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

SceneCraft: Interactive System for Image Editing via Scene Graph

Recent advances in generative AI have enabled natural language-driven image editing, yet existing systems often fail in complex scenes with multiple interacting objects because they rely heavily on users crafting precise text prompts. To address the absence of structured control, we propose SceneCraft, a novel interactive framework that bridges user intent and model execution by representing images as editable scene graphs. Instead of guessing text prompts through trial and error, users interact directly with a visual graph to perform complex spatial and relational operations. These graph modifications are automatically translated into precise, context-aware editing prompts, effectively eliminating linguistic ambiguity. To ensure robust and diverse results, structured prompts are dispatched to multiple state-of-the-art generative models. Evaluations across diverse editing scenarios show that SceneCraft provides a more intuitive control mechanism, significantly reducing the cognitive burden of manual prompt engineering while generating outputs that users consistently rate as higher in quality and fidelity.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

High-Fidelity Synthetic Transmission Electron Microscopy Image Generation Using Diffusion Probabilistic Models for Data-Limited Semiconductor Metrology

Advanced semiconductor nodes drastically increased demand for Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), yet destructive sample preparation, slow imaging and high costs severely limit the availability of diverse datasets needed for downstream machine learning (ML). Synthetic data generation is becoming essential, but current generative models often miss TEM-specific noise, structural detail, and stochastic variability crucial for evaluation. We present a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) framework for synthetic TEM image generation under extreme data scarcity. A progressive patch-based training strategy scales from low-resolution patches to full images, enabling from-scratch training with only 15 samples. We integrate a custom TrivialAugment adaptation, cross-process domain transfer, classifier guidance, and RePaint-style inpainting, culminating in full-image generation that preserves global structural and spatial relationships in compliance with FAB metrology requirements. Beyond synthesis, we repurpose DDPM feature representations for segmentation, partitioning encoder feature maps to obtain coherent region masks. Our synthetic images achieve up to MS-SSIM > 0.98 and qualitative expert assessment consistent with structural similarity results, facilitating downstream ML training for defect detection, segmentation, and metrology while preserving statistical and physical realism.

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

Decoupling Search from Reasoning: A Vendor-Agnostic Grounding Architecture for LLM Agents

Production LLM agents increasingly depend on real-time search, yet native search grounding bundles retrieval policy, provider choice, evidence injection, cost, latency, and generation behavior behind a single model-provider boundary. This coupling makes grounding hard to inspect, tune, reuse, or port, and can trigger Search-Induced Verbosity that breaks strict output contracts. We present Decoupled Search Grounding (DSG), a vendor-agnostic boundary that moves grounding outside the reasoning model through an MCP-compatible gateway, exposing provider routing, source-aware context rendering, configured fallback, retrieval-depth control, and exact plus semantic caching as first-class controls. Across five frontier models on SimpleQA, FreshQA, and HotpotQA, native search leads on recency-sensitive FreshQA, but DSG exposes a stronger frontier when control matters: on SimpleQA it nearly matches native accuracy (86.1% vs. 87.7%) at 91% lower search cost, preserves concise answer contracts, and reaches a 99.4% warm-cache hit rate with 68% lower latency. Deployed as a shared production grounding layer for large-scale agentic workloads with interchangeable models, DSG matches or slightly exceeds native-search accuracy on an e-commerce query-understanding (QIU) workload while cutting search cost by over 98%. Real-time grounding is best treated as an optimizable interface boundary, not a fixed model feature.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Personalizing Suicide Risk Assessment: Machine Learning Extraction of Cross-Modal Interactions Between Psychosocial and Demographic Factors in Veterans

Background: Veterans face an elevated risk of suicide compared to the general population, motivating national efforts to develop predictive models that can guide proactive care. Current models used by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) rely primarily on structured electronic health record (EHR) data, though clinical notes contain rich contextual information that can be quantified using natural language processing (NLP) to derive psychosocial variables that may improve risk detection. Machine learning methods, particularly classification and regression trees (CART), can also uncover interactions between clinical and psychosocial variables, enabling identification of patient characteristics that modify suicide risk factors. However, integrating structured and unstructured data presents challenges because NLP features often greatly outnumber traditional clinical variables, potentially biasing interaction discovery. In prior work, we addressed this imbalance by introducing a weighted CART framework that balances structured variables with NLP-derived psychosocial features from semantic lexicons (SEANCE). While effective, semantic approaches summarize language into predefined constructs and may overlook important lexical variation present in clinical narratives. Methods: In this study, we extend that framework by replacing semantic features with a high-dimensional bag-of-words (BoW) representation of clinical notes and by evaluating models across cohorts defined by structured suicide risk stratification (low, medium, high) and varying temporal lookback windows. Using a cohort of 27,241 veterans, we analyzed clinical documentation collected up to 30, 90, or 270 days prior to death (or a matched index date for controls), enabling temporally flexible risk modeling. XGBoost models were trained to balance structured and unstructured features and identify cross-modal interactions between textual and clinical variables. Results: When incorporated into generalized linear models, these interactions improved predictive performance, particularly among low- and medium-risk patients, and substantially reduced the performance gap between interpretable and more complex models. Notably, the BoW representation outperformed our prior semantic index-based approach. Discussion and Conclusions: Together, these findings demonstrate the utility of interpretable NLP methods for uncovering clinically meaningful interactions between psychosocial and demographic factors in suicide risk and establish a strong benchmark for future deep learning approaches aimed at capturing richer contextual and temporal information from clinical narratives.

05.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-03

IsoPepTracker: An interactive web application for peptide-driven isoform analysis

Authors:

by Araf Mahmud, Chen Huang Alternative splicing affects 95% of multi-exon genes, generating protein isoforms with distinct functions. While current alternative splicing analyses effectively identify splice events at the RNA level, they provide limited protein-level insight. To address this gap, we developed IsoPepTracker (https://www.isopeptracker.org), a user-friendly web application for analyzing and visualizing differential peptides across canonical and novel isoforms that are theoretically detectable by shotgun mass spectrometry-based proteomics. IsoPepTracker features four modules: Canonical Isoform Analysis, Novel Isoform Discovery, Peptide Sequence Search, and Alternative Splicing Analysis. Each module is tailored for distinct and complementary proteogenomics analyses. Users can input genes, novel cDNA sequences, peptides, or alternative splicing results to pinpoint peptides of interest and identify their associations with target genes or isoforms. We demonstrate the straightforward application of IsoPepTracker in proteogenomics through case studies. IsoPepTracker not only provides informative peptide signatures to understand the protein-level consequences of alternative splicing but also supplies peptide candidates for validation in shotgun proteomics.

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

Critical Percolation as a Synthetic Data Model for Interpretability

arXiv:2606.20347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural networks learn features that reflect the hierarchical, multi-scale structure of natural data. Synthetic datasets used to evaluate interpretability methods typically lack this structure, limiting their value as realistic toy models. To close this gap, we introduce a family of synthetic datasets consisting of hierarchical functions defined on critical mean-field percolation clusters embedded in a high-dimensional data space. The percolation data consists of sparse, low-dimensional fractal clusters with a power-law size distribution. Latent variables modeling a taxonomic hierarchy generate each data point's target value. The data model is analytically tractable with known critical exponents that fix its properties without requiring hyperparameter tuning. We leverage a mapping between percolation clusters, random trees, and additive coalescence to propose an almost linear-time algorithm to jointly sample a random tree and its hierarchical latent decomposition, enabling data generation at arbitrary scale. Using probing experiments, we find that the model's ground-truth latent variables can be linearly decoded from neural network activations. Together, sparsity, self-similarity, power-law statistics, and analytical tractability make critical percolation a principled testbed for interpretability research.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

FactCheck: Feasibility-aware Long-term Action Anticipation with Multi-agent Collaboration

Long-term action anticipation (LTA) aims to predict an ordered sequence of future verb-noun actions from a partially observed video. While this task serves as the foundation for embodied intelligence, anticipating physically feasible long-term actions remains a critical challenge. Existing methods, which operate in an open-loop manner, often hallucinate non-existent objects, violate object affordances, or disregard object states, as they lack explicit mechanisms to verify action feasibility against the physical environment. To address this, we propose FactCheck, a novel multi-agent collaboration framework that improves feasibility through a closed-loop "Observe-Plan-Verify" mechanism. FactCheck decomposes the complex LTA task into specialized roles: an Observer that recognizes historical actions from video observations and constructs a dual-form structured memory, comprising a History Action Abstract that captures high-level human intentions and environmental status, and a History Action Graph that encodes object states and temporal dependencies; a Planner that generates draft future actions conditioned on both low-level historical actions and high-level History Action Abstract; and a Verifier that rigorously validates the draft against the History Action Graph and refines infeasible actions. Extensive experiments on the EPIC-Kitchens-55 and EGTEA Gaze+ benchmarks demonstrate that FactCheck consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our work establishes a new paradigm for feasibility-aware long-term action anticipation, effectively closing the loop of action recognition, action prediction and action verification.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

CMDS-AD: Cross-Modal Dual-Stream Decoupling for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection

Few-shot anomaly detection remains challenging due to limited training data. Multi-modal anomaly detection (MAD) offers a viable solution, leveraging 3D geometric cues to enrich 2D RGB representations and compensate for this scarcity. However, existing MAD methods apply spatially uniform feature processing, conflating stable macroscopic structures with high-frequency localized defect signals, exacerbating cross-modal misalignment and inflating false-positive rates. To overcome this, we present CMDS-AD, a Cross-Modal Dual-Stream Anomaly Detection framework. A LoRA-guided diffusion model generates diverse RGB samples to mitigate extreme data scarcity. For 3D normal augmentation, we employ a pre-trained diffusion model as a normal estimator. Crucially, this estimator inherently acts as a non-linear low-pass filter, directly extracting low-frequency normal representations from RGB inputs. This establishes an auxiliary estimated stream of purely low-frequency information, anchoring robust structural templates and assisting the uncompressed real stream, containing coupled high- and low-frequency components, to precisely isolate micro-defects. A Coordinate-Aware Hierarchical Feature Mapper adaptively aligns cross-modal semantics, while a multiplicative scoring mechanism filters modality-specific noise. Under the extreme 1-shot setting, CMDS-AD achieves absolute performance gains of 5.7% (I-AUROC) and 2.0% (AUPRO) on MVTec 3D-AD, alongside 7.7% and 5.6% improvements on EyeCandies, establishing a new state-of-the-art.

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

Beyond Similarity: Temporal Operator Attention for Time Series Analysis

arXiv:2605.11287v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A persistent paradox in time-series forecasting is that structurally simple MLP and linear models often outperform high-capacity Transformers. We argue that this gap arises from a mismatch in the sequence-modeling primitive: while many time-series dynamics are governed by global temporal operators (e.g., filtering and harmonic structure), standard attention forms each output as a convex combination of inputs. This restricts its ability to represent signed and oscillatory transformations that are fundamental to temporal signal processing. We formalize this limitation as a simplex-constrained mixing bottleneck in softmax attention, which becomes especially restrictive for operator-driven time-series tasks. To address this, we propose $Temporal Operator Attention (TOA)$, a framework that augments attention with explicit, learnable sequence-space operators, enabling direct signed mixing across time while preserving input-dependent adaptivity. To make dense $N \times N$ operators practical, we introduce Stochastic Operator Regularization, a high-variance dropout mechanism that stabilizes training and prevents trivial memorization. Across forecasting, anomaly detection, and classification benchmarks, TOA consistently improves performance when integrated into standard backbones such as PatchTST and iTransformer, with particularly strong gains in reconstruction-heavy tasks. These results suggest that explicit operator learning is a key ingredient for effective time-series modeling.

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

The Perils of Agency: How Developers Perceive, Prioritize, and Address Risks in Agentic AI Products

arXiv:2606.15485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems act autonomously, use tools, adapt to context, and operate in complex real-world environments. However, these same characteristics can create or exacerbate product risks. We studied how industry developers (n=35) perceive, prioritize, and address the risks in their agentic AI products. We found that developers' perceptions of risk were closely tied to the qualities that made the product agentic, such as autonomy, tool use, and usage in a real-world context. Developers prioritized product and business risks before considering downstream societal risks like job displacement and end-user privacy. This prioritization also impacted developers' ability and motivation to mitigate agentic risks. Finally, developers lacked mature controls for containing agentic risks, often relying on constraining the same characteristics that make agents useful: e.g., autonomy and goal complexity. These findings reveal a capability vs. risk control tension in agentic AI development: developers need to address risks that emerge from agentic capabilities, yet they currently have limited support for doing so without constraining agentic functionality.

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

Human-in-the-Loop Atlas-Based 3D Asset Segmentation for Interactive Content Workflows

Segmenting 3D assets into meaningful regions remains challenging, especially when segmentation criteria are application-dependent and require user control. We present a human-in-the-loop pipeline for generating a segmented 2D parameterized atlas from a 3D model for interactive media, game, and XR content workflows. Our method first selects a compact set of rendered views using a greedy set cover strategy over sampled surface points, and then supports interactive segmentation of these views with SAM~2 and Label Studio. The resulting masks are back-projected onto the model's UV parameterization to produce a unified segmented atlas that supports downstream production tasks such as segment-wise material assignment, style transfer, and semantic labeling. We assess the pipeline through a demonstration-based technical evaluation on eight cultural heritage objects. The results show that the approach can generate usable segmented atlases across diverse geometries while revealing recurring sources of manual correction, particularly fine structures, cavities, and weak appearance boundaries.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Robustness of Similarity-based Positional Encoding Under Rotations: Theoretical Analysis and Experimental Validation

Positional encoding is a fundamental component of Transformer architectures, as it injects information about the spatial or sequential arrangement of inputs. Among recent alternatives to standard absolute and sinusoidal encodings, similarity-based positional encoding (simPE) has emerged as a flexible framework for representing positional structure through pairwise relations. simPE was originally designed for medical imaging applications, where geometric robustness is especially relevant: small rotations naturally arise during image acquisition, induced by imaging instruments, patient positioning, or slight acquisition misalignments. Despite its empirical promise, the theoretical behavior of simPE under geometric perturbations has not been fully characterized. In this paper, we study the robustness of simPE with respect to rotations, combining formal theoretical analysis with experimental validation. We first show that simPE is generally not rotation-invariant. We then prove that, under mild Lipschitz assumptions on the elementary components, simPE is stable under rotational perturbations and derive explicit perturbation bounds in Frobenius norm. We validate these findings experimentally on four controlled datasets–a synthetic Arrow dataset, a synthetic Shapes dataset (four geometric shape categories), a synthetic Digits dataset, and a benchmark image classification dataset (FashionMNIST)–in which training and validation images are kept in a fixed canonical orientation while test images are subjected to increasing rotation angles. Across all datasets, simPE consistently outperforms standard learned positional encoding in terms of accuracy, F1 score, precision, and recall under rotation, particularly in the small-to-moderate angle regime, corroborating the theoretical stability guarantees.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Changes in hierarchical brain dynamics of rumination following mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a leading cause of disability worldwide with risk of onset and recurrence linked to depressive ruminative thought patterns. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is an evidence-based treatment for depression that targets the ability to recognise, decenter, and disengage from ruminative thought patterns. Elucidating how MBCT impacts hierarchical brain organisation may be key to understanding the processes by which MBCT can modulate ruminative tendencies. In a randomised controlled functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) trial on individuals with MDD (N=80) before and after MBCT in addition to treatment as usual (TAU), we investigated changes in hierarchical brain organisation during resting-state and rumination. We built whole-brain models to obtain generative connectivity (GEC) matrices per patient and quantified brain hierarchy by measuring the global directedness and regional trophic levels in each GEC, in which greater directedness reflects more directional information flow and less recurrence. Global directedness in MBCT+TAU compared to TAU increased during rumination, with no changes during resting-state. Furthermore, increased regional breadth of hierarchy during rumination was related to improvements in clinical and behavioural outcomes following MBCT+TAU. Increased brain hierarchy during rumination following mindfulness training may be consistent with a shift away from self-reinforcing negative mental loops towards more differentiated and less coupled cognitive and bodily cycles, supporting MBCT's ability to interrupt ruminative processes. Hierarchical brain dynamics may hold promise as a treatment-sensitive marker and a potential mechanism of therapeutic change in MBCT for depression.

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

PromptMN: Pseudo Prompting Language

Prompting has become the primary interface between humans and generative AI, yet many natural language prompts remain fragile: roles, goals, constraints, and expected outputs are often buried in prose or left implicit. In agentic and software development workflows, a misread at the first handoff can propagate through every step, since a significant portion of agent failures stem from context ambiguities rather than model limitations. This paper introduces PromptMN, a pseudo-prompting domain-specific language that annotates natural language with compact, %-prefixed typed directives covering roles, goals, requirements, priorities, constraints, plans, inputs, and outputs. Semantic resolution lets authors write in any order while the model interprets directives by function. PromptMN sits between informal prompting and programming-style pseudocode: structured enough to be inspectable and reusable, yet lightweight enough for analysts, managers, developers, and stakeholders across the software development lifecycle (SDLC). PromptMN also pairs with reverse prompt engineering. Asking a model to restate a desired outcome as PromptMN lets users inspect the inferred roles, goals, constraints, and missing assumptions before acting, reducing repair cycles and yielding a reusable artifact for aligning people and AI tools. PromptMN's feasibility is evaluated across several frontier models, including Claude Fable 5, Claude Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT-5.5. The models correctly resolved PromptMN instructions, including complex structures such as repetition, conditionals, methods, and a prime-checking task, without fine-tuning. The same vocabulary applies across new codebases, maintenance, and redesign in the SDLC scenarios presented. While large-scale validation remains future work, these early results suggest PromptMN is a practical step toward clearer, more reviewable human-to-AI interaction.

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

Genealogical processes of sequential Monte Carlo methods and other non-neutral population models under rapid mutation

arXiv:2406.16465v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We show that genealogical trees arising from a broad class of non-neutral models of population evolution converge to the Kingman coalescent under a suitable rescaling of time. As well as non-neutral biological evolution, our results apply to genetic algorithms encompassing the prominent class of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods. The time rescaling we need differs slightly from that used in classical results for convergence to the Kingman coalescent, which has implications for the performance of different resampling schemes in SMC algorithms. In addition, our work substantially simplifies earlier proofs of convergence to the Kingman coalescent, and corrects an error common to several earlier results.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Immunologically Optimized Zmp1 Peptides Reveal a Translational Serological Biomarker Platform for Tuberculosis Diagnosis Across Disease Manifestations

Tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis remains challenging, particularly for extrapulmonary TB (EPTB), where invasive sampling, low bacillary burden, and suboptimal sensitivity of nucleic acid-based tests in peripheral specimens hinder timely detection. Here, we report an immunology-driven strategy for biomarker discovery and development of a peptide-based serological assay targeting Mycobacterium tuberculosis zinc metalloprotease-1 (Zmp1). Leveraging fundamental principles of adaptive immunity that antigenic regions containing overlapping B-cell and CD4 T-helper cell epitopes would preferentially generate high antibody titers through linked recognition and cognate T-cell help, we used an immunoinformatics pipeline to identify two nested immunodominant peptide regions within Zmp1 (Mtb-Zp-NT and Mtb-Zp-CT) enriched for overlapping B- and T-cell epitopes. The diagnostic potential of these peptides was evaluated through ELISA-based serological assays. A blinded pilot study (N=137) demonstrated a clear discrimination between active TB and TB-recovered individuals. The assay was subsequently validated in an expanded cohort (N=875) by screening 6,086 individuals, which identified 457 TB-positive cases. The cohort included pulmonary TB (PTB), EPTB, TB-recovered individuals, household contacts, non-specific infections, and healthy controls. Receiver operating characteristic analyses, supported by DeLong and bootstrap comparisons, revealed superior diagnostic performance of the peptide-based assays relative to full-length Zmp1. Mtb-Zp-CT exhibited the highest accuracy (AUC=0.93; specificity >90%), while Mtb-Zp-NT also demonstrated strong discriminatory power (AUC{approx}0.89). These findings establish that the immunologically optimized Zmp1 peptides are highly promising serological biomarkers for TB and EPTB. More broadly, they demonstrate how mechanistically informed epitope selection can accelerate translation of pathogen-specific immune signatures into sensitive, minimally invasive, and potentially point-of-care diagnostic platforms for resource-limited settings.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Calibration Drift Under Reasoning: How Chain-of-Thought Budgets Induce Overconfidence in Large Language Models

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to express calibrated uncertainty is important for safe deployment. Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is widely used to improve accuracy and reliability, but its effect on calibration is not fully understood. We show that this picture is incomplete: in some settings, increasing the reasoning budget beyond a task-specific threshold can cause models to become systematically overconfident, assigning high confidence to incorrect answers. We call this phenomenon Calibration Drift Under Reasoning (CDUR) and study it both theoretically and empirically. We define reasoning budget B and analyze conditions under which Expected Calibration Error ECE(B) follows a non-monotonic pattern: it first decreases as reasoning corrects errors, then increases as longer reasoning produces internally consistent but incorrect explanations. We propose a Hypothesis Lock-In model based on autoregressive generation to explain this behavior. We evaluate Llama-3.1-8B and Llama-3.3-70B on 47 reasoning-trap questions across four reasoning budgets and three seeds (1,368 API calls; 574 valid responses). The 8B model shows non-monotonic calibration behavior, while results for the 70B model are limited to baseline evaluation and are inconclusive for budget-dependent effects. We introduce CABStop, a calibration-aware stopping rule that halts reasoning when confidence diverges from an auxiliary accuracy estimate. These results suggest that increasing reasoning depth does not always improve reliability and should be monitored carefully.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Quantum Occam Learning: Sample-Supported Expressibility for Circuit-Based Quantum Learning

arXiv:2606.12211v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central principle in quantum machine learning is that an ansatz should be expressive enough to represent the quantum data of interest. Yet, the expressibility is statistically meaningful only insofar as it can be learned from finitely many copies of an unknown quantum state. In this work, we develop an information-theoretic Occam theory for quantum data generated by finite-size quantum circuits. For the class $S_{n,G}$ of $n$-qubit pure states preparable with at most $G$ two-qubit gates, a metric-entropy argument gives the realizable sample law $\widetilde{\Theta}(G/\epsilon^2)$ in the circuit-limited regime. For an arbitrary source $\hat{\rho}$, we introduce the best $G$-gate approximation error $d_G(\hat{\rho})$ and the approximate circuit complexity $C_\eta(\hat{\rho})$. We prove an agnostic quantum Occam theorem: with $M$ copies, one can learn up to the best $G$-gate approximation error plus a statistical penalty $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{G/M})$. We then remove the need to know $G$ in advance through an adaptive model-selection theorem whose oracle inequality selects the circuit complexity justified by the data. Matching lower bounds yield a sample-supported expressibility law: at trace-distance accuracy $\epsilon$, $M$ samples can support only $G_supported \simeq M\epsilon^2$ gates, up to logarithmic factors and tomography saturation at $2^n$. Thus, the circuit complexity becomes an adaptive statistical resource rather than a static promise. Our framework turns bounded circuit complexity into a model-selection principle for quantum machine learning.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Unifying spacetime approaches to quantum mechanics

arXiv:2606.12539v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent efforts to formulate quantum mechanics in a way that treats space and time on a more equal footing have led to a large variety of spacetime-oriented approaches. In this work we present a detailed study of spacetime states, the objects that play the role of quantum states in the recently introduced framework of spacetime quantum mechanics, and show that the main proposals in the literature are different manifestations of the same underlying object. Path integrals, quantum states over time, pseudo-density matrices, the Page and Wootters mechanism, superdensity operators, and timelike-entanglement proposals all arise from spacetime states through particular evaluations, reduced information, linear maps, or quantum channels. This unification provides explicit mathematical representations of these formalisms, reveals relations among them, and clarifies the spacetime information each one captures. We also study the broader relevance of the spacetime-state point of view for Leggett-Garg inequalities, OTOCs, temporal tensor networks, fermionic systems, relativistic QFTs, quantum reference frames, and classical physics, together with additional insights and perspectives revealed by the common unifying framework.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Diffusion-based Cumulative Adversarial Purification for Vision Language Models

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in multimodal understanding, yet their susceptibility to adversarial perturbations poses a significant threat to their reliability in real-world applications. Despite often being imperceptible to humans, these perturbations can drastically alter model outputs, leading to erroneous interpretations and decisions. This paper introduces DiffCAP, a novel diffusion-based purification strategy that can effectively neutralize adversarial corruptions in VLMs. We theoretically establish a provable recovery region in the forward diffusion process and meanwhile quantify the convergence rate of semantic variation with respect to VLMs. These findings manifest that adversarial effects monotonically fade as diffusion unfolds. Guided by this principle, DiffCAP leverages noise injection with a similarity threshold of VLM embeddings as an adaptive criterion, before reverse diffusion restores a clean and reliable representation for VLM inference. Through extensive experiments across six datasets with three VLMs under varying attack strengths in three task scenarios, we show that DiffCAP outperforms existing defense techniques by a substantial margin. Notably, DiffCAP significantly reduces both hyperparameter tuning complexity and the required diffusion time, thereby accelerating the denoising process. Equipped with theorems and empirical support, DiffCAP provides a robust and practical solution for securely deploying VLMs in adversarial environments. The source code is available at https://github.com/JasonFu1998/DiffCAP.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Principled RL for Flow Matching Emerges from the Chunk-level Policy Optimization

Recent Progress in post-training flow matching for text-to-image (T2I) generation with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has demonstrated strong potential. However, it is hindered by a critical limitation: inaccurate advantage attribution. In this work, we argue that aggregating consecutive steps into a coherent 'chunk' and shifting the policy optimization paradigm from GRPO's step level to the chunk level can effectively mitigate the negative impact of this issue. Building on this insight, we propose Group Chunking Policy Optimization (GCPO), the first chunk-level reinforcement learning approach for post-training flow matching. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GCPO achieves superior performance on both standard T2I benchmarks and preference alignment, with up to 43% relative gains over GRPO, highlighting the promise of chunk-level policy optimization. The code is available on https://github.com/xingzhejun/GCPO.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Emotion Diffusion Classifier with Adaptive Margin Discrepancy Training for Facial Expression Recognition

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) is essential for human-machine interaction, as it enables machines to interpret human emotions and internal states from facial affective behaviors. Although deep learning has significantly advanced FER performance, most existing deep-learning-based FER methods rely heavily on discriminative classifiers for fast predictions. These models tend to learn shortcuts and are vulnerable to even minor distribution shifts. To address this issue, we adopt a conditional generative diffusion model and introduce the Emotion Diffusion Classifier (EmoDC) for FER, which demonstrates enhanced adversarial robustness. However, retraining EmoDC using standard strategies fails to penalize incorrect categorical descriptions, leading to suboptimal recognition performance. To improve EmoDC, we propose margin-based discrepancy training, which encourages accurate predictions when conditioned on correct categorical descriptions and penalizes predictions conditioned on mismatched ones. This method enforces a minimum margin between noise-prediction errors for correct and incorrect categories, thereby enhancing the model's discriminative capability. Nevertheless, using a fixed margin fails to account for the varying difficulty of noise prediction across different images, limiting its effectiveness. To overcome this limitation, we propose Adaptive Margin Discrepancy Training (AMDiT), which dynamically adjusts the margin for each sample. Extensive experiments show that AMDiT significantly improves the accuracy of EmoDC over the baseline model with standard denoising diffusion training under 100-step evaluations. Additionally, AMDiT-enhanced EmoDC has better generalization and robustness than state-of-the-art discriminative classifiers.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Learning Urban Access Costs from Origin-Destination Flows via Inverse Optimal Transport

arXiv:2606.14157v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cities deliver basic services through mixed public-private facility networks, including schools, clinics, transit providers, and subsidized service points. In these systems, planners often observe where households go, but not the latent cost function through which they trade off factors such as distance, price, and institutional access. We study this urban problem through school choice in the Philippines, where the country's largest national education subsidy is intended to redirect learners from congested public schools to participating private schools. Treating school-to-school enrollment flows as an entropic optimal transport plan, we recover latent choice costs using two complementary inverse optimal transport models: an interpretable distance-banded model with a subsidy term, and a neural cost model trained through a differentiable Sinkhorn forward pass. Applied to 283{,}016 learner trips across 23{,}820 observed flows in the most populated region, the framework estimates a subsidy-equivalent distance, $\lambda^{(k)}$, interpreted as the kilometers of perceived travel cost offset by the subsidy. The case demonstrates how administrative origin-destination data can be transformed into interpretable planning metrics for accessibility-aware subsidy design, facility siting, and urban service allocation.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Agentic World Modeling: Foundations, Capabilities, Laws, and Beyond

arXiv:2604.22748v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As AI systems move from generating text to accomplishing goals through sustained interaction, the ability to model environment dynamics becomes a central bottleneck. Agents that manipulate objects, navigate software, coordinate with others, or design experiments require predictive environment models, yet the term world model carries different meanings across research communities. We introduce a "levels x laws" taxonomy organized along two axes. The first defines three capability levels: L1 Predictor, which learns one-step local transition operators; L2 Simulator, which composes them into multi-step, action-conditioned rollouts that respect domain laws; and L3 Evolver, which autonomously revises its own model when predictions fail against new evidence. The second identifies four governing-law regimes: physical, digital, social, and scientific. These regimes determine what constraints a world model must satisfy and where it is most likely to fail. Using this framework, we synthesize over 400 works and summarize more than 100 representative systems spanning model-based reinforcement learning, video generation, web and GUI agents, multi-agent social simulation, and AI-driven scientific discovery. We analyze methods, failure modes, and evaluation practices across level-regime pairs, propose decision-centric evaluation principles and a minimal reproducible evaluation package, and outline architectural guidance, open problems, and governance challenges. The resulting roadmap connects previously isolated communities and charts a path from passive next-step prediction toward world models that can simulate, and ultimately reshape, the environments in which agents operate. Code and resources are available at: https://github.com/matrix-agent/awesome-agentic-world-modeling.