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

Divide-and-Denoise: A Game-Theoretic Method for Fairly Composing Diffusion Models

The abundance of pre-trained diffusion models provides an opportunity for composition. Combining several models, however, runs the risk of one model dominating or models disagreeing with each other. Here, we propose Divide-and-Denoise, a method for coordinating multiple pre-trained diffusion models during sampling. Much like managing a specialized workforce, our method creates a fair but efficient division of labor across models. Central to our method is the notion of an allocation which defines the responsibility of each model to every region of the noisy sample. At every timestep, we then denoise by (i) updating the allocation by solving a fair division game, where we divide the sample into regions that maximize total utility under fairness constraints, and (ii) aligning the models with this allocation, where we guide each model to denoise within its assigned region. This leads to a new composite denoising process that evolves in tandem with a division process. We evaluate Divide-and-Denoise on conditional image generation. Across several quality metrics, including the GenEval benchmark, our method outperforms baselines and resolves common failures including missing objects and mismatched attributes. Experiments show that Divide-and-Denoise utilizes each model's expertise without neglecting any other model.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Higher Population Coverage with Typhoid Conjugate Vaccine is Needed to Induce Herd Protection: Evidence from a Cluster-Randomized Trial in Urban Bangladesh

Introduction: A cluster randomized trial (CRT) in Bangladesh found that Vi-tetanus toxoid (Vi-TT) vaccine conferred 85% protection to vaccinees at 18 months of follow-up; however, it failed to confer significant herd protection to non-vaccinees. Methods: In the CRT, children aged 9 months to

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

Learning Patient-Specific Disease Dynamics with Latent Flow Matching for Longitudinal Imaging Generation

Understanding disease progression is a central clinical challenge with direct implications for early diagnosis and personalized treatment. While recent generative approaches have attempted to model progression, key mismatches remain: disease dynamics are inherently continuous and monotonic, yet latent representations are often scattered, lacking semantic structure, and diffusion-based models disrupt continuity with random denoising process. In this work, we propose to treat the disease dynamic as a velocity field and leverage Flow Matching (FM) to align the temporal evolution of patient data. Unlike prior methods, it captures the intrinsic dynamic of disease, making the progression more interpretable. However, a key challenge remains: in latent space, Auto-Encoders (AEs) do not guarantee alignment across patients or correlation with clinical-severity indicators (e.g., age and disease conditions). To address this, we propose to learn patient-specific latent alignment, which enforces patient trajectories to lie along a specific axis, with magnitude increasing monotonically with disease severity. This leads to a consistent and semantically meaningful latent space. Together, we present $\Delta$-LFM, a framework for modeling patient-specific latent progression with flow matching. Across three longitudinal MRI benchmarks, $\Delta$-LFM demonstrates strong empirical performance and, more importantly, offers a new framework for interpreting and visualizing disease dynamics.

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

Acoustic Prompting via Stage-wise Modulation for Few-Shot Learning in Audio Language Models

arXiv:2606.15751v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio-Language Models (ALMs) have shown remarkable success in zero-shot audio classification by aligning audio waveforms with text. Recent efforts to improve downstream performance focus on learning optimal text prompts. However, previous approaches focus on the text encoder, leaving the potential of learnable prompts within the audio encoder unexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that introduces trainable prompts into the audio encoder to capture task-specific acoustic features. We demonstrate that integrating audio-side prompt learning with existing text-side approaches enhances few-shot adaptation. Through extensive experiments across 11 datasets show that integrating our method as a plug-and-play module alongside existing text prompt tuning generally leads to performance improvements. These findings suggest that explicitly modulating the audio representation space effectively complements text-only prompting approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/hyebin-c/aspl.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Leverage Is Not Reach: A Control-Window Law for Single-Neuron Steering in Language Models

Authors:

Aligned language models gate behaviors such as refusal and language routing through sparse feed forward neurons, yet no theory predicts when a single neuron intervention controls a behavior coherently rather than collapsing the output. We develop a budget normalized control window framework for single neuron steering. A dose along one write direction reduces to one control coordinate: the alignment between the residual stream and the write, driven along a universal saturation curve in units of a coherence budget set by the residual norm divided by the write norm. Coherent control exists when a behavior trigger lies below the collapse ceiling. The same coordinate governs benign mode switches and refusal; the ceiling follows from weights and one generic forward pass, while triggers are measured at rollout. On fifteen held out neurons, the predicted ceiling has mean absolute error 0.14, about 0.07 in bulk layers, and the committed open or closed verdict holds on eleven against a ten of fifteen majority baseline. Closed cases expose three failure modes rather than violations: collapse before trigger, too little depth to propagate, or a normalization that caps how far one neuron can push. The law explains why local gradient attribution anti predicts control: true controllers write off the readout axis and carry a near zero first order gradient. A forward only contrastive screen made precise by the window recovers controllers that attribution misses. On refusal, the hardest case, intervention success is typed, not scalar: coherent bypass and strict actionable reach separate, so a neuron can flip refusal in fluent, on task text with no actionable content, and genuine actionable reach appears only for three of six audited Llama pivots and only at later rollout horizons. Single neuron steering is therefore a budgeted, typed audit of controllability rather than a fixed dose anecdote.

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

Agent Skill Evaluation and Evolution: Frameworks and Benchmarks

The growth of agent skills has transformed how agentic systems are built, evaluated, and deployed. As skill libraries continue to scale, rigorous evaluation becomes critical to ensuring their utility, quality, and safety in real-world applications. Consequently, the field is undergoing an emerging paradigm shift from isolated skill creation to automated, evaluation-driven skill evolution. In this survey, we systematically examine the landscape of skill evolution and evaluation beyond foundational skill creation. We categorize evolution into four distinct paradigms, spanning execution feedback, trajectory distillation, compression, and reinforcement learning, showing how each element contributes to improving skill utility and reliability. We also provide an analysis of six skill-centric benchmark categories, identifying structural gaps in benchmark coverage, trade-offs, and metric richness to advance skill research. Finally, we identify open directions for building skill ecosystems that are generalizable, efficient, and verifiably safe. The project URL is https://github.com/Cassie07/AgentSkill_Survey

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Dual-Channel Grounded World Modeling (DCGWM): Structural Prevention of Objective Interference Collapse via Heterogeneous External Grounding with Inward-Only Gradient Flow

Authors:

arXiv:2606.18688v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) are a leading approach to world model representation learning. We identify a failure mode in JEPA-based world models grounded against two qualitatively distinct external signals: physical dynamics (sparse, high-magnitude, constraint-satisfying gradient corrections) and social-behavioral dynamics (diffuse, distribution-matching corrections). We term this Objective Interference Collapse (OIC): we argue that joint learning in a shared latent space causes the dominant channel to systematically collapse the subordinate channel's representational subspace, in a manner not resolvable by loss weighting alone. We propose Dual-Channel Grounded World Modeling (DCGWM), designed to structurally prevent OIC through a partitioned latent space (physical subspace Z_p, behavioral subspace Z_b) with inward-only gradient flow. A Physical Grounding Channel updates only Z_p via VICReg-style alignment to physical measurements; a Social-Behavioral Grounding Channel updates only Z_b via alignment to trajectories from an emergent multi-agent simulation. An Inter-Channel Interface Module couples the subspaces at the task level without cross-subspace gradients. An Asymmetric Grounding Adherence Loss penalizes rollout drift with a hard hinge for physical violations and a soft KL for behavioral divergence. A Generative Rendering Layer is architecturally isolated from the latent world model. We present three theoretical results: the partition removes the gradient-interference pathway implicated in OIC; each grounded subspace inherits anti-collapse guarantees from its alignment objective; and generative isolation is necessary under a stated assumption on the generative objective's geometry. This manuscript establishes the problem formulation and architecture; experimental validation is ongoing and will be reported in a future revision.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Statistical and Numerical Convergence in Stochastic Equilibrium

Authors:

arXiv:2606.07469v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper sets out the most general computational and econometric implications of the rigorous stochastic equilibrium theory from SELCKE (Staines (2024a)) arXiv:2312.16214. The analytical backbone is the discovery that the system converges geometrically to long-run equilibrium, at a rate given by the greater of the eigenvalue or inverse eigenvalue (from outside) closest to the unit circle and the maximum shock persistence. High-order shocks converge faster. I develop a simulation procedure to test, with asymptotic power, whether stochastic equilibrium exists for a particular model. The fundamental approximation result asserts that, whatever the order of expansion or loss function, the stochastic steady state delivers the most accurate perturbation solution. I also show that super-consistent parameter estimators $O(1/T)$ arise whenever second-order terms vanish. Besides Calvo, I study stochastic equilibrium in two alternative pricing models. Dynamics simplify considerably. I bound the time the impulse response peaks, by the maximum lag in the errors. This lends empirical support to Taylor contracts, although there are issues surrounding unit roots and the strong cost-channel. For menu costs, I demonstrate that the initial price distribution decays away super-exponentially, producing a system equivalent to Calvo with an endogenous reset probability. The impact of idiosyncratic disturbances appears as an additional wedge between actual and efficient output. Blow-up of the objective function at the boundary is proven, with the help of new distributional arguments, so the model meets existing eigenvalue existence conditions for the recursive equilibrium. Along the way, new light is shone on existing theoretical models and statistical procedures.

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

Blueprint First, Model Second: A Framework for Deterministic LLM Workflow

arXiv:2508.02721v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While powerful, the inherent non-determinism of large language model (LLM) agents limits their application in structured operational environments where procedural fidelity and predictable execution are strict requirements. This limitation stems from current architectures that conflate probabilistic, high-level planning with low-level action execution within a single generative process. To address this, we introduce the \textsc{Source Code Agent} framework, a new paradigm built on the ``Blueprint First, Model Second'' philosophy that decouples workflow logic from the generative model. An expert-defined operational procedure is first codified into a source code-based Execution Blueprint, which is then executed by a deterministic engine. The LLM is strategically invoked as a specialized tool to handle bounded, complex sub-tasks within the workflow, but never to decide the workflow's path. We evaluate on the TravelPlanner benchmark for constraint-aware travel planning. The \textsc{Source Code Agent} achieves a 35.56\% final pass rate, a 97.6\% improvement over the state-of-the-art ATLAS baseline (18.00\%) on the same Claude-Sonnet-4 backbone. Critically, it reduces constraint violations by 96.0\% (11 vs 275) while improving execution efficiency by 27.1\% (10.2$\pm$0.7 steps vs 14.0). Two production incident-diagnosis deployments and additional results on ScienceWorld and ALFWorld confirm that the architecture transfers beyond travel planning to procedurally well-defined, constraint-intensive workflows. Our work enables the verifiable and reliable deployment of autonomous agents in applications governed by strict procedural logic.

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

Learning from Your Own Mistakes: Constructing Learnable Micro-Reflective Trajectories for Self-Distillation

arXiv:2606.18844v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-distillation improves reasoning in large language models by using the model's own rollouts as training signal, typically through implicit logit-level alignment that minimizes KL divergence toward a privileged target distribution. However, because this supervision is generated via uncontrolled sampling, it provides no diagnostic insight into the model's specific errors or corrective guidance for its individual failure patterns. Consequently, the model learns to imitate a privileged distribution rather than receiving fine-grained corrections that pinpoint where and why its reasoning fails. In this paper, we propose Trajectory-Augmented Policy Optimization (TAPO), which advances self-distillation from implicit distributional alignment to explicit trajectory construction. During RL training, the model produces both correct and incorrect rollouts to the same query, and TAPO leverages this contrastive structure to construct micro-reflective corrections, new training trajectories that retain the model's erroneous reasoning up to the point of failure, then insert a natural-language diagnosis and corrected reasoning guided by a correct reference from the same sampling group. Since each trajectory is anchored in the learner's own prefix and solutions, the corrective signal preserves the model's on-policy distribution to a greater extent than the position-wise alignment imposed by KL-based methods. To integrate these trajectories, TAPO introduces difficulty-aware candidate selection at the model's capability boundary and decoupled advantage estimation to prevent gradient contamination. Experiments on AIME 2024, AIME 2025, and HMMT 2025 show that TAPO achieves consistent improvements over GRPO under the same number of training steps. Further analysis demonstrates that TAPO strengthens both first-pass reasoning and error-correction effectiveness.

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

Talking to Your Data: Exploring Embodied Conversation as an Interface for Personal Health Reflection

arXiv:2606.17767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Personal health data from wearables are typically presented through dashboards of charts and summary statistics, requiring users to actively interpret patterns and implications. We explore an alternative interaction paradigm: engaging with personal health data through an embodied conversational agent that facilitates objective data reflection in dialogue with the user. We present a system that combines lightweight preprocessing of wearable data with a Unity-based embodied character. Internally, the system follows a dual-agent design in which an Observer agent extracts descriptive statistics and temporal trends, and a Presenter agent communicates these findings through "spoken statistics," intentionally refraining from clinical advice to isolate the impact of the interaction modality. We evaluate this approach through a simulated-self user study (N=5) using a within-subject design. Participants adopted health personas and goals derived from the LifeSnaps dataset to compare traditional dashboard exploration with embodied conversational reflection. Our evaluation focuses on perceived understanding, the specificity of generated actions, and the cognitive shift from passive viewing to active sensemaking. The paper contributes a functional prototype, a design pattern for objective health data narrative generation, and early empirical insights into how embodiment affects the interpretation of personal health metrics.

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

RT-VLA: Real-Time Vision-Language-Action Models via Knowledge Distillation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for end-to-end autonomous driving by jointly modeling visual perception, language reasoning, explainability and action prediction. However, their large vision-language backbones and reasoning modules introduce substantial inference latency and thereby prevent their deployment in the unforgiving reality of the road networks. We propose RT-VLA, a lightweight, distilled VLA model that transfers the driving and reasoning capabilities of the state-of-the-art SimLingo model into a compact student through multi-level supervised distillation. RT-VLA preserves language-based reasoning and supports post-hoc explanation through offline language analysis of safety-critical driving moments without adding latency to real-time control. Compared to the SimLingo teacher, RT-VLA maintains competitive closed-loop driving and language reasoning performance while reducing inference time by 44.8X in vision-only mode and 7.9X in vision+language mode. These results suggest that supervised distillation is a practical approach for building real-time, explainable VLA-style autonomous driving models.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Cost-Optimal LLM Routing with Limited User Feedback under User Satisfaction Guarantees

arXiv:2606.19376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference costs for large language model (LLM) applications are rapidly growing, driven by surging demand and rising infrastructure cost. Users expect high-quality responses, and in commercial settings this is formally codified in Service Level Agreements (SLAs), creating a fundamental tension between cost and quality. Recent progress on cost-aware LLM request routing has shown potential to resolve this tension, but existing approaches rely on complete feedback signals, offline training, extensive per-workload tuning, and most lack SLA guarantees or inference-time adaptivity. We introduce SLARouter, an online routing algorithm that learns a cost-optimal policy from the sparse, one-sided user feedback available in production systems. SLARouter provides theoretical guarantees for both cost optimality and strict SLA compliance. Experiments across a wide range of LLM benchmarks show that SLARouter satisfies SLA constraints without the need for per-benchmark tuning, reducing operating cost by up to 2.2x over existing baselines.

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

Geometry-Preserving in 3D Gaussian Splatting for LiDAR-Camera Extrinsic Calibration

Accurate LiDAR-camera calibration is essential for robust multi-modal perception. Targetless approaches avoid manual setup but remain limited by the scarcity of discriminative cross-modal features. Recent methods address this by reconstructing the scene within a differentiable model, enabling extrinsic optimization through dense photometric supervision. Among these, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has been widely adopted as a geometric proxy that bridges LiDAR and camera within a single differentiable framework. However, since 3DGS was originally designed for novel view synthesis, existing methods tend to prioritize rendering quality, causing the proxy geometry to drift from the true LiDAR structure. We propose a framework that preserves the metric geometry of the Gaussian proxy by aggregating multi-view LiDAR observations for dense depth supervision and blocking photometric gradients from updating the Gaussian spatial parameters. We validate our method on public driving datasets, where it consistently outperforms existing targetless methods in calibration accuracy.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Analyzing Defensive Misdirection Against Model-Guided Automated Attacks on Agentic AI Systems

arXiv:2606.20470v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems increasingly rely on language-model components to interpret instructions, process external data, invoke tools, and coordinate with other agents. These capabilities make prompt-injection and jailbreak attacks more consequential, especially as attackers adopt model-guided automation to scale probing, prompt refinement, and response evaluation. This work analyzes the resulting attack-defense setting through a probabilistic model of a target system, its defense mechanism, and the attacker's automated judge. Our analysis shows that conventional detect-and-block defenses can allow attacker success rate (ASR) to approach one as the query budget grows, since predictable refusals provide useful feedback to automated search. We then examine detect-and-misdirect, where detected malicious interactions receive controlled, non-operational responses designed to induce false-positive errors in the attacker's judge. This strategy reduces the positive predictive value of attacker-selected candidates and yields a bounded asymptotic ASR. We evaluate a proof-of-concept realization of this strategy through Contextual Misdirection via Progressive Engagement (CMPE), a lightweight conversational misdirection method designed to replace predictable refusal text with safe but strategically misleading responses in automated jailbreak settings. On jailbreak benchmarks, CMPE reduces estimated ASR upper bounds by up to two orders of magnitude and nearly eliminates verified attack success in end-to-end PAIR and GPTFuzz attack runs.

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

MagpieTTS-LF: Inference-Time Long-Form Speech Generation Without Training on Long-Form data

arXiv:2606.18485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems achieve remarkable quality on short utterances but long-form speech generation shows prosodic drift, speaker inconsistencies and sentence boundary artifacts. Existing approaches either compress sequences, increase context length or naively concatenate independently synthesized chunks. We present an inference-time approach called MagpieTTS-LF that enables MagpieTTS to produce coherent long-form speech without model retraining. Our method introduces three key innovations: (1) soft attention priors to guide monotonic alignment while preserving past and future context; (2) a stateful inference algorithm that maintains context across sentence chunks, ensuring prosodic continuity; (3) history-aware text encoding that uses past text for discourse-level prosodic planning. Experiments on long texts show significant improvements in long-range intelligibility, prosodic coherence, speaker consistency, and boundary naturalness compared to other baselines.

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

Towards Engineering Scaling Laws with Pretraining Data Composition

arXiv:2606.19781v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural scaling laws describe how model performance improves as a power law in compute, model size, and dataset size. While well-established for large language models, these relationships are emerging for large models in particle physics. As with language, empirical studies show that the performance scales as a power law. However, unlike natural language or image domains, fundamental physics has high-fidelity simulators that produce synthetic data cheaply. This favors scaling regimes where additional data is cheaper than additional parameters, and allows the pretraining dataset itself to be engineered to influence the scaling. For the task of classifying hadronic jets produced in collisions of high-energy particle beams, we show that the scaling behavior can be engineered towards requiring more data rather than larger models by inclusion of pretraining data which is more diverse and better aligned with the downstream classification task.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Plug-and-Play image restoration with Stochastic deNOising REgularization

Plug-and-Play (PnP) algorithms are a class of iterative algorithms that address image inverse problems by combining a physical model and a deep neural network for regularization. Even if they produce impressive image restoration results, these algorithms rely on a non-standard use of a denoiser on images that are less and less noisy along the iterations, which contrasts with recent algorithms based on Diffusion Models (DM), where the denoiser is applied only on re-noised images. We propose a new PnP framework, called Stochastic deNOising REgularization (SNORE), which applies the denoiser only on images with noise of the adequate level. It is based on an explicit stochastic regularization, which leads to a stochastic gradient descent algorithm to solve ill-posed inverse problems. A convergence analysis of this algorithm and its annealing extension is provided. Experimentally, we prove that SNORE is competitive with respect to state-of-the-art methods on deblurring and inpainting tasks, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Impact of the disposable vape ban in Great Britain: a representative interrupted time-series study 2022-2026

Objective: To examine changes in vaping and smoking trends following the announcement and implementation of the disposable vape ban in Great Britain. Design: Interrupted time-series analysis of representative monthly cross-sectional data from the Smoking Toolkit Study. Setting: Great Britain. Participants: 118,946 adults ([≥]16y), including 12,042 young adults (16-24y), surveyed between Jan-2022 and Feb-2026. Main outcome measures: Changes in trends in disposable vape use among vapers, and current vaping and smoking prevalence, using seasonally-adjusted generalised additive models with comparisons against a no-ban counterfactual in which pre-announcement trends continued unchanged. Results: The proportion of vapers mainly using disposable devices began to decline following the announcement of the ban in Jan-2024, with the fall accelerating after implementation in June-2025. By Feb-2026, 5.6% (95%CI 4.6-6.9) of adult vapers and 7.1% (5.1-10.1) of young adult vapers mainly used disposables, compared with 62.0% (53.6-71.8) and 63.6% (52.7-76.7), respectively, under a no-ban counterfactual. Increases in vaping prevalence slowed post-announcement and plateaued post-implementation; by Feb-2026, prevalence was lower than the no-ban counterfactual in adults (13.6% v 18.8%; difference -5.2 percentage points, 95%CI -7.1 to -3.3) and young adults (27.8% v 39.1%; -11.3, -18.6 to -4.1). Declines in smoking prevalence stalled among adults and reversed among young adults post-announcement, before shifting downward again post-implementation; by Feb-2026, smoking prevalence was similar to the no-ban counterfactual in adults (difference +0.9 percentage points, -0.5 to +2.2) but possibly higher in young adults (+3.3, -0.5 to +7.1). Conclusions: The disposable vape ban in Great Britain was associated with substantial changes after both announcement and implementation, including a marked reduction in disposable vape use and a slowing then plateauing of growth in overall vaping prevalence. However, declines in smoking also temporarily slowed–and among young adults, reversed–after the announcement, before downward trends resumed after implementation.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

MedPCFM: Improving Medical Point Cloud Completion by Integrating Point Transformers and Flow Matching

arXiv:2606.24433v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Medical point cloud completion is important for anatomical reconstruction and downstream clinical workflows, yet generative modeling in this setting remains insufficiently studied. We investigate completion through continuous-time generative modeling and introduce PCFM, a PTv3-backed flow matching approach for medical point cloud completion. We evaluate on SkullFix and SkullBreak, and additionally on the more recent Mandibular Defect dataset. We build strong baselines by adapting PTv3 to a deterministic encoder-decoder completion model and by instantiating diffusion completion (PCDiff) with both PVCNN and PTv3 denoisers. PCFM with PTv3 is competitive with the deterministic PTv3 baseline and achieves state-of-the-art generative performance across datasets, while requiring substantially fewer sampling steps than diffusion. At the best operating points, PTv3 also yields clear throughput gains, providing up to a 7$\times$ speed-up for PCFM compared to a PVCNN backbone. Finally, we study empirical scaling trends by varying model size and point cardinality, showing consistent gains with higher point resolution and informative trade-offs across model scales.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Retrospective Progress-Aware Self-Refinement for LLM Agent Training

LLM-based agents trained with reinforcement learning optimize step-wise action prediction but lack metacognitive awareness of task progress, inducing a gap that hinders long-horizon scaling. A pilot study reveals that online progress prompting hurts performance while retrospective demonstrations help, yet this capability cannot emerge from outcome-reward training alone. We present RePro, Retrospective Progress-Aware Training, a framework that trains agents to self-generate progress signals via a forward-then-reflect rollout paradigm: the agent executes actions online, then retrospectively reassesses its step-wise progress given the completed trajectory and known outcome. RePro initializes with a Retrospection Warmup that teaches reflection format from minimal external demonstrations, then further trains through RePro-PO with a composite reward that produces self-generated signals without continuous external supervision. Experiments on WebShop, ALFWorld, and Sokoban show that RePro enhances the Qwen family's performance, with up to $12\%$ absolute success rate gains.

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

Pareto Q-Learning with Reward Machines

arXiv:2606.19134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Pareto Q-Learning with Reward Machines (PQLRM), a multi-objective reinforcement learning algorithm for tasks whose reward structure is specified by a set of reward machines (RMs). PQLRM combines Pareto Q-Learning (PQL), which maintains sets of vector-valued Q-estimates to approximate the Pareto front, with enhancements from Q-Learning with Reward Machines (QRM), which exploits the factored automaton structure of the reward signal. This yields a multi-policy algorithm that remains sample-efficient under non-Markovian, RM-encoded rewards. Experimental trials show that PQLRM converges faster than a naive PQL baseline applied to the cross-product MDP and can synthesize Pareto-optimal policies that QRM cannot.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Occupational Prompting Reveals Cultural Bias in Large Language Models

Social roles shape expectations, priorities, and judgments, yet it remains unclear how large language models (LLMs) associate occupational identities with broader cultural value patterns. Prior work used nationality-based cultural prompting to study how LLM responses to value-survey questions align with human cultural benchmarks. In this paper, we extend that framework by replacing cultural prompting with occupational prompting to examine how professional-role cues influence value-survey responses in open-weight LLMs. Using a survey-grounded evaluation pipeline based on questions from the Integrated Values Surveys, we project model responses into the two-dimensional Inglehart–Welzel cultural space. We prompt open-weight LLMs to answer questions under occupational identities such as accountant, teacher, engineer, and nurse, and then analyze how these occupation-conditioned responses are positioned on the cultural map. Our results show that when open-weight LLMs are prompted with occupations rather than national identities, their responses remain within a broadly Western-leaning region of the cultural map. However, different occupations introduce shifts within this region, producing distinct occupational skews. This indicates that occupational prompts are not treated as neutral role labels, but instead elicit structured value patterns. These findings extend survey-based evaluation of cultural bias beyond nationality-based prompting and provide a framework for studying how occupational personas shape value expression in LLMs.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Zero-Inflated Gaussian Distributions Enable Parameter-Space Sparsity in Estimation-of-Distribution Algorithms

arXiv:2606.19369v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Estimation-of-distribution algorithms (EDAs) are a powerful class of evolutionary methods for black-box optimization, especially when little is known about the structure of the objective. Whereas classical evolutionary algorithms rely on hand-designed mutation and crossover operators, hard to devise for unknown problem structures, and a source of bias, EDAs sidestep operator design entirely: they fit a probability distribution to the best individuals and sample the next generation from it. EDAs are well established on continuous parameter spaces, but they have not previously been generalized to sparse ones, in which most coefficients of a good solution are exactly zero. Existing sparse black-box optimizers therefore reintroduce exactly what EDAs were designed to avoid: hand-crafted sparsity operators, bi-level schemes alternating between support set and active values, zeroing thresholds, and other baked-in assumptions. We close this gap by proposing multivariate zero-inflated Gaussian (ZIG) distributions as EDA sampling laws. A latent Gaussian model with separate indicator and value dimensions represents sparsity patterns, correlations among active parameters, and the interactions between the two, so sparsity patterns and active values are optimized jointly, hierarchy-free. We show that the latent parameters of this model are identifiable from observed samples, unlike in the missing-data settings where related constructions originate, and introduce practical amortized inversion-based estimators for them. The estimators accurately recover latent correlation structures, and on the Lunar Lander benchmark the resulting ZIG-EDA converges faster and reaches higher final returns than a dense Gaussian EDA, a hand-crafted sparse evolutionary algorithm, and an ad-hoc sparse EDA, while finding controllers with only a small fraction of parameters active.

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

Interaction-Centered Intelligence: Toward an Interaction-Based Theory of Human-AI Co-Creation

arXiv:2606.00807v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Traditional artificial intelligence has largely conceptualized intelligence as isolated computation occurring within bounded agents. Across classical AI, machine learning, and many generative systems, the dominant unit of analysis remains the individual model or autonomous system evaluated through outputs, benchmarks, prediction accuracy, or optimization performance. While these approaches have produced major advances, they often under-theorize the role of interaction in the emergence of intelligence, creativity, meaning, and adaptive behavior. This paper proposes interaction as the primary unit of analysis for co-creative AI and interaction-centered intelligence more broadly. Drawing from distributed cognition, embodied cognition, enaction, participatory sense-making, human-computer interaction, and computational creativity, the paper traces a historical progression toward increasingly relational accounts of intelligence. Building upon prior work in Creative Sense-Making, quantified co-creation, and co-creative systems such as the Drawing Apprentice and AI Drawing Partner, it argues that intelligence emerges through evolving interaction dynamics among agents, environments, and socio-technical systems rather than solely through internal computation. The paper introduces Interaction-Centered Intelligence as a framework for understanding human-AI co-creation, collaborative emergence, adaptive participation, and interactional dynamics. Rather than evaluating intelligence solely through generated outputs, the framework emphasizes interaction trajectories, coordination patterns, participatory engagement, adaptive regulation, and interactional drift unfolding through time. Implications for explainable co-creative AI, hybrid intelligence, enactive AI, and future human-AI systems are discussed.