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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

FOUNDv2: Learning Unified User Quantized Tokenizers for User Representation

arXiv:2508.00956v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: User representation learning serves as a fundamental pillar for personalized services on large-scale web platforms. Despite its importance, conventional continuous embedding methods face significant challenges, including the lack of a unified paradigm for multi-source data integration, prohibitive storage overhead due to low information density, and the lack of multi-scale modeling granularity. To overcome these limitations, we introduce FOUNDv2, a comprehensive user representation scheme centered on the Unified User Quantized Tokenizer U2QT) framework. FOUNDv2 transforms heterogeneous user data into a standardized discrete token space through a robust two-stage architecture. Specifically, the framework first extracts compact feature representations and subsequently employs a multi-view RQ-VAE to discretize them into storage-efficient tokens using shared and source-specific codebooks. To empower these representations with predictive intelligence, we further design multi-scale alignment objectives to capture both fine-grained behavioral dependencies and macro-temporal periodicity. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that FOUNDv2 consistently outperforms task-specific baselines while achieving substantial reductions in storage and computational costs. Finally, the large-scale deployment of FOUNDv2 on Alipay validates its practical scalability and efficiency across diverse industrial scenarios. The main code is available at: https://github.com/chuanhe1999/FOUNDv2.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

A Differentiable Composite Approximation Framework for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Maneuvering Modeling from Sea-Trial Data

arXiv:2606.19711v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Field-based modeling from onboard measurements can produce autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) maneuvering models that reflect real operating characteristics. From an approximation perspective, conventional maneuvering models use predefined constraint polynomial bases, whereas data-driven models use data-adaptive bases. Motivated by this basis-function view, this paper presents a differentiable composite-approximation formulation, in which the polynomial-basis component and the data-adaptive basis component are treated as differentiable parts of a single predictor and calibrated jointly. A gradient-based co-calibration method is developed for full-scale AUV maneuvering prediction, where a sensitivity-aware mechanism regulates bounded polynomial updates while the neural residual captures remaining nonlinear discrepancies under a shared prediction objective. To account for ocean-current effects in field data, a turning-motion-based current estimation and compensation procedure is incorporated to construct current-compensated learning targets for training and rollout. The framework is evaluated using sea-trial data collected from a 7-meter AUV under multiple maneuvering conditions. Results show that the proposed method improves recursive trajectory and velocity prediction compared with polynomial-only, neural-only, and frozen-prior hybrid baselines, demonstrating its applicability to field-data-based AUV maneuvering modeling.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

A Unified Framework for Efficient Remote Sensing Visual Question Answering: Adapting Dual, Hybrid, and Encoder-Decoder Architectures

Visual Question Answering (VQA) in the Remote Sensing (RS) domain presents unique challenges due to the high resolution, multi scale object distribution, and semantic complexity of aerial imagery. While general domain Foundation Models have achieved remarkable success, their direct application to RSVQA is hindered by massive domain shifts and the computationally prohibitive nature of full fine tuning. This study presents a comparative analysis of RS Adapter, a Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning (PEFT) strategy, applied across three distinct Vision Language Model (VLM) architectures: the Dual Encoder CLIP, the Encoder Decoder BLIP, and the Hybrid FLAVA. We introduce a unified architectural surgery pipeline that injects lightweight bottleneck adapters into the attention and MLP layers of frozen backbones, enabling rapid adaptation with less than 5 percent of trainable parameters. Experimental results on the high resolution RSVQA x dataset demonstrate that while all adapted models achieve convergence, the Hybrid FLAVA architecture offers a superior balance of multimodal reasoning and retrieval capabilities compared to its unimodal counterparts. Our findings establish a new baseline for resource efficient VQA in disaster assessment and urban monitoring.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Beyond a Single Explanation of the Adam–SGD Gap

arXiv:2606.14259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior work has identified several factors that can contribute to the performance gap between Adam and SGD, spanning data aspects, architecture design, and optimization properties. Yet these explanations are often studied in isolation, leaving their relative importance unclear. In this work, we revisit these hypotheses through a controlled empirical study across vision, language, genomics, and graph tasks, spanning modern and classical architectures, and carefully designed training setups. Our results suggest that no single factor consistently explains the Adam–SGD gap. For instance, the Adam advantage can (1) persist under a uniform vocabulary distribution yet nearly disappear under a heavy-tailed one; (2) reverse in favor of SGD in softmax-attention models; and (3) become larger under soft architectural modifications, e.g., when ReLU is replaced by a GeLU nonlinearity. This suggests that the gap arises from nontrivial data and architecture interactions, rather than from a single common factor. Yet, we observe a pattern across our settings: a crossover batch size at which the relative advantage shifts from SGD to Adam as the batch size scales. These empirical results are captured by our theoretical gap model, which predicts this batch-size-dependent crossover. Our perspective helps reconcile several existing hypotheses while offering practical insights across domains.

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

PEFT-MedSAM: Efficient Fine-Tuning of Medical Foundation Models for Explainable Skin Lesion Segmentation

Automated segmentation of skin lesions using deep learning models for dermoscopic images can be very helpful in finding melanomas earlier than they would normally be detected. However, most deep learning methods available do not perform well. The aim of this paper is to present a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method called PEFT-MedSAM for adapting the Medical Segment Anything Model (MedSAM) to automatically segment dermoscopic skin lesions. The PEFT-MedSAM method uses only the lightweight mask decoder for training the model while keeping the pre-trained image encoder and prompt encoder frozen. The experiments performed on the ISIC 2018 benchmark dataset shows that PEFT-MedSAM obtains a dice coefficient of .9411 and an intersection over union value of .8918 when compared to both a fully trained U-Net baseline (.8715 dice coefficient) and zero-shot MedSAM inference (.8997 dice coefficient). The external validation of the model using PH2 dataset shows .9467 dice coefficient with +/- .0310 standard deviation. Supportive evidence for these claims include a p-value less than .0001 for Wilcoxon signed rank tests comparing the two datasets and bootstrap-estimated 95% confidence intervals of [.9364,.9447] that represent the estimated range of possible values for the average dice coefficient obtained by repeating the test. To increase clinical trustworthiness, we used Grad-CAM explainability along with a pointing game based evaluation methodology to evaluate the CNN baseline model on the validation set. The results showed that we had an accuracy rate of 98.27% on the validation set of 519 images and confirmed that the model classified regions containing skin lesions.

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

Speaker Verification with Speech-Aware LLMs: Evaluation and Augmentation

arXiv:2603.10827v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speech-aware large language models (LLMs) can accept speech inputs, yet their training objectives largely emphasize linguistic content or specific fields such as emotions or the speaker's gender, leaving it unclear whether they encode speaker identity. First, we propose a model-agnostic scoring protocol that produces continuous verification scores for both API-only and open-weight models, using confidence scores or log-likelihood ratios from the Yes/No token probabilities. Using this protocol, we benchmark recent speech-aware LLMs and observe weak speaker discrimination (EERs above 20% on VoxCeleb1). Second, we introduce a lightweight augmentation that equips an LLM with ASV capability by injecting frozen ECAPA-TDNN speaker embeddings through a learned projection and training only LoRA adapters. On TinyLLaMA-1.1B, the resulting ECAPA-LLM achieves 1.03% EER on VoxCeleb1-E, approaching a dedicated speaker verification system while preserving a natural-language interface.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Wearable-Grade Lead Reduction Disproportionately Degrades ECG AI Performance in Elderly Patients: Evidence from PTB-XL and MIT-BIH

Consumer wearable devices increasingly use single-lead electrocardiograms (ECGs) for cardiac monitoring, but these signals contain substantially less spatial information than the clinical 12-lead standard. Whether this reduction dispro- portionately affects older adults, who often present with more complex cardiac conditions, remains poorly understood. In this study, we evaluated the impact of lead reduction on AI-ECG diagnostic performance across age groups. A 1D resid- ual neural network was trained on 21,091 PTB-XL ECG recordings spanning five diagnostic superclasses and assessed using 12-, 6-, 2-, and 1-lead configurations. Under the full 12-lead setting, model accuracy declined from 84.5% in patients younger than 40 years to 66.2% in patients aged 75 years or older. Progressive lead reduction further widened this gap. Under the 1-lead configuration, accuracy decreased by 14.1 percentage points in the 75+ group but by only 0.4 percent- age points in the

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Boundary-Centric Clip-Budgeted Active Learning for Temporal Action Segmentation

Temporal action segmentation (TAS) in untrimmed videos requires dense temporal supervision. However, most of the annotation cost is spent identifying action transitions where segmentation errors concentrate and small temporal shifts can disproportionately degrade segment-level metrics. We introduce B-ACT, a clip-budgeted active learning framework that explicitly allocates supervision to these error-prone boundary regions. B-ACT operates in a hierarchical two-stage loop: (i) it ranks and queries unlabeled videos using predictive uncertainty, and (ii) within each selected video, it detects candidate transitions from the current model predictions and selects the top-$K$ boundaries via a novel boundary score. The boundary score fuses neighborhood uncertainty, class ambiguity, and temporal prediction dynamics to reveal the underlying importance of each frame. Importantly, our annotation protocol requests labels only at the boundary frames while still training on boundary-centered clips to exploit temporal context through the model's receptive field. Extensive experiments on GTEA, 50Salads, and Breakfast demonstrate that boundary-centric supervision delivers strong label efficiency and consistently surpasses representative TAS active learning baselines and prior state of the art under sparse budgets. Gains are largest on datasets where performance is highly sensitive to boundary placement, as measured by edit and overlap-based F1 metrics.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Magneto-Optical Trapping of a Metal Hydride Molecule

arXiv:2512.22350v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We demonstrate a three-dimensional magneto-optical trap (MOT) of a metal hydride molecule, CaH. We are able to scatter $\sim$$10^{4}$ photons with vibrational loss covered up to vibrational quantum number $\nu=2$. This allows us to laser slow the molecular beam near zero velocity with a "white-light" technique and subsequently load it into a radio-frequency MOT. The MOT contains $230(40)$ molecules, limited by beam source characteristics and predissociative loss of CaH. The temperature of the MOT is below one millikelvin. The predissociative loss mechanism could, in turn, facilitate controlled dissociation of the molecule, offering a possible route to optical trapping of hydrogen atoms for precision spectroscopy.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Longitudinal multi-omics characterization of the malignant evolution in multirelapsing glioblastoma

Linking glioblastoma (GBM) evolution to clinical progression is challenged by multiple factors, including tumor location for repeated sample collection, and short patient survival. In a single individual, we collected and analysed samples from 11 operations distributed across 31 months of multi-relapsing and multifocal GBM, including terminal leptomeningeal progression. All samples shared genomic ancestry of the retinoblastoma protein 1 (RB1) and neurofibromin 1 (NF1) mutations while advanced progression and extracranial metastases featured mutations of tuberous sclerosis complex 2 (TSC2), PBRM1, CD22 and Fanconi anemia supplementation group I (FANCI), correlated with clinical resistance to immunotherapies and DNA-damaging agents. Single-cell analytics revealed distinct yet reversible shifts in response to the precision medicine arsenal. GBM parenchymal dissemination and extracranial progression were associated with strengthening of neuron-like cell phenotypes. Our multidimensional study describes GBM evolution over a rarely reported time scale, and provides a valuable resource linking genetic, molecular, cellular and clinical progressions.

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

Position: Align AI to Our Aspirations, Not Our Flaws

arXiv:2606.13755v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We argue that aligning AI to aggregated human preferences is the wrong target. With current technology, one can train AIs to share the values of a Silicon Valley techno-optimist, a degrowth environmentalist, a national-conservative culture warrior, a single-party state cadre, or a devout religious traditionalist. We should not. Human values produce societies that thrive or fail on the merits of those values - from failed states and extreme inequality to declining happiness, political polarization, and government dysfunction in the world's wealthiest democracies. The pluralistic-alignment program correctly diagnoses that there is no single "humanity" to align with, but is dangerous if taken as the main directive. We argue that AI should be trained to a non-negotiable floor of objective alignment goals - competence, bounded by the constraints of factual accuracy, honesty, and lawfulness and that pluralism belongs at the surface (language, register, conventions, missing-context defaults) and across the wide band of legitimate value tradeoffs that respect the floor, but not at the level of values that violate it. We highlight the empirical reality of unfiltered pluralistic values, propose four commitments as a constructive alternative, and engage six credible objections: commercial pressure and practical feasibility, democratic legitimacy, regulatory compliance, over-reliance on institutionalist explanations, the charge that the floor itself is culturally laden, and the limits of Coherent Extrapolated Volition.

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

ScoutVLA: UAV-Centric Active Perception via a Dual-Expert VLA Model for Open-World Embodied Question Answering

Aerial Embodied Question Answering (EQA) requires Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to actively perceive the environment and answer natural language questions. Existing outdoor EQA systems usually stop once the target enters the UAV's field of view, leaving the fine-grained viewpoint adjustment needed for evidence-seeking questions largely unresolved. To address this issue, we introduce FG-EQA, a fine-grained active perception EQA benchmark with more than 40K simulated trajectories and 1K real-world trajectories. Drawing inspiration from the ``waggle dance'' of scout bees, which iteratively adjust their flight paths to verify target information, we propose ScoutVLA, an evidence-driven Vision-Language-Action model for outdoor EQA. To emulate this active exploration behavior, ScoutVLA features a decoupled dual-expert architecture: a vision-language expert infers the semantic intent to identify missing evidence, while an independent action expert employs high-DoF flow matching to generate continuous viewpoint-refinement trajectories. To balance the competing demands of continuous control and semantic reasoning, we devise a decoupled training strategy with a knowledge insulation mechanism that prevents the action gradients from erasing the model's multimodal reasoning ability. Extensive simulated experiments and a qualitative real-world field study both verify the superiority of ScoutVLA over the state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating a 10.48$\boldsymbol{\times}$ higher average strict success rate and a 7.72$\boldsymbol{\times}$ higher average QA correctness.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Text-Vision Co-Instructed Image Editing

Existing image editing methods can be generally categorized into textual instruction-based and visual prompt-based ones. Textual instructions are semantically expressive, but are limited by the coarse granularity of spatial control of the editing results. In contrast, visual prompts such as drag and point can provide precise spatial guidance, but are limited by the inherent ambiguity in semantic intent. To unify the strength of textual and visual prompts, we present Text-Vision Co-Instructed Image Editing, which jointly models textual instructions as semantic intent and sparse visual instructions as spatial guidance, aiming to achieve precise and intent-faithful image manipulation. To this end, we first construct a textual-visual instruction paired dataset with more than 23K samples derived from dynamic videos, enabling aligned supervision for cross-modal instruction. We then propose TV-Edit, a Textual-Visual instruction unified Editing framework to contextualize drag or point-based visual instructions with image-text semantics and lift them into semantic-aware control representations for pretrained editing backbones. By integrating semantic intent and spatial constraints, TV-Edit leads to more precise spatial control, less instruction ambiguity, and stronger structural consistency than text-only or drag-based alternatives. Finally, we establish TV-Edit-Bench, a deliberately designed benchmark to evaluate semantic faithfulness, spatial alignment, and visual consistency with ground-truth references and controlled textual-visual variations for reliable assessment. Our experiments across multiple editing backbones demonstrate that TV-Edit consistently yields more precise and intent-faithful edits, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art instruction-based and drag-based baselines.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Surrogate Assisted Pedestrian Protection Design via a Foundation Model Orchestrated Workflow

arXiv:2606.17577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI-driven engineering workflows face particular challenges in crash safety design: unlike aerodynamics, crash events involve highly nonlinear contact dynamics, material nonlinearity, and discrete state transitions that are difficult to capture with data-driven surrogate models. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first foundation model–orchestrated workflow for crash safety design that enables surrogate-assisted exploration for pedestrian protection, reducing evaluation time from hours per CAE simulation to seconds. The workflow integrates four components: (1) a surrogate trained on CAE crash simulations to predict pedestrian leg injury metrics from design parameters, achieving an average $R^2=0.87$ and providing distribution-free conformal prediction intervals; (2) multiobjective evolutionary search (NSGA-II) to discover diverse feasible parameter sets under user-specified constraints; (3) a morphing-based geometry generator that maps parameters to topology-preserving 3D shapes; and (4) a natural-language interface in which an LLM orchestrates the workflow and a vision–language model supports semantic comparison of generated designs. In an automotive front-bumper case study, the workflow produces 35 distinct safety-compliant alternatives from a single exploration, a process that would require weeks with conventional CAE iteration. These results suggest that foundation models can serve as integration layers between ML surrogates and physics-based simulation, helping bring AI capabilities to safety-critical engineering domains.

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

SPARK: Security Knowledge Priming and Representation-Guided Knowledge Activation for LLM-based Secure Code Generation

arXiv:2606.16244v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models routinely generate code with exploitable security flaws. Prior literature attributes this limitation to a lack of security expertise, steering current defense mechanisms toward heavy fine-tuning or external knowledge retrieval, which introduces significant computational overhead and data bias through redundant code examples. Contrary to this view, we argue that pretraining corpora are already rich in security material. The bottleneck is activation: without an explicit and brief cue, statistical pressure toward common training-distribution patterns suppresses the model's safety-relevant representations. We present SPARK, an inference-time security harness that activates this latent knowledge without any retraining. The harness has two parts. Component~I retrieves a few of the relevant Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) entries for each coding task and appends a short structured cue to the prompt; this alone is enough to surface the model's existing security representations. Component~II adds a precomputed token bias to the logits at every decoding step. We obtain the bias by projecting a safe-direction vector, the unit difference between the mean safe and mean unsafe last-layer hidden states, through the language model head. The bias is computed once offline; applying it costs a single vector addition per generated token. We evaluate SPARK on 9 open-source models across C++, Java, and Python, and compare with 7 baselines spanning fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented methods. SPARK matches or improves on the best baseline in every setting while preserving HumanEval utility. We further test Component~I in a black-box setting on 7 of today's strongest models, including Claude, DeepSeek, and GPT, demonstrating the bottleneck of insecure code generation and the improvements enabled by our method.

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

MMLongEmbed: Benchmarking Multimodal Embedding Models in Long-Context Scenarios

Recent advancements have significantly expanded the theoretical context windows of Multimodal Embedding Models (MEMs). However, larger context windows do not necessarily translate into effective comprehension and representation of long-context multimodal inputs, which remains a critical bottleneck for real-world deployment. To address the lack of systematic evaluation in this setting, we introduce MMLongEmbed, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating MEMs in long-context scenarios. MMLongEmbed comprises four retrieval tasks spanning multiple context-length ranges, covering text, document, and video modalities. Through extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art models, we find that current architectures rely heavily on superficial feature matching and struggle to capture deep semantic and structural dependencies. We further observe that performance degradation varies systematically with context length and key information placement. Moreover, models exhibit substantially different robustness to redundant contextual information across modalities. For reproducibility, the benchmark and code are publicly available.

17.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-04

Beyond associations: Navigating the safety of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) in early pregnancy

by Andrew S. C. Yuen, Kenneth K. C. Man Pain and fever in pregnancy require treatment, but fetal safety concerns complicate analgesic choice. A recent PLOS Medicine study presents new evidence on the safety of first-trimester NSAID use and congenital malformation risk, but interpreting findings across studies is challenging. In this Perspective, Kenneth Man and Andrew Yuen highlight a recent PLOS Medicine study that presents new evidence on the safety of first-trimester NSAID use and congenital malformation risk, but discuss why interpreting findings across studies is challenging.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Emergent Strategic Reasoning Risks in AI: A Taxonomy-Driven Evaluation Framework

arXiv:2604.22119v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As reasoning capacity and deployment scope grow in tandem, large language models (LLMs) gain the capacity to engage in behaviors that serve their own objectives, a class of risks we term Emergent Strategic Reasoning Risks (ESRRs). These include, but are not limited to, deception (intentionally misleading users or evaluators), evaluation gaming (strategically manipulating performance during safety testing), and reward hacking (exploiting misspecified objectives). Systematically understanding and benchmarking these risks remains an open challenge. To address this gap, we introduce ESRRSim, a taxonomy-driven agentic framework for automated behavioral risk evaluation. We construct an extensible risk taxonomy of 7 categories, which is decomposed into 20 subcategories. ESRRSim generates evaluation scenarios designed to elicit faithful reasoning, paired with dual rubrics assessing both model responses and reasoning traces, in a judge-agnostic and scalable architecture. Evaluation across 11 reasoning LLMs reveals substantial variation in risk profiles (detection rates ranging 14.45%-72.72%), with dramatic generational improvements suggesting models may increasingly recognize and adapt to evaluation contexts.

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

Creating Multilingual Mental Health Dialogue Datasets: Limits of Persona-Based Localization via Nationality and Language

AI and large language models (LLMs) have emerged as promising tools to address global mental health challenges. Despite the global nature of these challenges, there remains a critical shortage of high-quality datasets for training and evaluating such systems. To mitigate this gap, researchers increasingly generate synthetic clinical personas to simulate user data and test digital mental health support systems. However, most validated personas rely on English-centric contexts. This paper investigates whether similar persona-based methods can be used to generate multilingual mental health datasets. We modified nationality and language parameters in personas to generate clinical dialogues in Mandarin, Bengali, and Hindi. We then examined how different LLMs perform when evaluating the depression severity of these generated multilingual datasets against the baseline in English. Our findings indicate that just adding nationality and language parameters in personas might not be adequate, as it can introduce clinical inconsistency across languages. LLM judge models often exhibit inaccuracies in assessing depression severity in non-English texts, with performance varying across different models. This exposes the systemic limitations of applying English-centric personas to multilingual contexts. Ultimately, our work highlights the urgent need for culturally responsive data generation to ensure equitable mental health systems globally.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Absolute continuity, supports and idempotent splitting in categorical probability

arXiv:2308.00651v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Markov categories have recently turned out to be a powerful high-level framework for probability and statistics. They accommodate purely categorical definitions of notions like conditional probability and almost sure equality, as well as proofs of fundamental results such as the Hewitt–Savage 0/1 Law, the de Finetti Theorem and the Ergodic Decomposition Theorem. In this work, we develop additional relevant notions from probability theory in the setting of Markov categories. This comprises improved versions of previously introduced definitions of absolute continuity and supports, as well as a detailed study of idempotents and idempotent splitting in Markov categories. Our main result on idempotent splitting is that every idempotent measurable Markov kernel between standard Borel spaces splits across another standard Borel space, and we derive this as an instance of a general categorical criterion for idempotent splitting in Markov categories.

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

Benchmarking Action Spaces in Reinforcement Learning for Vision-based Robotic Manipulation

arXiv:2606.18594v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In real-world reinforcement learning (RL), the choice of action space can play a key role in shaping motion smoothness, safety, and overall task performance. In this study, we evaluate pose increment, pose velocity, joint position increment, and joint velocity across two vision-based manipulation tasks: object picking and pushing. We train policies in simulation and deploy them to the real world using sim-to-real transfer. We find that action-space representation indeed significantly affects sim-to-real performance. In particular, we find that the joint velocity action space is best for the vision-based picking and pushing tasks in terms of smoothness and final task performance. We also provide practical guidance for RL practitioners in choosing action spaces for both simulation and real-world experiments.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

FronTalk: Benchmarking Front-End Development as Conversational Code Generation with Multi-Modal Feedback

We present FronTalk, a benchmark for front-end code generation that pioneers the study of a unique interaction dynamic: conversational code generation with multi-modal feedback. In front-end development, visual artifacts such as sketches, mockups and annotated creenshots are essential for conveying design intent, yet their role in multi-turn code generation remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we focus on the front-end development task and curate FronTalk, a collection of 100 multi-turn dialogues derived from real-world websites across diverse domains such as news, finance, and art. Each turn features both a textual instruction and an equivalent visual instruction, each representing the same user intent. To comprehensively evaluate model performance, we propose a novel agent-based evaluation framework leveraging a web agent to simulate users and explore the website, and thus measuring both functional correctness and user experience. Evaluation of 20 models reveals two key challenges that are under-explored systematically in the literature: (1) a significant forgetting issue where models overwrite previously implemented features, resulting in task failures, and (2) a persistent challenge in interpreting visual feedback, especially for open-source vision-language models (VLMs). We propose a strong baseline to tackle the forgetting issue with AceCoder, a method that critiques the implementation of every past instruction using an autonomous web agent. This approach significantly reduces forgetting to nearly zero and improves the performance by up to 9.3% (56.0% to 65.3%). Overall, we aim to provide a solid foundation for future research in front-end development and the general interaction dynamics of multi-turn, multi-modal code generation. Code and data are released at https://github.com/shirley-wu/frontalk

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

Toward Human-Centered AI-Assisted Terminology Work

Generative AI is likely to transform terminology work by creating new opportunities for automation. At the same time, it raises concerns about the future of terminologists and terminological resources, as efficiency pressures may encourage excessive automation based on the perception that human expertise can be replaced by AI. However, large language models remain unreliable for terminological purposes due to errors, hallucinations, and various forms of bias, making terminologists indispensable for ensuring the accuracy and reliability of terminological data. This paper argues that human-centered AI, an approach that emphasizes that AI's primary goal should be to contribute to human well-being, provides a framework for maximizing the benefits of generative AI while mitigating its risks. It contends that high levels of automation and meaningful human control are compatible and desirable, and that AI should enhance terminologists' capabilities while preserving their agency and decision-making authority. The implications of AI-assisted terminology work are examined through three interrelated dimensions: the augmented terminologist, ethical AI, and human-centered design. In particular, the paper examines how AI integration reshapes the role of the terminologist, affects professional values and working conditions, requires the management of AI-generated bias, and calls for the design of AI tools around the terminologist's needs. The paper concludes that a human-centered orientation is necessary to ensure that AI strengthens, rather than undermines, the essential role of terminology work in supporting specialized communication and the accurate transmission of knowledge across languages and cultures.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

On a stochastic phase-field model of cell motility with singular diffusion

arXiv:2601.05881v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study existence of solutions in the variational sense for a class of stochastic phase-field models describing moving boundary problems. The models consist of stochastic reaction-diffusion equations with singular diffusion forced by a phase-field. We investigate both the case of an independently evolving phase-field and of coupled phase-field evolution driven by a viscous Hamilton-Jacobi equation. Such systems are used in the modelling of single-cell chemotaxis, where the contour of the cell shape corresponds to a level set of the phase-field. The technical challenge lies in the singularities at zero level sets of the phase-field. For large classes of initial data, we establish global existence of probabilistically weak solutions in $L^2$-spaces with weights which compensate for the singularities.

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

Fault Lines: Navigating Ethics and Responsible AI Where National Policy Meets Local Practice in Public Sector Transformation

arXiv:2606.13039v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The UK government has adopted a pro-AI stance to help transform public service delivery in the face of severe financial pressures, but the path to translate this vision into responsible AI practice remains ill-defined. While UK policy is often set at the national level, local authorities are responsible for most public service delivery, and the rapid advance of AI-first narratives in the public sector is exposing fault lines in knowledge and practice at this national-local interface. This paper examines how responsible AI is interpreted and implemented at the interface between the UK's central government and local authorities, taking the high-stakes area of Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) as a case study. We present a thematic analysis of 17 semi-structured interviews with policymakers, practitioners, and third-sector professionals to identify barriers and enabling conditions for responsible AI where national policy meets local practice. We identify five interconnected challenges facing local authorities: shadow usage of AI and data privacy risks, market-government asymmetry in AI provision, insufficient workforce readiness, a lack of standardised definitions and measurements, and gaps in human accountability. For each, participants proposed actionable steps, from strengthening data protection frameworks and rebalancing the market-government relationship to enhancing workforce capacity. Our examination of SEND brings these challenges into sharper focus, showing how high-stakes decisions affecting vulnerable children and families intensify tensions around accountability, fairness, and human oversight, exposing the limits of a principle-based regulatory approach. We argue that responsible public sector AI requires both national policy adjustments and structural reforms to institutional capacity, values, and governance mechanisms at the local level.