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

Native Active Perception as Reasoning for Omni-Modal Understanding

Passive models for long video understanding typically rely on a "watch-it-all" paradigm, processing frames uniformly regardless of query difficulty, causing computational cost to grow with video duration. Although interactive frameworks have emerged, they often rely on global pre-scanning, and their context cost still scales with video length. We propose OmniAgent, the first native omni-modal agent that formulates video understanding as a POMDP-based iterative Observation-Thought-Action cycle. OmniAgent executes on-demand actions to selectively distill audio-visual cues into a persistent textual memory, effectively decoupling reasoning complexity from raw video duration. To operationalize this, we introduce (1) Agentic Supervised Fine-Tuning to bootstrap native active perception via best-of-N trajectory synthesis with dual-stage quality control, and (2) Agentic Reinforcement Learning with TAURA (Turn-aware Adaptive Uncertainty Rescaled Advantage), which leverages turn-level entropy to steer credit assignment toward pivotal discovery turns. Crucially, OmniAgent exhibits positive test-time scaling, where performance improves as the number of reasoning turns increases, validating the efficacy of active perception. Empirical results across ten benchmarks (e.g., VideoMME, LVBench) demonstrate that OmniAgent achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models. Notably, on LVBench, our 7B agent outperforms the 10$\times$ larger Qwen2.5-VL-72B (50.5% vs. 47.3%).

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

Your Mouse and Eyes Secretly Leak Your Preference: LLM Alignment using Implicit Feedback from Users

To align a Large Language Model (LLM), most existing methods collect explicit human feedback and train a reward model to predict the human preference based on the response text. These existing methods have two key limitations. First, the users rarely provide explicit feedback for LLM responses, which makes the high-quality preference annotation expensive to collect. Second, the methods do not leverage implicit human feedback, which has proven vital to the economic moats of Internet giants. To quantify the value of implicit feedback, we build a new dataset called IFLLM, which collects 1336 multi-turn questions from the 59 Mechanical Turk workers, their mouse trajectories, and eye gazing points to the LLMs' responses from their webcams. IFLLM shows that the users have very diverse types of gazing behavior and mouse trajectories. Our reward model based on the implicit user feedback boosts the accuracy of the text-based reward model from 55% to 64% and nearly triples the relative response quality improvements after applying the DPO to eight LLMs, demonstrating the value of implicit feedback in the wild. Our data collection website, dataset, and codes can be found at https://github.com/themehulpatwari/llm-implicit-feedback/.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

The Holistic Storage of Verb+Up Phrases in Text-based and Audio-based Language Models

A crucial aspect of linguistic capability is the ability to trade off between stored representations and abstract knowledge: one must retrieve learned representations, but also generate novel ones by applying productive rules. While recent work has examined abstract knowledge in language models, holistic storage of multi-word units has received far less attention. We probe internal representations in text-based LLMs and an ASR model, testing whether V+up phrasal verbs develop distinct representations as a function of frequency and predictability. All models show evidence of holistic storage driven by frequency and predictability, further supporting usage-based theories of language.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Improving End-to-End Speech Recognition for Dysarthric Speech through In-Domain Data Augmentation

arXiv:2606.19797v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dysarthric speech recognition is crucial for facilitating effective communication among individuals with dysarthria. However, accurately recognizing dysarthric speech poses significant challenges due to varying severity levels and limited data availability. In this paper, we explore data augmentation techniques for dysarthric automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems by fine-tuning the End-to-End pre-trained Wav2Vec2 model, with a specific focus on severity levels. To address the challenges of data scarcity and the need for extensive data in fine-tuning pre-trained ASR systems for dysarthric speech, we investigate four prominent data augmentation methods: Speaking-Rate Modification (SRM), Pitch Modification (PM), Formant Modification (FM), and vocal tract Length Perturbation (VTLP), tailored to different aspects of dysarthria. The study uses individually fine-tuned Wav2Vec2 models for each severity class as baseline systems. Additionally, we conducted severity-specific fine-tuning of the ASR model using augmented data. Results demonstrate distinct efficacy patterns for each augmentation technique across severity levels. The best WERs were achieved with SRM ($s$=0.8) for low (9.02\%) and medium (38.11\%) severities, and with PM ($\tau$=0.8) for high severity (55.15\%), reflecting relative improvements of 30.02\%, 16.64\%, and 15.47\%, respectively. These results confirm the effectiveness of the augmentation methods in improving dysarthric ASR performance.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

C-QUERI: Congressional Questions, Exchanges, and Responses in Institutions Dataset

Questions in political interviews and hearings serve strategic purposes beyond information gathering including advancing partisan narratives and shaping public perceptions. However, these strategic aspects remain understudied due to the lack of large-scale datasets for studying such discourse. Congressional hearings provide an especially rich and tractable site for studying political questioning: Interactions are structured by formal rules, witnesses are obliged to respond, and members with different political affiliations are guaranteed opportunities to ask questions, enabling comparisons of behaviors across the political spectrum. We develop a pipeline to extract question-answer pairs from unstructured hearing transcripts and construct a novel dataset of committee hearings from the 108th–117th Congress. Our analysis reveals systematic differences in questioning strategies across parties, by showing the party affiliation of questioners can be predicted from their questions alone. Our dataset and methods not only advance the study of congressional politics, but also provide a general framework for analyzing question-answering across interview-like settings.

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

TAROT: Task-Adaptive Refinement of LLM-prior Graphs for Few-shot Tabular Learning

arXiv:2606.11640v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Few-shot tabular learning provides a cost-effective approach for real-world applications where annotation is costly and collecting sufficient samples for new tasks is difficult. Existing Traditional and LLM-based methods have demonstrated effectiveness in few-shot scenarios. However, traditional methods need additional training on unlabeled or generated data, which incur significant computational overhead. In addition, LLM-based methods that directly feed raw tabular data into LLMs raise privacy and compliance concerns. More importantly, both paradigms largely overlook the semantic relationships between features, which provide structural and semantic prior for constructing a semantic graph. Semantic graph is essential for modeling meaningful feature interactions in few-shot scenarios. In this paper, we propose TAROT, a GNN-based framework that encodes the structural and semantic prior by constructing and refining a task-adaptive semantic graph from this prior, thereby improving predictive performance in few-shot tabular learning. TAROT first encodes heterogeneous tabular data into unified node semantic representations via a Unified Semantic Tabular Node Encoder (USTNE). Then, it prompts LLMs to infer the semantic relationship between features based on the task description and feature names to construct a semantic graph. To mitigate structural noise introduced by the hallucination of LLMs, TAROT introduces Task-adaptive Semantic Graph Refinement that prunes spurious or task-unrelated edges and adds missing task-related ones, aligning the graph structure with the downstream objective. Finally, a GNN performs message passing over the refined graph to capture task-related semantic dependencies for prediction. Extensive experiments on various few-shot tabular learning benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of TAROT, establishing it as a state-of-the-art approach in this domain.

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

Denoising Score Matching with Random Features: Insights on Diffusion Models from Precise Learning Curves

arXiv:2502.00336v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We theoretically investigate the phenomena of generalization and memorization in diffusion models. Empirical studies suggest that these phenomena are influenced by model complexity and the size of the training dataset. In our experiments, we further observe that the number of noise samples per data sample ($m$) used during Denoising Score Matching (DSM) plays a significant and non-trivial role. We capture these behaviors and shed insights into their mechanisms by deriving asymptotically precise expressions for test and train errors of DSM under a simple theoretical setting. The score function is parameterized by random features neural networks, with the target distribution being $d$-dimensional Gaussian. We operate in a regime where the dimension $d$, number of data samples $n$, and number of features $p$ tend to infinity while keeping the ratios $\psi_n=\frac{n}{d}$ and $\psi_p=\frac{p}{d}$ fixed. By characterizing the test and train errors, we identify regimes of generalization and memorization as a function of $\psi_n,\psi_p$, and $m$. Our theoretical findings are consistent with the empirical observations.

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

YeasierAgent: Agentic Social Sandbox as a Canvas for Intent-Driven Creation of Platform-Agnostic Symbiotic Agent-Native Applications

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13722v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces YeasierAgent, an application-building paradigm based on symbiotic agents, narrative worlds, and scene-aware interaction. It challenges the conventional device-coupled model of software by redefining applications as collaborative spaces among users, agents, and worlds. We present a system architecture that achieves two primary contributions: (1) enabling the rapid, cross-platform construction of agent-native applications by utilizing platform-agnostic interactive units (agents, scenes, dialogue) rather than fixed graphical layouts; and (2) unifying the emotional companionship and practical tool execution attributes of intelligent agents within a single experiential sandbox. By integrating automated generation, user-created worlds, and spatial multi-agent collaboration, YeasierAgent formalizes the category of Symbiotic Agent-Native Applications, demonstrating a shift from isolated, tool-specific chatbots toward cohesive, socially embedded computational environments.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Transposition Approach to Optimal Control of McKean-Vlasov SPDEs

arXiv:2603.06245v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper, we investigate an optimal control problem for McKean-Vlasov stochastic partial differential equations, in which the coefficients depend on the law of the state process. For systems with nonconvex control sets, we establish a Pontryagin-type stochastic maximum principle that provides necessary optimality conditions for admissible controls. The analysis is based on the classical spike variation method together with the introduction of an adjoint backward stochastic partial differential equation involving Lions derivatives with respect to probability measures. Our results extend the stochastic maximum principle for McKean-Vlasov controlled stochastic differential equations to the infinite-dimensional SPDE setting.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Bridging data-driven priors via the score function for posterior sampling – Comparative review and experimental study

arXiv:2606.14800v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper reviews how a diverse set of popular data-driven priors commonly used in Bayesian inverse problems can be unified through their respective score functions. By framing these priors under this common perspective, we show that they can benefit from their straightfoward and effective integration into a recently proposed sampling algorithm. The applicability of this common framework is illustrated by considering several data-driven priors, namely regularization-by-denoising, normalizing flow-based priors, score-based generative models, and convex-ridge regularizers. For these four particular priors, the performance of the method is evaluated when conducting image inpainting and single image super-resolution. These results, as well as those obtained when restoring real images acquired in a geological context, demonstrate the efficiency of the method. This unified framework proves versatile enough to handle any posterior distribution defined by a broad class of score function-based priors, beyond the specific cases considered in this paper.

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

Performance Analysis of YOLOv11 and YOLOv8 for Mixed Traffic Object Detection under Adverse Weather Conditions in Developing Countries

In modern vehicular systems, robust performance under harsh conditions has become a critical problem of autonomous driving. Our study delivers a comprehensive evaluation of the newest iteration of the YOLO series, which is YOLOv11 Nano architecture benchmarked against the widely adopted YOLOv8 Nano as a baseline on a custom fused dataset that combines the Indian Driving Dataset (IDD) [1] and Berkeley Deep Drive Dataset (BDD100K) [2]. We have analyzed the trade-offs among detection accuracy, inference speed, and computational efficiency in high-entropy scenarios involving dense mixed traffic, rain, and low-light conditions. Specifically, YOLOv11n achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP@50) of 46.6%, with a notable 3.2% improvement in Precision over the baseline, effectively reducing false positives in cluttered scenes. Furthermore, the proposed model exhibits enhanced energy efficiency, requiring 22% fewer FLOPs (6.3G vs. 8.1G) while maintaining real-time inference speed of 70.9 FPS on a Tesla T4 GPU, offering an optimal trade-off for safety-critical edge deployment.

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

Depth-Width tradeoffs in Algorithmic Reasoning of Graph Tasks with Transformers

Transformers have revolutionized the field of machine learning. In particular, they can be used to solve complex algorithmic problems, including graph-based tasks. In such algorithmic tasks a key question is what is the minimal size of a transformer that can implement the task. Recent work has begun to explore this problem for graph-based tasks, showing that for sub-linear embedding dimension (i.e., model width) logarithmic depth suffices. However, an open question, which we address here, is what happens if width is allowed to grow linearly, while depth is kept fixed. Here we analyze this setting, and provide the surprising result that with linear width, constant depth suffices for solving a host of graph-based problems. This suggests that a moderate increase in width can allow much shallower models, which are advantageous in terms of inference and train time. For other problems, we show that quadratic width is required. Our results demonstrate the complex and intriguing landscape of transformer implementations of graph-based algorithms. We empirically investigate these trade-offs between the relative powers of depth and width and find tasks where wider models have the same accuracy as deep models, while having much faster train and inference time due to parallelizable hardware.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Mixing times of one-sided $k$-transposition shuffles

arXiv:2112.05085v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study mixing times of the one-sided $k$-transposition shuffle. We prove that this shuffle mixes relatively slowly, even for $k$ big. Using the recent ``lifting eigenvectors'' technique of Dieker and Saliola and applying the $\ell^2$ bound, we prove different mixing behaviors and explore the occurrence of cutoff depending on $k$.

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

Urdu Katib Handwritten Dataset: A Historical Document Dataset for Offline Urdu Handwritten Text Recognition with CRNN-Based Baseline Evaluation

Automatic Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is inherently a challenging task, and its complexity is further increased when dealing with cursive scripts. Although significant efforts have been made on various cursive scripts, research regarding Urdu Handwritten Text Recognition (UHTR) has been relatively limited. This lag of research is primarily due to the unique challenges posed by its script, and the scarcity and unavailability of benchmark datasets. Therefore, to advance research in UHTR, this study presents a specialized real dataset called the Urdu Katib Handwritten Dataset (UKHD). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first offline Urdu handwritten text lines dataset specifically curated from the materials written by Katibs in historical times. It encompasses a diverse range of flat nib writing variations in the Nastalique calligraphic style. Additionally, the effectiveness of different CRNN-based hybrid models has been evaluated to identify the optimal architecture for Urdu Katib Handwriting Recognition (UKHR). Among the analyzed models, the CNN-BGRU-CTC model showed more robust performance, with low Character Error Rate (CER) and Word Error Rate (WER). This research work aims to support and encourage the research community in developing a robust recognition system for preserving Urdu handwritten literature.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Unreduced Persistence Diagrams for Topological Machine Learning

arXiv:2507.07156v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Supervised machine learning pipelines trained on features derived from persistent homology have been experimentally observed to ignore much of the information contained in a persistence diagram. Computing persistence diagrams is often the most computationally demanding step in such a pipeline, however. To explore this dynamic, we introduce several methods to generate topological feature vectors from unreduced boundary matrices and investigate their theoretical and computational properties. We compared the performance of pipelines trained on vectorizations of unreduced PDs to vectorizations of fully-reduced PDs across several data and task types. Our results indicate that models trained on PDs built from unreduced diagrams can perform on par and even outperform those trained on fully-reduced diagrams on some tasks. We also benchmarked the computational performance of an algorithm for computing unreduced diagrams, which was implemented as a heavily modified version of Ripser. These computations are parallelizable and required an order of magnitude less memory on average compared to computing full persistence diagrams. Our results suggest that machine learning pipelines which incorporate topology-based features may benefit in terms of computational cost and performance by utilizing information contained in unreduced boundary matrices.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Differential DNA Methylation and Delirium After Anesthesia and Surgery

Background: DNA methylation is an epigenetic modification that regulates gene expression in response to environmental exposures. We measured differential DNA methylation levels in blood before after general anesthesia and surgery in participants with and without postoperative delirium (POD) and postoperative neurocognitive disorder (PNCD). Methods: Blood sampling, delirium assessment and cognitive testing were prospectively performed at baseline before non-cardiac, non-neurologic surgery, and at 24 hours (24h) and 6 weeks (6wk) thereafter in 94 participants comprising 13 with POD and 81 without POD, and 40 with PNCD and 54 without PNCD 6wk after surgery who were matched for age and sex in the INTUIT and MADCO cohorts. DNA methylation was assessed using the Illumina Infinium MethylationEPIC Beadchip. Results: 132 differentially methylated positions (DMPs) annotated to 198 differentially methylated genes (DMGs) were identified in 94 participants 24h after surgery compared to baseline with a local false discovery rate (LFDR)

17.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-06

Point-of-care early infant HIV diagnosis at birth in a pragmatic cluster-randomized trial in Mozambique and Tanzania: A comparative cost and cost-effectiveness study

Authors:

by Kira Elsbernd, Issa Sabi, Ilesh V. Jani, Chishamiso Mudenyanga, Siriel Boniface, Arlete Mahumane, Joaquim Lequechane, Falume Chale, Bindiya Meggi, Kassia Pereira, Raphael Edom, Anange F. Lwilla, W. Chris Buck, Nyanda Elias Ntinyinya, Michael Hoelscher, Till Baernighausen, Arne Kroidl, Stefan Kohler, the LIFE Study Consortium Background Timely access to early infant diagnosis (EID) is crucial for newborns with HIV, as late diagnosis can delay lifesaving antiretroviral treatment (ART). We assessed the comparative cost and cost-effectiveness of integrating point-of-care EID at birth into routine care in primary healthcare settings. Methods and findings This pre-specified secondary analysis was nested in the cluster-randomized LIFE study conducted at 28 primary healthcare facilities in Mozambique and Tanzania from October 2019 to September 2021. We estimated the health system cost of point-of-care birth plus 4–8-week HIV testing (very early infant diagnosis; VEID) compared to standard-of-care (SoC) testing at 4–8 weeks only, both with immediate ART initiation. We assessed the cost-effectiveness of VEID relative to SoC with respect to ART initiation within one week of life using Bayesian hierarchical models. As this is an intermediate outcome, incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICERs) cannot be directly compared to available life-year-based cost-effectiveness thresholds. To contextualize results, we derived the minimum life-years gained per early ART initiation required for VEID to meet standard thresholds in a break-even analysis.VEID was associated with a higher cost and resulted in earlier ART initiation than SoC in both countries. In Mozambique, VEID increased the proportion of infants initiating ART within one week of life by 90.0 (95% CrI [67.5, 98.5]) percentage points at an incremental cost of $2,632 (95% CrI [$2,249, $3,062]) per infant with HIV. In Tanzania, VEID increased early ART initiation by 59.9 (95% CrI [20.9, 89.5]) percentage points at an incremental cost of $6,263 (95% CrI [$5,394, $7,243]) per infant with HIV. The ICER was $2,924 and $10,458 in Mozambique and Tanzania, respectively and was sensitive to intrauterine transmission rate. These findings were limited by the lack of long-term health outcome data and reliance on an intermediate outcome. Based on the break-even analysis, we estimated that VEID would need to yield 6–32 life-years gained per additional early ART initiation to meet standard thresholds. Conclusions Adding birth testing improved early ART initiation but was unlikely to be cost-effective relative to standard thresholds given current prices, vertical transmission rates, and knowledge of long-term health benefits. Cost-effectiveness could be achieved at current costs if early ART translates to substantial long-term health benefits or if targeted to infants at high risk of vertical transmission.

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

Peak-Based Nuclide Identification in HPGe $\gamma$-Spectrometry with Machine Learning and SHAP

arXiv:2606.14874v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-purity germanium gamma spectra often require time-consuming analyses from subject matter experts. Photopeaks within these spectra are carefully fitted and numerical methods are employed to assist with nuclide identification (NID) and quantification. Amending the list of nuclides identified by analysis software can be nontrivial. When many samples need to be analyzed, it is therefore challenging to make timely and correct decisions. Supervised machine-learning-based NID can serve as an expert-informed, automated tool to improve the initial set of radionuclides suggested to an analyst and more effectively drive subsequent quantification. To that end, we implemented machine learning models that map photopeaks carefully fitted by analysts to NID results for experimental spectra containing various isotopic combinations drawn from a set of 65 isotopes. The best model achieved an F1 score of 0.97, markedly surpassing the F1 score of 0.84 achieved by traditional software when compared using a nuclide library comprising the same 65 isotopes assessed by the models. Finally, we illustrated the most important input features for model predictions using Shapley Additive Explanations. These explanations revealed that the models use physically relevant photopeaks when making predictions for the isotopes in our nuclide library.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Schattor: Schatten-family methods for deep learning optimization

arXiv:2606.15702v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern deep learning optimization features heterogeneous parameter structures, noisy gradients, and highly nonconvex landscapes, posing significant challenges for both algorithm design and theoretical analysis. Motivated by the limitations of SGD and the success of adaptive optimizers, we propose {\it Schattor}, a family of adaptive first-order methods based on Schatten norms. Schattor unifies SGD and the recently proposed matrix-variate adaptive optimizer Muon within a single Schatten-norm-based framework. We establish dimension-free stationarity guarantees for methods in the Schattor family for stochastic matrix optimization problems via a novel matrix martingale moment bound. We also develop multi-block extensions that adaptively balance block-wise optimization progress and prove dimension-free stationarity guarantees in this more general setting.

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

Overcoming the Incentive Collapse Paradox

arXiv:2603.27049v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-assisted task delegation is increasingly common, yet human effort in such systems is costly and typically unobserved. Recent work by Bastani and Cachon (2025); Sambasivan et al. (2021) shows that accuracy-based payment schemes suffer from incentive collapse: as AI accuracy improves, sustaining positive human effort requires unbounded payments. We study this phenomenon in a budget-constrained principal-agent framework with strategic human agents whose output accuracy depends on unobserved effort. Our first contribution is a general impossibility result showing that incentive collapse is not merely a limitation of simple linear payments, but arises for any payment rule based only on observed task accuracy.To overcome this barrier, we propose a sentinel-auditing payment mechanism that enforces a strictly positive and controllable level of human effort at finite cost, independent of AI accuracy. Building on this incentive-robust foundation, we develop an incentive-aware active statistical inference framework that jointly optimizes (i) the auditing rate and (ii) active sampling and budget allocation across tasks of varying difficulty to minimize the final statistical loss under a single budget. Experiments demonstrate improved cost-error tradeoffs relative to standard active learning and auditing-only baselines.

21.
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.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Adaptive Weighted Averaging

arXiv:2606.12763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of selecting the largest among $n$ unknown values $x_1,\dots,x_n$ given only a single unbiased estimate $y_i$ for each $x_i$. We design strategies that are simultaneously admissible (not uniformly dominated by any other strategy) and also never worse than a given baseline such as uniform random selection. We provide an application to stochastic optimization, where we obtain online-to-batch conversion bounds with a desirable "no-compromise" guarantee: they are never worse than standard random iterate selection, and yet can be significantly better in benign settings.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Proact-VL: A Proactive VideoLLM for Real-Time AI Companions

Proactive and real-time interactive experiences are essential for human-like AI companions, yet face three key challenges: (1) achieving low-latency inference under continuous streaming inputs, (2) autonomously deciding when to respond, and (3) controlling both quality and quantity of generated content to meet real-time constraints. In this work, we instantiate AI companions through two gaming scenarios, commentator and guide, selected for their suitability for automatic evaluation. We introduce the Live Gaming Benchmark, a large-scale dataset with three representative scenarios: solo commentary, co-commentary, and user guidance, and present Proact-VL, a general framework that shapes multimodal language models into proactive, real-time interactive agents capable of human-like environment perception and interaction. Extensive experiments show Proact-VL achieves superior response latency and quality while maintaining strong video understanding capabilities, demonstrating its practicality for real-time interactive applications.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

MOLAR: Learning Multimodal Molecular Representations from Noisy Labels

arXiv:2606.18390v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Motivation: Noisy labels are a common challenge in molecular property prediction because molecular annotations are often obtained from assays, curated databases, or weak annotation pipelines rather than directly observed clean biological states. Treating recorded labels as reliable supervision can cause models to memorize corrupted observations and learn misleading molecular evidence. In multimodal molecular representation learning, this issue can be amplified by graph-text fusion or alignment, which may propagate label-induced errors across modalities. Results: We propose MOLAR, a noise-aware framework for learning multimodal molecular representations from noisy labels. MOLAR separates latent clean-property inference from recorded-label observation: graph and text views contribute residual evidence to a clean-property distribution, and a categorical label-observation channel maps this distribution to recorded labels for training. This formulation derives posterior label reliability and modality-specific molecular evidence from the model. Experiments on naturally noisy molecular benchmarks and controlled label-flipping benchmarks show that MOLAR consistently outperforms representative baselines. Visualization analyses further show that MOLAR provides interpretable reliability and modality-evidence diagnostics.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Keep It in Mind: User Centric Continual Spatial Intelligence Reasoning in Egocentric Video Streams

We introduce UCS-Bench, a dataset spanning 170+ hours of egocentric visual observations with 8.1K+ timestamped questions for diagnosing User-Centric Continual Spatial intelligence in egocentric video streams. UCS-Bench targets a new problem that emphasizes dynamic spatial reasoning, long-term memory, and their alignment with users' real-time locations. We propose DirectMe, a framework that incrementally constructs and maintains a structured spatial memory from streaming egocentric observations. DirectMe enables robust tracking and recall of object locations, all relative to the user's movement over time. By tightly coupling visual perception with memory updates and spatial reasoning, our approach supports long-horizon queries that require recalling interactions, resolving viewpoint-induced ambiguities, and adapting to dynamic scenes. Our experiments show that DirectMe significantly improves the spatial reasoning of leading multimodal LLMs; it also surpasses many spatially aware and long-form streaming video models. We hope our benchmark and solution will advance spatial intelligence research for egocentric AI assistants. Data and code are available at https://github.com/cocowy1/UCS-Bench.