# Research Papers — 2026-06 · bundle page 83 of 260 > Full-text markdown of papers #4101–4150 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/83 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/82.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/84.md) ### Evolving Spatial Weights for Cartographic Synthesis Authors: Gesiel R. Lopes, Roberto F. da Silva, Mellina Yamamura, Sergio H. V. L. de Mattos, Antonio M. Saraiva, Alexandre C. B. Delbem, Eric K. Tokuda Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CY, stat.AP, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22252v1 The integration of multiple thematic data layers into a single composite map, known as the cartographic synthesis problem, is typically addressed through expert-driven weighting schemes. This study presents a multi-objective formulation of cartographic synthesis grounded in spatial autocorrelation structure. We develop a bi-objective evolutionary framework, GIS-moGA, that estimates layer weights by simultaneously maximizing global spatial structure, measured by Global Moran's I, and minimizing local spatial heterogeneity, measured by the variance of Local Indicators of Spatial Association (LISA). Because naive evaluation of spatial relationships requires O(N^2) operations, direct computation becomes impractical for larger datasets. We address this challenge by exploiting the 97.7% sparsity of queen contiguity matrices, reducing effective complexity to O(N k) and enabling scalable municipal-level analysis. The framework is evaluated on a high-dimensional spatial epidemiology dataset with N = 523 units from Araraquara, Brazil. A 64-scenario experimental design is used to examine evolutionary behavior across parameter settings. Results show that higher mutation rates are important for maintaining population diversity and preventing premature convergence in spatially autocorrelated fitness landscapes, where crossover operators can disrupt geographically coherent structures. Compared with expert-derived Analytic Hierarchy Process baselines, the resulting Pareto fronts show substantial hypervolume gains and significant improvements in spatial coherence (p < 0.001, Cliff's delta = 0.87). These findings provide a systematic and scalable framework for data-driven geographic multi-criteria decision analysis. --- ### On the Expressive Power of Weight Quantization in Large Language Models Authors: Shao-Qun Zhang Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22249v1 In recent years, weight quantization that encodes the learnable parameters of large language models in an $n$-bit format has garnered significant attention due to its potential for model compression and inference acceleration. Many practical techniques have been developed; however, the theoretical understanding of many aspects, especially the approximation and degradation of expressive power as the number of quantization bits decreases, remains unclear. In this paper, we provide a theoretical investigation into the expressive capability of large language models relative to the number of quantization bits. We argue that 1.58-bit is the limiting precision for weight quantization by establishing the universal approximation and expressive collapse properties of weight-quantized models with respect to the number of quantization bits. Additionally, we confirm that weight quantization leads to expressive degradation, in which the expressive capacity of weight-quantized models degrades polynomially as the number of quantization bits decreases. These theoretical findings provide a solid foundation for advancing weight quantization in the context of scaling laws and shed insights for future research in model compression and inference acceleration. --- ### SamatNext v0.2-B: An Exploratory Study of RMS-Normalized Hybrid Decoders for Curriculum Retention in Small Code Models Authors: Samat Zharassov Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22248v2 Standard autoregressive Transformer decoders can often exhibit substantial forgetting under sequential fine-tuning on shifting curriculum distributions. This technical report evaluates SamatNext v0.2-B, an experimental 356M-parameter hybrid sequence decoder that alternates Differential-Attention-style layers with DeltaNet-inspired simplified linear-state mixer layers using RMS normalization and output scale calibration. We study the model under a controlled staged Python code curriculum and compare it with a parameter-matched Transformer baseline. In this setting, SamatNext v0.2-B achieves a 100.0% pass rate on the controlled Stage 5 holdout while retaining 98.8% of adjacent Stage 3 semantic behavior and reaching 12.0% on the Stage 2E early syntax holdout. The strongest Transformer baseline reaches 97.6% on Stage 5 but retains only 6.0% of Stage 3 behavior. Both architectures remain weak on long-horizon early-stage retention, so the result should be interpreted as evidence of an altered retention/plasticity tradeoff in this controlled setting, not as a general solution to catastrophic forgetting. Code, model specifications, evaluation scripts, and result tables are provided for independent verification. --- ### Variance-Tilted Diffusion Models for Diverse Sampling Authors: Iskander Azangulov, Leo Zhang, Kianoosh Ashouritaklimi Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22239v1 Diffusion models are typically sampled independently, even when the downstream objective is to obtain a diverse set of candidates. We introduce a variance-weighted batch distribution that favours collections of samples with large empirical spread after a prescribed linear feature map. The target is specified explicitly, and the sampler is derived as the corresponding Doob $h$-transform of independent diffusion dynamics. The resulting correction has a compact form: an interaction term that repels posterior denoised means, together with a curvature term that moves particles to the region of higher feature variance. This yields an interacting-particle sampler with a transparent probabilistic target rather than a heuristic repulsive drift. --- ### Distributional Granger Causality: Identification, Sequential Inference, and Adaptive Testing Authors: Ayush Jha Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: econ.EM, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22230v1 Predictive dependence in time series need not be confined to the conditional mean. Outside the Gaussian setting, causal content may arise through conditional scale, tail behavior, asymmetry, or other distributional features, implying that no single Granger-type test provides a complete characterization of predictive dependence. This paper develops a framework for distributional Granger causality based on a finite collection of channel-specific restrictions. Under suitable determinacy conditions, the channel menu is shown to be complete, yielding an identification result that links distributional Granger non-causality to a finite set of testable hypotheses. Building on this representation, we develop an adaptive sequential testing procedure that allocates inferential resources across channels while maintaining familywise error control through an alpha-investing mechanism. A policy-invariant validity theorem establishes finite-sample size control under arbitrary admissible selection rules, while an asymptotic efficiency theorem shows that a confidence-bound allocation rule achieves power equivalent to that of an infeasible oracle benchmark. The theoretical guarantees are derived from primitive mixing and moment conditions together with a circular-block permutation scheme. --- ### Quantifying Theoretical AI Alignment Guarantees: Receiver-Utility Bounds in Bayesian Persuasion Authors: Eric Yachbes, Eva Tardos Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.GT, cs.AI, cs.IT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22226v1 Misalignment can change how information moves from an AI agent to a human user. We model this as an information advantage: the AI agent observes the world state, while the human receiver only knows a prior and must act after seeing the agent's signal. A strategic AI sender may withhold evidence or garble information in order to steer the human's decision. We ask how much useful information can still reach the human when the AI optimizes a misaligned objective. We study a Bayesian persuasion model in which the world state is a bit string, the human receiver wants to guess the bits correctly, and a single AI sender wants the receiver to guess as many bits as possible as $1$. For a prior $μ$, let $R_0(μ)$ be the receiver's utility from using only the prior, and let $R_{\max}(μ)$ be the largest receiver utility among signaling schemes that are optimal for the sender. We prove $R_{\max}(μ)/R_0(μ)\leq 3/2$. This bound improves for priors close to the independent product prior with the same marginals: if $μ(x)\geq (1-η)π_μ(x)$ for every state $x$, then $R_{\max}(μ)\leq R_0(μ)+ηn$. We also give a six-bit prior for which $R_{\max}(μ)/R_0(μ)=39/31>5/4$, so no universal $5/4$ bound is possible. --- ### MultiMem: Measuring and Mitigating Memorization in Multi-Modal Contrastive Learning Authors: Wenhao Wang, Franziska Boenisch, Michael Backes, Adam Dziedzic Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22220v2 Memorization in machine learning models enables high performance on rare in-distribution samples by capturing their atypical patterns. However, it also causes harmful retention of noise and outliers, degrading generalization. While memorization has been extensively studied in both supervised and self-supervised learning in the vision domain, it remains unexplored in multi-modal contrastive learning. We address this gap by introducing MultiMem, the first metric designed to quantify memorization in multi-modal contrastive learning. Through our systematic analysis, we demonstrate that cross-modal semantic misalignment has the strongest influence on memorization, with text being the dominant modality driving memorization, followed by video, image, and audio. We show that targeted augmentations applied across all modalities effectively reduce memorization as measured by our MultiMem metric and improve model performance. Overall, this work establishes the first framework for measuring and mitigating memorization in multi-modal contrastive learning, preventing harmful data retention and contributing to higher-performing models. --- ### An Analysis of Untrained Deep Reservoir Networks for Audio Surveillance Authors: Corrado Baccheschi, Patrizio Dazzi Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22218v1 In this paper, we investigate untrained recurrent models from the Reservoir Computing (RC) paradigm for audio surveillance, focusing on bidirectional Echo State Networks with different depths, from shallow to deep configurations, for emergency sound event detection. We evaluate these models on the MIVIA Audio Events dataset in a multiclass setting across different Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) levels, with the goal of assessing the trade-off between depth, recognition performance, and computational efficiency. We compare the proposed architectures against fully trained recurrent and convolutional-recurrent baselines, namely Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory networks (BiLSTMs) and Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks (CRNNs). Results show that deep and shallow reservoir-based models achieve competitive recognition rates, with deeper variants being more robust in highly noisy conditions and shallower ones offering the most favorable efficiency profile, particularly on edge devices such as the NVIDIA Orin. In addition, the proposed approach remains robust across different input representations, including log-Mel spectrograms and MFCCs with varying resolutions. These findings highlight untrained reservoir architectures as a promising solution for resource-constrained audio surveillance scenarios. --- ### Delta-Diffusion: Modeling Longitudinal Brain Amyloid-PET Trajectories via Conditional Poisson Diffusion Bridge Authors: Yongheng Sun, Minhui Yu, Mengqi Wu, Maureen Kohi, Mingxia Liu Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: eess.IV, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22216v2 While longitudinal brain PET imaging is the gold standard for quantifying the spatiotemporal accumulation of Beta-amyloid, its widespread clinical utility is constrained by high operational costs and cumulative radiation risks. Recent deep generative models show promise in longitudinal image synthesis; however, they often fail to capture subtle pathological progression due to identity drift and a persistent bias toward trivially replicating baseline signal intensities rather than modeling temporal transition. To this end, we propose Delta-Diffusion, a novel progression-aware framework that redefines longitudinal PET synthesis as a conditional Poisson Diffusion Bridge (PDB) process. Unlike standard diffusion models that start from Gaussian noise, our PDB formulation is mathematically anchored to the subject's baseline PET, effectively transforming the generative task into a conditional distribution transition of the amyloid trajectory. To handle heteroscedastic nature of PET imaging, we introduce a physically-grounded Poisson perturbation within a Diffusion Transformer (DiT). This architecture uses adaptive scale-shift modulation to precisely calibrate the synthesis with the elapsed clinical interval and structural MRI context. A volume-of-interest balanced objective is designed to emphasize sparse, high-risk regions of amyloid accumulation. Validated on two cohorts with 542 subjects, Delta-Diffusion demonstrates superior performance in capturing longitudinal variations in amyloid deposition compared to state-of-the-art methods, offering a robust computational framework for tracking disease progression. --- ### Sequential Minimal Optimization Algorithm for One-Class Support Vector Machines With Privileged Information Authors: Andrey Lange, Dmitry Smolyakov, Evgeny Burnaev Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22210v1 One of the powerful techniques in data modeling is accounting for features that are available at the training stage, but are not available when the trained model is used to classify or predict test data -- the Learning Using Privileged Information paradigm (LUPI). Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO) methods have been developed for supervised Support Vector Machines (SVM), unsupervised one-class SVM, and SVM with privileged information (SVM+). The missing brick in this research has long been a one-class SVM with privileged information (OC-SVM+). In this paper, we propose an SMO algorithm for OC-SVM+ that significantly outperforms non-sequential algorithms for training the OC-SVM+ model. Its finite-time convergence is established. The experiments show how privileged information affects a descriptive domain in the space of original features. Comparative benchmark tests demonstrate that our algorithm is superior over interior point algorithms. --- ### Lexical Consensus: Grounded Word Learning and Shared Meaning in Artificial Agents Authors: Patricio M. Vera Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22207v1 Artificial intelligence systems are commonly evaluated through task performance and behavioral imitation, but such evaluations leave open whether an artificial agent can acquire, stabilize, and use new lexical meanings from grounded experience. This paper introduces Lexical Consensus, an experimental framework for studying grounded word learning over a structured perceptual substrate. Using frozen DINOv2 visual embeddings, Carroll-style nonce words, and interpretable lexical learners plus linear baselines, we test whether agents can acquire artificial labels for visual concepts, generalize them bidirectionally, and stabilize them across controlled settings. The main result is a robust perceptual-coherence gradient: native categories are easiest to learn, coherent overextensions remain learnable, mid-range disjunctive concepts degrade, and far-disjunctive concepts approach chance. A pre-registered CIFAR-100 dissociation experiment confirms that this gradient is governed by perceptual distance rather than semantic relatedness: perceptual distance predicts acquisition accuracy (partial R^2 = 0.245, p < 1e-7), while semantic distance adds no significant explanatory power (partial R^2 = 0.002, p = 0.660). Bidirectional evaluation shows that naming and retrieval are distinct: exemplar-based mechanisms outperform centroid prototypes in label-to-image retrieval, exposing a memory-fidelity dimension separate from naming accuracy. Falsification controls, homogeneous candidate-pool evaluations, and null results on representational restructuring indicate that frozen perceptual geometry both enables lexical grounding and limits what can be acquired without representational adaptation. --- ### When Is Emergent Consensus Real? A Measured Coupling Gain and a Validity Diagnostic for LLM Agent Societies Authors: Dongxu Yang Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.MA, cs.SI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22203v1 LLM "agent societies" are studied via demonstrations of emergent consensus or polarization -- with no measurable control parameter, no theory of when each regime appears, and no test of whether an outcome is a genuine social dynamic or a model artifact. We introduce the coupling gain gamma, measured per-agent by counterfactually perturbing a neighbour's stated opinion. (i) gamma is stable and model-distinguishing -- across five frontier models it spans 0.15-0.43 (n=20, 95% CIs <= 0.025), paraphrase-invariant; social-neighbour gamma roughly equals numeric-anchor gamma, so gamma is evidence-coupling, not uniquely social. (ii) Classical dynamics with measured (not assumed) coefficients organise the regime: Friedkin-Johnsen for consensus/pluralism, signed-Laplacian/structural-balance for polarization. (iii) Frontier LLMs do not spontaneously backfire (beta <= 0), so default societies do not self-polarize -- polarization is always induced; the beta>0 branch arises only in the FJ surrogate, never in the agents. (iv) A randomized-initial-condition diagnostic -- the (slope, bias) of final vs. initial opinion -- separates genuine averaging from model-prior artifacts (boundary-censoring ruled out by construction via interior-valued facts); applied to a published "emergent consensus" result (Chuang et al. 2023) it reveals a model-specific conflation: averaging on debatable claims, prior-artifact on settled facts. (v) Coupling is context-dependent: pairwise gamma does not predict multi-neighbour outcomes -- it can order them backwards -- whereas a modality-matched group coupling does (sixteen closed+open models, Pearson r=-0.70, permutation p=0.008). The regime laws take this matched coupling, not the single-neighbour gamma: emergent consensus must be read from coupling in the target interaction. We contribute a measurement protocol and a validity instrument, not new theory. --- ### Neural Conjugate Aggregation: Identifiable Unsupervised Multi-Sensor Regression under Heterogeneous Sensor Bias Authors: Muhammed Faruk Aytin, Zehra Demir, Alper Ünal, Julian Marshall, Gözde Ünal Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22200v1 We study regression-based data fusion under uncertainty, where multiple noisy and biased measurement sources are available but ground-truth labels are absent during training. This setting arises in sensor networks, simulation ensembles, and scientific monitoring systems where supervision is costly or infeasible. We propose the Neural Conjugate Aggregation Model (NCAM), a hierarchical Bayesian framework that combines neural networks with conjugate Gaussian inference for unsupervised multi-source fusion. NCAM learns source-specific bias and reliability conditioned on contextual covariates, yielding an analytically tractable posterior over a latent target variable with decomposed epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty. Structural non-identifiability is resolved through sensor anchoring and variance regularization, enabling stable and interpretable posterior aggregation. To complement Bayesian uncertainty with finite-sample guarantees, we integrate locally adaptive Monte Carlo conformal prediction, producing heteroscedastic prediction intervals with coverage guarantees under exchangeability assumptions. Experiments on synthetic and real-world air-quality datasets demonstrate improved predictive accuracy and well-calibrated uncertainty compared to unsupervised baselines, including mean aggregation, probabilistic PCA, and Kalman filtering. --- ### Multi4D: High-Fidelity Dynamic Gaussian Splatting via Multi-Level Competitive Allocation Authors: Rui Wang, Quentin Lohmeyer, Siyu Tang, Mirko Meboldt Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22197v1 Dynamic 3D Gaussian splatting faces a fundamental tension between motion consistency and visual fidelity. Deformation-based approaches preserve temporal correspondence but suffer from motion over-factorization, oversmoothing high-frequency dynamics. In contrast, 4D-primitive methods capture fine visual details yet incur temporal overparameterization, breaking object identity and leading to severe storage overhead. To resolve this, we introduce Multi4D, a framework for high-fidelity dynamic Gaussian Splatting based on multi-level competitive allocation. Instead of a monolithic representation, we distribute modeling capacity across three structured levels: static structure, persistent dynamic geometry, and transient appearance primitives. Through shared rasterization and residual-driven optimization, these levels dynamically compete to explain photometric error, enabling adaptive specialization without pre-assigned decomposition. This allocation preserves long-term motion consistency while capturing fine dynamic detail, achieving state-of-the-art rendering quality and real-time performance with significantly fewer dynamic primitives. Furthermore, because our representation explicitly tracks compact persistent Gaussians over time, semantic features can be embedded afterward, enabling Multi4D to achieve state-of-the-art 4D segmentation accuracy with an order-of-magnitude speedup. Project page: https://batfacewayne.github.io/Multi4D.io/ --- ### Resolving Multi-Target Association in OFDM-based ISAC via Vision-aided Multi-Modal Learning Authors: Meng Hua, Chenghong Bian, Deniz Gunduz Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.CV, eess.SP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22195v1 Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems commonly extract target parameters by peak-searching a delay-Doppler map (DDM) constructed from reflected pilots. In multi-target scenarios, this results in ambiguity: the DDM does not reveal which physical target produced which peak, and two targets within the same delay-Doppler resolution cell cannot be separated. We propose a vision-assisted OFDM-ISAC framework that resolves both limitations by fusing wireless and visual modalities. The transmitter encodes an onboard street-view image with deep joint source-channel coding (DeepJSCC) and transmits it over the same OFDM waveform used for sensing; the receiver reconstructs the image, runs a fine-tuned YOLOv5 detector and fuses the resulting per-target features (bounding-box coordinates and class labels) with the DDM and transmitter-receiver geometry through a learned multi-modal network. To stabilize training of the high dimensional delay and Doppler classifiers, we introduce a Kullback Leibler loss against triangular soft labels centered on the ground-truth bin. On a Blender-rendered vehicular testbed, the proposed framework achieves a 16 cm localization root mean square error (RMSE) and a 10.8 ns delay RMSE. An ablation study confirms that removing the visual modality causes a 60x degradation in localization. These results highlight the potential of vision to overcome the data-association and resolution limits of single-modality ISAC. --- ### L20-Edu-135M: An Auditable Single-GPU Study of Data-Efficient Small Language Modeling Authors: Yin Li Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22189v1 Small language models are cheap to serve and feasible on local hardware, but strong public 135M-class systems are commonly trained with hundreds of billions to trillions of tokens on large clusters. We study a sharply resource-constrained regime: a complete 134.5M-parameter language-model pipeline executed on one NVIDIA L20 GPU. The released checkpoint, L20-Edu-135M, receives approximately 13B pretraining tokens: 10B FineWeb-Edu tokens followed by a 3B-token educational, mathematics, code, and reasoning mixture. We document the architecture, data gates, cross-source MinHash/LSH near-deduplication, segment deduplication, benchmark-overlap removal, throughput optimization, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with weight interpolation, and reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) on GSM8K. In a self-run zero-shot six-task harness, L20-Edu-135M obtains a mean score of 0.4150. It trails SmolLM-135M (0.4767) and SmolLM2-135M (0.4917), but its mean is 87.1% of SmolLM-135M's while its nominal token count is 2.17% as large. This ratio is descriptive, not evidence of statistical equivalence or a controlled scaling law. The model exceeds several older 100M-160M public baselines under the same harness. Direct GRPO-style RLVR decreases GSM8K exact-match accuracy from 1.82% to 1.59% (192-token completions) and 1.21% (320-token completions). These single-run results identify a concrete failure mode rather than establishing a general lower bound on RLVR. The contribution is an auditable resource-constrained case study, not a state-of-the-art claim. --- ### Bayesian Adaptation Gym: A Benchmark for the Bayesian Low-Rank Adaptation of Multi-Modal Language Models Authors: Colin Samplawski, Ramneet Kaur, Manoj Acharya, Anirban Roy, Adam D. Cobb Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22188v1 Large multi-modal language models are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains, making well-calibrated uncertainty essential. Traditional Bayesian methods approximate posteriors over all model weights, which becomes intractable for modern large models. For this reason, recent work instead considers Bayesian low-rank adaptation to enable tractable posterior approximation. Due to a lack of a standardized benchmark to evaluate these approaches, it remains unclear where these methods provide meaningful benefits. To fill this gap, we introduce Bayesian Adaptation Gym (BAG), a benchmark for the Bayesian adaptation of multi-modal language models. BAG provides reference implementations of classic Bayesian baselines and state-of-the-art adaptation methods, along with a multi-modal dataset and task suite designed to probe calibration, robustness under distribution shift, and decision-making under uncertainty via active learning. Using BAG, we conduct and report extensive experiments across model sizes, datasets, and tasks to highlight the successes and failures of current Bayesian adaptation approaches. To enable further research, BAG is fully open source: https://github.com/SRI-CSL/BayesAdapt. --- ### Dual-Stream EEG Decoding for 3D Visual Perception Authors: Ninon Lizé Masclef, Taisija Demcenko, Antonella Catanzaro, Nataliya Kosmyna Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22182v1 This paper explores a novel brain decoding model for 3D shape perception through a dual pathway architecture mirroring biological vision. Our bio-inspired approach implements separate decoding modules for object identity and spatial orientation, inspired by ventral and dorsal pathways, during continuous rotations. We employ circular regression for angle prediction and develop EEG-conditioned multiview diffusion for 3D reconstruction. Our approach successfully decodes both object identity and spatial orientation from EEG signals and enables 3D reconstruction from neural activity, with interpretability analyses revealing temporally structured involvement of ventral, dorsal, and motor-related channels rather than a static ventral dominance in supporting object and angle decoding. --- ### Residue-Level Attributions in Protein Language Models Do Not Recover Allergen Epitopes Authors: Jianzhou Yao, Anxiong Song, Katja Baerenfaller, Damir Zhakparov Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22181v1 Deep allergenicity classifiers are increasingly used in safety screening of novel foods, and recent protein language models have substantially improved protein-level allergenicity prediction. However, whether their explanations capture biologically meaningful information remains unclear. We introduce an epitope-grounded residue-level benchmark for quantitatively evaluating attribution faithfulness in protein allergenicity models. Across frozen ESM-2, multi-task ESM-2, and DeepPlantAllergy, protein-level classification was robust, yet classification-head explanation signals did not significantly exceed random in their residue-level alignment with annotated epitopes across AUROC, AUPRC, and Precision@k. Integrated Gradients identified residues that were functionally important to the model, but not overlapping annotated epitopes. Saturation mutagenesis further suggested classifiers may rely on physicochemical and compositional sequence features rather than epitope-specific mechanisms. Residue-level importance signals should therefore not be interpreted as immunological explanations for safety screening or hypoallergen design without quantitative validation. Code available: https://github.com/Jeffateth/XAllergen2.0-paper --- ### FeLoG: Scalable and Efficient Distributed Graph Embedding with Feedback Loop Mechanism Authors: Peng Fang, Arijit Khan, Ziqiang Wu, Zhenli Li, Yibo Zhou, Fang Wang, Dan Feng Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.DC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22180v3 Graph embedding maps graph nodes into low-dimensional vectors to support applications such as recommendation, fraud detection, and graph-based retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG). As graphs scale to billions of edges, scalable and efficient graph embedding has become increasingly important. Existing frameworks commonly adopt a sampling-training paradigm, in which mini-batches are constructed by sampling nodes and their neighbors. However, sampling is typically decoupled from evolving embedding quality, causing redundant exploration of well-trained regions while under-sampling undertrained nodes. At the system level, such decoupling further leads to excessive communication, serialized execution, and low resource utilization in distributed environments. We present FeLoG, a feedback loop-driven system for scalable distributed graph embedding. (1) FeLoG introduces feedback-coupled sampling and training, dynamically prioritizing undertrained nodes according to real-time embedding-quality feedback, thereby reducing redundant computation and accelerating convergence. (2) It employs activity-aware communication that compresses frequently occurring node sequences to reduce intra-machine PCIe traffic and selectively synchronizes frequently updated embeddings to reduce inter-machine communication. (3) It adopts a round-interleaved pipeline that overlaps next-round sampling with current-round training to improve CPU-GPU utilization. Experiments against six state-of-the-art baselines on large-scale graphs show that FeLoG achieves an average speedup of 27.9x, reduces communication cost by more than 53.1%, and sustains over 80% CPU-GPU utilization. --- ### FeLoG: Scalable and Efficient Distributed Graph Embedding with Feedback Loop Mechanism Authors: Peng Fang, Arijit Khan, Ziqiang Wu, Zhenli Li, Yibo Zhou, Fang Wang, Dan Feng Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.DC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22180v2 Graph embedding maps graph nodes into low-dimensional vectors to support applications such as recommendation, fraud detection, and graph-based retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG). As graphs scale to billions of edges, scalable and efficient graph embedding has become increasingly important. Existing frameworks commonly adopt a sampling-training paradigm, in which mini-batches are constructed by sampling nodes and their neighbors. However, sampling is typically decoupled from evolving embedding quality, causing redundant exploration of well-trained regions while under-sampling undertrained nodes. At the system level, such decoupling further leads to excessive communication, serialized execution, and low resource utilization in distributed environments. We present FeLoG, a feedback loop-driven system for scalable distributed graph embedding. (1) FeLoG introduces feedback-coupled sampling and training, dynamically prioritizing undertrained nodes according to real-time embedding-quality feedback, thereby reducing redundant computation and accelerating convergence. (2) It employs activity-aware communication that compresses frequently occurring node sequences to reduce intra-machine PCIe traffic and selectively synchronizes frequently updated embeddings to reduce inter-machine communication. (3) It adopts a round-interleaved pipeline that overlaps next-round sampling with current-round training to improve CPU-GPU utilization. Experiments against six state-of-the-art baselines on large-scale graphs show that FeLoG achieves an average speedup of 27.9x, reduces communication cost by more than 53.1%, and sustains over 80% CPU-GPU utilization. --- ### The Score Granularity Gap in Black-Box LLM Classification: A Comparative Study of Confidence Constructions Authors: Ao Sun, Tian Sun, Jiaxing Geng Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22179v2 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as black-box classifiers in pipelines that automate confident decisions and route uncertain ones to human review. Such selective prediction needs a confidence score that an operator can threshold at a chosen risk level. Prior work asks whether LLM confidence is well calibrated or well ranked; we ask a complementary, deployment-oriented question that has been largely overlooked: at what resolution can the score be thresholded? We call the answer the score granularity gap. Through a controlled comparison of seven ways to build a confidence score, from a single verbalized number, to token probabilities, to querying the model many times and combining the answers, across 25 model-dataset pairs (9 LLMs, 3 benchmarks), we find that single-shot verbalized confidence, once correctly converted to a class probability, ranks cases surprisingly well, yet takes only a handful of distinct values. It therefore offers an operator only a few coarse thresholds, no matter how well it ranks. We show which constructions widen this gap, at what inference cost, and with what effect on ranking, notably that multi-query aggregation helps weak models but can degrade already-strong ones. We translate these trade-offs into concrete deployment guidance. --- ### The Score Granularity Gap in Black-Box LLM Classification: A Comparative Study of Confidence Constructions Authors: Ao Sun, Tian Sun, Jiaxing Geng Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22179v1 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as black-box classifiers in pipelines that automate confident decisions and route uncertain ones to human review. Such selective prediction needs a confidence score that an operator can threshold at a chosen risk level. Prior work asks whether LLM confidence is well calibrated or well ranked; we ask a complementary, deployment-oriented question that has been largely overlooked: at what resolution can the score be thresholded? We call the answer the score granularity gap. Through a controlled comparison of seven ways to build a confidence score, from a single verbalized number, to token probabilities, to querying the model many times and combining the answers, across 25 model-dataset pairs (9 LLMs, 3 benchmarks), we find that single-shot verbalized confidence, once correctly converted to a class probability, ranks cases surprisingly well, yet takes only a handful of distinct values. It therefore offers an operator only a few coarse thresholds, no matter how well it ranks. We show which constructions widen this gap, at what inference cost, and with what effect on ranking, notably that multi-query aggregation helps weak models but can degrade already-strong ones. We translate these trade-offs into concrete deployment guidance. --- ### DSSCNet: A Transfer Learning Framework for Cross-Corpus Dysarthric Speech Severity Classification Authors: Arnab Kumar Roy, Hemant Kumar Kathania, Paban Sapkota, Sudarsana Reddy Kadiri, Shrikanth Narayanan Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: eess.AS, cs.AI, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22178v1 Dysarthric speech severity classification is challenging due to speaker variability, class imbalance, and limited datasets. This study introduces DSSCNet, a deep learning model that employs transfer learning and multi-corpus learning to enhance speaker-independent classification. By pre-training on one dysarthric speech corpus and fine-tuning on another, DSSCNet achieves improved feature extraction and cross-corpus generalization. Experimental results demonstrate that DSSCNet outperforms state-of-the-art models for speaker-independent severity classification, achieving 75.80\% accuracy on TORGO and 68.25\% on UA-Speech, significantly reducing misclassification errors. The findings confirm that leveraging knowledge transfer between datasets improves model robustness, making DSSCNet well-suited for automated dysarthria assessment. This research contributes to the development of more effective assistive speech technologies for individuals with speech impairments. --- ### How Well Do Self-Supervised Speech Models Encode Age and Gender in Children's Speech? A Layer-Wise Analysis Across Multiple Architectures Authors: Abhijit Sinha, Hemant Kumar Kathania, Mohit Joshi, Harishankar Kumar, Shrikanth Narayanan, Sudarsana Reddy Kadiri Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: eess.AS, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22177v1 Self-supervised learning (SSL) models have become a central component of modern speech processing systems, as they enable the learning of rich acoustic representations without reliance on labeled data. Despite their success on adult speech, it remains unclear how effectively these models capture speaker-related attributes such as age and gender in children's speech, which differs substantially from adult speech due to ongoing physiological and cognitive development. Higher pitch, increased articulatory variability, and age-dependent acoustic changes make children's speech a particularly challenging domain. In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis of how age and gender information is encoded across layers of four widely used SSL models: Wav2Vec2, HuBERT, Data2Vec, and WavLM. Layer-wise features are extracted and evaluated using a lightweight CNN on two benchmark children's speech corpora, PFSTAR and CMU Kids. To analyze feature compactness and redundancy, PCA is applied to identify redundancy and highlight the dimensions that contribute most to classification performance. Experimental results show that age- and gender-related information is unevenly distributed across SSL layers, with early to mid-level layers encoding the strongest paralinguistic cues. HuBERT achieves the best overall performance for age classification, while Wav2Vec2 and HuBERT lead gender classification on PFSTAR and CMU Kids, respectively. Beyond single-split evaluation, we further demonstrate that these findings remain stable under speaker-wise cross-validation, layer aggregation, and cross-database evaluation, indicating robustness to data imbalance and domain mismatch. Finally, we show that reliable age and gender classification is achievable even from short speech segments of 1--3 seconds. --- ### Gated MLPs as Symmetry-Broken Rank-1 Bilinear Attention Authors: Nathan Breslow Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22172v1 We show that the conventional gated MLP can be viewed as a rank-1 approximation to a bilinear attention mechanism with two distinct factors corresponding to the query and the key. We further show that moving the nonlinearity onto one factor breaks the exchange symmetry between the two factors and, for non-homogeneous activations, the inverse-scaling symmetry as well. This perspective may help explain why gated MLPs are effective in practice and inform the design of future architectures. --- ### Beyond Time Series: Spatial Reasoning for Epidemic Forecasting via Multimodal Learning Authors: Diana Guadalupe Gomez, Chenwei Wu, Zhiyi Wang, Liyue Shen, Alexander Rodríguez Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22171v1 Epidemic forecasting models typically rely on surveillance data reported over administrative regions, treating them as atomic units, thereby obscuring sub-regional spatial structure that shapes disease dynamics. We introduce a spatially structured multimodal epidemic forecasting setting that integrates region-level temporal surveillance data with spatially localized auxiliary signals that are misaligned in resolution and structure, reflecting realistic public health reporting constraints. Building on this formulation, we propose M-SPICE (Multimodal SPatIal Context for Epidemic Forecasting), a structure-aware spatiotemporal forecasting framework that performs joint reasoning over temporal disease dynamics and spatial context via attention-based multimodal fusion, allowing spatial signals to selectively condition temporal representations across forecast horizons. We evaluate our approach on real-world COVID-19, influenza, and influenza-like illness (ILI) forecasting tasks under realistic real-time evaluation protocols. Across all forecasting settings, our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art multivariate time-series, multimodal, and epidemiological forecasting baselines while maintaining strong probabilistic forecasting performance. Finally, interpretability analyses reveal when, where, and how spatial signals are leveraged, highlighting settings in which purely temporal, region-aggregated models are most likely to fail. --- ### From Convolution to Transformer: A Comparative Study of U-Net Variants for Brain Tumor and Retinal Vessel Segmentation Authors: Khoa Pham, Sindhuja Penchala, Jiacheng Li, Andy Perkins, Noorbakhsh Amiri Golilarz Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22168v1 Medical image segmentation plays an important role in computer aided diagnosis, treatment planning, and disease monitoring. U-Net has been widely used for biomedical image segmentation because of its encoder decoder structure and skip connections. However, conventional convolution based U-Net models may have limited ability to capture long range dependencies and global contextual information, which can affect performance in complex segmentation tasks. This paper presents a comparative study of five U-Net based architectures: U-Net 3D, Residual U-Net, Attention U-Net, UNETR, and Swin UNETR. The models are evaluated on two benchmark datasets: BraTS 2023 for brain tumor segmentation and DRIVE for retinal vessel segmentation. Experimental results show that Swin UNETR achieves the best overall performance, with Dice scores of 0.8965 on BraTS 2023 and 0.8078 on DRIVE. The results suggest that transformer based U-Net variants are effective for segmentation tasks requiring global contextual modeling, while residual learning remains useful for fine structure segmentation. This study provides practical insights into model selection for medical image segmentation across volumetric MRI and retinal imaging tasks. --- ### Early-Exit Graph Neural Networks for Link Prediction Authors: Roman Knyazhitskiy, Andrea Giuseppe Di Francesco Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22167v1 Graph Neural Networks are great for link prediction in various network-like structures; however, the question of their speed/quality tradeoff has been barely studied. While in practice the time it takes to do inference matters little for small benchmarks, the latency does limit applicability in large-scale domains. In this work, we explore early-exiting strategies that can be applied to Graph Neural Networks to solve the problem of link-prediction faster. We use no auxiliary losses to enforce early exiting, allowing it to emerge as an implicit property of the architecture. We show that our method enables early exiting in several setups, moving the Pareto frontier on the HeaRT benchmark for GCN and SAS-GNN backbones. Our findings show that inference speed of GNNs on many link-prediction problems can be improved, while losing little, or even winning in terms of prediction quality. The code is available in our repository: https://github.com/knyazer/link_prediction. --- ### Rebuttals Move Peer-Review Scores, but Initial-Review Structure Bounds the Movement Authors: Mathieu Louis, Tibo Vanleke, Vincent Ginis, Andres Algaba Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.DL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22166v1 Author rebuttals are the main post-submission window in peer review, but their effect on reviewer scores remains hard to measure because score updates mix rebuttal content with initial score position, paper-level consensus, reviewer confidence, and discussion dynamics. We study ICLR 2024-2025 using 73,000 reviewer trajectories with externally archived pre- and post-rebuttal scores, and use LLMs only as measurement instruments. Gemini Flash 3.0 predicts implied pre-rebuttal scores from score-stripped review text. The resulting text-score offset predicts later movement, with score-increase rates rising from 8.3% when text reads below the assigned score to 31.9% when it reads above. Claude Opus 4.6 induces, and outcome-blinded Gemini Flash 3.0 validates, a 44-feature taxonomy of resolved reviewer-author exchanges, where 23 features replicate across model and held-out year under Bonferroni correction. In the rebuttal-engaged benchmark (n=6,705), initial-review structure already predicts much score movement (AUC=0.747, minimal AUC=0.696), while adding the resolved exchange raises AUC to 0.804. Rebuttals can move scores, but measurable movement is bounded by initial-review structure, and robust exchange signals are mostly rebuttal failure modes. --- ### Drowning in Routine: Signal Dilution in Multi-Turn Agent Training Authors: Yann Pernot, Vi Retault Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22164v1 Multi-turn agents interleave consequential decisions with routine execution: some actions change the downstream return distribution, while others are necessary but reward-equivalent. The cost of trajectory-level credit assignment, often attributed to long horizons, is in fact governed by decision density $ρ$: the fraction of turns whose actions affect the return. When decision density is low, routine turns create signal dilution: they add gradient variance to trajectory-level estimators such as GRPO without adding expected signal. Under explicit assumptions, the resulting turn-level to trajectory-level signal-to-noise ratio scales as $ρ^{-1/2}$, provided critic error remains controlled. The same analysis identifies the complementary regime: at high decision density, trajectory-level methods can remain competitive while avoiding the cost of a critic. In a controlled environment where $ρ$ is exactly tunable, the predicted scaling is recovered with $R^2 = 0.999$, and the training-step gap widens significantly as $ρ\to 0$. --- ### Deep RL for Fast Long-Horizon Operations Scheduling on NASA's Carruthers Geocorona Observatory Mission Authors: Alex Zhang, Jackson Craig, Lara Waldrop Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: astro-ph.IM, astro-ph.EP, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22159v1 Spacecraft operations scheduling is a highly constrained, long-horizon combinatorial optimization problem that traditionally relies on heuristics, constraint programming, or manual planning. We present a scalable deep reinforcement learning framework developed and deployed for NASA's Carruthers Geocorona Observatory mission. Our framework introduces a macro-action abstraction known as activity blocks coupled with dynamic action-masking to navigate the intractably large search space and strictly enforce complex power, thermal, and instrument constraints. The resulting architecture generates globally feasible schedules with overwhelming probability, establishes operational trust, and executes a full training cycle in under six hours, circumventing the need for policy robustness by enabling rapid, on-demand retraining. Further, resulting schedules outperform baseline heuristics in scheduled science quality. The deep reinforcement learning framework was deployed as the default operational scheduler for the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory mission from the outset of the mission, demonstrating that deep reinforcement learning can be trusted for real spacecraft operations under complex, evolving constraints. --- ### Improving Reasoning in Vision-Language Models via Perception Verified Self-Training Authors: Sourabh Sharma, Sonam Gupta, Sadbhawna Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22158v3 Achieving human-like reasoning in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) remains a long-standing challenge. Recent approaches leverage Chain-of-Thought (CoT) rationales generated by human annotators or proprietary models, which are costly and difficult to scale. Self-training offers a promising alternative but often suffers from visual hallucinations and language shortcuts because rationales are filtered only by answer correctness without verifying visual perception. We propose a perception-verified self-training framework that enforces visually grounded reasoning. Our method employs a CoT template (caption-reasoning-conclusion) that disentangles perception from reasoning, enabling independent verification of visual understanding. To compensate for the absence of ground-truth captions, we introduce PerceptEval, an unsupervised method that evaluates caption quality based on its alignment with visual and textual elements in the image. Using caption verification together with answer correctness, we partition the data into easy, medium, and hard subsets and design a two-stage curriculum learning strategy. Stage 1 trains on easy samples, while Stage 2 enhances medium samples by regenerating reasoning conditioned on verified captions and retaining only those with correct conclusions. This ensures training is performed exclusively on perceptually grounded reasoning, reducing hallucinations and language shortcuts. Extensive experiments across diverse domains and models demonstrate improvements of up to 16% over standard self-training baselines, showing that our framework provides a scalable and cost-effective solution for advancing multimodal reasoning without manually annotated CoT rationales. --- ### $π$-RAG: Oblivious Retrieval via Semantic Quantization and Transcendental Addressing for Large Language Models Authors: Aniket Wattamwar, Mrunal Kakirwar Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22153v1 This paper introduces $π$-RAG, a novel architecture for oblivious retrieval that decouples Large Language Models (LLMs) from sensitive data storage without sacrificing semantic understanding. Traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures expose raw vector embeddings to potential inversion attacks and nondeterministic retrieval failures. To address this, we utilize the digits of $π$ as a source of transcendental entropy, creating an immutable indirection layer between the LLM and private records. The value $π$ provides immutability, is uneditable and math governs it. The architecture also introduces a Semantic Quantization Layer. This layer projects user inputs onto a pre-computed manifold of Canonical Intent Centroids. RAG performs vector cosine similarity but here it maps the centroids to deterministic offsets via cryptographic salt. The resulting $π$-key is a pointer to standardized payload from the actual datastore. By replacing direct access to the datastore via LLM with this transcendental layer, $π$-RAG mathematically guarantees that the inference remains oblivious to the data. This architecture unifies deterministic randomness, auditability, and differential privacy, demonstrating high efficacy for high-compliance sectors such as finance and healthcare. --- ### Parameterized Representations via Implicit Stochastic Modulation for High-Dimensional and High-Order Neural PDE Solvers Authors: Zhangyong Liang, Huanhuan Gao Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22150v1 Solving high-dimensional and high-order PDEs is challenged by the coupled growth of spatial dimensionality and derivative order. Recent stochastic derivative estimators reduce this cost by replacing full derivative tensors with randomized dimension or Taylor estimators, but they are mostly designed for fixed physical parameters and require retraining for each new parameter. We show that direct conditional parameterization of such solvers entangles physical parameters with the high-order automatic differentiation graph, causing extra memory growth and parameter-induced variance amplification. We propose Parameterized Representations via Implicit Stochastic Modulation (PRISM), a plug-and-play framework for parameterized high-dimensional and high-order stochastic neural PDE solvers. PRISM uses a hyper-generator to map physical parameters to affine modulators that scale and shift a purely spatial latent manifold, while keeping parameter branches value-connected but spatial-tangent-disconnected. This design preserves unbiased stochastic dimension and Taylor estimators, removes the parameter encoder from high-order spatial AD, and provides a variance-aware Lipschitz envelope over the parameter space. We prove parameterized unbiasedness, estimation-error bounds, and convergence under bounded stochastic variance. Experiments with PRISM-STDE and PRISM-SDGD on nonlinear parameterized PDEs show stable zero-shot generalization, reduced memory usage, and scalability up to 100,000 dimensions on a single GPU, with efficient low-rank SVD adaptation for unseen parameters. --- ### Failure Analysis in Transition: An Industry Survey of Challenges, Priorities, and Standardization Needs in Advanced Packaging and Heterogeneous Integration Authors: Himanandhan Reddy Kottur, Nusra Akter Takia, Mahamudul Hassan Fuad, Istiaq Firoz Shiam, Matthew Walsh, Navid Asadizanjani Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.SE, cs.CV, eess.IV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22149v1 Failure analysis is being reshaped by heterogeneous integration, chiplet-based architectures, hybrid bonding, backside technologies, & increasingly buried package structures. To examine how practitioners view this transition, an anonymous survey was distributed across a broad set of organizations involved in semiconductor design, packaging, systems, tools, & failure analysis. The survey collected approximately one hundred responses & probed organizational background, supported product domains, future priorities in failure analysis, critical bottlenecks, sample preparation challenges, emerging architecture specific pain points, & perceived needs for workflow acceleration & data standardization. The results show that heterogeneous integration, chiplet, and three-dimensional products dominate the respondent base at 69%, while package & heterogeneous integration failure analysis received the highest importance rating at 7.92 out of 10. Hybrid bonding emerged as the most difficult new architecture to analyze at 54%, higher-resolution non-destructive imaging ranked as the most important future accelerator at 8.18 out of 10, and 83% of respondents supported formalized data standardization frameworks. The complete survey data are provided in Appendix A (Table II) to improve transparency & support future benchmarking. --- ### Meta-Reinforcement Learning via Evolution for Multi-Objective Combinatorial Supply Chain Optimisation Authors: Rifny Rachman, Bahrul Ilmi Nasution, Josh Tingey, Richard Allmendinger, Pradyumn Shukla, Wei Pan Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22146v1 Meta-reinforcement learning is a promising approach to multi-objective optimisation because it enables rapid policy adaptation across changing environments and preference settings. However, conventional few-shot methods usually fine-tune from a single shared meta-policy, which can reduce solution diversity and limit exploration of the Pareto front, especially in high-dimensional combinatorial problems such as supply chain optimisation. We propose a population-based Meta-reinforcement learning framework that combines decomposition with evolutionary search in scalarisation weight space. The framework maintains a population of weight vectors, each associated with a distinct meta-policy trained through gradient-based meta-learning, and iteratively refines this population through elitist selection, crossover, and mutation guided by hypervolume and entropy contributions. We evaluate the method in a multi-objective supply chain setting with conflicting economic, environmental, and social goals, and further test its generality on standard reinforcement learning problems. The results show that the proposed approach yields more diverse, better distributed Pareto front approximations, improves cross-task adaptation, increases hypervolume by up to 32\% over Meta-multi-objective reinforcement learning in the complex case, and attains the lowest average Hausdorff distance among all compared methods. --- ### SAGE: An Expert-Annotated South Asian GI Endoscopy Dataset for Multimodal Learning and Hallucination Analysis Authors: Niyoj Oli, Sachin Acharya, Sandesh Pokhrel, Sanjay Bhandari, Ramesh Rana, Nikesh Mani Shrestha, Ram Bahadur Gurung, Yash Raj Shrestha, Prashnna K Gyawali, Binod Bhattarai Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22144v2 Gastrointestinal cancers represent a growing health burden in the South Asian region, driven largely by rapid changes in socio-economic conditions and lifestyle habits. However, early diagnosis remains limited by inadequate equipment, financial resources, and scarce GI expertise. AI-assisted diagnosis and report generation show great promise in alleviating this problem by providing non-specialist healthcare workers the technical expertise to perform diagnosis. Yet, almost all open-source, publicly available datasets are predominantly collected from the European region, with minimal representation from the South Asian region. The lack of open-source GI datasets from diverse geographic regions has made it difficult to assess whether population bias is present in existing models, and to develop geographically inclusive AI tools for automated GI diagnosis. To address this gap, we introduce SAGE: An Expert-Annotated South Asian GI Endoscopy dataset for Multimodal Learning and Hallucination Analysis, for image captioning, multi-label classification, and VQA tasks. It consists of 1,300 images, their captions along with hallucination tag, 18 labels and 14,276 question-answer pairs making it well-suited for diverse range of tasks including classification, benchmarking, and fine-tuning LMMs. We further conducted benchmarking of task-specific models, like multi-class classifiers on the effect of population shift which reveals that such models suffers the most with an average F1 score drop of 54 points on South Asian dataset. Further, benchmarking of contemporary LMMs reveals a substantial drop in the average GREEN score for anatomical landmark detection (0.308) and abnormality detection (0.410). We open-source our dataset under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, and we hope to encourage others to contribute toward more inclusive dataset representation and help counteract population bias in medical AI. --- ### Physics-Informed Eikonal Caging for Whole-Arm Manipulation Planning Authors: Yan Zhang, Yiming Li, Yifei Dong, Florian T. Pokorny, Sylvain Calinon Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.RO, cs.GT, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22143v1 Planning contact-rich whole-arm manipulation is challenging because interactions that involve extended robot geometry give rise to complex contact dynamics that are difficult to model accurately. This creates a need for planning principles that do not rely heavily on precise contact models. Caging offers one such geometric notion of robustness to modeling inaccuracy by restricting object escape through geometrically enclosing the object. However, existing caging formulations are difficult to incorporate into continuous optimization-based manipulation planning. We reformulate caging as a minimum-time escape problem in which the object seeks to leave an enclosing robot geometry in the shortest time. This yields a continuous escape-time field that measures the robot's enclosure quality and we show it satisfies an eikonal equation. We therefore can approximate this field using a physics-informed neural network, producing a smooth differentiable representation that can be embedded directly into manipulation planning. The resulting objective supports whole-arm manipulation planning to favor robot configurations resisting object escape. This improves the manipulation robustness to contact model mismatch, thus enabling planning with simplified contact models, including quasi-dynamic approximations and simplified object geometry. Across simulation and real-world experiments, we show improved robustness to disturbances and contact-model mismatch relative to baselines. These results suggest that geometric enclosure can serve as a practical robustness primitive for whole-arm manipulation. A supplementary video, which includes an intuitive overview of our method and experiment video results, is available on our project webpage. --- ### BioMatrix: Towards a Comprehensive Biological Foundation Model Spanning the Modality Matrix of Sequences, Structures, and Language Authors: Qizhi Pei, Zhimeng Zhou, Yi Duan, Yiyang Zhao, Wei Li, Han Guo, Liang He, Chengping Li, Chang-Yu Hsieh, Conghui He, Rui Yan, Lijun Wu Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG, q-bio.BM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22138v1 We present BioMatrix, the first multimodal foundation model that natively integrates sequences, structures, and natural language for both molecules and proteins within a single decoder-only architecture. Existing biological foundation models pursue native multimodality and broad entity coverage separately: those that fuse multiple modalities under a shared objective remain confined to a single entity type, while those spanning multiple entity types either omit explicit structural modeling or rely on adapter-based designs in which the model cannot natively generate the very modalities it can read. BioMatrix closes this gap by mapping molecular sequences (supporting both SMILES and SELFIES notations), molecular structures, protein sequences, protein structures, and natural language into a shared discrete token space through a unified tokenization scheme, so that all modalities are consumed and produced uniformly under a single next-token prediction objective -- without external encoders, projection adapters, or modality-specific output heads. Built upon the Qwen3 language model (1.7B and 4B), BioMatrix is continually pretrained on 304.4 billion tokens spanning general and domain-specific text, sequence and structure views of molecules and proteins, and cross-modal corpora that interleave biomolecular entities with scientific text and link distinct entities through molecule-protein and protein-protein interaction data. After tuning on a comprehensive suite of downstream applications covering 80 tasks across 6 categories -- encompassing single-entity and multi-entity understanding and generation tasks across and within modalities -- BioMatrix achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on 77 out of 80 tasks, demonstrating that a single, natively multimodal generalist model can effectively match or surpass specialized approaches across a wide range of biological tasks. --- ### Feed-forward Motion In-betweening for Any 4D Authors: Hiroki Nishizawa, Hubert P. H. Shum, Yoshihiro Fukuhara, Hirokatsu Kataoka, Shigeo Morishima Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22131v1 4D dynamics (3D geometry evolving over time) is a fundamental representation of the physical world and plays a crucial role in world modeling (e.g., animation and games). Owing to the scarcity of large-scale, long-horizon 4D mesh data with arbitrary shapes, early text-to-4D methods rely on distillation or test-time optimization from video diffusion priors, making inference prohibitively slow. Recent feed-forward generators greatly reduce inference cost but offer limited spatiotemporal controllability, and short-horizon generation often leads to error accumulation in long-horizon sequences. We propose a novel feed-forward in-betweening framework for arbitrary 4D meshes with keyframe conditioning. Building on universal mesh-animation latents, we introduce a frame-wise mesh VAE that encodes each frame into topology-agnostic latent tokens anchored by a reference mesh for keyframe conditioning. We further introduce a keyframe-conditioned rectified flow model with an MMDiT backbone that synthesizes non-keyframe frames conditioned on sparse keyframes. Experiments show strong performance and improved controllability on both DyMesh16 and DyMesh32 benchmarks. --- ### From Recognition to Understanding: Unlocking Cognitive Time Series Reasoning with LLMs Authors: Xin Qiu, Junlong Tong, Yao Zhang, Yunpu Ma, Wei Zhang, Xiaoyu Shen Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22126v1 Time series analysis has recently been coupled with Large Language Models (LLMs) to leverage their reasoning and world knowledge capabilities, yet gains remain limited. We attribute this to a fundamental mismatch between existing task formulations and LLM strengths: most settings reduce time series understanding to curve-fitting systems, focusing on low-level prediction while ignoring the semantic, contextual, and reasoning-intensive nature of real-world temporal decision-making.To address these limitations, we introduce TSCognition, a multimodal benchmark for multi-dimensional time series reasoning. It collects real-world time series and textual information from 15 public sources and constructs approximately 41K QA samples around five cognitive reasoning tasks: Decoding, Grounding, Inferring, Extrapolating, and Acting. Building on this, we further propose TSAlign, a unified framework that encodes time series into compact patch-level representations and aligns them with semantic directions in the LLM embedding space via gated residual injection and multivariate fusion.Experiments show that TSAlign outperforms existing LLM, VLM, and time series QA baselines on TSCognition and the publicly available TimerBed benchmark while substantially reducing computational cost.Code is available at: (https://github.com/EIT-NLP/CognitiveTSR)(https://github.com/EIT-NLP/CognitiveTSR) --- ### Surgical Anatomy Recognition with Context Learning using Foundation Representations Authors: Ronald L. P. D. de Jong, Tim J. M. Jaspers, Raf A. H. Vervoort, Aron F. H. A. Bakker, Yiping Li, Jip L. Tolenaar, Jelle P. Ruurda, Willem M. Brinkman, Josien P. W. Pluim, Marcel Breeuwer, Daan de Geus, Fons van der Sommen Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22124v1 Accurate recognition of anatomical structures is essential for safe and effective minimally invasive surgery (MIS), yet it remains underexplored in surgical computer vision due to limited annotated data and methods tailored primarily to natural scenes. In this work, we present a combined dataset and model framework to advance anatomy-aware perception in MIS. First, we introduce ATLAS-120k, a large-scale clip-level semantic segmentation dataset comprising over 120,000 annotated frames from 100 surgical videos spanning 14 procedures and multiple modalities, including laparoscopic and robot-assisted surgery. The dataset captures substantial procedural variability and was created using a scalable annotation pipeline that integrates expert manual labeling, automated propagation, iterative refinement, and surgeon verification to ensure high-quality annotations. Second, we propose ATLAS (Anatomy Recognition with Context Learning using Foundation Representations), a video semantic segmentation model specifically designed for surgical anatomy recognition. Unlike conventional approaches that emphasize object tracking, ATLAS leverages foundation-model embeddings together with lightweight temporal reasoning to incorporate contextual cues such as procedure type, surgical phase, and short-term visual memory. This design enables temporally consistent and accurate predictions while maintaining real-time feasibility. Together, the dataset and model establish a practical foundation for robust surgical scene understanding and support the development of clinically applicable guidance systems for minimally invasive surgery. The models, dataset annotations and annotation platform are publicly available at: https://github.com/TimJaspers0801/ATLAS. --- ### KITE: Decoupling Kinematics and Interaction for Zero-Shot Cross-Embodiment Manipulation Authors: Qianxu Wang, Kuan Fang Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22113v1 Generalizing manipulation policies across robot embodiments remains difficult because standard policies entangle task reasoning with embodiment-specific motor control. We study zero-shot cross-embodiment manipulation, where a policy trained on source embodiments must be deployed on a structurally different target embodiment without additional task demonstrations. We introduce Kinematic Interaction Transfer across Embodiments (KITE), which decouples manipulation into embodiment-agnostic task reasoning and embodiment-specific motor control, connected through a learned latent representation of interaction intent based on contact patterns. Task reasoning is performed by a shared policy that predicts latent intents from source demonstrations, while motor control is performed by an intent-conditioned action decoder learned from each embodiment's kinematic model. With KITE, adaptation to a new embodiment requires only training a new action decoder using its kinematic model, without recollecting demonstration data. We evaluate KITE on three manipulation tasks spanning transfer between parallel grippers, dexterous hands, and composite embodiments. KITE consistently achieves zero-shot transfer to structurally different target embodiments, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in transfer success and task-embodiment scope. --- ### Accurate identification and measurement of the precipitate area by two-stage deep neural networks in novel chromium-based alloys Authors: Zeyu Xia, Kan Ma, Sibo Cheng, Thomas Blackburn, Ziling Peng, Kewei Zhu, Weihang Zhang, Dunhui Xiao, Alexander J Knowles, Rossella Arcucci Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.CV, cond-mat.mtrl-sci, cs.LG, physics.chem-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22112v1 The performance of advanced materials for extreme environments is underpinned by their microstructure, including the size and distribution of reinforcing phases. Chromium-based superalloys are a recently proposed alternative to conventional face-centred-cubic superalloys for high-temperature applications, such as Concentrated Solar Power, and their development requires efficient measurement of precipitate volume fraction and size distribution from electron microscopy images. Traditional fixed-threshold image processing is sensitive to background noise, generalises poorly across materials, and requires substantial manual measurement effort. To address these bottlenecks, this study proposes DT-SegNet, an end-to-end two-stage deep learning scheme based on YOLOv5 and SegFormer for object detection and segmentation in electron microscopy images. The approach combines the training efficiency of convolutional neural networks at the detection stage with the segmentation accuracy of a Vision Transformer. Numerical experiments show that DT-SegNet substantially outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation tools offered by Weka and ilastik across metrics including accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The model provides a useful tool for alloy-development microstructure examinations and helps address the large datasets associated with high-throughput alloy development. --- ### TraceView: Interactive Visualization of Agentic Program Repair Trajectories Authors: Amirali Sajadi, Tu Nguyen, Kimmie Huynh, Esteban Parra, Preetha Chatterjee Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22110v1 LLM-based automated program repair (APR) agents generate patches to fix software bugs with minimal human intervention. These agents often produce long trajectories of reasoning, tool use, and feedback to produce candidate patches. Final patch outcomes show whether a repair attempt succeeded or failed, but they do not show how the agent reached that outcome, or where the process became repetitive or misaligned with the task. This makes agentic repair failures difficult to diagnose, reproduce, and prevent. To help developers address these challenges, we present TraceView, an interactive tool for labeling and visualizing repair trajectories from APR systems. TraceView organizes raw and pre-labeled agentic runs with Thought, Action, and Result components to support semantic relation labeling and diagnosis, and renders the resulting trajectory as graph views. Furthermore, TraceView provides relation filters, patch outcome summaries, metrics, and node-level evidence panels to help users inspect how reasoning, actions, and feedback connect across the various steps of an agentic repair attempt. We evaluate TraceView with five researchers through a survey-based user study. Participants reported that TraceView made trajectories easier to scan and that its overview-to-detail workflow helped them better understand repair behavior. The TraceView source code is available at https://github.com/SOAR-Lab/agent-traj-visualization. A screencast of TraceView is available at https://youtu.be/9ZCh7Ifj2AQ. --- ### Reinforcement Learning-Based Traffic Signal Control for IoT-Enabled Intersections Authors: Yousef AlSaqabi Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: eess.SY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22108v1 Urban traffic congestion remains a persistent challenge in car-dependent cities, imposing significant economic and societal costs. Traffic signal systems are increasingly deployed as networked cyber-physical components within smart-city infrastructures, where distributed sensing and edge intelligence enable adaptive traffic management. This paper investigates reinforcement learning (RL) as an edge-intelligent approach for adaptive traffic signal operation at a signalized urban intersection in Kuwait. A Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)-based controller is developed to dynamically allocate green-phase durations using locally observed traffic states, without relying on future demand information or centralized coordination. The controller is evaluated in a realistic simulation environment informed by real-world hourly traffic volume data from Kuwait, and is compared against both conventional fixed-time control and a vehicle-actuated controller representing the current state of practice, using average vehicle delay, queue length, and emissions as performance metrics. Under nominal conditions, the proposed controller reduces average vehicle delay by 46% relative to fixed-time control and 34% relative to actuated control, while also lowering per-vehicle CO2 emissions by approximately 23%. These performance gains persist under demand perturbations of +/-15%, generalize from weekday to weekend traffic patterns, and are corroborated by a reward function ablation; low variance across five random seeds confirms their statistical reliability. These findings demonstrate the practicality of learning-based edge traffic signal control as a building block for IoT-enabled smart-city transportation systems, and as a deployable precursor toward fully connected, Internet of Vehicles (IoV)-based urban mobility. --- ### OphthaDT: Generative Digital Twins for Forecasting Visual Acuity Trajectories in Ophthalmology Authors: Pietro Belligoli, Nikita Makarov, Sayedali Shetab Boushehri, Fabian Schmich, Raul Rodriguez-Esteban, Michael Menden Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22101v1 Precision medicine in ophthalmology requires accurate longitudinal predictions, but the fragmented nature of multimodal clinical data remains a barrier to forecasting. We introduce OphthaDT, an LLM-based digital twin for ophthalmology that serializes longitudinal patient histories from 3,220 patients across four Phase III clinical trials into structured narratives to forecast best corrected visual acuity (BCVA). In benchmarks spanning up to 100 weeks, OphthaDT demonstrated the lowest prediction error in neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD), achieving an average mean absolute error (MAE) reduction of 6.0% compared to all baselines. In diabetic macular edema (DME), OphthaDT demonstrated competitive performance against all baselines while outperforming Random Forest and XGBoost by an average MAE reduction of 2.6% and 6.9%, respectively. Results reveal that OphthaDT's predictive advantage scales with trajectory complexity: whereas linear models remain effective for the more stable treatment responses of DME, OphthaDT's capacity is better suited for capturing the high longitudinal variability of nAMD. Finally, OphthaDT handles irregular sampling without imputation, positioning LLM-based clinical trajectory modeling as a methodology that could reduce patient burden and accelerate drug development. --- ### Plurification in/of language technology -- The integration of culture in next-generation AI Authors: Gertraud Koch, Fausto Giunchiglia Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22097v1 The paper explores how "culture" can be operationalised in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and what this reveals about the possibilities and limits of considering a plurality of cultural backgrounds in technological design. It proposes that cultural alignment cannot be achieved only by adding more examples of "other cultures", rather it requires plural epistemologies: allowing multiple, locally grounded ways of knowing. To analyze how this plurality of knowing can be addressed in NLP, the paper uses a socio-technical model of language technology (LT) design, the five layers of technological activity model, for collecting and systematizing approaches to culture in NLP. The analysis shows that while NLP research has made progress toward more culturally sensitive systems, many approaches remain partial, addressing "culture" primarily at the level of output or representation while leaving deeper questions of power, governance, and social context unresolved. The paper concludes that operationalising culture requires much more than technical adaptation; it suggests a reflexive and plural socio-technical approach that navigates potentials and limits of computational formalisation for accounting multiple linguistic and socio-cultural backgrounds. --- ### Cross-View Yaw Estimation in Location Uncertainty with Line-Aligning Yaw Scoring Authors: Taeho Kang, Nairan Zhang, Yelin Kim, Yujiao Shi, Youngki Lee Published: 2026-06-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22094v2 Accurate yaw estimation is a bottleneck in cross-view localization between ground view and Bird's Eye View (BEV). Existing methods couple yaw with translation and rely on height or projection assumptions that degrade under large yaw ambiguity. We disentangle yaw from location accuracy and introduce LAYS, a radially invariant line-consensus voting method. By exploiting the radial invariance of our formulation, we achieve sub-degree yaw precision via 3D voting over all candidate poses, while eliminating the need for accurate location. Our key observation is that a ground-image column matched to BEV pixels induces the same yaw across all camera positions along the radial direction of the pixels. LAYS matches BEV pixels to ground columns using feature similarity and accumulates the induced yaw votes into discrete 3D bins, where correct correspondences along the radial line concentrate into a sharp peak for the correct yaw. Experiments on Mapillary, Ford, KITTI, and VIGOR show significant gains under unknown yaw, particularly for normal FoV with unknown yaw (+28$\sim$45\%p), and using LAYS as a yaw prior improves downstream 3-DoF localization. ---