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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

JanusMesh: Fast and Zero-Shot 3D Visual Illusion Generation via Cross-Space Denoising

Creating 3D visual illusions, a single 3D mesh that reveals entirely different semantics from various viewing angles, is a fascinating but tough challenge. Existing optimization-based methods are slow and can produce oversaturated colors. In contrast, naive stitching approaches fail to produce geometrically coherent objects. This results in visible unnatural seams and semantic leaks. In this paper, we present a fast and training-free framework for generating text-driven 3D visual illusions. Our approach decouples the generation into two stages. First, we propose a cross-space dual-branch denoising process. This process dynamically decodes 3D latents into voxel space for CLIP-guided orientation alignment and Signed Distance Field (SDF) blending, which ensures seamless geometric fusion. Second, we introduce a view-conditioned texture synthesis module that projects and aggregates view-specific 2D diffusion priors onto the fused geometry. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method generates highly realistic, dual-semantic 3D illusions in just 3-5 minutes. It significantly outperforms existing methods in geometric integrity, semantic recognizability, and efficiency. Project page: https://siang1105.github.io/JanusMesh.github.io/

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Emergent Bell Phase in an Electro-Nanomechanical Quantum Simulator

arXiv:2511.02613v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Suspended carbon nanotubes hosting electrostatically defined quantum dots allow for exceptionally strong and tunable electromechanical coupling as well as mechanical modes that can reach the quantum ground state of motion simply by cryogenic cooling. This makes them a unique platform for quantum simulation of electron-phonon coupling. Here, we propose an experimentally realisable setup with two such carbon nanotubes in parallel, each hosting four quantum dots. Our system not only exhibits phonon-mediated electron-electron attraction, but also supports a robust, maximally entangled Bell phase at mesoscopic scales shared across the subsystems. These features highlight its potential as a simulator of strongly correlated quantum systems.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Learning to Refine Hidden States for Reliable LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2606.17524v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models show strong reasoning ability, but their internal reasoning process can remain unstable in complex multi-step settings, where early hidden-state errors may propagate to incorrect predictions. We propose ReLAR, a reinforcement-guided latent refinement framework that iteratively updates hidden representations before decoding. ReLAR maintains a compact latent reasoning state and uses learned depth and action controllers to adaptively determine both the number and direction of refinement steps. The controllers are trained with a policy gradient objective based on step-wise likelihood improvement, enabling efficient input-dependent reasoning without explicit chain-of-thought generation. Experiments on medical, mathematical, multi-hop reasoning, and open-ended generation benchmarks show that ReLAR improves accuracy, generation quality, and reasoning stability with substantially lower inference overhead than explicit reasoning baselines.

04.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-20

Associations between hematologic dynamics during pregnancy and obstetric complications: A retrospective observational study

by Veronica Tozzo, Rachel Petherbridge, Kaitlyn James, Sarah Hsu, Deepti Pant, Chloe Michalopoulos, Brody H. Foy, Tanayott Thaweethai, Christopher Mow, Jacqueline Maya, Carolina Batlle Camero, Lydia Shook, Kathryn J. Gray, Logan Mauney, John M. Higgins, Camille E. Powe Background Pregnancy alters hematologic state as measured by complete blood count (CBC), but the longitudinal changes in CBC indices that define healthy pregnancies are not well established. In a large cohort based at an academic health system in the United States, we aimed to define reference intervals and typical longitudinal changes in CBC indices during pregnancy. We then tested for associations between extreme CBC values for gestational age or extreme longitudinal changes in CBC indices and obstetric complications. Methods and findings We studied nine CBC indices in individuals with singleton pregnancies who delivered after 30 weeks’ gestation and presented for prenatal care prior to 20 weeks. The electronic health record (EHR)-based Maternal Health Cohort (Massachusetts General Hospital; 1998–2016) formed our discovery cohort of 45,992 pregnancies, 18% of which had relevant complications. We developed a validation cohort of 48,868, 27% with complications from EHR data in the Mass General Brigham healthcare system from 2016 to 2024. In pregnancies without complications in the discovery cohort, we derived gestational-age-specific reference intervals (2.5th–97.5th percentile) and established typical intra-pregnancy longitudinal changes. In the validation cohort, we then tested CBC values outside of the 26–29 weeks’ gestation reference interval and CBC rare changes (uncommon changes in magnitude and direction) between 7–14 and 26–29 weeks’ gestation for association with a composite outcome (hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, small for gestational age birthweight, preterm birth) and its individual components using generalized estimating equations. Derived reference intervals differed from those in the literature for mean red cell volume, mean red cell hemoglobin, red cell count, and mean red cell hemoglobin concentration; reference intervals for other indices were similar to those previously published. In validation, hematocrit, hemoglobin, and red cell count values above their gestational-age specific reference intervals were associated with increased risk of the composite obstetric outcome: odds ratios (ORs) of 1.4 (95% CI [1.2, 1.5] p 

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Achieving High-Quality Portfolio Optimization with the Variational Quantum Eigensolver

arXiv:2508.18625v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Portfolio optimization lies at the core of quantitative finance and aims to determine how assets should be allocated to balance expected returns against risk. It can be formulated as a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem, which is NP-hard. Quantum computing offers the potential to solve such problems more efficiently than classical methods. In this work, we employ the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) to address the portfolio optimization problem. To increase the likelihood of converging to high-quality solutions, we propose using the Weighted Conditional Value-at-Risk (WCVaR) as the cost function and the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) as the optimizer. Our experiments are conducted using both classical simulations and quantum hardware on the Wuyue QuantumAI platform. Together, these results demonstrate that the combination of WCVaR and CMA-ES improves the performance of VQE for portfolio optimization and provides a practical route for applications on NISQ devices.

06.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Neuron-based Personality Trait Induction in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly proficient at simulating various personality traits, an important capability for supporting related applications (e.g., role-playing). To further improve this capacity, in this paper, we present a neuron-based approach for personality trait induction in LLMs, with three major technical contributions. First, we construct PersonalityBench, a large-scale dataset for identifying and evaluating personality traits in LLMs. This dataset is grounded in the Big Five personality traits from psychology and is designed to assess the generative capabilities of LLMs towards specific personality traits. Second, by leveraging PersonalityBench, we propose an efficient method for identifying personality-related neurons within LLMs by examining the opposite aspects of a given trait. Third, we develop a simple yet effective induction method that manipulates the values of these identified personality-related neurons. This method enables fine-grained control over the traits exhibited by LLMs without training and modifying model parameters. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of our neuron identification and trait induction methods. Notably, our approach achieves comparable performance as fine-tuned models, offering a more efficient and flexible solution for personality trait induction in LLMs. We provide access to all the mentioned resources at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/NPTI.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Phase locking nuclear spins in silicon with spin-orbit coupling

arXiv:2606.20340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Because they have such long coherence times, nuclear spins have extraordinary potential for use in quantum information processing devices. However, coherent nuclear spin control generally requires external phase references, such as microwave control fields. Here, we phase-lock a $^{29}$Si nuclear spin ensemble in a silicon quantum dot using only the internal electronic spin-orbit coupling as a phase reference. When driven with the quantum-dot electrons, the nuclear spins align themselves to a phase determined by the electronic spin-orbit coupling and the timing of the drive protocol. This enables us to measure the coherent precession and inhomogeneous dephasing of the nuclear spins. We corroborate our results with detailed numerical simulations of the many-body electron nuclear system. Our work opens new routes for coherently controlling solid-state nuclear spin ensembles.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Understanding LLMs in Title-Abstract Screening: From Disagreements to Recommendations

arXiv:2606.17588v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Several studies have examined the use of large language models (LLMs) for title-abstract screening in systematic reviews (SRs), reporting mixed accuracy. However, questions of reliability remain largely unaddressed. In this study, we go beyond quantitative LLM-human agreement metrics and qualitatively investigate how and why LLMs fail. We also propose actionable recommendations. We analyzed disagreements between LLMs and researchers across six software engineering SRs and over 1,000 primary study papers. For each SR, papers were screened independently by human experts and LLMs in zero-shot mode, resulting in Kappa values ranging from 0.52 to 0.77. Qualitative analysis suggests that human-LLM disagreement results from recurring, identifiable causes, such as boundary ambiguity in key terms, keyword overemphasization, and incorrect topic inference. Based on these findings, we propose recommendations such as validating semantic understanding before deployment, running multiple LLMs, and focusing validation efforts on borderline cases. Future studies are needed to validate the impact of our recommendations, and community efforts are needed to develop normative guidelines on LLM usage in SRs.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Rethinking the Pointer Loss in Table Structure Recognition: Geometry-Aware Pointer Loss for Spatial Locality

Table Structure Recognition (TSR) using a pointer network achieves impressive results by predicting HTML sequences while aligning tags to detected text (or cell) regions. However, our analysis reveals that when pointer networks fail, 79.6% of errors occur between spatially adjacent cells (Manhattan distance

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Reason, Then Re-reason: Cross-view Revisiting Improves Spatial Reasoning

Spatial reasoning from egocentric videos is inherently challenging because the observable evidence is constrained by the camera trajectory. Existing methods rely on single-turn inference, forcing models to resolve geometric ambiguity through semantic priors rather than verifiable evidence. We argue that spatial reasoning should be revisitable: conclusions formed under limited evidence should remain open to revision when complementary viewpoints become available. Building on this insight, we propose Reason, then Re-reason (ReRe), a training-free, inference-time framework with two phases: in the Reason Phase, an MLLM forms a spatial hypothesis from the original video; in the Re-reason Phase, it verifies or revises the hypothesis by observing a synthesized novel-view video. To enable effective cross-view revisiting, we design a Geometry-to-Video pipeline that renders strategically complementary novel views from predicted 3D geometry. These views feature an elevated, oblique perspective with scene-spanning coverage, while preserving the MLLM's native video interface without architectural modifications. Extensive evaluations on VSI-Bench and STI-Bench demonstrate that ReRe substantially boosts open-source MLLMs to rival proprietary state-of-the-art performance. Project page: https://zhenjiemao.github.io/ReRe/

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

MetaPlate: Counterfactual-Guided RAG-LLM Tool for Personalized Food Recommendation and Hyperglycemia Prevention

arXiv:2606.10120v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Postprandial hyperglycemia is a key risk factor for metabolic disorders; however, existing dietary guidance is often static, impractical, and insufficiently personalized, providing recommendations that are difficult to follow or not impactful. While recent advances leverage continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) and machine learning to predict glycemic responses, these approaches are largely predictive and lack actionable guidance. Moreover, recommendation systems are often misaligned with user goals and require extensive input. We present MetaPlate, a counterfactual explanation (CF) guided, context-aware decision-support framework that generates personalized meal recommendations to mitigate postprandial glucose excursions in healthy adults. MetaPlate integrates multimodal data, including CGM readings, wearable-derived physiological signals, and user-provided meal inputs from $25$ individuals to model pre-meal context. A machine learning model predicts glucose response, while a CF optimization module adjusts meal composition modifying macronutrient amounts to maintain glucose levels within a target range ($\leq 140$ mg/dL). An LLM-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) layer enhances interpretability by producing human-readable recommendations using constrained search of the USDA food database. We evaluate MetaPlate via a structured expert-in-the-loop assessment with registered dietitians (RDs), comparing performance before and after prompt refinement. Results show improvements in meal realism, portion suitability, and recommendation likelihood, with expert feedback indicating a shift from clinically implausible outputs to actionable, contextually appropriate recommendations. Our findings emphasize the importance of domain knowledge and structured constraints in LLM-driven systems and highlight the potential of MetaPlate as a real-time personalized dietary decision-support tool.

12.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Stereoretentive decarbonylative C(sp<sup>3</sup>)-C(sp<sup>3</sup>) cross-coupling

Authors:

While C(sp3)–C(sp3) bond-forming cross-coupling methods have become more common, stereocontrolled bond-formation remains a challenge,1 despite its importance for drug discovery, where there is a emerging demand for molecules with increased sp3 character.2-4 Enantiospecific cross-coupling approaches would complement advances in enantioselective coupling,5-8 but have been limited to specialized substrates with lower availability5,9 because stereospecific oxidative addition of more abundant chiral alkyl electrophiles is unknown.10 Inspired by the classic, stereoretentive Curtius rearrangement,11 herein we disclose a catalytic strategy that proceeds by an analogous stereoretentive decarbonylation step to form a versatile chiral alkylnickel intermediate from easily-available chiral amino-acid and α-hydroxy-acid derivatives. The chiral alkylnickel intermediates decompose and/or racemize on the order of minutes, but are sufficiently stable to enable stereoretentive cross-electrophile coupling12 with alkyl radicals (derived from alkyl iodides) at relatively low temperature (22-40 °C). This mechanistic strategy provides a straightforward approach to stereocontrolled C(sp3)–C(sp3) bond formation, including diastereomers that are inaccessible by stereoselective radical mechanisms. The “metallo-Curtius” strategy described in this study lays a mechanistic foundation for the development many new stereospecific cross-coupling reactions.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

4DSloMo: 4D Reconstruction for High Speed Scene with Asynchronous Capture

Reconstructing fast-dynamic scenes from multi-view videos is crucial for high-speed motion analysis and realistic 4D reconstruction. However, the majority of 4D capture systems are limited to frame rates below 30 FPS (frames per second), and a direct 4D reconstruction of high-speed motion from low FPS input may lead to undesirable results. In this work, we propose a high-speed 4D capturing system only using low FPS cameras, through novel capturing and processing modules. On the capturing side, we propose an asynchronous capture scheme that increases the effective frame rate by staggering the start times of cameras. By grouping cameras and leveraging a base frame rate of 25 FPS, our method achieves an equivalent frame rate of 100-200 FPS without requiring specialized high-speed cameras. On processing side, we also propose a novel generative model to fix artifacts caused by 4D sparse-view reconstruction, as asynchrony reduces the number of viewpoints at each timestamp. Specifically, we propose to train a video-diffusion-based artifact-fix model for sparse 4D reconstruction, which refines missing details, maintains temporal consistency, and improves overall reconstruction quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly enhances high-speed 4D reconstruction compared to synchronous capture.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Training and Evaluating Diffusion Policies with Long Context Lengths

arXiv:2606.16447v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Imitation learning has enabled highly-dexterous robotic manipulation from RGB observations. Policies trained with these methods, however, typically condition robot actions on only a short history of observations. These policies cannot solve tasks that require memory and can get stuck repeatedly executing the same failing motions. In this work, we first benchmark policy performance as context length is incrementally increased from short to long, across a spectrum of tasks with varying local stability and memory requirements, and in multiple data regimes. To our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate context length in imitation learning at this level of detail. Our results challenge prior claims: naively scaling context length is not as brittle as advertised in literature. With an appropriate conditioning method and denoising backbone (UNet+Cross-Attention), single-task policies achieve high success rates on many tasks in the usual data regime even with naive scaling. Next, we propose a training algorithm to jointly train policies at multiple context lengths, further reducing the sample complexity of long-context learning. Finally, we apply our findings to re-evaluate some previously proposed solutions to long-context imitation learning.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Benchmarking Cross-Domain Audio-Visual Deception Detection

Automated deception detection is crucial for assisting humans in accurately assessing truthfulness and identifying deceptive behavior. Conventional contact-based techniques, like polygraph devices, rely on physiological signals to determine the authenticity of an individual's statements. Nevertheless, recent developments in automated deception detection have demonstrated that multimodal features derived from both audio and video modalities may outperform human observers on publicly available datasets. Despite these positive findings, the generalizability of existing audio-visual deception detection approaches across different scenarios remains largely unexplored. To close this gap, we present the first cross-domain audio-visual deception detection benchmark, that enables us to assess how well these methods generalize for use in real-world scenarios. We used widely adopted audio and visual features and different architectures for benchmarking, comparing single-to-single and multi-to-single domain generalization performance. To further exploit the impacts using data from multiple source domains for training, we investigate three types of domain sampling strategies, including domain-simultaneous, domain-alternating, and domain-by-domain for multi-to-single domain generalization evaluation. We also propose an algorithm to enhance the generalization performance by maximizing the gradient inner products between modality encoders, named ``MM-IDGM". Furthermore, we proposed the Attention-Mixer fusion method to improve performance, and we believe that this new cross-domain benchmark will facilitate future research in audio-visual deception detection.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Distributional Biases in Post-Training: A Markovian Analysis of Reasoning Trajectories

arXiv:2511.07368v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation models exhibit broad knowledge but limited task-specific reasoning, motivating post-training strategies such as RL with verifiable rewards (RLVR) and test-time scaling (TTS). While recent work highlights the role of exploration in improving pass@K, empirical evidence points to a paradox: RLVR and ORM/PRM typically reinforce existing paths rather than expanding the reasoning scope, raising the question of why exploration helps if no new patterns emerge. To reconcile this paradox, we adopt the perspective of Kim et al. (2025), viewing easy (e.g., simplifying a fraction) versus hard (e.g., discovering the some symmetry) reasoning steps as low versus high probability Markov transitions. In this tractable model, pretraining corresponds to tree-graph discovering, while post-training corresponds to CoT reweighting. We provably show that, both RLVR and ORM/PRM would favor heavily to several high-probability paths, and thereby forget rare-but-crucial CoTs. Building on this, we further prove that exploration strategies such as rejecting easy instances and KL regularization help preserve rare CoTs. Empirical simulations corroborate our theoretical results.

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

HydraHead: From Head-Level Functional Heterogeneity to Specialized Attention Hybridization

The quadratic complexity of attention poses a critical bottleneck for long-context processing, spurring interest in hybrid attention designs. Most open-source hybrid models adopt a layer-wise strategy. Yet, prior work has noted the inherent difficulty of integrating Linear Attention (LA) with Full Attention (FA), suggesting that the design space of attention hybridization remains underexplored. To probe this space, we conduct interpretability analysis and observe that layers exhibit block-wise functional similarity, while individual heads within the same layer display distinct functional specialization despite sharing input features. This head-level heterogeneity suggests that the head dimension provides a natural and principled granularity for fusing heterogeneous attention signals. Building on this insight, we introduce HydraHead, a novel architecture that hybridizes FA and LA along the head axis. HydraHead features two key innovations: (1) an interpretability-driven selection strategy that identifies retrieval-critical heads and preserves FA only for them, and (2) a scale-normalized fusion module that reconciles the distributional gap between FA and LA head outputs. By leveraging a three-stage transfer pipeline with parameter reuse and distillation, we achieve high-performance hybrid models with minimal training overhead. Under a unified training setup, HydraHead outperforms other hybrid designs in long-context tasks while maintaining strong general reasoning. With interpretability-driven head selection, it matches a 3:1 layer-wise hybrid's long-context performance at a 7:1 LA-to-FA ratio. Crucially, trained on only 15B tokens, HydraHead achieves over 69% improvement over the baseline at 512K context length, approaching Qwen3.5, a leading model of comparable size with a native context length of 256K. This highlights the significant scaling potential of head-level hybridization.

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

Better Adherence, Richer Context: A Field Evaluation of LLM-Powered Conversational Voice Diaries for Sleep

arXiv:2606.18596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sleep diaries are central to behavioral sleep medicine and cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, yet daily completion is difficult to sustain, and static forms often provide limited context for interpreting night-to-night sleep variation. We designed an LLM-powered conversational voice diary that delivers clinically grounded morning and evening sleep diary questions through proactive smart-speaker prompts, structured conversational intake, and adaptive follow-up dialogue. We evaluated the system in a four-week between-subjects field study with 30 university students, comparing it with a text-based mobile diary using matched diary items, reporting windows, and reminder intervals. Compared with the text-based diary, the conversational voice diary showed higher adherence and elicited more detailed contextual self-report about routines, stressors, environmental conditions, and other sleep-related factors. Participants also described the voice diary as easier to integrate into daily routines, despite longer perceived completion time. However, voice-based conversational intake produced lower completeness for some structured diary fields, revealing a trade-off between expressive richness and structured precision. These findings show both the promise and the challenge of using LLM-powered conversational voice assistants for longitudinal health self-report.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Convergence to the Brownian CRT for critical branching Markov processe

arXiv:2601.05906v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove an invariance principle for a general class of continuous time critical branching processes with finite variance (non-local) branching mechanism. We show that the genealogical trees, viewed as random compact metric measure spaces, converge under rescaling to the Brownian continuum random tree in the Gromov-Hausdorff-weak topology, establishing a universal scaling limit for critical finite variance branching processes.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Revisiting Structural Dependency in Autoregressive Multi-Task Table Recognition via Order-Independent Cell-Level Representations

Multi-task table recognition jointly addresses table structure prediction, cell localization, and cell content recognition within a unified framework. Existing approaches often rely on autoregressive decoders to generate table structures and reuse their hidden states for cell localization and content recognition. This autoregressive generation process can make cell representations order-dependent, degrading global consistency across cells. This paper proposes a structural refinement module that produces order-independent cell features through non-causal attention. This design enables parallel inference of cell contents while conditioning each cell on global context encoded in the refined features. Experiments on two large datasets demonstrate consistent gains in cell localization and end-to-end recognition, while reducing overall inference time by around threefold.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

BBP Phase Transition for a Doubly Sparse Deformed Model

arXiv:2603.04832v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove the equivalent of the Baik, Ben Arous, Péché (2004) phenomenon for a novel, doubly sparse model where both the Wigner noise matrix and signal vector(s) are sparse. Specifically, we consider a deformed sub-Gaussian sparse Wigner ensemble with a fixed number of sub-Gaussian spike vectors of the same-order sparsity added. We show that spike vectors with signals greater than one are correlated with the top eigenvectors of the deformed ensemble and that each spike vector of signal greater than one induces an outlier eigenvalue. Notably, our results hold in the supercritical sparsity regime for the Wigner matrix ($q \gg \frac{\log n}{n}$) and for any sparse spike vector with an unbounded number of entries ($np\to \infty$). No further relationship between the sparsities of the noise matrix ($q$) and spike vectors ($p$) is necessary. This generalizes the work of Benaych-Georges and Nadakuditi (2010) and Péché (2005).

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

ViTexQA: A Multi-Frame Temporal Perception Dataset for Video Text Question Answering

Despite remarkable progress in multimodal understanding, current MLLMs still exhibit limitations in video text understanding, particularly when semantics emerge through the integration of temporally distributed textual cues across multiple frames. This perception challenge fundamentally differs from static image text understanding, yet existing datasets fail to capture: the vast majority of questions remain answerable from single frames, inadequately reflecting real-world video text comprehension demands. To address this, we present ViTexQA, a large-scale video-text QA dataset, and FrameThinker for robust multi-frame temporal reasoning. We build ViTexQA via a quality-controlled Chain-of-Thought (CoT) annotation pipeline boosted with temporal constraints; all its QA pairs demand cross-frame text fusion to solve, enforcing true temporal reliance. FrameThinker adopts two-stage training for explicit temporal modeling: CoT-Guided Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) generates frame-aware reasoning chains, followed by Temporally-grounded Reinforcement Learning (RL) optimized with multi-frame coherence rewards. Evaluations show our method outperforms SOTA baselines on ViTexQA, lifting ROUGE-L by 6.3%.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Noise-Driven Escape from Metastable Phases explains Grokking in Deep Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.17120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) exhibit first order phase transitions under variations of the L2 regularization strength, with each transition marking the onset of a new learnable feature. Below a critical regularization strength, all features are in principle learnable, but coexisting metastable states, separated by energy barriers, can trap the network and impede convergence. A strength of DNNs is their ability to generalize. But many open questions remain, among them the origin of so called grokking: the abrupt, delayed onset of generalization after prolonged apparent overfitting. We show for linear DNNs that grokking is consistent with hysteresis in first-order L2 phase transitions: using L2 regularization to engineer deliberate trapping, we demonstrate that a model in a low-accuracy metastable state escapes only when SGD noise drives it across an energy barrier, with escape times following Arrhenius scaling. We reproduce grokking-like delayed convergence across two orders of magnitude in escape time by deliberately trapping models in metastable phases. Using sparse sub-sampling we also reproduce the canonical grokking curve where test error eventually approaches the final training error. Our work suggests that the number of metastable states equals the number of learnable features – one per singular value of the data covariance – the potential for hysteresis grows naturally with task complexity. We provide evidence that the same mechanism likely operates in general nonlinear DNNs. Our results provide routes toward more efficient learning schemes.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

A prior-free blind detection of information leakage from model predictions

arXiv:2606.11267v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data leakage – contamination of a model with information unavailable at baseline – is the dominant reproducibility failure in machine-learning-based science, yet detection tools require training code, external data, or domain expertise. None operates on the artifact an auditor most often holds: the model's output. We ask what can be decided about leakage from predictions and outcomes alone. We give a decision-theoretic framework in which leakage diagnostics are functionals of the predicted-risk/outcome law, parameterized by a threshold-weighting linked to proper scoring rules and decision-curve analysis. We prove a sharp impossibility: a recalibrated leak matching an honest model's calibration and discrimination is indistinguishable from honest performance by any function of the predictions, so the broad class is detectable only against an externally supplied ceiling on achievable discrimination. We then prove what leakage cannot hide: a near-deterministic subgroup – the signature of a near-label leak – produces a sustained unit-purity head that no legitimate predictor of a non-deterministic outcome can manufacture, yielding a prior-free test. These results organize leakage into a trichotomy – miscalibrated, broad-calibrated, and deterministic – each with a matched detector and failure mode. We validate on UK Biobank using time-windowed comorbidity leakage with known, graded severity, measuring a detection floor of $\Delta\cstar \approx 0.007$ on this endpoint, below which residual leakage is undetectable from output and too small to alter conclusions. The numerical floor is cohort- and endpoint-specific; the structural lesson is general: output-only detection fails where residual leakage is indistinguishable from an honestly stronger predictor. The test returns a verdict on a prediction vector in under a second on commodity hardware.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Dynamic In-Group Persona Generation for Enhancing Human-AI Rapport

arXiv:2606.18256v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based chatbots are increasingly applied in interpersonal domains such as counseling and peer support, where establishing human-AI rapport is crucial yet remains challenging. In this work, we introduce a novel approach for conditioning LLMs with in-group personas, which (i) first identifies a user's primary concern and brief personal context (e.g., a computer science undergraduate worried about future career prospects), and (ii) generates a synthetic in-group persona that shares a similar primary concern while differing in background and narrative details, such as age or profession (e.g., a junior researcher at an AI startup). Furthermore, we conduct a human-subject study to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of in-group persona agents in enhancing human-AI rapport. We compare our approach against two baseline conditions: a conventional agent without persona conditioning and an agent exhibiting minimal self-disclosure (e.g., "I've felt that too"). Results from post-task questionnaires assessing rapport and user experience indicate that the in-group persona agent significantly improves perceived rapport and personal relevance compared to the baselines, and also yields more positive user experience-most notably higher engagement.