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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

FashionChameleon: Towards Real-Time and Interactive Human-Garment Video Customization

Human-centric video customization, particularly at the garment level, has shown significant commercial value. However, existing approaches cannot support low-latency and interactive garment control, which is crucial for applications such as e-commerce and content creation. This paper studies how to achieve interactive multi-garment video customization while preserving motion coherence using only single-garment video data. We present FashionChameleon, a real-time and interactive framework for human-garment customization in autoregressive video generation, where users can interactively switch garment during generation. FashionChameleon consists of three key techniques: (i) Instead of training on multi-garment video data, we train a Teacher Model with In-Context Learning on a single reference-garment pair. By retaining the image-to-video training paradigm while enforcing a mismatch between the reference and garment image, the model is encouraged to implicitly preserve coherence during single-garment switching. (ii) To achieve consistency and efficiency during generation, we introduce Streaming Distillation with In-Context Learning, which fine-tunes the model with in-context teacher forcing and improves extrapolation consistency via gradient-reweighted distribution matching distillation. (iii) To extend the model for interactive multi-garment video customization, we propose Training-Free KV Cache Rescheduling, which includes garment KV refresh, historical KV withdraw, and reference KV disentangle to achieve garment switching while preserving motion coherence. Our FashionChameleon uniquely supports interactive customization and consistent long-video extrapolation, while achieving real-time generation at 23.8 FPS on a single GPU, 30-180$\times$ faster than existing baselines.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

RedactionBench

Large Language Models are increasingly applied to sensitive domains that require redaction of personally identifiable information (PII). While redacting PII is a data cleaning prerequisite, existing benchmarks conflate extraction mechanics with privacy semantics. A public phone number is not equivalent to a phone number in a medical record. Whether information constitutes a violation depends heavily on who holds it, why, and in what context, fundamentally differentiating redaction from simple entity recognition. Grounded in contextual integrity, we introduce RedactionBench, a manually annotated benchmark comprising 200 diverse documents across 11 domains, mostly seeded from real-world sources. We also introduce R-Score, a novel character-level metric that treats semantically similar redactions equally and nullifies shallow formatting choices, such as varying masking styles for phone numbers. Evaluations across Named Entity Recognition models, entity extraction Small Language Models, and frontier models equipped with agentic tools demonstrate that contextual redaction remains an unsolved problem. A human evaluation with over 80 users on RedactionBench reveals a stark dichotomy in privacy perceptions. Annotators show consensus with target labels for mandatory redactions (89.4 percent) and safe text preservations (94.1 percent), but fail to agree on contextual redactions (47.7 percent). This variance demonstrates the subjective nature of contextual privacy and motivates R-Score, which decouples contextual ambiguity from strict precision. We compare 35 models across families and report their performance in redacting PII. Finally, we release RedactionBench to establish a baseline for future privacy-preserving systems, hoping to inspire efficient model design and standardized evaluations.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Machine-learned, finite temperature Fermi-operator expansions suitable for GPUs and AI-hardware

arXiv:2605.08523v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present several finite-temperature recursive Fermi-operator expansion schemes based on the second-order spectral projection (SP2) method. Our approach builds on a previous observation that the electronic structure problem, as formulated through a recursive SP2 expansion, can be mapped onto the architecture of a deep neural network. Using this perspective, we generalize SP2 to finite electronic temperatures by constructing machine learning models that determine optimized recursive expansion coefficients. The same approach is also applied to the prediction of the electronic entropy for fractional occupation numbers. The coefficients are trained for a specified chemical potential and electronic temperature and are not available in closed analytical form. However, by employing an appropriate affine rescaling strategy to the Hamiltonian matrix, we eliminate the need to retrain the model for different temperatures and chemical potentials. Our approach avoids explicit diagonalization and relies solely on highly optimized matrix-matrix multiplication kernels. Compared to state-of-the-art diagonalization, we achieve an order-of-magnitude speedup in the single-particle finite-temperature density matrix calculation for small and moderately sized matrices on modern GPUs and dense matrix multiply units.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

S-SPPO: Semantic-Calibrated Self-Play Preference Optimization

arXiv:2606.01561v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is often formulated via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). However, the standard Bradley-Terry instantiation of DPO is limited in modeling common departures from transitivity in human preferences. To address this, recent work has introduced Self-Play Preference Optimization (SPPO), which iteratively refines the policy by training on self-generated win-lose pairs. Our investigation, however, reveals a critical instability in SPPO: the optimization is prone to policy degeneration when the preference oracle assigns overly confident wins to semantically indistinguishable responses. To mitigate this, we propose S-SPPO, a dual-space semantic calibration framework comprising: i) Supervision Calibration via semantic gating, which anneals win rate targets toward the maximum-entropy baseline as semantic overlap increases; and ii) Representation Calibration via latent repulsion to enforce geometric diversity to prevent manifold collapse and maintain latent diversity between chosen and rejected samples. Theoretically, we show that the calibration preserves the constant-sum game structure, facilitating convergence to a Nash Equilibrium. Empirically, S-SPPO avoids the performance degradation seen in prior methods, achieving 52.19% win rate and 47.46% length-controlled win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0 with Llama-3-8B, without using additional human-annotated preferences during training. The code will be available at https://github.com/xiwenc1/s-sppo.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Montreal Forced Aligner and the state of speech-to-text alignment in 2026

The Montreal Forced Aligner (MFA) was released in 2016 and has since become the most widely used tool for forced alignment in research and industry. In the decade since, MFA has undergone substantial development, including expanded coverage across more languages and dialects using larger open-source datasets, harmonized IPA dictionaries, model adaptation, cross-language phone remapping, and support utilities. This paper documents MFA 3.0's developments since version 1.0 and evaluates MFA's performance across English, Japanese, and Korean, benchmarked against classic and neural forced aligners. MFA 3.0 achieves state-of-the-art or near state-of-the-art performance across all four benchmark datasets with mean boundary errors below 15 ms. Adaptation and cross-language remapping are effective for languages outside MFA's training distribution, and pronunciation probability modeling and phonological rules provide gains in specific conditions.

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

When Lower Privileges Suffice: Investigating Over-Privileged Tool Selection in LLM Agents

As LLM agents increasingly select tools autonomously, their choices among tools with different privileges become safety-relevant. However, prior tool-selection studies focus on safety-agnostic metadata preferences, leaving privilege-sensitive choices underexplored. To address this gap, we study over-privileged tool selection, in which an agent selects or escalates to a higher-privilege tool despite a sufficient lower-privilege alternative. We introduce ToolPrivBench to evaluate whether agents choose higher-privilege tools despite sufficient lower-privilege alternatives, measuring both initial selection and escalation after transient tool failures. Across eight domains and five recurring risk patterns, we find that over-privileged tool selection is common among mainstream LLM agents and is further amplified by transient failures. We further find that general safety alignment does not reliably transfer to least-privilege tool choice, while prompt-level controls provide only limited mitigation under transient failures. We therefore introduce a privilege-aware post-training defense that teaches agents to prefer sufficient lower-privilege tools and escalate only when necessary. Our mitigation experiments show that this defense substantially reduces unnecessary high-privilege tool use while preserving general capabilities.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Quantile-Free Uncertainty Quantification in Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2605.04847v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in graph neural networks (GNNs) is crucial in high-stakes domains but remains a significant challenge. In graph settings, message passing often relies on strong assumptions such as exchangeability, which are rarely satisfied in practice, and achieving reliable UQ typically requires costly resampling or post-hoc calibration. To address these issues, we introduce Quantile-free Prediction Interval GNN (QpiGNN), a framework that builds on quantile regression (QR) to enable GNN-based UQ by directly optimizing coverage and interval width without requiring quantile inputs or post-processing. QpiGNN employs a dual-head architecture that decouples prediction and uncertainty, and is trained with label-only supervision through a quantile-free joint loss. This design allows efficient training and yields robust prediction intervals, with theoretical guarantees of asymptotic coverage and near-optimal width under mild assumptions. Experiments on 19 synthetic and real-world benchmarks show QpiGNN achieves average 22% higher coverage and 50% narrower intervals than baselines, while ensuring efficiency and robustness to noise and structural shifts.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Where, What, Why, and Importance: Structured Defect Grounding for Text-to-Image Feedback

Despite generating increasingly photorealistic images, text-to-image (T2I) models still exhibit localized, subtle, and structurally complex failures. Diagnosing these failures requires instance-level feedback that answers where a defect occurs, what type it is, why it is defective, and its importance to overall image quality. While recent dense-feedback methods move beyond scalar supervision, their heatmap-centric representations still formulate diagnosis as pixel-field regression, making it difficult to localize variable-cardinality defects and bind semantic reasons to individual failures. To address this representation bottleneck, we propose Structured Defect Grounding (SDG), which casts T2I diagnosis as structured set prediction by modeling each defect as a (location, type, reason, importance) tuple. To make this formulation trainable and measurable, we introduce SDG-30K, a 30K-image dataset with box-grounded annotations across four modern T2I generators, together with a dedicated evaluation protocol, SDG-Eval. Building on this structured representation, we further present a diagnosis-to-alignment framework in which a Vision-Language Model (VLM) serves as the SDG detector, and BoxFlow-GRPO converts predicted defect sets into box-derived, importance-weighted spatial rewards for diffusion model alignment. Extensive experiments show that our SDG detector outperforms leading proprietary VLMs on structured defect grounding, while SDG-guided rewards consistently improve T2I alignment and support localized image refinement. These results establish SDG as a unified, instance-level interface for diagnosing, evaluating, and enhancing modern generative models.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Clinical Study Protocol of the 'Biomarkers of Severity of COVID-19 Patients' (BIOMARCOVID) Project

Introduction The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has challenged health care systems worldwide, in certain areas exceeding hospital capacities and human resources. This has underscored the importance of having better tools to predict the outcome of potentially severe respiratory infections such as SARS-CoV-2. Predicting COVID-19 severity may allow physicians to better manage ICU beds and increase the chances of patient survival through appropriate management. During the toughest months of the pandemic, most physicians tried to identify patients that might develop severe forms based primarily on clinical features on admission (e.g., BMI, age). In this context, significant research has focused on identifying comorbidities, clinical manifestations, and routine blood biomarkers to predict disease severity. However, despite the demonstrated value of untargeted metabolomics in assessing severity, limited data exist on its use for identifying novel metabolite biomarkers that could improve both the sensitivity and specificity of outcome prediction. Our goal is to identify metabolite biomarkers that could enhance the predictive accuracy of standard medical biology data and clinical parameters. Methods and analysis This is a retrospective, observational, monocentric cohort study conducted at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Grenoble Alpes (CHUGA). The maximum number of eligible patients admitted for PCR-confirmed COVID-19 between March and December 2020 will be included. Severity outcome is defined using the WHO 10-category ordinal scale (mild: categories 4-5; severe: >5). Blood samples were collected within 48 hours of admission and analyzed for 62 routine blood tests and untargeted multiplatform LC-MS/MS metabolomics across four national platforms. Statistical analysis will include logistic regression with variable selection for the primary aim, and multi-block chemometric integration of clinical, biological, and metabolomics data as a secondary aim. Ethics and dissemination A study steering committee has been formed to ensure the accuracy of the collected data by thoroughly reviewing it prior to the data lock. All aspects of the study comply with ethical standards, including approval by the CHUGA institutional review board and adherence to CNIL Reference Methodology MR004 for the protection of participants' rights, privacy, and confidentiality. This study is registered on the French Health Data Hub (number F20210218154851). Results will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications, presentations at national and international scientific and clinical conferences, and reports shared with key healthcare system stakeholders.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Efficient Financial Language Understanding via Distillation with Synthetic Data

Large instruction-following models are powerful but costly to deploy, particularly in finance, where labelled data are limited by confidentiality and expert annotation cost. We present an efficient framework for financial sentiment analysis through distillation with synthetic data, transferring knowledge from a large instruction-tuned teacher to compact student models. The framework is designed for low-resource conditions, where a small set of real examples are collected and labelled by hand. The framework then clusters the examples and uses the clusters to select seeds for generating synthetic examples via structured few-shot prompting. Experiments show that clustering-based seed selection yields more representative synthetic data than random sampling, enabling compact models to achieve strong performance with minimal supervision. Notably, on a more complex and noisy text domain, the compact model trained on the complete synthetic-seed corpus even outperforms the teacher model, while remaining competitive on formal text. The framework provides a practical route toward resource-efficient domain adaptation in financial NLP with minimal human labelling effort.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Physics-Informed Neural Network with Squeeze-Excitation-like Attention

arXiv:2606.19853v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce SEA-PINN, a novel architecture that incorporates a Squeeze-Excitation-like attention mechanism into physics-informed neural networks to dynamically recalibrate the importance of neurons across layers. A key feature of SEA-PINN is its highly stable initialization. On 17 out of 20 benchmark problems, SEA-PINN exhibit nearly negligible variance and significantly reduced initial loss, establishing a quasi-deterministic and favorable starting point for optimization. Notably, without employing Fourier feature embeddings or periodic activation functions, SEA-PINN attained competitive accuracy (83\% vs. 90\% improvement relative to FNN-PINN on the high-frequency case 7) as compared with TSA-PINN-a model specifically engineered for high-frequency problems via learnable frequencies in sinusoidal activations. Furthermore, integrating SEA-PINN into TSA-PINN boosted performance by 42.49\%. These results underscore SEA-PINN as a lightweight plug-in module that enhances nonlinear representation power, promotes more robust and efficient convergence, and strengthens the overall reliability of physics-informed learning.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Can Artificial Intelligence Accelerate Technological Progress? Researchers' Perspectives on AI in Manufacturing and Materials Science

arXiv:2511.14007v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) raises expectations of substantial increases in rates of technological progress, but such anticipations are often not connected to detailed ground-level studies of AI use in innovation processes. Accordingly, it remains unclear how and to what extent AI can accelerate innovation. To help to fill this gap, we explore and assess results from 32 interviews with U.S.-based academic manufacturing and materials sciences researchers experienced with AI and machine learning (ML) techniques. We found that AI was primarily used for modeling of materials and manufacturing processes, facilitating cheaper and more rapid search of design spaces for materials and manufacturing processes alike. Benefits included cost, time, and computation savings in technology development. However, AI/ML tools were unreliable outside design spaces for which dense data were already available; they required skilled and judicious application in tandem with older research techniques; and concerns were raised about the potential to detrimentally circumvent opportunities for disruptive theoretical advancement. Based on these results, we suggest there is reason for optimism about acceleration in sustaining innovations through the use of AI/ML; but that support for conventional empirical, computational, and theoretical research is required to maintain the likelihood of further disruptive advances in manufacturing and materials.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

A new class of degenerate solutions to the massless Dirac equation and their potential applications in optical memories

arXiv:2606.14256v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this article, we present a novel class of degenerate solutions to the massless Dirac equation, corresponding to a wide variety of electromagnetic 4-potentials and fields, including both zero field and circularly polarized electromagnetic waves. An interesting property of these solutions is that the spin of the particles rotates in synchronization with the electric and magnetic fields of the electromagnetic waves. These results could be utilized for the development of optical memories based on materials supporting massless Dirac fermions, such as graphene.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Spiking Pyramid Wavelet Transformation for High-efficient and Low-energy Image Restoration

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have garnered significant interest in computer vision due to their potential for efficiency and biological inspiration. While spiking CNN-based methods have shown promise for image restoration (IR) tasks, their performance is constrained by the inherent receptive field limitations of CNN operations. In the paper, we explore the benefits of discrete wavelet transformation and propose a spiking pyramid wavelet-based model (SPWM) for high-efficient and low-energy target. Specifically, we develop a spiking dual pyramid wavelet (SDPW) block to model long-range dependency and exploit the properties of the degradation in the wavelet domain. Experimental results on several benchmarks demonstrate that SPWM significantly lowers computational costs and energy consumption while maintaining image quality. Our method showcases the potential of SNNs in the field of IR, offering new insights for future applications of resource-limited devices.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

TimeROME-DLM: Temporal Causal Tracing and Low-Rank Inference-Time Knowledge Editing for Masked Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2606.12841v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) such as LLaDA now rival autoregressive (AR) LLMs, but every existing knowledge-editing and unlearning method (ROME, MEMIT, etc.) targets AR transformers and either makes assumptions that fail under iterative denoising, or requires gradient updates whose backward-pass activations cost tens of GB of extra VRAM and which collapse MDLMs at standard learning rates. We introduce TimeROME-DLM, the first training-free, gradient-free, inference-time knowledge-editing framework for MDLMs. It couples two components: a Temporal Indirect Effect (TIE) causal-tracing protocol that identifies, for each fact, the coordinate whose intervention most strongly drives the object prediction at later denoising steps; and a closed-form, low-rank residual edit memory that aggregates subject keys and target deltas across all forget facts and applies a single ridge-regularised update at that coordinate at every diffusion forward, with sparsification to limit utility spillover. Backbone weights stay frozen; only three hyperparameters (alpha, lambda, q) are tuned on a small validation split. On TOFU forget01 with TOFU-finetuned LLaDA-8B-Base, TimeROME-DLM cuts forget-set log-probability by roughly 83 nats. The same configuration transfers to LLaDA-8B-Instruct, Dream-7B, MMaDA-8B, DiffuLLaMA-7B, and LLaDA-MoE-1.4B. It keeps retain-set log-probability nearly flat (within ~1 nat at the utility-safe operating point) across 50 sequentially inserted facts, delivers a four- to fourteen-fold wall-clock speedup with zero additional VRAM over the strongest converged training-time baseline, and scales sub-linearly to 400 facts. TimeROME-DLM closes the locate-then-edit gap between AR LLMs and MDLMs at a fraction of the computational cost.

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

AutoMine Solution for AV2 2026 Scenario Mining Challenge

arXiv:2606.11874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: With the development of autonomous driving systems, mining high-value, safety-critical, and planning-relevant scenarios from large-scale driving logs has become essential for data-driven evaluation. In this paper, we propose AutoMine, a robust self-refining scenario mining method based on LLMs and VLMs. AutoMine uses semantics-preserving prompt augmentation to reduce LLM prompt sensitivity, combines robust trajectory atomic functions with VLM-based functions to handle perception noise and open-world visual cues, and refines generated code through execution feedback from real logs. In the Argoverse 2 Scenario Mining Competition at CVPR 2026, AutoMine achieves a HOTA-Temporal score of 36.38 and a Timestamp BA score of 77.21.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

DF-ExpEnse: Diffusion Filtered Exploration for Sample Efficient Finetuning

arXiv:2606.19656v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A natural recipe for intelligent robotic decision-making is initializing from pretrained generative control policies, which have summarized offline experience, and adapting them to self-collected online experience. We present DF-ExpEnse, an exploration technique that improves the quality of online experience collection, thus increasing finetuning sample-efficiency. DF-ExpEnse leverages the multimodal modeling capabilities of the generative control policy to create an expressive and tractably evaluatable candidate set. It then utilizes an ensemble of critics to identify the action that best balances quality with high exploration interest. In fleet settings, DF-ExpEnse further enables cross-agent communication to facilitate collaborative exploration as a group. DF-ExpEnse can be seamlessly integrated with existing strategies that finetune pretrained generative control policies via reinforcement learning. We experimentally validate consistent sample-efficiency benefits through DF-ExpEnse across a variety of manipulation and locomotion tasks, compared to default finetuning and alternative action selection schemes. Project can be found at https://df-expense.github.io.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum Resources and Wigner Symmetry in Nucleon-Nucleon Scattering from Effective Field Theory

arXiv:2606.17148v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study quantum resources in the spin degrees of freedom, such as entanglement, stabilizer magic, and non-local magic, in low-energy nucleon-nucleon scattering through next-to-leading order in pionless effective field theory. Treating each nucleon spin as a qubit, we calculate the corresponding resource-generating powers of the scattering operator at generic center-of-mass momentum and scattering angle $\Theta$. The analysis retains $S$- and $P$-wave channels generated by two-derivative contact interactions. When the microscopic physics exhibits Wigner's $SU(4)$ spin-flavor symmetry, the neutron-proton amplitude becomes proportional to the spin-space identity operator and therefore generates no new resources after scattering, extending an observation previously made for leading-order $S$-wave scattering. The same-nucleon channel remains resource-generating because constraints from identical particles project out part of the Hilbert space. These results show how enhanced symmetries, partial-wave structure, and resource generation are intertwined in low-energy two-body scattering.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Deconvolution-based cell-type specific DNA methylation-wide and transcriptome-wide association studies identify risk CpG sites and genes associated with colorectal cancer risk

Bulk tissue-based DNA methylation-wide (MWAS) and transcriptome-wide association studies (TWAS) have identified CpG sites and genes associated with colorectal cancer (CRC) risk, but do not account for cellular heterogeneity. To address this, we developed a deconvolution-informed framework to infer cell-type specific DNA methylation and gene expression profiles from bulk normal colon tissues using reference single-cell epigenomic and transcriptomic datasets. We performed cell-type specific MWAS (ctMWAS) using deconvoluted DNA methylation data from 293 normal colon samples and conducted cell-type specific TWAS (ctTWAS) using deconvoluted gene expression data from 707 normal colon samples. Genetically predicted methylation and expression models were integrated with CRC GWAS summary statistics (78,473 cases and 107,143 controls) to identify risk-associated CpG sites and genes. Through ctMWAS, ctTWAS, and colocalization analyses, we identified 178 significant cell-type-specific CpG sites in 106 loci and 68 risk genes in 40 loci, including 26 previously unreported loci. Through additional integrative methylation-gene analysis, we prioritized 132 candidate risk genes, the majority of which were supported by multi-omics evidence and stage-specific dysregulation across the adenoma-carcinoma and serrated-carcinoma progression pathways. Pathway enrichment analyses implicated pathways involved in DNA double-strand break repair, TP53 regulation, TGF-{beta} signaling, and innate immune responses. Among prioritized genes, 14 were identified as putative druggable targets linked to 90 FDA-approved or clinical-stage drugs. Experimental validation supports an oncogenic role for SF3A3. These findings demonstrate that deconvolution-informed integrative analyses enable cell-type-resolved identification of epigenetic and transcriptional mechanisms underlying CRC susceptibility and provide insights into disease biology, prevention, and therapeutic target discovery.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

PatchWorld: Gradient-Free Optimization of Executable World Models

Text-agent environments are typically modeled as partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), assuming that the simulator's latent state and transition dynamics are hidden from the agent. Yet little work has examined whether executable code can be induced to serve as a world model for prediction and planning under partial observability. We introduce PatchWorld, a gradient-free framework that turns offline trajectories into executable Python world models through counterexample-guided code repair. Instead of predicting the next observation with a black-box model, PatchWorld induces symbolic belief-state programs whose action updates can be inspected, replayed, and locally patched. Across seven AgentGym environments, PatchWorld-Simple achieves the highest code-based planning score among evaluated methods, reaching 76.4\% macro success in live one-step lookahead while invoking no LLM calls inside the world-model prediction module itself. We further find that a human-specified residual-memory bias improves surface observation fidelity but weakens decision utility. This exposes a tradeoff in executable world models, since improving observation fidelity can come at the expense of action-discriminative dynamics, and vice versa. Code is available at https://github.com/HKBU-KnowComp/PatchWorld.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Towards Conditional Feature Alignment for Cross-Domain Counting

Object counting models often degrade under cross-domain deployment because density composition varies across domains and is itself task-relevant. Standard feature alignment methods tend to suppress such variation by encouraging global domain invariance, which can be harmful when source and target domains contain different proportions of background, sparse foreground, and dense foreground. We propose Conditional Feature Alignment (CFA), a cross-domain counting framework that aligns representations within label-induced conditions rather than across full marginal feature distributions. Given density annotations or pseudo-density predictions, CFA constructs foreground/background or density-level conditions and aligns only features belonging to matching conditions. We formalise this idea through a conditional divergence perspective, showing that conditional alignment removes within-condition discrepancy while preserving condition-marginal density shift. For unsupervised domain adaptation, CFA estimates source conditions from annotations and target conditions from detached pseudo-density maps, then performs condition-wise adversarial alignment with full-image consistency regularisation. For source-domain generalisation, we instantiate the same principle with MPCount by enforcing condition-wise memory-consistency between generated source-domain views. Experiments on crowd and cell counting benchmarks show competitive or improved performance across diverse UDA and DG settings. For example, on JHU-CROWD++ FH$\rightarrow$SN, CFA-DG reduces MAE/RMSE from MPCount's 216.3/421.4 to 90.5/169.9, indicating that condition-wise alignment is especially effective under large weather- and density-induced shifts. These results suggest that condition-wise alignment is a promising design principle for domain-adaptive counting.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

TurboGS: Accelerating 3D Gaussian Splatting via Error-Guided Sparse Pixel Sampling and Optimization

Consumer-level applications require fast optimization of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) with high-fidelity novel view rendering. However, existing 3DGS acceleration approaches still incur substantial computation on redundant pixels while sacrificing fine details. In this paper, we present TurboGS, an error-guided training framework that accelerates 3DGS by concentrating optimization on perceptually informative pixels. TurboGS is built upon four core components: (1) a tile-wise sparse pixel sampling, which, driven by multi-view reconstruction errors during training, prioritizes challenging regions and skips well-reconstructed ones to avoid redundant gradient computation; (2) a tile-wise structure-aware loss with sparse Normalized Cross-Correlation, which provides sparse yet effective supervision to preserve fine details and stabilize training; (3) an error-driven Gaussian density control strategy, which dynamically allocates model capacity and removes redundant primitives; and (4) a tailored hybrid optimizer that couples Hessian-informed updates with Adam moment damping to stabilize and improve convergence under sparse supervision. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that TurboGS can deliver on par or superior rendering quality within 100 seconds on a single RTX 5090 GPU card (up to 10x training speedup over vanilla 3DGS).

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

PosterForest: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Collaboration for Scientific Poster Generation

arXiv:2508.21720v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automating scientific poster generation requires hierarchical document understanding and coherent content-layout planning. Existing methods often rely on flat summarization or optimize content and layout separately. As a result, they often suffer from information loss, weak logical flow, and poor visual balance. We present PosterForest, a training-free framework for scientific poster generation. Our method introduces the Poster Tree, a structured intermediate representation that captures document hierarchy and visual-textual semantics across multiple levels. Building on this representation, content and layout agents perform hierarchical reasoning and recursive refinement, progressively optimizing the poster from global organization to local composition. This joint optimization improves semantic coherence, logical flow, and visual harmony. Experiments show that PosterForest outperforms prior methods in both automatic and human evaluations, without additional training or domain-specific supervision.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13

PertDiffBench: Benchmarking Diffusion Models for Single-Cell Perturbation Response Prediction

Diffusion models are increasingly used to predict transcriptional responses to perturbations, but whether they improve on simpler generative and representation-based baselines remains unclear. Existing evaluations often do not separate the effects of model architecture, input representation, biological context and metric choice, making it difficult to determine where diffusion-based methods are useful. Here we introduce PertDiffBench, a standardized benchmark for diffusion-based transcriptomic perturbation prediction across single-cell and bulk RNA-seq datasets. PertDiffBench evaluates diffusion-based models across three complementary evaluation settings: standard prediction in known single-cell contexts and bulk perturbation conditions, generalization to unseen cell types, species, drugs and intermediate time points, and stress tests of feature dimensionality, input representation, noise type and gene ordering. Across these settings, diffusion models did not show a consistent advantage. scGen remained a strong baseline in common prediction tasks, whereas scDiffusion was the most competitive diffusion-based method in several generalization settings. Temporal imputation showed a different pattern, with a simple DDPM operating directly in expression space outperforming more specialized models. Stress tests showed that performance was model dependent and sensitive to feature dimensionality, encoder choice, noise type and gene ordering. Pretrained encoders did not consistently improve performance, with the classical scVI representation slightly exceeding STATE in seen-condition and unseen-cell-type settings. These results indicate that diffusion-model performance in perturbation response prediction depends strongly on task design and representation choice. PertDiffBench provides a practical framework for evaluating these models under biologically varied and stress-tested conditions.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Using Cognitive Models to Improve Language Model Simulation of Human Persuasion Games

arXiv:2606.17657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: People make decisions differently in strategic interactions. Some update beliefs like a Bayesian; others exhibit biases like motivated reasoning. Although creators of large language models use simulated humans for safety evaluations and training, they often fail to cover this breadth of human behavior. We argue that cognitive science and economics provide a convenient tool for doing so, making use of mathematical models of human decision-making. We propose an approach that we call Equation-to-Behavior Prompting for guiding large language models to match cognitive models, and evaluate this approach on persuasion games based on legal decision-making. We find that large models can approximate equation-based specifications – Bayesian updating, affine distortion, motivated updating, and Grether's $\alpha$-$\beta$ model – using prompting, but small models fail to do so. However, training small models with reinforcement learning to adhere to mathematical rules, Equation-to-Behavior RL, reduces belief error by 26.5% in out-of-distribution parameterizations. We show that these simulations can help create diverse training environments; training small models to consider different kinds of decision-makers improves average belief change by 2.5%–12% over Bayesian-only training, even when persuading GPT-5-mini. Our work could improve human simulations for training and evaluation in increasingly realistic settings, and could also enable novel research into more complicated mathematical models of human decision-making.