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作者: J. H. Ni ×
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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Pixels to Proofs: Probabilistically-Safe Latent World Model Control via Parallel Conformal Robust MPC

We present SLS^2, a framework for safe feedback motion planning from pixels using robust model predictive control (MPC) in learned latent world models. Our approach trains an action-conditioned joint-embedding world model with compact Markovian latent states, enabling efficient gradient-based trajectory optimization through learned latent dynamics. To enforce safety for the true system despite imperfect latent predictions, we inform a GPU-accelerated system level synthesis (SLS) robust MPC scheme with conformal prediction to obtain calibrated latent error bounds and robust latent-space constraint sets. We further learn and conformalize a latent constraint checker, allowing the SLS planner to impose probabilistic safety constraints during closed-loop execution. We evaluate our method on vision-based control tasks, where it improves both goal-reaching performance and safety over latent world-model and safe-planning baselines.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SHARD: Safe and Helpful Alignment via Self-Reframing Distillation

Large language models often struggle with sensitive prompts. They may refuse outright, provide generic safety boilerplate, or fail to address the user's legitimate informational needs that can be answered safely. We introduce SHARD, a self-reframing distillation method to improve safe-helpfulness. It first rewrites sensitive prompts to surface benign intent using philosophical guidelines, then reframes its original responses into safe, more helpful ones, and finally fine-tunes the model on its self-reframed responses. Across DNA and the English subset of LINGUASAFE, SHARD improves helpfulness for most model families while preserving safety. It also remains competitive with distillation from a larger teacher model, suggesting that models can internalize safe and helpful behavior elicited from their own. Warning: This paper contains content that may be offensive or harmful.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Matching Markets meet Cumulative Prospect Theory: Towards Optimal and Adversarially Robust Learning

arXiv:2606.19883v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a multi-agent multi-armed bandit problem in the competitive setup with two-sided matching markets under a human centric decision making model. To capture human preferences, we use cumulative prospect theory (CPT) that weighs the actions of the agent in a nonlinear fashion using a ($\alpha$-Hölder continuous) weight function. CPT has been widely used in behavioral economics and risk sensitive machine learning to emulate human preferences. We analyze the state-of-the-art learning algorithm with CPT weight distorted rewards and obtain a player optimal regret of $\mathcal{O}(K\log T \left(\frac{1}{\Delta}\right)^{2/\alpha})$, where $K$ denotes the number of arms, $T$ is the learning horizon, and $\Delta$ represents (suitably defined) players' minimum preference gap. Noticing the dependence on $\Delta$ to be sub-optimal, we further improve this regret by judiciously selecting the active set of arms during exploration, which removes the dependence on $K$ in the dominant term and achieves an improved (optimal) regret guarantees in the setting where the number of arms $K$ is significantly larger than the number of players $N$. In addition, we consider adversarial markets where the observed rewards of the agents may be corrupted. We propose and analyze algorithms for robust markets with CPT as risk sensitive measure in both settings where the total corruption budget is known and where it is unknown, and establish logarithmic player-optimal regret guarantees in both cases.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

SG2Loc: Sequential Visual Localization on 3D Scene Graphs

Visual localization in complex indoor environments remains a critical challenge for robotics and AR applications. Sequential localization, where pose estimates are refined over time, is important for autonomous agents. However, traditional methods often require storing extensive image databases or point clouds, leading to significant overhead. This paper introduces a novel, lightweight approach to sequential visual localization using 3D scene graphs. Our method represents the environment with a compact scene graph, where nodes represent objects (with coarse meshes) and edges encode spatial relationships. For each image in the localization phase, we extract per-patch semantic features, predicting object identities. Localization is performed within a particle filter framework. Each particle, representing a camera pose, projects the coarse object meshes from the scene graph into the image, assigning object identities to patches based on visibility. The similarity of the per-patch features, in the input image, and object features from the scene graph determines the weight of a particle. Subsequent images are incorporated sequentially, refining the pose estimate. By leveraging a compact scene graph and efficient semantic matching, our method significantly reduces storage while maintaining performance on real-world datasets. The code will be available at https://github.com/DmblnNicole/sg2loc.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Multicluster measles outbreak with a substantial proportion of modified cases in Tokyo, Japan, January-May 2026

Tokyo experienced a measles outbreak (260 cases) in early 2026 despite elimination status. Adults aged 20-39 years were most affected, and 38% of cases were modified measles, increasing with prior vaccination. Although incidence rose until April, the effective reproduction number; R(t) fell below 1, consistent with outbreak control. Multiple clusters were identified, but many cases lacked epidemiological links, suggesting that modified measles is less likely to be considered in differential diagnosis. Intensive contact tracing and surveillance contributed to limiting transmission.

06.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

When Tables Go Crazy: Evaluating Multimodal Models on French Financial Documents

Vision-language models (VLMs) perform well on many document understanding tasks, yet their reliability in specialized, non-English domains remains underexplored. This gap is especially critical in finance, where documents mix dense regulatory text, numerical tables, and visual charts, and where extraction errors can have real-world consequences. We introduce Scribe Finance, the first multimodal benchmark for evaluating French financial document understanding. The dataset contains 1,204 expert-validated questions spanning text extraction, table comprehension, chart interpretation, and multi-turn conversational reasoning, drawn from real investment prospectuses, KIDs, and PRIIPs. We evaluate six open-weight VLMs (8B-124B parameters) using an LLM-as-judge protocol. While models achieve strong performance on text and table tasks (85-90% accuracy), they struggle with chart interpretation (34-62%). Most notably, multi-turn dialogue reveals a sharp failure mode: early mistakes propagate across turns, driving accuracy down to roughly 50% regardless of model size. These results show that current VLMs are effective for well-defined extraction tasks but remain brittle in interactive, multi-step financial analysis. Scribe Finance offers a challenging benchmark to measure and drive progress in this high-stakes setting.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Efficient Reinforcement Learning by Guiding World Models with Non-Curated Data

arXiv:2502.19544v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Leveraging offline data is a promising way to improve the sample efficiency of online reinforcement learning (RL). This paper expands the pool of usable data for offline-to-online RL by leveraging abundant non-curated data that is reward-free, of mixed quality, and collected across multiple embodiments. Although learning a world model appears promising for utilizing such data, we find that naive fine-tuning fails to accelerate RL training on many tasks. Through careful investigation, we attribute this failure to the distributional shift between offline and online data during fine-tuning. To address this issue and effectively use the offline data, we propose two techniques: i) experience rehearsal and ii) execution guidance. With these modifications, the non-curated offline data substantially improves RL's sample efficiency. Under limited sample budgets, our method achieves nearly twice the aggregate score of learning-from-scratch baselines across 72 visuomotor tasks spanning 6 embodiments. On challenging tasks such as locomotion and robotic manipulation, it outperforms prior methods that utilize offline data by a decent margin.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

FineREX: Fine-Tuned NER-RE for Human Smuggling Knowledge Graphs

Court proceedings contain valuable evidence about human smuggling networks, but this information is often buried within unstructured, jargon-heavy legal documents. While large language models (LLMs) can support knowledge graph construction through automated information extraction, existing approaches rely on general-purpose models that are not tailored to the entity and relationship definitions required in this domain. We introduce FineREX, a streamlined knowledge graph construction pipeline built around a fine-tuned LLM for named entity recognition and relationship extraction (NER-RE). Using a manually annotated dataset of $512$ text chunks, FineREX achieves absolute improvements of 15.50% and 31.46% in entity and relationship F1-score, respectively, compared to a larger general-purpose baseline. These gains translate into higher-quality knowledge graphs, reducing legal noise by nearly half and lowering node duplication on long documents from 17.78% to 11.17%. By eliminating document rewriting and redundant extraction stages, FineREX also reduces end-to-end processing time by 50.0%. Our results demonstrate that domain-specific fine-tuning can substantially outperform larger general-purpose models while improving both the quality and efficiency of knowledge graph construction for illicit network analysis.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Vision-language models for chest radiography do not always need the image

Medical vision-language models report strong chest radiograph accuracy, and this is increasingly read as evidence that they use the image. That inference is unsafe: a model exploiting finding-name priors scores like one that reads the scan, and no standard benchmark separates them. We introduce a causal audit that intervenes on the image, occluding the relevant region, occluding an irrelevant one, and swapping in another patient's same-label scan, and combines three behavioral metrics to test whether a correct answer depends on the image. Across nine systems, a text-only model with no image access reaches within 5.7 accuracy points of the best multimodal one, and a 119-billion-parameter multimodal model is statistically indistinguishable from a 7-billion text-only baseline. The audit splits the cohort into three models that ignore the image, one that is unstable, and five that use it selectively, for a subset of findings; the categories hold across a second dataset, resolution, and prompt phrasing. Against board-certified radiologists, a text-only model is statistically indistinguishable from a radiologist's accuracy while grounding at zero, whereas the image-using models ground at radiologist-comparable rates. Reported confidence flags ungrounded answers only when a model uses the image. Grounding audits, not accuracy, should gate clinical deployment.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence

We present a preview version of DeepSeek-V4 series, including two strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models – DeepSeek-V4-Pro with 1.6T parameters (49B activated) and DeepSeek-V4-Flash with 284B parameters (13B activated) – both supporting a context length of one million tokens. DeepSeek-V4 series incorporate several key upgrades in architecture and optimization: (1) a hybrid attention architecture that combines Compressed Sparse Attention (CSA) and Heavily Compressed Attention (HCA) to improve long-context efficiency; (2) Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC) that enhance conventional residual connections; (3) and the Muon optimizer for faster convergence and greater training stability. We pre-train both models on more than 32T diverse and high-quality tokens, followed by a comprehensive post-training pipeline that unlocks and further enhances their capabilities. DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Max, the maximum reasoning effort mode of DeepSeek-V4-Pro, redefines the state-of-the-art for open models, outperforming its predecessors in core tasks. Meanwhile, DeepSeek-V4 series are highly efficient in long-context scenarios. In the one-million-token context setting, DeepSeek-V4-Pro requires only 27% of single-token inference FLOPs and 10% of KV cache compared with DeepSeek-V3.2. This enables us to routinely support one-million-token contexts, thereby making long-horizon tasks and further test-time scaling more feasible. The model checkpoints are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

HemExp: Clinically-Guided Latent Diffusion for Modeling Hematoma Expansion

Hematoma expansion (HE) after spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) is a major determinant of acute triage and treatment decisions in neurosurgical care. However, most existing methods provide either a binary expansion risk or a single follow-up volume, limiting uncertainty-aware decisions. We introduce HemExp, a clinically-guided latent diffusion model that generates patient-specific follow-up non-contrast CT images, along with segmentations of intraparenchymal and intraventricular hemorrhage. Generation is conditioned on baseline imaging, clinical variables, and an explicit expansion indicator, enabling controllable simulation of realistic clinical scenarios. HemExp uses a hemorrhage-aware multi-head variational autoencoder and models progression as the difference between baseline and follow-up latent representations with a conditional diffusion model. The model is trained on paired scans from 450 patients across multiple centers and evaluated on 107 patients from a held-out institution. HemExp produces spatial HE probability maps by generating multiple synthetic follow-up images per patient to estimate distributions of plausible follow-up hematoma volumes. Perturbing clinical inputs such as symptom-onset-to-imaging time or anticoagulant status shifts the predicted follow-up volume distribution. HemExp extends binary predictors and demonstrates robust estimation of clinically relevant outcomes in the imaging space, such as hematoma volume, intraventricular involvement, and mass effects. Overall, our results support controllable latent diffusion as a promising direction for uncertainty-aware modeling of early ICH progression.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimising Entanglement Distillation Policies

arXiv:2606.14908v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entanglement distillation is a fundamental operation in quantum information processing used to obtain higher-fidelity entangled pairs from a supply of less entangled quantum states using local operations aided by classical communication (LOCC). In a physically relevant setting, where states with an initial fidelity of $f_0$, probabilistically generated over multiple, $m$, memory pairs distributed between two parties, Alice and Bob, are pairwise distilled, the optimal policy identifies the system-configuration dependent sequence of entanglement generation and distillation operations that need to be performed in order to minimize the expected time to reach some target fidelity $f_T>f_0$. Here, we formulate and systematically analyze this task as a Markov decision problem and using a value iteration algorithm, obtain optimal deterministic policies that minimize the expected waiting time required to reach a target fidelity. Our results show that the expected waiting time under the optimal policy decreases with increasing generation probability $p$ and number of quantum memories $m$ - as expected. In contrast, it exhibits non-monotonic behavior with respect to $f_0$ for a fixed fidelity gap, $(\Delta f = f_T-f_0)$. While the optimal policy consistently outperforms baseline policies such as the greedy, nested and entanglement pumping policies, its relative advantage is regime-dependent, being determined by the system parameters ($p,f_0,f_T,m$), and exhibits a nontrivial dependence on the fidelity gap $\Delta f$. Our results highlight the value of formulating entanglement distillation as a Markov decision problem, enabling the systematic design of policies that achieve target fidelity thresholds for quantum information tasks in realistic resource-constrained settings.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Adaptive Identification and Modeling of Clinical Pathways with Process Mining

arXiv:2512.03787v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Clinical pathways are specialized healthcare plans that model patient treatment procedures. They are developed to provide criteria-based progression and standardize patient treatment, thereby improving care, reducing resource use, and accelerating patient recovery. However, manual modeling of these pathways based on clinical guidelines and domain expertise is difficult and may not reflect the actual best practices for different variations or combinations of diseases. We propose a two-phase modeling method using process mining, which extends the knowledge base of clinical pathways by leveraging conformance checking diagnostics. In the first phase, historical data of a given disease is collected to capture treatment in the form of a process model. In the second phase, new data is compared against the reference model to verify conformance. Based on the conformance checking results, the knowledge base can be expanded with more specific models tailored to new variants or disease combinations. We demonstrate our approach using Synthea, a benchmark dataset simulating patient treatments for SARS-CoV-2 infections with varying COVID-19 complications. The results show that our method enables expanding the knowledge base of clinical pathways with sufficient precision, peaking to 95.62% AUC while maintaining an arc-degree simplicity of 67.11%.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

HypOProto: Hyperbolic Ordinal Prototypes for Left Ventricular Filling Pressure Classification

Echocardiography (echo) is a widely used imaging modality for assessing cardiac function, with Left Ventricular Filling Pressure (LVFP) serving as a critical physiological marker for conditions such as heart failure. Standard LVFP classification into normal vs elevated categories relies on the Doppler-derived $E/e'$ ratio, which is operator-dependent and often unavailable in resource-limited settings, motivating methods that infer LVFP directly from B-mode echo. Existing deep learning approaches achieve high performance but remain largely black-box, limiting clinical interpretability. We propose HypOProto, a hyperbolic, ordinal prototype-based framework for interpretable LVFP classification using a frozen, explainable foundation model backbone. HypOProto arranges prototypes along the physiological $E/e'$ scale, placing borderline cases near the hyperboloid root where small angular differences separate similar cases, while normal and elevated cases occupy outward positions reflecting increasing diagnostic certainty. This hyperbolic geometry encodes clinically meaningful ordinal relationships and improves interpretability. We also introduce a novel Hyperbolic Prototype Angular Separation (HyperPAS) loss, enforcing inter-class prototype separation in hyperbolic space. HypOProto achieves SOTA performance while maintaining transparency, and highlights clinically relevant regions in visualizations. This work represents the first prototype-based framework for LVFP classification in echo. Our code can be found at https://github.com/DeepRCL/HypOProto.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

HiLo-Token: Input-Adaptive High-Low Frequency Token Compression for Efficient Image Editing

Creative image editing tools, such as Photoshop's Remove or Generative Fill buttons, are central to everyday customer use and account for a major share of traffic in Photoshop and Lightroom. However, current generative AI models face significant latency challenges, which become even more pronounced when transitioning from convolution-based U-Nets to Diffusion Transformers (DiTs). In our evaluation on hundreds of representative image editing samples spanning a wide range of mask ratios, the DiT module alone accounts for an average of 73% of the total model latency, even after being distilled from 50 timesteps down to 8 timesteps. To tackle this challenge, we propose $HiLo-Token$, an input-adaptive token compression framework that allocates more token budget to high-frequency, rich-context regions while assigning fewer tokens to low-frequency areas. Specifically, for the editing region specified by the user mask, we retain all tokens within a dilated mask to preserve strong locality and contextual relevance. Outside the editing region, we introduce a simple yet effective high-frequency token selection strategy based on spatial frequency to capture important local details, while using tokens from a 16x downsampled image to represent low-frequency components and preserve the blurry but global structure. Extensive experiments on production-level evaluation data validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, achieving 3.13x, 2.59x, and 1.67x DiT speedups on A100-80GB for image editing tasks across small, medium, and large mask ratio categories with average ratios of 6.38%, 15.92%, and 35.36%, respectively, without any regression in generation quality.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Improved Baselines with Representation Autoencoders

Representation Autoencoders (RAE) replace traditional VAE with pretrained vision encoders. In this paper, we systematically investigate several design choices and find three insights which simplify and improve RAE. First, we study a generalized formulation where the representation is defined as sum of the last k encoder layers rather than solely the final layer. This simple change greatly improves reconstruction without encoder finetuning or specialized data (e.g., text, faces). Second, we study the prevalent assumption that RAE (using pretrained representation as encoder) replaces representation alignment (REPA), which distills the same representation to intermediate layers instead. Through large-scale empirical analysis, we uncover a surprising finding: RAE and REPA exhibit complementary working mechanisms, allowing the same representation to be used as both encoder and target for intermediate diffusion layers. Finally, the original RAE struggles with classifier-free guidance (CFG) and requires training a second, weaker diffusion model for AutoGuidance (AG). We show that REPA itself can be viewed as x-prediction in RAE latent space. By simply re-parameterizing the output of the DiT model, it can provide guidance for "free". Overall, RAEv2 leads to more than 10x faster convergence over the original RAE, achieving a state-of-the-art gFID of 1.06 in just 80 epochs on ImageNet-256. On FDr6, RAEv2 achieves a state-of-the-art 2.17 at just 80 epochs compared to the previous best 3.26 (800 epochs) without any post-training. This motivates EPFID@k (epochs to reach unguided gFID < k) as a measure of training efficiency. RAEv2 attains an EPFID@2 of 35 epochs, versus 177 for the original RAE. We also validate our approach across diverse settings for text-to-image generation and navigation world models, showing consistent improvements. The code is available at https://raev2.github.io.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Irresponsible AI: big tech's influence on AI research and associated impacts

arXiv:2512.03077v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The accelerated development, deployment and adoption of artificial intelligence systems has been fuelled by the increasing presence of big tech in the AI field. This trend has been accompanied by growing ethical concerns and intensified societal and environmental impacts. This position paper argues that irresponsible AI development is strongly driven by big tech's influence and involvement in the field. First, we examine the growing and disproportionate influence of big tech in AI research and argue that its drive for scaling and general-purpose systems is fundamentally at odds with the responsible, ethical, and sustainable development of AI. Second, we review key current environmental and societal negative impacts of AI and trace their connections to big tech's influence. Third, we discuss the underlying economic forces driving big tech's actions. Finally, as a call to action, we invite AI researchers to counter big tech's influence in irresponsible AI development through strategies that build on the responsibility of implicated actors and collective action.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Simple Domain Generalization Methods are Strong Baselines for Open Domain Generalization

In real-world applications, a machine learning model is required to handle an open-set recognition (OSR), where unknown classes appear during the inference, in addition to a domain shift, where the data distribution differs between the training and inference phases. Domain generalization (DG) aims to handle the domain shift situation where the target domain of the inference phase is inaccessible during the model training. Open domain generalization (ODG) considers DG and OSR. Domain-augmented meta-learning (DAML) is a method targeting ODG; however, it has a complicated learning process. By contrast, although various DG methods have been proposed, they have not been evaluated in ODG situations. In this study, we comprehensively evaluate the existing DG methods in ODG and show that the two simple DG methods, CORrelation ALignment (CORAL) and maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), are competitive with DAML in several cases. In addition, we propose simple extensions of CORAL and MMD by introducing the techniques used in DAML, such as ensemble learning and Dirichlet mixup data augmentation. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that the extended CORAL and MMD can perform comparably to DAML with lower computational costs. This suggests that the simple DG methods and their simple extensions are strong baselines for ODG.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Validating an Early Pregnancy HbA1c as the Screening Test for Gestational Diabetes Mellitus: Findings from PRISMA Pakistan Cohort

Background: Early identification of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is critical to improving maternal and neonatal outcomes, particularly in resource-constrained settings where universal oral glucose tolerance testing (OGTT) is burdensome. We assessed whether early-pregnancy HbA1c alone or combined with common risk factors can predict GDM and reduce the burden of OGTT requirements in a peri-urban cohort in Karachi, Pakistan. Methods: We conducted a secondary analysis of the Pregnancy Risk Infant Surveillance and Measurement Alliance (PRISMA) Pakistan cohort. Women enrolled before 20 weeks' gestation with available early-pregnancy HbA1c and a 2-hour 75g OGTT at 24 to 28 weeks were included. We externally validated GDM prediction models originally developed in the STRiDE-India cohort. Model performance was evaluated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and area under the curve (AUC). We assessed four models: HbA1c alone (Model 1a); age, BMI, and family history of diabetes mellitus (FH DM) (Model 1b); HbA1c combined with age, BMI, and FH DM (Model 2); and an extended model, i.e., Model 2 combined with socioeconomic status, gestational age, parity, systolic and diastolic blood pressure (Model 3). A dual-threshold approach was applied to assess rule-in and rule-out performance. Results: Among 2,489 women, GDM incidence was 7.5% (n=186). Models with a broader set of predictors demonstrated higher AUC values, with Model 2 achieving an AUC of 0.61 (95% CI: 0.57, 0.66). Including additional factors (Model 3) did not further improve predictive ability (AUC: 0.62; 95% CI: 0.58, 0.66). In addition, at predefined thresholds, Model 2 achieved sensitivity of 73.7% (rule-out) and specificity of 83.5% (rule-in), with the potential to reduce OGTT requirements (58.5%). Conclusions: Early-pregnancy risk stratification using HbA1c combined with simple clinical predictors offers a pragmatic approach to streamline GDM screening among high-risk pregnant women. A dual-threshold strategy using Model 2 could reduce reliance on universal OGTT while prioritizing high-risk women for confirmatory testing.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Open Materials Generation with Inference-Time Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2602.00424v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Continuous-time generative models for crystalline materials enable inverse materials design by learning to predict stable crystal structures, but incorporating explicit target properties into the generative process remains challenging. Policy-gradient reinforcement learning (RL) provides a principled mechanism for aligning generative models with downstream objectives but typically requires access to the score, which has prevented its application to flow-based models that learn only velocity fields. We introduce Open Materials Generation with Inference-time Reinforcement Learning (OMatG-IRL), a policy-gradient RL framework that operates directly on the learned velocity fields and eliminates the need for the explicit computation of the score. OMatG-IRL leverages stochastic perturbations of the underlying generation dynamics preserving the baseline performance of the pretrained generative model while enabling exploration and policy-gradient estimation at inference time. Using OMatG-IRL, we present the first application of RL to crystal structure prediction (CSP). Our method enables effective reinforcement of an energy-based objective while preserving diversity through composition conditioning, and it achieves performance competitive with score-based RL approaches. Finally, we show that OMatG-IRL can learn time-dependent velocity-annealing schedules, enabling accurate CSP with order-of-magnitude improvements in sampling efficiency and, correspondingly, reduction in generation time. The OMatG-IRL code is included in a new release of the Open Materials Generation (OMatG) framework available at https://github.com/FERMat-ML/OMatG.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Low-Cost Neuromorphic Fall Detection Using Synthetic Event Data and Hybrid SNNs

This work presents the development of hybrid models that integrate spiking neural networks (SNNs) with components of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to learn from simulated event-based camera data (Dynamic Vision Sensor, DVS) generated from conventional smartphone videos. Aimed primarily at human fall detection, the approach leverages the energy efficiency and spatio-temporal processing capabilities of SNNs by converting video frames into event-based data. The proposed models are evaluated through simulations on multiple datasets, comparing their performance to that of traditional machine learning models. Results demonstrate significant gains in efficiency without sacrificing accuracy, underscoring the potential of combining SNNs and DVS technology for complex tasks in real-world environments.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Efficient Image-to-Image Schrödinger Bridge for CT Field of View Extension

Computed tomography (CT) is a cornerstone imaging modality for non-invasive, high-resolution visualization of internal anatomical structures. However, when the scanned object exceeds the scanner's field of view (FOV), projection data are truncated, resulting in incomplete reconstructions and pronounced artifacts near FOV boundaries. Conventional reconstruction algorithms struggle to recover accurate anatomy from such data, limiting clinical reliability. Deep learning approaches have been explored for FOV extension, with diffusion generative models representing the latest advances in image synthesis. Yet, conventional diffusion models are computationally demanding and slow at inference due to their iterative sampling process. To address these limitations, we propose an efficient CT FOV extension framework based on the image-to-image Schrödinger Bridge (I$^2$SB) diffusion model. Unlike traditional diffusion models that synthesize images from pure Gaussian noise, I$^2$SB learns a direct stochastic mapping between paired limited-FOV and extended-FOV images. This direct correspondence yields a more interpretable and traceable generative process, enhancing anatomical consistency and structural fidelity in reconstructions. I$^2$SB achieves superior quantitative performance, with root-mean-square error (RMSE) values of 49.8 HU on simulated noisy data and 152.0 HU on real data, outperforming state-of-the-art diffusion models such as conditional denoising diffusion probabilistic models (cDDPM) and patch-based diffusion methods. Moreover, its one-step inference enables reconstruction in just 0.19 s per 2D slice, representing over a 700-fold speedup compared to cDDPM (135 s) and surpassing DiffusionGAN (0.58 s), the second fastest. This combination of accuracy and efficiency indicates that I$^2$SB has potential for real-time or clinical deployment.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

SPOT-E: Test-Time Entropy Shaping with Visual Spotlights for Frozen VLMs

arXiv:2606.20244v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) often underperform on evidence intensive tasks because decisive visual evidence are small, localized, and easy to overlook, leading to failures in evidence readout even when high-level reasoning is intact. Prior inference-time visual interventions can improve grounding without retraining, but they are largely open-loop and lack a mechanism to verify whether highlighted evidence is actually used. We study answer-span prediction entropy as a model-internal feedback signal and show that naive entropy minimization is ambiguous, since low entropy may arise from evidence-grounded confidence or shortcut collapse. To resolve this ambiguity, we introduce low-entropy anchors and an entropy-shaping objective that reduces answer uncertainty while preserving baseline high-confidence tokens. We instantiate this principle in SPOT-E, a plug-and-play test-time method that produces question-conditioned spotlights, optimized per instance via light-weight tuning based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Across all benchmarks and different VLM families, SPOT-E yields consistent gains and improved robustness under visual corruptions. Code is publicly available at: \url{https://github.com/YinBo0927/SPOT-E}

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Closing the Loop: PID Feedback Control for Interpretable Activation Steering in Symbolic Music Generation

arXiv:2606.18790v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer-based architectures have significantly advanced the generation of complex symbolic sequences, yet a significant gap remains in achieving fine-grained, interpretable control over discrete signal attributes. This paper investigates the mechanistic interpretability of the Multitrack Music Transformer (MMT) and proposes a framework for deterministic attribute modulation without retraining to bridge this gap via inference-time activation steering. Utilizing the Difference-in-Means (DiffMean) methodology, we isolate latent directions for signal attributes, specifically Pitch and Duration, within the residual stream. We validate the Linear Representation Hypothesis in this domain, achieving high correlation between steering magnitude and attribute shift. To address the inherent feature entanglement in multi-attribute steering, we introduce a Dual Steering framework utilizing Gram-Schmidt Orthogonalization. Experimental results demonstrate that this geometric decoupling reduces conceptual interference and signal degradation compared to naive vector addition, enabling independent deterministic control even against strong autoregressive conditioning.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Self-Distillation Zero: Self-Revision Turns Binary Rewards into Dense Supervision

Current post-training methods in verifiable settings fall into two categories. Reinforcement learning (RLVR) relies on binary rewards, which are broadly applicable and powerful, but provide only sparse supervision during training. Distillation provides dense token-level supervision, typically obtained from an external teacher or using high-quality demonstrations. Collecting such supervision can be costly or unavailable. We propose Self-Distillation Zero (SD-Zero), a method that is substantially more training sample-efficient than RL and does not require an external teacher or high-quality demonstrations. SD-Zero trains a single model to play two roles: a Generator, which produces an initial response, and a Reviser, which conditions on that response and its binary reward to produce an improved response. We then perform on-policy self-distillation to distill the reviser into the generator, using the reviser's token distributions conditioned on the generator's response and its reward as supervision. In effect, SD-Zero trains the model to transform binary rewards into dense token-level self-supervision. On math and code reasoning benchmarks with Qwen3-4B-Instruct and Olmo-3-7B-Instruct, SD-Zero improves performance by at least 10% over the base models and outperforms strong baselines, including Rejection Fine-Tuning (RFT), GRPO, and Self-Distillation Fine-Tuning (SDFT), under the same question set and training sample budget. Extensive ablation studies show two novel characteristics of our proposed algorithm: (a) token-level self-localization, where the reviser can identify the key tokens that need to be revised in the generator's response based on reward, and (b) iterative self-evolution, where the improving ability to revise answers can be distilled back into generation performance with regular teacher synchronization. Code: https://github.com/princeton-pli/Self-Distillation-Zero.