling, while the decoder models the system instruction, user instruction, and query intent; cross-attention then captures relevance between the query context and passage representations. This design makes KaLM-Reranker-V1 efficient through decoupled passage encoding, yet not late interaction, by preserving rich relevance modeling through cross-attention. We instantiate KaLM-Reranker-V1 in three sizes, Nano, Small, and Large, with 0.27B, 1B, and 4B activated parameters, respectively. Extensive experiments on BEIR, MIRACL, and LMEB demonstrate that KaLM-Reranker-V1 achieves strong reranking performance with superior efficiency. On BEIR, KaLM-Reranker-V1 achieves state-of-the-art performance, on par with strong industrial models such as the Qwen3-Reranker series; on MIRACL, despite not being extensively trained on multilingual data, KaLM-Reranker-V1 still shows excellent reranking performance. Moreover, on LMEB, reranking models demonstrate a clear advantage, with even the 0.27B Nano model remaining competitive with 7-12B embedding models. --- ### Policy-as-Data: Learning Generalizable HOI Diffusion Models from Simulated Physics Authors: Shujia Li, Jianshu Hu, Haiyu Zhang, Yunpeng Jiang, Haoyuan Jin, Xinyuan Chen, Yaohui Wang, Yutong Ban Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22806v1 Synthesizing realistic Human-Object Interactions (HOI) is critical for creating embodied avatars and functional virtual environments. However, current data-driven approaches primarily rely on motion capture datasets, which are expensive to scale and limited in functional diversity. Models trained with these datasets fail to generalize to unseen objects and maintain physical consistency over long horizons. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that leverages a physics simulator to overcome the data-scarcity bottleneck in HOI generation. Specifically, we propose a scalable pipeline, called \ours, which leverages policies trained with reinforcement learning in a physics simulator for task-oriented data generation and trains a generative model on the augmented dataset for generalizable HOI generation. To seamlessly utilize the synthetic data, we introduce a coarse-to-fine retargeting process that bridges the representation gap between the simplified model used in physics simulator and the standard parametric body models required for generative training. Validated through comprehensive experiments, our method demonstrates enhanced generalization to unseen objects and the capability of long-horizon generation, while exhibiting greater dynamic diversity and physical plausibility. --- ### CoVStream: Edge-Cloud Collaboration for Understanding of Long Video Streams Authors: Xu Liu, Guikun Chen, Zihao Yan, Kanzhi Wu, Wenguan Wang Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22804v3 Long, continuous video streams are an increasingly critical driver of multimedia intelligence. Existing efforts often handle long videos with a sample-encode-reason approach using large models. However, they overlook a crucial deployment fact: the stream is often produced by computationally constrained devices. This forces an untenable compromise: cloud offloading unlocks strong reasoning but incurs prohibitive bandwidth overhead, while on-device processing remains limited by edge hardware capacity. Therefore, we propose CoVStream, the first edge-cloud collaborative framework for understanding long video streams. The edge node distills raw video streams into compact visual features and semantic captions for transmission to the cloud, minimizing bandwidth costs, while the cloud server integrates this data into an entity graph and global visual context, activating the heavy reasoning model only when a user query arrives. Experiments on VideoMME-Long, LVBench, and RTV-Bench show that CoVStream reduces bandwidth usage by 87.6% while retaining 99.2% of the cloud baseline accuracy on LVBench. --- ### Learning Adaptive Dynamical Features via Multi-$τ$ Liquid-Mamba for All-in-one Image Restoration Authors: Hu Gao, Changshuo Wang, Yulong Chen, Lizhuang Ma Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22801v1 Image restoration aims to recover high-quality images from degraded observations. Recent Mamba-based image restoration models have demonstrated strong potential in modeling long-range dependencies with linear complexity. However, most existing designs still rely on a single state-evolution timescale, which limits their adaptability to spatially heterogeneous and task-dependent degradation patterns in all-in-one image restoration. In this paper, we propose Multi-$τ$ Liquid-Mamba, an adaptive state space module that introduces input-conditioned multi-timescale liquid discretization into selective state space modeling. Instead of changing the overall selective scan pipeline, the proposed module modulates the effective discretization steps of multiple dynamical branches and adaptively fuses their responses according to degradation-aware gating weights. This design allows the model to capture both fast-varying local details and slowly evolving global structures while preserving the linear scaling property of Mamba with respect to sequence length. Importantly, Multi-$τ$ Liquid-Mamba modulates the effective transition dynamics while preserving the original selective parameterization and hardware-efficient selective scan mechanism, making it a plug-and-play module that can be seamlessly integrated into existing Mamba-based architectures. Built upon this framework, we develop a Multi-$τ$ Liquid-Mamba Image Restoration Network (MLMIR) for all-in-one image restoration. Extensive experiments on a wide range of restoration benchmarks demonstrate that MLMIR consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance in all-in-one image restoration while remaining highly competitive in task-aligned restoration settings. --- ### Does the Same Token Mean the Same State? MoE Routing as Signal for Reasoning Control Authors: Kang Chen, Minshen Yu, Junjie Nian, Yaoning Wang, Yixin Cao, Yugang Jiang Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22798v1 In sparse Mixture-of-Experts language models, does the same token id imply the same router state and the same experts producing it? Holding the emitted token id fixed at repeated anchors, we find it does not: the experts that produce it still separate task context, trajectory history, and reasoning-effort mode. This residual structure supports test-time control: near \emph{boundary} anchors (the final-response transition) and \emph{delimiter} anchors (which open the answer, e.g.\ \texttt{\textbackslash boxed\{} or code fences), routing neighborhoods already align with final-answer basins at a marker-only readout and strongest when the routing is read at the answer opening. We operationalize this as \textbf{RAD} (Routing Agreement Decoding), an answer-string-free multi-rollout selector: it locates a fixed anchor, represents each rollout by its anchor-window MoE routing states, and returns the densest Weighted-Jaccard $K$-NN route-basin center, without parsing, normalizing, executing, or voting over answer strings. Across 10 sparse-MoE configurations (gpt-oss, Qwen3-MoE) and 6 datasets spanning math, GPQA, and code, RAD is on par with Majority where string voting is well-posed, with small positive paired deltas (RAD $73.9$ / RAD+DC $74.2$ vs.\ Majority $73.6$). Like majority voting, RAD is not a verifier: a dense \emph{wrong} basin can still win. Its value is the interface: the same selector gives direct pass@1 on code, where exact-string voting is ill-defined, and the same routing-density principle, re-anchored to the agentic boundary, improves best-of-16 patch selection on SWE-bench Verified over random, where patches have no answer string to vote on. --- ### Measuring Behavior Portability in Large Language Models Authors: Tianjia Dong, Nadav Kunievsky, James A. Evans Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.GT, econ.GN arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22797v1 Large language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous decision makers, yet the behavioral mapping they exhibit can vary substantially across decision environments that are payoff-equivalent by construction-environments that share identical payoff-relevant structure but differ in surface presentation. This sensitivity renders suite-based evaluation fragile and raises a fundamental question of behavioral portability: how well does a behavioral mapping learned in one decision environment informative on another that preserves the same underlying incentive structure? We introduce a formal framework to measure this property. Our protocol fits an interpretable behavioral model on data pooled from a set of source environments and evaluates its out-of-sample predictive performance in a held-out target environment, benchmarking against an oracle trained directly on target data. Portability is quantified via a loss-agnostic measure that delivers worst-case bounds on the performance of the induced prediction-action mapping in the target environment. In controlled experiments spanning seven canonical economic decision problems, we document substantial and systematic portability losses, suggesting that behavioral characterizations of LLMs obtained in one decision environment cannot be assumed to transfer reliably to structurally equivalent alternatives. --- ### A Formula-Driven Survey and Research Agenda for On-Policy Distillation Authors: Bowen Zhang Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22793v1 On-policy distillation (OPD) trains an LLM on states induced by the current or recent student policy: the student generates complete or partial rollouts, a teacher or self-teacher scores the resulting tokens under their generated contexts, and dense log-probability, logit, or distributional signals are converted into post-training updates. This survey studies OPD as a feedback-to-update problem rather than a single loss family. We develop a formula-driven taxonomy from two routes -- direct distributional losses and policy-gradient-style log-ratio updates -- and use it to organize core methods, verifier- or outcome-guided hybrids, industrial reports, framework implementations, failure modes, and stabilization recipes under explicit evidence boundaries. The taxonomy shows that OPD effectiveness depends not only on KL direction or teacher access, but also on state compatibility, support construction, temporal credit, vocabulary-level probability routing, gates and weights, and regularization. We further separate two mechanisms often conflated in sampled-token OPD stability discussions. Temporal credit asks how teacher-student log-ratio returns should weight sampled actions across a rollout; vocabulary routing asks where probability mass should move when negative feedback suppresses a sampled token. This distinction yields bias boundaries for immediate, return-to-go, discounted, and baseline-corrected estimators, motivates GAE-OPD as a value-based hypothesis for log-ratio returns, and motivates Counterfactual Routed OPD (CR-OPD) for routing probability mass toward teacher-supported, student-reachable alternatives. We close by mapping actionability diagnostics, failure mechanisms, case studies, open problems, and a reporting checklist onto the same feedback-to-update variables. --- ### The Origins of Stochasticity: Comprehensive Investigations on Uncertainty Quantification for Large Language Models Authors: Xiang-Jun Ou, Shuang Liang, Xin-Yu Hu, Rong-Hao Huang, Jing Wang, Shao-Qun Zhang Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22792v1 Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled sophisticated reasoning and content generation, yet their inherent stochasticity poses significant challenges for ensuring predictive credibility. While traditional uncertainty taxonomy paradigms, such as the dichotomy of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties, provide conceptual foundations, they often fail to capture the multi-component and multi-stage nature of LLM generation and struggle to evaluate the effectiveness of various Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) methods. In this paper, we propose a granular uncertainty taxonomy that systematically attributes LLM uncertainty into input-level, parameter-level, token-level, and decoding-process sources. Correspondingly, we categorize existing UQ methods into Bayesian, ensemble, consensus-based, and single-pass approaches. Furthermore, we introduce a comprehensive evaluation framework covering diverse generation settings and metrics. We empirically evaluate 21 typical UQ methods across three prominent LLM families, including Qwen3, Llama 3.2, and DeepSeek-V3, on benchmarks such as TriviaQA, GSM8K, and HumanEval. Our experimental results demonstrate that (i) the effectiveness of UQ methods is sensitive to task types and generation settings; (ii) consensus-based methods, typed Deg and EigV, consistently outperform other UQ approaches; and (iii) larger model scales correlate with lower uncertainty estimates, suggesting an empirical scaling law for LLM uncertainty. This work bridges the gap between theoretical origins and practical deployment, providing a versatile diagnostic tool for systematically quantifying uncertainty in LLM applications. --- ### Scaling Audio Models Efficiently: Joint Optimization of Scale, Resolution, Adaptation, Precision, and Sparsity Authors: Vyom Agarwal, Mokshda Gangrade, Siddharth Pal, Jerry Wu Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22790v5 Large automatic speech recognition (ASR) models such as Whisper must be deployed across hardware with widely varying memory and inference-speed constraints. We present a compression framework that jointly parametrizes Whisper deployment along six dimensions: model size, temporal resolution, encoder token stride, low-rank adaptation capacity, weight precision and sparsity pattern. All axes are jointly optimized using NSGA-III with respect to three deployment objectives: word error rate (WER), inference FLOPs, and memory footprint. Across 50 of the 1,680 candidate configurations evaluated, we characterize the conditional effect of each axis and identify compression combinations that dominate naive single-axis scaling, while finding that 1:4 structured sparsity fails to recover acceptable accuracy under the tested recovery budgets. We report measured WER and resident memory, use analytical EffFLOPs as the search-time compute surrogate, and separately validate representative inference configurations using measured real-time factor (RTF). --- ### Scaling Audio Models Efficiently: A Joint Study of Compute Constraints and Optimization Behavior Authors: Vyom Agarwal, Mokshda Gangrade, Siddharth Pal, Jerry Wu Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22790v1 In this paper, we investigate the tradeoffs between compute allocation and model performance for two speech processing tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Speech Emotion Recognition (SER). We propose a unified framework that analyzes three fundamental compute dimensions: model size ($x_N$), input length ($x_T$), and representation resolution ($x_V$). Motivated by recent advances in compute optimal scaling for multimodal models, we systematically vary these dimensions to examine their influence on task performance under fixed computational budgets. Our study provides insights into how compute resources can be optimally distributed across model capacity, temporal context, and representational granularity, offering practical guidelines for the design of efficient speech models. Through experiments on LibriSpeech and CREMA-D datasets, we demonstrate non-linear scaling behavior and identify optimal operating points. Our results show that (1) increasing model size yields diminishing returns: scaling Tiny (39M) to Small (244M) reduces WER by 8.22%, whereas Small to Medium (769M) reduces WER by only 2.35%; (2) an optimal audio duration of approximately 4 seconds exists for SER; and (3) reducing encoder token resolution provides an effective mechanism for lowering inference cost, Large-v3 (1540M) with 750 frames requires 2572 GFLOPS whereas with 1500 frames requires 5228 GFLOPS, with less than 3% relative increase in WER. Additionally, LoRA-based adaptation enables efficient finetuning with minimal performance degradation. --- ### Visual Geometry Transformer in the Wild: Distractor-Free 3D Reconstruction Authors: Tianbo Pan, Xingyi Yang, Shizun Wang, Xinchao Wang Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22787v1 Current end-to-end multi-view 3D reconstruction methods achieve impressive results, but rely on a restrictive static assumption: the scenes is entire distractor-free with perfect cross-view geometry. This reliance on idealized inputs causes even the most advanced methods to fail in real-world settings, where transient distractors and occlusions present. To address this, we propose Visual Geometry Transformer in the Wild (VGTW), an end-to-end framework for robust reconstruction from inconsistent views. At its core, we isolate and suppress distractor-affected regions while preserving the consistent components across views. Specifically, we introduce a Distractor-aware Training (DAT) strategy that separates clean features from distractor-contaminated ones in the attention mechanism while enforcing feature consistency across images. To enable this, we train the model with an auxiliary mask prediction head, using supervision from a new dataset we collected with pixel-level distractor masks. The resulting VGTW model is a feed-forward network that directly outputs clean, distractor-free point clouds. Remarkably, it requires no additional 3D supervision, remains computationally efficient, and is compatible with existing pipelines. Extensive experiments validate our approach, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance and robust generalization in diverse, real-world scenarios. --- ### Learning Filters with Certainty Authors: Yuval Banoun, Daniel Sadoc Menasche, Ori Rottenstreich Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.AI, cs.DC, cs.PF arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22786v1 Hash-based data structures such as Bloom filters are widely used in network systems for tasks including caching, anomaly detection, and machine learning pipelines. They typically provide binary indications of whether an element belongs to a set of interest, e.g., the contents of a cache. When uncertainty arises due to hash collisions, a positive indication is returned to avoid false negatives. We argue that the certainty associated with such indications can itself be useful information. This work focuses on Counting Bloom Filters (CBFs), a Bloom-filter variant that maintains counters rather than bits. Besides supporting insertions and deletions, these counters provide additional information that can be used to estimate the certainty of positive membership indications. We show how this certainty signal can be exploited in architectures that combine Bloom Filters with machine learning (ML) models. --- ### Cross-National Information Attacks: A Two-Decade Analysis of Troll Behavior in Korea Authors: Jaehong Kim, Hyeonseung Kim, Jiseon Kim, Alice Oh, Thorsten Holz, Wonjae Lee, Meeyoung Cha Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.SI, cs.CL, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22785v1 Coordinated foreign influence operations pose a growing threat to online platforms, but detecting state-linked troll activity and tracking its evolution remain challenging. This paper presents an explainable machine learning framework for theory-guided detection and longitudinal analysis of suspected trolling within Korean online news comment sections. Our hierarchical model classifies comments along three dimensions central to influence campaigns: foreign origin, moral-emotional framing, and target country. To support explainability, it also extracts brief span-level textual evidence that provides human-interpretable rationales. We apply the approach to 112M South Korean news comments authored by 4M users over nearly 20 years, identifying 23,998 accounts exhibiting behavior consistent with coordinated manipulation. Analyzing these accounts, we find that they predominantly rely on morally condemning rhetoric rather than direct promotion of foreign-aligned narratives; this rhetoric receives significantly higher user engagement. Among the highest-engagement comments, the moral condemnation most frequently targets domestic political figures (e.g., presidents or party leaders) on both the left and the right, potentially amplifying polarization. Our framework supports transparent platform governance through explainable, evidence-based moderation. These observed rhetorical and engagement patterns can inform how platforms and observatories prioritize defenses and intervene before harmful narrative-target combinations achieve widespread reach. --- ### Towards Robust Personalized Federated Learning: Vulnerability Assessment and Defense Co-Design Authors: Mingyuan Fan, Cen Chen Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22782v1 The proliferation of IoT devices has fueled distributed edge systems to collect vast amounts of sensitive data, creating fertile ground for on-device machine learning applications. While federated learning (FL) mitigates privacy concerns by exchanging model parameters instead of raw data, we identify a critical blind spot in current research. We examine the most commonly used personalized federated learning (PFL) methods, which allow clients to maintain private, personalized models to address data heterogeneity across clients. Through systematic analysis, we reveal that PFL methods exhibit heightened vulnerability to transfer-based adversarial attacks compared to centralized learning paradigms. Wherein, malicious clients can exploit local model knowledge to craft adversarial examples that can compromise peer clients' personalized models. We establish this vulnerability through both theoretical analysis and empirical evaluation across multiple benchmark datasets, demonstrating significant accuracy drops across various PFL methods. To address this challenge, we propose a defense framework combining stochastic input noise, input-scaled trace regularization, and parameter sensitivity maximization to improve FL's robustness. Our findings establish the first systematic study of adversarial threats in PFL systems, providing both diagnostic tools and practical countermeasures. --- ### Explainable AI for Mental Health Prediction in Drug-Affected Populations with Dragonfly Algorithm and GAN Oversampling Authors: Ahnaf Atef Choudhury, Shahriar Siddique Ayon, Md. Ebrahim Hossain, Abdullah Al Mamun Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22780v1 Mental illnesses among drug users are an increasing international issue, particularly in regions where early detection cannot be easily undertaken. The current literature tends to ignore the use of AI-based mental health analysis in drug users, and low quality of the class imbalance treatment, low interpretability, and optimal hyperparameter optimization can lower predictive quality and clinical utility. This study present a detailed, explainable machine learning (ML) model of multiclass mental health prediction, using a multidimensional data set of drug-affected persons. We combine hybrid PCA-Information Gain (PCA-IG) feature selection, Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based oversampling, and Dragonfly Algorithm (DA)-optimized XGBoost to address some of the limitations of existing methods. The suggested framework is effective to work with high-dimensional categorical data, address the issue of class imbalance, and improve predictive performance due to intelligent hyperparameter tuning. The experimental findings show that the XGBoost model optimized using the DA, in combination with GAN-based oversampling, has an accuracy of 94.17% and a weighted F1-score of 93.80%, which is better than the traditional and baseline models. The behavioral, lifestyle, and health factors, particularly sleep quality, physical health, and emotional regulation, are strongly predictive of mental health, with demographic factors having little impact, as seen through feature analysis. SHAP-based explainable AI provides easy-to-understand, instance-level information, enhancing interpretability and trust in models to be used in clinical settings. The results indicate that this framework has the potential to generate valid mental health forecasting tools, which would facilitate early intervention and enhance the treatment of drug-influenced people. --- ### DE-FIVE: Detecting Malicious Image Prompts via Fourier Features and Image Vector Embeddings Authors: Xingwei Zhong, Varun Sharma, Kar Wai Fok, Vrizlynn L. L. Thing Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CR, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22779v1 Vision language models (VLMs) employ both visual and textual modalities to enable advanced vision-language inference. However, incorporating visual modalities expands the attack surface of VLMs, making them more susceptible to security threats such as adversarial perturbations and indirect prompt injection, wherein crafted malicious image prompts can elicit unintended model outputs. Existing defense methods against malicious image prompts remain insufficient as they typically demand extensive datasets for retraining or the deployment of additional, complex classifiers. Most critically, there is a profound lack of specialized defense mechanisms specifically targeting indirect prompt injections, a gap that serves as a primary motivation for this work. To address these limitations, we introduce DE-FIVE, a novel training-free framework for detecting malicious image prompts by leveraging Fourier features and the hidden state representations of the visual encoder (image vector embeddings) across perturbations. Specifically, we develop a hybrid detection strategy consisting of a black-box detector that operates on Fourier-domain features and a white-box detector that exploits image vector embeddings derived from only a few-shot malicious set. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines against malicious image prompts. --- ### HAKARI-Bench: A Lightweight Benchmark for Comparing Retrieval Architectures and Efficiency Settings under Unified Conditions Authors: Yuichi Tateno Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.IR, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22778v1 With the rapid spread of retrieval-augmented generation and semantic search, choosing the right embedding and retrieval configuration is increasingly hard. Large retrieval benchmarks are comprehensive but too heavy to rerun during development, and there is little infrastructure for comparing production settings--dimensionality reduction, quantization, reranking--across many models under identical conditions. We present HAKARI-Bench, a lightweight benchmark that reconstructs existing retrieval suites into small datasets (Nano-sets): 35 benchmarks and 551 tasks across 43 languages in a unified format, enabling same-condition, model-agnostic comparison of five retrieval families (BM25, dense, sparse, late interaction, rerankers) and their efficiency variants. Across 55 models, its overall ranking reproduces the official MTEB retrieval v2, MMTEB v2 retrieval, and English BEIR (full) at Spearman >0.97. HAKARI-Bench does not replace full evaluation; it enables rapid model selection, regression detection, and reading the quality-efficiency Pareto frontier. Code, data, and leaderboard are released under the MIT license. --- ### GeoRouteNet: A Geometry-Aware Non-Autoregressive Neural Solver for the Euclidean Traveling Salesman Problem Authors: Xiang Li Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22776v2 Non-autoregressive neural solvers amortize computation across traveling salesman problem (TSP) instances, but models trained on random Euclidean instances can degrade when the number or spatial distribution of nodes changes. We study whether explicit geometric features and a richer within-instance training signal improve transfer across graph sizes and spatial distributions. We introduce GeoRouteNet, which augments a non-autoregressive TSP solver with centered node offsets and radii, learnable radial distance bases, distance-aware graph attention, explicit edge messages, and cross-layer representation mixing. We also introduce multi-candidate self-comparison reinforcement learning (MCS-RL), which trains on several sampled tours per instance using a leave-one-out adaptive baseline, winner-candidate guidance, and annealed entropy regularization. In a single-seed study, all neural variants are trained only on random TSP-50 instances and evaluated with the same greedy and beam-search decoders. Under Beam-1000 decoding, GeoRouteNet-MCS-RL obtains gaps of 0.32% on the TSP-50 validation set used for checkpoint selection, 1.26% on a correlated TSP-100 size diagnostic, and 3.60% across 27 TSPLIB EUC_2D instances. The NAR4TSP-PG gaps on the same evaluations are 0.42%, 2.73%, and 17.12%. A 2x2 comparison crosses encoder and training choices. Under PG, the geometry-aware encoder has lower gaps than the reproduced encoder on the TSP-100 diagnostic and TSPLIB. With the geometry-aware encoder, MCS-RL is associated with a further reduction; with the reproduced encoder, it has a higher TSPLIB gap. --- ### Target-Aware Linear Regression Under Distribution Shift Authors: Zhewen Hou, Tian Zheng Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: stat.ME, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22775v2 Distribution shift between training and deployment is a pervasive challenge for modern AI systems. In many cases, the target marginals of covariates and response are known or specified through population-level observations, boundary conditions, properties of simulator configurations, or alignment-time distributional constraints. Such knowledge may provide valuable side information for regression estimation. We study this problem in the multivariate linear regression setting with a stable conditional mean $E(Y\mid X)$ across source and target, and identify the hybrid-loss estimator, which jointly incorporates both target marginals, as a benchmark target-aware estimator. Its direct computation, however, requires solving a coupled nonlinear optimization that is expensive at scale. Our main contribution is to develop and evaluate two computationally tractable alternatives: a constrained moment-matching estimator and a two-stage estimator that augments ordinary least squares with a calibration step. For all three estimators, we derive and compare closed-form asymptotic mean squared errors, yielding conditions under which the tractable alternatives match or closely approximate the hybrid benchmark, and regimes in which they do not. Monte Carlo experiments across three controlled shift regimes validate the theoretical results, investigate the accuracy-runtime tradeoffs among the three estimators, and translate into guidance on estimator choice. In particular, the two-stage estimator nearly matches the hybrid benchmark in the high signal-to-noise regime at essentially no additional cost, providing theoretical grounding for empirical observations in nonlinear settings. --- ### LoCC: Detection and Localization of Lip-Syncing Deepfakes via Counterfactual Frame Consistency Authors: Soumyya Kanti Datta, Shan Jia, Siwei Lyu Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22772v1 Lip-syncing deepfakes are among the most challenging forms of manipulated media because their artifacts are localized almost exclusively to the mouth region and evolve dynamically over time. Detecting such deepfakes requires precise temporal and spatial modeling of lip motion. In this paper, we propose LoCC, a novel detection framework that performs fine-grained detection and localization of lip-syncing deepfakes at both segment and frame levels. Unlike prior approaches that analyze videos holistically, our method evaluates whether each frame aligns with a counterfactual estimate generated from its temporal neighbors. Real videos exhibit strong and stable consistency, whereas lip-sync deepfakes introduce localized inconsistencies. Following a teacher-student learning paradigm, our model effectively captures these frame-level discrepancies and achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods on multiple benchmark lip-syncing deepfake datasets, including LAV-DF, AVDF1M, FakeAVCeleb, and KODF, and generalizes well across compression levels and datasets. ---