Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2503.14331

ADAPT: An Autonomous Forklift for Construction Site Operation

Authors:

Johannes Huemer↗Markus Murschitz↗Matthias Sch\"orghuber↗Lukas Reisinger↗Thomas Kadiofsky↗Christoph Weidinger↗Mario Niedermeyer↗Benedikt Widy↗Marcel Zeilinger↗Csaba Beleznai↗Tobias Gl\"uck↗Andreas Kugi↗…

Efficient material logistics play a critical role in controlling costs and schedules in the construction industry. However, manual material handling remains prone to inefficiencies, delays, and safety risks. Autonomous forklifts offer a promising solution to streamline on-site logistics, reducing reliance on human operators and mitigating labor shortages. This paper presents the development and evaluation of ADAPT (Autonomous Dynamic All-terrain Pallet Transporter), a fully autonomous off-road forklift designed for construction environments. Unlike structured warehouse settings, construction sites pose significant challenges, including dynamic obstacles, unstructured terrain, and varying weather conditions. To address these challenges, our system integrates AI-driven perception techniques with traditional approaches for decision making, planning, and control, enabling reliable operation in complex environments. We validate the system through extensive real-world testing, comparing its continuous performance against an experienced human operator across various weather conditions. Our findings demonstrate that autonomous outdoor forklifts can operate near human-level performance, offering a viable path toward safer and more efficient construction logistics.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

02.

Nature (Science) 2026-06-17 DOI: HASH:1ef221dc0065d687270ab7848ecb3503

Confined migration induces non-lethal DNA damage in developing neurons

Authors:

Zhejing Zhang↗

Migratory cells tend to have soft nuclei that deform and penetrate narrow spaces1,2. Extensive nuclear deformation during migration can cause nuclear-envelope rupture and DNA damage in cancer cells, which may contribute to malignant transformation during tumour progression3–6. However, the importance of DNA damage in physiological migration is less well understood. Here we demonstrate that the migration of neurons in developing cerebral and cerebellar cortices is accompanied by massive DNA double-stranded breaks (DSBs) due to mechanostress during passage through narrow interstitial spaces. In contrast to many other migratory cells, these DSBs occur without detectable nuclear envelope rupture. Confined migration increases topoisomerase-IIβ covalently bound DSBs, and these lesions are repaired through non-homologous end-joining during brain development without causing cell death. Genome sequencing revealed that DSBs tend to occur at transcriptionally inactive regions. The deletion of ligase IV at the onset of neuronal migration leads to persistent DSB accumulation in cerebellar neurons with moderate transcriptional changes in genes related to synaptic function, neuronal development and stress and immune responses. The mutant mouse develops mild motor deficits in later life, suggesting that the DNA damage generated during normal brain development poses a potential disease risk if left unrepaired. The migration of neurons in developing cerebral and cerebellar cortices is accompanied by massive DNA double-strand breaks due to mechanostress during passage through narrow interstitial spaces.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

03.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17791

The Slop Paradox: How Synthetic Standardization Erodes Clinical Uncertainty and Cross-Modal Alignment in AI-Rewritten Radiology Reports

Authors:

Samar Ansari↗

AI-assisted clinical documentation tools increasingly summarize, standardize, and reformat radiology reports using large language models (LLMs). We present a controlled measurement of the resulting information degradation. Using 450 chest X-ray reports from the Indiana University dataset, we generate synthetic versions via three realistic LLM rewriting tasks: EHR summarization, standardized rewriting, and teaching case preparation. We measure entity erosion (via medical NER), hedging collapse (loss of clinical uncertainty language), and cross-modal alignment degradation (via BiomedCLIP image-text similarity). Our central finding is a dissociation between information loss and cross-modal fidelity. EHR summarization is the most destructive at the content level, eroding 51.4% of clinical entities and 43.7% of hedging language, yet it preserves image-text alignment almost entirely (a 2.5% drop). The two tasks meant to produce cleaner training data, standardized rewriting and teaching case preparation, do the reverse: they preserve more entities (26.8% and 29.3% eroded) but cause 14.9-16.5% alignment drops, six to seven times those of EHR summarization. We term this the slop paradox: rewriting that makes clinical text look cleaner for multimodal training is precisely what pulls it away from the image. Contrary to our pre-specified hypothesis, rare pathologies were not preferentially degraded: across nine rare-versus-common comparisons, no difference survived multiple-comparison correction, and nominal differences ran in the opposite direction (common > rare), so contamination is invisible to condition-specific monitoring. The dominant determinant of degradation is the type of AI rewriting task, not the clinical content. These findings bear on multimodal medical AI dataset construction and the governance of AI-assisted clinical documentation.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

04.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19914

Co-policy: Responsive Human-Robot Co-Creation for Musical Performances

Authors:

Xuetao Li↗Wenke Huang↗Mang Ye↗Zijian Liu↗Jinhua Xie↗Jifeng Xuan↗Miao Li↗

arXiv:2606.19914v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Art has long stood as a pivotal expression of human creativity. Embodied artificial intelligence offers a route for generative models to participate in that creativity through physical action rather than disembodied digital content. In robotic music co-creation, it is challenging to connect semantic musical understanding with real-time and physically executable performance. We present Co-policy, a framework for human-robot musical co-creation that separates semantic intent grounding, constrained musical variation, and visuomotor execution. To ground musical semantics, Co-policy uses pre-inference semantic anchors and a fine-tuned Qwen-vl planner (F-Qwen) to transform speech, live musical seeds, and visual observations into structured co-creation plans. To support low-latency execution, Co-policy introduces a Gaussian-Mixture Visuomotor Policy (GMP), implemented as a conditional mixture-density policy that maps target notes and visual context to multimodal robot actions in a single forward pass. Unlike robotic playback systems that merely reproduce user-specified notes, Co-policy generates complementary musical responses under both musical and physical constraints. Real-robot chime experiments, ablations, and expert evaluation show improved intent alignment, execution accuracy, and response frequency over diffusion-policy and ablated baselines, supporting physically grounded action generation as a key requirement for embodied human-AI co-creation.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

05.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12186

A Resource for Enthymeme Detection in Controversial Political Discourse

Authors:

Martial Pastor↗Nelleke Oostdijk↗

Enthymemes, arguments with unstated premises or conclusions, are pervasive in persuasive discourse, yet their annotation remains notoriously subjective. We present a resource of 1,482 tweets from politically controversial discourse, annotated by five annotators for the presence of enthymemes and their argument structure, designed to study label variation. We first revisit the definition of enthymemes and propose annotation guidelines anchored in Walton's argumentation schemes, offering a structured and constrained approach that nonetheless preserves room for the interpretive nature of the task. This contrasts with past resources, which tend to eliminate disagreement, obscuring its sources and preventing investigation of its potential benefits for model performance. We further propose a complexity analysis of the task, identifying where annotation imposes high cognitive load and may give rise to inconsistent annotation. Our preliminary experiments show that models trained on annotator disagreement outperform models trained on hard majority-vote labels. We close by reflecting on how structural openness in enthymeme definitions and guidelines enables the study of variation in subjective inferential processes for future resources and downstream NLP applications concerned with human inference.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

06.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19944

Timage: A Generative Text-in-Image Paradigm for Fine-Tuning Vision-Language Models

Authors:

Yifeng Wu↗Huimin Huang↗Ruiluo Wu↗Chunyi Lin↗Guanhua Chen↗Xian Wu↗Wang Song↗Ruize Han↗

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often lose track of the right image regions during fine-grained spatial reasoning, because a textual query rarely carries any explicit geometric anchor into the pixel domain. Prevailing remedies either rewire the model's weights or pad the prompt with verbose instructions, yet neither reliably pins the language to the correct visual coordinates without eroding the backbone's general competence. We introduce Timage, a paradigm that recasts multimodal understanding as an alignment problem solved at the input: the query is drawn, as a typeset overlay, onto the image itself. The placement and appearance of this overlay are produced by a Constrained Schrödinger Bridge (cSB), an entropic optimal-transport sampler that factorizes layout synthesis into two coupled stochastic stages. The first stage, Region Search, transports noise toward query-aligned image zones while obeying a hard occlusion barrier that protects salient foreground content; the second stage, Appearance Shaping, sizes the glyphs through an ``ink-budget'' regularizer so that the rendered text stays legible and visually balanced. The resulting overlay behaves as an explicit attention beacon that channels the model's focus along spatial semantics. On the VMCBench suite, Timage paired with a modest 7B backbone clearly overtakes far larger proprietary systems as well as parameter-tuned baselines. The study positions deliberate input reconstruction as a powerful, architecture-neutral lever for strengthening multimodal reasoning.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

07.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15328

SGFormer++: Semantic Graph Transformer for Incremental 3D Scene Graph Generation

Authors:

Mengshi Qi↗Changsheng Lv↗Zijian Fu↗Xianlin Zhang↗Huadong Ma↗

In this paper, we propose SGFormer++, a novel Semantic Graph Transformer for 3D scene graph generation (SGG), which aims to parse point cloud scenes into semantic structural graphs, where nodes denote detected object instances and edges encode their pairwise relationships, with the core challenge lying in modeling complex global scene structure. While existing graph convolutional network (GCN)-based methods suffer from over-smoothing and limited receptive fields, SGFormer++ leverages Transformer layers as its backbone to enable global message passing. Specifically, we introduce two key components tailored for 3D SGG: (1) a Graph Embedding Layer++ that efficiently integrates edge-aware global context with linear computational complexity, and (2) a Semantic Injection Layer++ that enriches visual features with linguistic priors from large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), boosting semantic representation without introducing extra trainable parameters. To further address the practical challenge of incremental SGG (I-SGG), where new relationship categories arrive sequentially, we equip SGFormer++ with a novel Spatial-guided Feature Adapter, which calibrates predicate features using subject-object spatial geometry to counter scale variation, and a Cascaded Binary Prediction Head that mitigates catastrophic forgetting via task-incremental classifier expansion and logit distillation. Extensive experiments on the 3DSSG benchmark demonstrate that SGFormer++ achieves state-of-the-art performance in both standard and incremental settings: it yields a significant 4.49% absolute improvement in Predicate A@1 under the incremental setting. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/Andy20178/SGFormer.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

08.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20416

On the Redundancy of Timestep Embeddings in Diffusion Models

Authors:

Jos\'e A. Ch\'avez↗

arXiv:2606.20416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models rely heavily on explicit timestep embeddings to modulate the denoising process across various noise scales. In this work, we challenge the necessity of these temporal signals by analyzing their impact on U-Net and Diffusion Transformer architectures. Beyond empirical evidence, we provide a theoretical framework demonstrating that, under certain conditions, the global minimizer of the diffusion training objective can be achieved without explicit timestep conditioning. Our findings reveal a surprising robustness when timestep embeddings are completely removed. Extensive ablation studies on the CelebA and CIFAR-10 datasets show that these time-agnostic models can maintain high structural fidelity and even surpass their conditioned counterparts in competitive metrics, including FID, precision, and recall. Our analysis suggests these architectures can implicitly infer noise scales from the corrupted input under specific assumptions, rendering explicit temporal conditioning redundant. This study challenges long-standing temporal conditioning paradigms and paves the way for more efficient and structurally focused generative architectures.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

09.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15160

DLWM: Diverse Latent World Models for Efficient Multimodal Reasoning

Authors:

David Huang↗Lianlei Shan↗

Reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have improved considerably in recent years. Existing approaches typically rely on explicit chain-of-thought or continuous latent-space trajectories to enhance multi-step reasoning. However, these methods generally assume that an input admits a single latent interpretation and unfold reasoning along a fixed path or under a uniform computation budget. In real-world multimodal settings, visual observations are often subject to occlusion, blur, viewpoint variation, or semantic ambiguity, giving rise to multiple plausible interpretations. A uniform reasoning strategy not only limits the model's ability to explore multiple hypotheses but also incurs high memory usage and rollout cost. We present DLWM (Diverse Latent World Models), a multimodal reasoning framework that combines latent-space reasoning with reinforcement learning. First, we construct a set of diverse latent world hypotheses in continuous latent space, each capturing a different plausible interpretation of the visual input, and unfold latent reasoning independently on each hypothesis. An orthogonality-based diversity regularizer explicitly prevents hypothesis collapse. Second, we formulate the latent reasoning process as a resource-constrained sequential decision problem and introduce a resource-aware reinforcement learning policy that adaptively allocates computation across hypotheses, dynamically deciding whether to expand, terminate, or merge reasoning paths, thereby substantially reducing memory footprint and improving rollout efficiency. Experiments on multiple multimodal reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that DLWM outperforms existing methods by 2-5 points in accuracy while reducing memory usage by 24%.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

10.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15038

Fusion is not one-size-fits-all: Cross-Modal Representation Alignment for Time-to-Event Modeling

Authors:

Zhemin Zhang↗Weijie Chen↗David Le↗Amara Tariq↗Alex Wallace↗Matthew Stib↗Juan Maria Farina↗Chadi Ayoub↗Reza Arsanjani↗Imon Banerjee↗

arXiv:2606.15038v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate time-to-event (TTE) prediction from multimodal clinical data remains challenging due to modality imbalance and distribution shift. We introduce a foundation model-driven framework for cross-modal representation alignment between CT imaging and longitudinal EHR data, designed to generalize across tasks and institutions. CT and EHR modalities are encoded independently using domain-specific foundation models and aligned in a shared latent space through four principled fusion strategies: late fusion, contrastive alignment, cross-attention, and co-attention. We evaluate two clinically distinct TTE tasks: pulmonary embolism (PE) mortality and cardiovascular disease (CVD) outcomes, on large-scale multi-institutional cohorts (PE: N=3,099 train; 1,098 internal; 435 external; CVD: N=2,951 train; 837 internal; 682 external). Fusion consistently improves concordance index by 1.5-5.4% over unimodal baselines when modalities contribute comparably. Overall, contrastive multimodal fusion, particularly with CLMBR representations, provided the most consistent and statistically robust improvements, especially for PE mortality prediction. For MACE, cross-attention (one-hot) achieved the highest internal performance and image-guided co-attention achieved the best external performance. We therefore introduce a generalizable foundation model-based cross-modal alignment framework and provide the first systematic analysis of fusion behavior under modality imbalance in TTE prediction. Our results establish task-aware multimodal alignment as a necessary design principle for robust generalization and scalable clinical deployment.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

11.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13477

SupraBench: A Benchmark for Supramolecular Chemistry

Authors:

Tianyi Ma↗Yijun Ma↗Zehong Wang↗Weixiang Sun↗Ziming Li↗Connor R. Schmidt↗Chuxu Zhang↗Matthew J. Webber↗Yanfang Ye↗

Supramolecular chemistry, which includes the study of non-covalent host-guest assemblies, has advanced various applications. However, designing host-guest systems remains time-consuming, requiring days of dry-lab verification per candidate pair. Although LLMs have emerged as a fast alternative with strong performance on molecular binding tasks, no benchmark currently systematically evaluates LLMs for host-guest reasoning across fundamental supramolecular chemistry tasks, e.g., binding affinity prediction. To this end, we collaborate with domain experts to release the first Supramolecular Benchmark, called SupraBench, to evaluate LLMs in chemistry reasoning. Specifically, we design four fundamental tasks, i.e., binding affinity prediction, top-binder selection, solvent identification, and host-guest description, plus an auxiliary vision-based task for molecular identification. We also release SupraPMC, a curated 16M-token corpus of Supramolecular chemistry articles distilled from Europe PMC, to support the adaptation to the supramolecular domain. We benchmark a broad range of open and proprietary LLMs and find that LLMs leave substantial headroom across all tasks. Domain adaptation pretraining over SupraPMC transfers cleanly to in-distribution regression but trades off against strict letter-format output. Moreover, the difficulty profile differs sharply across task families, revealing distinct failure modes that indicate specific gaps in current supramolecular chemistry reasoning. Our source codes and benchmark datasets are available at https://github.com/Tianyi-Billy-Ma/SupraBench.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

12.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15962

p-PSO: A Penalized Particle Swarm Optimization Technique for Finding D-Optimal Designs with Mixed Factors in Generalized Linear Models

Authors:

Shrabanti Chowdhury↗Abhyuday Mandal↗

arXiv:2606.15962v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finding D-optimal designs for generalized linear models (GLMs) is challenging due to the dependence of the Fisher information matrix on unknown parameters and the lack of closed-form solutions, particularly when input factors include both discrete and continuous variables. Although classical algorithms and recent metaheuristic approaches have offered partial solutions, there remains a need for robust and computationally efficient methods. In this paper, we propose a penalized Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) approach, named $p$-PSO. Here we introduce a new, general-purpose penalty formulation for constrained optimization and demonstrate its effectiveness in optimal design problems. The formulation is algorithm-agnostic and applicable to a broad class of black-box optimization methods. Results show that the method is highly efficient, with its primary contribution being a penalty formulation that enables the direct use of an off-the-shelf PSO algorithm and extends naturally to more general constrained optimization tasks.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

13.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19591

A BART-based approach with hierarchical strategy for Vietnamese abstractive multi-document summarization

Authors:

Vu Nguyen Nguyen Xuan↗Huy Ngo Quang↗

In this technical report, we focus on solving the challenge of Vietnamese multi-document abstractive summarization, introduced in the International Workshop on Vietnamese Language and Speech Processing (VLSP) 2022. We choose to follow the popular hierarchical approach, i.e. condensing each document followed by aggregation and summarization. We propose a novel yet simple strategy to shorten documents that is driven by the golden summary, thus ensuring high correlation between stages of the hierarchical approach. Our method achieves a ROUGE2-F1 score of 0.2468 on the VLSP's public test set, and can produce fluent and concise summaries. Additionally, we utilize external sources for extra data, which greatly enhances the quantity of data for Vietnamese multi-document summarization. The additional data is made available for the community.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

14.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2511.09465

Branching Flows: Discrete, Continuous, and Manifold Flow Matching with Splits and Deletions

Authors:

Lukas Billera↗Hedwig Nora Nordlinder↗Jack Collier Ryder↗Anton Oresten↗Aron St{\aa}lmarck↗Theodor Mosetti Bj\"ork↗Ben Murrell↗

arXiv:2511.09465v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion and flow matching approaches to generative modeling have shown promise in domains where the state space is continuous, such as image generation or protein folding & design, and discrete, exemplified by diffusion large language models. They offer a natural fit when the number of elements in a state is fixed in advance (e.g. images), but require ad hoc solutions when, for example, the length of a response from a large language model, or the number of amino acids in a protein chain is not known a priori. Here we propose Branching Flows, a generative modeling framework that, like diffusion and flow matching approaches, transports a simple distribution to the data distribution. But in Branching Flows, the elements in the state evolve over a forest of binary trees, branching and dying stochastically with rates that are learned by the model. This allows the model to control, during generation, the number of elements in the sequence. We also show that Branching Flows can compose with any flow matching base process on discrete sets, continuous Euclidean spaces, smooth manifolds, and `multimodal' product spaces that mix these components. We demonstrate this in three domains: small molecule generation (multimodal), antibody sequence generation (discrete), and protein backbone generation (multimodal), and show that Branching Flows is a capable distribution learner with a stable learning objective, and that it enables new capabilities.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

15.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16694

Adaptive inference and function vectors in deep transformers

Authors:

Ravin Raj↗Gautam Reddy↗

arXiv:2606.16694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformers are widely used as a general-purpose substrate for learning complex correlations between a large collection of coupled variables, but their internal mechanisms have remained mysterious. We introduce a theory of a deep transformer as a mean-field interacting system that implements distributed inference, subject to constraints on communication, locality and depth. We show that such a system can exploit internal state representations ('function vectors') to infer a latent context variable at increasingly finer scales over its layers. In an in-context regression task, the theory predicts a non-trivial relationship between non-Gaussian, hierarchical structure in the latent context variable, and transformer depth. Predictions are tested using constrained linear attention transformers and demonstrate adaptive inference in deep architectures. Feedforward blocks and depth enable transformers to implement a much richer class of in-context learning algorithms than previously described.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

16.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15214

On the Smoluchowski-Kramers approximation for the hyperbolic $O(N)$ linear sigma model and its mean-field limit

Authors:

Alexander Czernik↗Ruoyuan Liu↗Shao Liu↗

arXiv:2606.15214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the hyperbolic $O(N)$ linear sigma model, i.e. a system of $N$ interacting stochastic damped nonlinear wave equations (SdNLW) with coupled cubic nonlinearities, posed on the two-dimensional torus and indexed by a parameter $\varepsilon > 0$. We show that as $\varepsilon$ goes to zero (Smoluchowski-Kramers approximation) and $N$ goes to infinity (mean-field limit), each component of the solution to the SdNLW system converges to the solution to the stochastic nonlinear heat equation (SNLH) with a mean-field nonlinearity. We prove such convergence via two regimes: first with $\varepsilon$ going to zero to obtain the parabolic $O(N)$ linear sigma model, i.e. a system of $N$ coupled SNLH, and then with $N$ going to infinity; or first with $N$ going to infinity for each component to obtain the mean-field SdNLW and then with $\eps$ going to zero. As a result, we obtain a commutative diagram regarding the convergence from the hyperbolic $O(N)$ linear sigma model to the mean-field SNLH.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

17.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2512.02318

COGNITION: From Evaluation to Defense against Multimodal LLM CAPTCHA Solvers

Authors:

Junyu Wang↗Changjia Zhu↗Yuanbo Zhou↗Lingyao Li↗Xu He↗Mingkui Wei↗Junjie Xiong↗

arXiv:2512.02318v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies how multimodal large language models (MLLMs) undermine the security guarantees of visual CAPTCHA. We identify the attack surface where an adversary can cheaply automate CAPTCHA solving using off-the-shelf models. We evaluate 7 representative MLLMs on 18 real-world CAPTCHA task types, measuring single-shot accuracy, success under limited retries, end-to-end latency, and per-solve cost. We further validate our findings through a supplemental external dataset and an adaptive-attacker setting with session memory, while also analyzing the impact of task-specific prompt engineering and few-shot demonstrations on solver effectiveness. We reveal that MLLMs can reliably solve recognition-oriented and low-interaction CAPTCHA tasks at human-like cost and latency, whereas tasks requiring fine-grained localization, multi-step spatial reasoning, or cross-frame consistency remain significantly harder for current models. By examining the reasoning traces of such MLLMs, we investigate the underlying mechanisms of why models succeed/fail on specific CAPTCHA puzzles and use these insights to derive defense-oriented guidelines for selecting and strengthening CAPTCHA tasks. To validate these principles, we present a proof-of-concept by hardening a vulnerable CAPTCHA type using our guidelines. We demonstrate that incorporating fine-grained localization and implicit counting reduces the success rate of state-of-the-art MLLMs from over 95\% to 0\%, confirming that structural changes can effectively mitigate the threat. We conclude by emphasizing the urgent need for CAPTCHA redesign as MLLM capabilities increasingly threaten existing defenses. Code Availability (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20406852).

Read & Discuss → View Source →

18.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2506.10476

Construction of ergodic IDLA forests in $\mathbb{Z}^d$

Authors:

Nicolas Chenavier↗David Coupier↗Keenan Penner↗Arnaud Rousselle↗

arXiv:2506.10476v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove the existence of infinite-volume IDLA forests in $\mathbb{Z}^d$ , with $d \geq 2$, based on a multi-source IDLA protocol. Unlike IDLA aggregates, the laws of the IDLA forests studied here depend on the trajectories of particles, and then do not satisfy the famous Abelian property. Their existence is due to a stabilization result (Theorem 1.1, our main result) that we establish using percolation tools. Although the sources are infinitely many, we also prove that each of them play the same role in the building procedure, which results in an ergodicity property for the IDLA forests (Theorem 1.2).

Read & Discuss → View Source →

19.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2505.18201

Reinforcement Twinning for Hybrid Control of Flapping-Wing Drones

Authors:

Romain Poletti↗Lorenzo Schena↗Lilla Koloszar↗Joris Degroote↗Miguel Alfonso Mendez↗

arXiv:2505.18201v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Controlling flapping-wing drones requires controllers that handle time-varying, nonlinear, underactuated dynamics from incomplete, noisy sensor data. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly reinforcement learning (RL), have opened new perspectives for addressing such complex control problems through data-driven policy optimization from interaction with the environment. Yet purely data-driven methods are sample-inefficient, demanding extensive, sometimes unsafe exploration, especially without guiding physical models. This motivates hybrid AI-physics frameworks. This article proposes a hybrid model-free/model-based flight-control approach using the reinforcement twinning algorithm. The model-based (MB) component uses an adjoint formulation and an adaptive digital twin continuously identified from live trajectories; the model-free (MF) component uses RL. The two agents share knowledge via transfer learning, imitation learning, and shared experience between the real environment and the digital twin, coordinated by a policy referee that selects which agent acts in reality based on digital-twin performance and a real-to-virtual consistency ratio. The framework is evaluated for the longitudinal control of a flapping-wing drone, modelled as a nonlinear time-varying system driven by quasi-steady aerodynamic forces. The hybrid strategy is tested under three adaptive-model initializations: (1) offline identification from existing data, (2) random initialization with fully online identification, and (3) offline pre-training with biased parameters followed by online adaptation. In all cases, the hybrid framework improves performance, robustness, and sample efficiency over purely model-free and purely model-based approaches.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

20.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20376

CRAX: Fast Safe Reinforcement Learning Benchmarking

Authors:

Tristan Tomilin↗Mourad Boustani↗Mickey Beurskens↗Thiago D. Sim\~ao↗

arXiv:2606.20376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety is a core concern for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) agents in real-world domains such as robotics and autonomous driving. While benchmarks have been central to progress in RL, existing safety benchmarks with high-fidelity 3D physics remain computationally slow, limiting large-scale experimentation and rapid prototyping. To address this gap, we propose CRAX (Constrained RL Accelerated with JAX). Built on top of the MuJoCo XLA (MJX) physics engine with realistic 3D dynamics, CRAX leverages vectorized operations and hardware acceleration, yielding up to ~100x speedups over comparable CPU-based safety benchmarks. The benchmark features six environment suites and three agent-specific tasks, each spanning three difficulty levels. Evaluating six popular safe RL methods shows that no single approach dominates across all tasks, and reveals the trade-offs between performance and safety. We find that curriculum learning across difficulty levels and safety transfer can improve performance over direct training in harder settings.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

21.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2505.03201

Enhancing Visual Feature Attribution via Weighted Integrated Gradients

Authors:

Kien Tran Duc Tuan↗Tam Nguyen Trong↗Son Nguyen Hoang↗Khoat Than↗Anh Nguyen Duc↗

arXiv:2505.03201v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Integrated Gradients (IG) is a widely used attribution method in explainable AI, particularly in computer vision applications where reliable feature attribution is essential. A key limitation of IG is its sensitivity to the choice of baseline (reference) images. Multi-baseline extensions such as Expected Gradients (EG) assume uniform weighting over baselines, implicitly treating all baseline images as equally informative. In high-dimensional vision models, this assumption often leads to noisy or unstable explanations. This paper proposes Weighted Integrated Gradients (WG), a principled approach that evaluates and weights baselines to enhance attribution reliability. WG introduces an unsupervised criterion for baseline suitability, enabling adaptive selection and weighting of baselines on a per-input basis. The method preserves the core axiomatic properties of IG in a generalized weighted-baseline form. Under an expected, proxy-based fitness–relevance monotonicity assumption, WG provides a probabilistic justification for assigning larger weights to more informative baselines. Experiments on commonly used image datasets and models show that WG improves over EG under our protocol, with up to 36% gains across evaluated convolutional and Transformer architectures. These gains come with additional fitness-evaluation cost, so WG should be viewed as an attribution-fidelity trade-off rather than a faster alternative to EG. By moving beyond the assumption that all baselines contribute equally, Weighted Integrated Gradients offers a clearer and more reliable approach to explaining computer-vision models, improving both understanding and practical usability in explainable AI.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

22.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15553

Distilling Drifting Transformers with Representation Autoencoders

Authors:

Jiawei Zhang↗Mengfei Xia↗Gen Li↗Yuantao Gu↗

arXiv:2606.15553v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Representation Autoencoders (RAEs) have improved diffusion and flow models by semantically richer latent space owing to the strongly label-wise clustered DINO features in the pretrained encoders. Yet in the distillation stage, the severe anisotropy and large curvatures caused by the rich semantic representations would hinder the convergence and performance, making the trajectory-based distillation unstable. In this work, we argue that the RAE latent space is compatible with distillation via the newly proposed Drifting Models. We first quantitatively study the curvatures and isotropy statistics across different autoencoders, and theoretically reveal that Drifting Model itself is highly likely to fail on extremely scattered spaces like reconstruction-based VAEs. These motivate us to apply the drifting paradigm directly to representation autoencoders. Our proposed method, Drift-RAE, distills pretrained flow models in RAE latent spaces using Drifting, together with insightful modifications that improve training stability by thereotically aligning drifting fields with other frameworks. Regarding the experimental evidences, we achieve 1.77 FID on ImageNet 256 dataset using only 10k distillation steps, surpassing state-of-the-art RAE distillation methods and appearing comparative with the original Drifting Model without requiring an auxiliary MAE feature extractor. The code will be made publicly available.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

23.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11341

Energy-Conserved Neural Pipelines: Attenuating Error Propagation in Modular Neural Networks via Physical Conservation Constraints

Authors:

David Young↗Swan Yi Htet↗

arXiv:2606.11341v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modular neural network pipelines suffer from error compounding: noise at any module boundary propagates and potentially amplifies through subsequent modules. We introduce energy conservation as a hard physical constraint on inter-module information flow. Activation energy (the squared L2 norm of feature vectors) is enforced to be exactly preserved at every module boundary. Unlike soft energy penalties, conservation is an inviolable law: the network may redistribute energy across neurons but cannot create or destroy it. Four experiments on CIFAR-10 demonstrate: (1) conservation retains 77.4% of clean accuracy at noise sigma=0.2, versus 35.1% for baselines and 30.9% for energy-penalized models (p

Read & Discuss → View Source →

24.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16925

RAID: Semantic Graph Diffusion for True Cold-Start and Cross-Lingual Forecasting

Authors:

Arunkumar V↗Manoranjan Gandhudi↗Gangadharan G. R↗Arun Prakash↗S. Senthilkumar↗

arXiv:2606.16925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series foundation models show strong transfer performance when given a non-empty history window. However, true cold-start scenarios, where a new item has no prior observations, violate this assumption. We propose RAID (Retrieval-Augmented Iterative Diffusion) a framework, which replaces history-based correlation learning with metadata-driven semantic retrieval and graph-conditioned diffusion. RAID maps textual metadata into a shared semantic space using a frozen multilingual embedding model and constructs an inductive retrieval graph that extends naturally to unseen items. It first forms a base forecast by aggregating information from semantically related neighbors, then refines this forecast with a gated diffusion module to model residual uncertainty. Under a strict true cold-start protocol, RAID outperforms strong foundation models and competitive baselines on both forecasting accuracy and prediction interval coverage, while reducing inference latency by an order of magnitude through non-autoregressive decoding. The shared semantic space also enables zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, allowing a model trained on English descriptions to generalize to items described in other languages without direct supervision.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

25.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2508.05032

On the spatio-temporal increments of nonlinear parabolic SPDEs and the open KPZ equation

Authors:

Jingwu Hu↗Cheuk Yin Lee↗

arXiv:2508.05032v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study spatio-temporal increments of the solutions to nonlinear parabolic SPDEs on a bounded interval with Dirichlet, Neumann, or Robin boundary conditions. We identify the exact local and uniform spatio-temporal moduli of continuity for the sample functions of the solutions. These moduli of continuity results imply the existence of random points in space-time at which spatio-temporal oscillations are exceptionally large. We also establish small-ball probability estimates and Chung-type laws of the iterated logarithm for spatio-temporal increments. Our method yields extension of some of these results to the open KPZ equation on the unit interval with inhomogeneous Neumann boundary conditions. Our key ingredients include new strong local non-determinism results for linear stochastic heat equation under various types of boundary conditions, and detailed estimates for the errors in linearization of spatio-temporal increments of the solution to the nonlinear equation.

Read & Discuss → View Source →