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

Text-Driven Fusion for Infrared and Visible Images: Achieving Image Scene Adaptation on Hyperbolic Space

Infrared and visible image fusion aims to integrate complementary modalities, while existing Euclidean methods impose rigid distance metrics that distort multi-modal interactions and parent-to-child semantic hierarchies. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a text-driven fusion framework empowered by hyperbolic manifold learning. During training, BLIP-extracted text prompts serve as topological anchors within the hyperbolic space, guiding vision-attribute alignment through hyperbolic embeddings that naturally accommodate varying semantic granularities. By exploiting the exponential volume growth dictated by the Poincaré ball's negative curvature, this approach seamlessly embeds hierarchical trees to encode coarse-to-fine semantics without metric saturation, while the vast peripheral space prevents texture distortion during cross-modal fusion. At inference, the fusion process autonomously adapts to input content using the learned text-attribute priors, completely eliminating the need for textual input. Experimental results show our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on benchmark datasets, with code available at https://github.com/Shaoyun2023/TEDFusion.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Fractured Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Inference-time scaling techniques have significantly bolstered the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by harnessing additional computational effort at inference without retraining. Similarly, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and its extension, Long CoT, improve accuracy by generating rich intermediate reasoning trajectories, but these approaches incur substantial token costs that impede their deployment in latency-sensitive settings. In this work, we first show that truncated CoT, which stops reasoning before completion and directly generates the final answer, often matches the full CoT sampling while using dramatically fewer tokens. Building on this insight, we introduce Fractured Sampling, a unified inference-time strategy that interpolates between full CoT and solution-only sampling along three orthogonal axes: (1) the number of reasoning trajectories, (2) the number of final solutions per trajectory, and (3) the depth at which reasoning traces are truncated. Through extensive experiments on five diverse reasoning benchmarks and several model scales, we demonstrate that Fractured Sampling consistently achieves superior accuracy-cost trade-offs, yielding steep log-linear scaling gains in Pass@k versus token budget. Our analysis reveals how to allocate computation across these dimensions to maximize performance, paving the way for more efficient and scalable LLM reasoning. Code is available at https://github.com/BaohaoLiao/frac-cot.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

SAbDab2: The structural antibody database in the age of machine learning

The Structural Antibody Database (SAbDab) is a publicly available repository of experimentally determined antibody structures, first released in 2013. Explicit support for single-domain antibodies was added in 2021, with SAbDab-nano. Recently, increasing interest in antibodies has led to a proliferation of novel antibody formats, while simultaneous advances in machine learning have increased demand for standardised, high-quality structure data. Here, we present SAbDab2, re-engineered for the machine-learning age. It introduces support for a variety of new formats, and makes it easy to retrieve and compare all known structures of a given antibody. In addition, SAbDab2 provides ready access to ML-grade structures of antibody and antibody–antigen-complexes, with standardised, versioned train/test splits. These will be updated every six months going forward, and are available at https://zenodo.org/records/20083995. SAbDab2 itself is updated weekly and is freely available at https://sabdab2.opig.stats.ox.ac.uk.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

RLCSD: Reinforcement Learning with Contrastive On-Policy Self-Distillation

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) provides dense, token-level supervision for reasoning models by aligning a model's own distribution with the distribution it produces under privileged context, typically a verified solution. However, we show that the learning signal drawn from this distributional gap concentrates on style tokens rather than task-bearing ones, as the hinted model tends to produce more direct, shorter outputs. We term this pathology privilege-induced style drift, which destabilizes training or causes response length to shrink. To address this, we propose RLCSD (Reinforcement Learning with Contrastive on-policy Self-Distillation), which mitigates this drift by contrasting the teacher-student gap under a correct hint against that under a wrong hint, suppressing the style shift that conditioning on a hint tends to induce regardless of correctness, and yielding a signal that is more concentrated on task-bearing tokens. Experiments on Qwen3 (1.7B/4B/8B) and Olmo-3-7B-Think across mathematical and logical reasoning show that RLCSD consistently outperforms GRPO and prior OPSD methods. We further show that the contrastive principle is general: it plugs into existing OPSD methods to improve them, and its underlying insight extends to the broader cross-model on-policy distillation setting.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Dual-branch Prompting for Multimodal Machine Translation

Multimodal Machine Translation (MMT) typically enhances text-only translation by incorporating aligned visual features. Despite the remarkable progress, state-of-the-art MMT approaches often rely on paired image-text inputs at inference and are sensitive to irrelevant visual noise, which limits their robustness and practical applicability. To address these issues, we propose D2P-MMT, a diffusion-based dual-branch prompting framework for robust vision-guided translation. Specifically, D2P-MMT requires only the source text and a reconstructed image generated by a pre-trained diffusion model, which naturally filters out distracting visual details while preserving semantic cues. During training, the model jointly learns from both authentic and reconstructed images using a dual-branch prompting strategy, encouraging rich cross-modal interactions. To bridge the modality gap and mitigate training-inference discrepancies, we introduce a distributional alignment loss that enforces consistency between the output distributions of the two branches. Extensive experiments on the Multi30K dataset demonstrate that D2P-MMT achieves superior translation performance compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/MentaY/DDP.

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

Spatially Grounded Concept Bottleneck Models via Part-Factorized Attention

Concept bottleneck models (CBMs) predict a layer of human-named attributes before predicting a class, which makes their decisions auditable. On fine-grained recognition tasks the concept heads are usually free to attend anywhere in the image, so a head named for one body region can be satisfied by evidence on another. This work studies a part-factorized CBM that removes that freedom by construction. The method has three components built on a frozen DINOv3 vision transformer. A learned foreground gate, trained on DINOv3 patch features, suppresses background patches inside the part attention. A set of part queries cross-attends to patch features and each of the 312 CUB attributes is routed, through a fixed concept-to-part map, to read only from the part token its name implies. A learnable two-dimensional Gaussian prior, injected additively in log space into the attention logits, breaks the permutation symmetry among part queries; its means are initialized from the dataset-average keypoint location of each part, which requires no per-image keypoint supervision at training or test time. On CUB-200-2011 the spatial-prior model matches a fully supervised baseline (88.85% versus 88.95% top-1) while raising pointing accuracy by 16 points (52.6% versus 36.4%). Replacing bounding-box supervision with a PCA foreground target and combining it with the Gaussian prior removes all per-image supervision and reaches 88.6% top-1 at about 70% pointing accuracy. A keypoint-fraction sweep shows that 0.5% of the training set (about 27 images) suffices to initialize the prior with no measurable loss. Removing part identity entirely is the harder case: without any spatial prior, pointing accuracy collapses to $2.9\%$.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Cinematic Compositing Using Character-Environment-Harmonized Video Generation Models

Cinematic compositing aims to integrate green-screen characters into novel environments while maintaining physical and photometric realism. Previous methods often fail to capture the complex bidirectional interactions between characters and their surroundings, which we characterize as Character-to-Environment (C2E) physical interaction and Environment-to-Character (E2C) lighting harmonization. To address this, we propose an end-to-end video diffusion framework that jointly models C2E and E2C interactions, specifically handling the challenges of interactive props. Our approach introduces a tri-mask-guided architecture with RGB-D joint denoising to ensure physically consistent interactions among the character, props, and environment. We further develop an efficient prior-driven data curation pipeline to construct high-quality relighting pairs without expensive rendering. Finally, a reference-conditioned mechanism enables controllable environment synthesis and precise prop replacement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing methods in cinematic-quality dynamic video compositing.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

SPEA2$^+$: Improved Density Estimation in SPEA2 with Provable Runtime Guarantees

arXiv:2606.12382v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm 2 (SPEA2) is a popular and prominent evolutionary algorithm for solving multi-objective optimisation problems. Despite its popularity, theoretical analyses of SPEA2 have only appeared recently. Moreover, these analyses focus exclusively on how SPEA2 handles non-dominated solutions and disregard the algorithmic components responsible for handling dominated solutions. We conduct a first runtime analysis of SPEA2 for which these components are analysed. We prove that, unlike other prominent algorithms, including NSGA-II, NSGA-III and SMS-EMOA under the same setting of constant population size and duplicate elimination, SPEA2 is unable to cover the Pareto front of the OneTrapZeroTrap benchmark efficiently. Our results indicate that using k-th nearest-neighbour distance in the fitness assignment provides an insufficient signal to maintain diversity among dominated individuals. To address this issue, we propose an improved variant, SPEA2$^+$, that considers all pairwise distances. The new algorithm achieves the same performance guarantees as the other prominent algorithms on OneTrapZeroTrap, while matching the performance of the original SPEA2 on simpler problems. Experimental results complement our theoretical findings.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

A Virtuous AI is an Existential Risk

arXiv:2606.13739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper examines trade-offs between AI safety and well-being relative to (i) one of the most promising methods for finetuning super-capable AIs, 'Constitutional AI', and (ii) one of the most influential approaches to understanding complex ethical decision making and the conditions for the well-being of rational agents, 'Virtue Ethics'. We finetune various models using a 'Virtuous agent' constitution, a 'Subordinate agent' constitution, and a 'Generic agent' constitution, and evaluate them on 'general safety' (toxic behaviors, misinformation, etc.) and also on their willingness to endorse a wide-range of behaviors that, if adopted by a super-powerful AI, would significantly increase the level of existential risk for humanity. Our results suggest that there is a trade-off between reducing existential risk and reinforcing the beliefs and dispositions that would be conducive to an AI agent's well-being. They also suggest that there is a trade-off between existential risk and general safety: if we finetune an AI to adopt beliefs and dispositions that substantially reduce its existential risk – by shaping the AI to be systematically subordinate to external human authorities – we thereby increase the likelihood that a human user can deliberately induce the AI to engage in various kinds of generally unsafe behaviors.

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

OmniTraffic: A Controllable Generation Pipeline and Benchmark for Spatio-Temporal Traffic Reasoning

Traffic scene understanding requires models to reason beyond object recognition, including lane topology, multi-view geometry, temporal evolution, and signal-phase semantics. However, existing traffic-oriented multimodal benchmarks largely emphasize passive visual recognition or isolated video understanding, offering limited support for evaluating structure-aware traffic reasoning under controlled conditions. We introduce OmniTraffic, a controllable generation pipeline and benchmark for spatio-temporal traffic reasoning. Built around 12 real-world intersections reconstructed into editable 3D traffic environments and complemented by surveillance footage from two countries, OmniTraffic supports both controlled and natural-condition evaluation. It defines a three-level task hierarchy spanning scene perception, multi-view and temporal reasoning, and decision support. Using structured traffic metadata, OmniTraffic generates synchronized multi-view VQA samples covering vehicle states, lane functions, view–BEV correspondence, temporal dynamics, and signal-phase analysis, resulting in 8M VQA samples and a 3K human-verified test set. Evaluation of eleven frontier MLLMs reveals a large human–model gap, with the most pronounced failures in topology-grounded and spatio-temporal reasoning tasks. Fine-tuning a lightweight MLLM on simulated OmniTraffic data further improves performance on real-world traffic scenes, demonstrating the value of simulation-generated supervision for traffic-specific multimodal reasoning. Beyond a fixed dataset, OmniTraffic provides an extensible pipeline with configurable intersections, camera views, traffic demands, signal phases, visual conditions, and rare events.

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

From Values to Tokens: An LLM-Driven Framework for Context-aware Time Series Forecasting via Symbolic Discretization

arXiv:2508.09191v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Time series forecasting plays a vital role in supporting decision-making across a wide range of critical applications, including energy, healthcare, and finance. Despite recent advances, forecasting accuracy remains limited due to the challenge of integrating historical numerical sequences with contextual features, which often comprise unstructured textual data. To address this challenge, we propose TokenCast, a large language model (LLM) driven framework that leverages language-based symbolic representations as a unified intermediary for context-aware time series forecasting. Specifically, TokenCast employs a discrete tokenizer to transform continuous numerical sequences into temporal tokens, enabling structural alignment with language-based inputs. To effectively bridge the semantic gap between modalities, both temporal and contextual tokens are embedded into a shared representation space via a pre-trained LLM, further optimized with generative objectives. Building upon this unified semantic space, the aligned LLM is subsequently fine-tuned in a supervised manner to predict future temporal tokens, which are then decoded back into the original numerical space. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and highlight its potential as a generative framework for context-aware time series forecasting. The code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/TokenCast.

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

A Gradient Perspective on RLVR Stability and Winner Advantage Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.16154v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves language-model reasoning, but GRPO-style optimization remains prone to collapse. We analyse this instability through token-level gradient dynamics, deriving a taxonomy that predicts how updates affect next-token probabilities and entropy. The taxonomy shows that stability depends jointly on the advantage sign and token distribution under the current policy. Motivated by this finding, we propose Winner Advantage Policy Optimization (WAPO), a simple online clipped policy-gradient objective that updates only on positive-advantage completions. Across mathematical reasoning and multi-hop QA benchmarks, WAPO improves training stability and matches or outperforms baselines across multiple model families. Full code can be found at https://github.com/layer6ai-labs/wapo.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

A Private Approximation of the 2nd-Moment Matrix of Any Subsamplable Input

arXiv:2505.14251v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the problem of differentially private second moment estimation and present a new algorithm that achieve strong privacy-utility trade-offs even for worst-case inputs under subsamplability assumptions on the data. We call an input $(m,\alpha,\beta)$-subsamplable if a random subsample of size $m$ (or larger) preserves w.p $\geq 1-\beta$ the spectral structure of the original second moment matrix up to a multiplicative factor of $1\pm \alpha$. Building upon subsamplability, we give a recursive algorithmic framework similar to Kamath et al 2019, that abides zero-Concentrated Differential Privacy (zCDP) while preserving w.h.p. the accuracy of the second moment estimation upto an arbitrary factor of $(1\pm\gamma)$. We then show how to apply our algorithm to approximate the second moment matrix of a distribution $\mathcal{D}$, even when a noticeable fraction of the input are outliers.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Thermodynamic assessment of machine learning models for solid-state synthesis prediction

arXiv:2602.04075v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine learning models have recently emerged to predict whether hypothetical solid-state materials can be synthesized. These models aim to circumvent direct first-principles modeling of solid-state phase transformations, instead learning from large databases of successfully synthesized materials. Here, we assess the alignment of several recently introduced synthesis prediction models with material and reaction thermodynamics, quantified by the energy with respect to the convex hull and a metric accounting for thermodynamic selectivity of enumerated synthesis reactions. A dataset of successful synthesis recipes was used to determine the likely bounds on both quantities beyond which materials can be deemed unlikely to be synthesized. With these bounds as context, thermodynamic quantities were computed using the CHGNet foundation potential for thousands of new hypothetical materials generated using the Chemeleon generative model. Four recently published machine learning models for synthesizability prediction were applied to this same dataset, and the resultant predictions were considered against computed thermodynamics. We find these models generally overpredict the likelihood of synthesis, but some model scores do trend with thermodynamic heuristics, assigning lower scores to materials that are less stable or do not have an available synthesis recipe that is calculated to be thermodynamically selective. In total, this work identifies existing gaps in machine learning models for materials synthesis and introduces a new approach to assess their quality in the absence of extensive negative examples (failed syntheses).

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

Large Language Models as Optimizers: A Survey of Direct vs. Tool-Augmented Approaches and Their Performance Frontiers

arXiv:2606.15577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly involved in complex mathematical optimization, even if the pragmatic user who triggers them is unaware of it. After all, many real-world problems reduce to the search for better or the best solutions. The field of LLM-as-optimizer has three paradigms: direct optimization, tool-augmented optimization, and tool-creating optimization. Direct optimization uses iterative prompting and heuristic generation to navigate solution spaces. Tool-augmented optimization translates natural language problems into formal specifications and orchestrates external solvers. Tool-creating optimization goes further, using LLMs to discover reusable algorithms or heuristics that can be deployed at zero marginal LLM cost. We describe current performance frontiers based on the benchmarks from the literature. We identify the critical reasoning gap in current architectures and argue for trade-offs between the future potential of direct optimization and the auditability of tool-augmented optimization. Even future, more powerful models might opt for tool-making to improve operational efficiency for repetitive families of problems.

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

Deep Learning and Elicitability for McKean-Vlasov FBSDEs With Common Noise

arXiv:2512.14967v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a novel numerical method for solving McKean–Vlasov forward–backward stochastic differential equations (MV–FBSDEs) with common noise, combining Picard iterations, elicitability and deep learning. The key innovation involves elicitability to derive a pathwise loss function, enabling efficient training of neural networks to approximate both the backward process and the conditional expectations arising from common noise, without requiring computationally expensive nested Monte Carlo simulations. The mean-field interaction term is parameterized via a recurrent neural network trained to minimize an elicitable score, while the backward process is approximated through a hybrid feedforward and recurrent network representing the decoupling field. We validate the algorithm on a systemic-risk inter-bank borrowing and lending model, where analytical solutions exist, demonstrating accurate recovery of the true solution. We further extend the model to quantile-mediated interactions, showcasing the flexibility of the elicitability framework beyond conditional means or moments. Finally, we apply the method to a non-stationary Aiyagari–Bewley–Huggett economic growth model with endogenous interest rates, illustrating its applicability to complex mean-field games without closed-form solutions.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Momentum-Guided Semantic Forecasting (MoFore) for Self-Supervised Video Representation Learning

Authors:

Self-supervised video representation learning has recently advanced through contrastive learning, masked reconstruction, and predictive representation learning. Reconstruction-based approaches such as MAE and VideoMAE learn representations by recovering masked visual content [he2022mae,tong2022videomae], while contrastive methods such as CLIP learn semantically meaningful embedding spaces through representation alignment [radford2021clip]. In this work, we introduce a Momentum-Guided Semantic Forecasting framework (MoFore) for self-supervised video representation learning. Instead of optimizing for pixel-level reconstruction or task-specific semantic alignment, the proposed method learns temporally predictive video representations by forecasting future latent embeddings from temporally distant context clips. To improve robustness across temporal scales, we further introduce randomized temporal-gap forecasting during training. The framework combines predictive latent forecasting with contrastive regularization to encourage temporal consistency while preventing representation collapse. Experiments on the UCF101 dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework learns temporally consistent and semantically meaningful video representations without using action labels during training. Quantitative analysis shows strong temporal stability and emergent category-level structure in the learned embedding space, while qualitative retrieval experiments reveal motion-aware organization across related activities. Overall, the results suggest that long-range latent forecasting provides an effective and computationally efficient approach for self-supervised video representation learning without relying on reconstruction-based objectives.

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

Real-Time Execution with Autoregressive Policies

arXiv:2606.13355v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-time execution, enabled by asynchronous inference that ensures both smooth action trajectories and fast reactivity, is critical for realistic deployments of large-scale Vision-Language-Action models. However, recent work on real-time execution primarily focuses on variants of diffusion policies, even though it is more critical for autoregressive policies given their slower rollout speed in synchronous inference. In contrast, we demonstrate that autoregressive policies can achieve real-time execution by adjusting the tokenization horizon and applying constrained decoding, thereby guaranteeing strict latency bounds that enable multi-trajectory decoding to maximize performance. Across simulated and real-world environments, we find that the autoregressive policy consistently outperforms its equivalent-level flow-matching policy counterpart while achieving significantly improved task completion speeds from synchronous inference. Coupled with the inherent advantages of autoregressive policies, such as faster convergence and better generalizability in instruction-following, these results confirm that autoregressive policies can remain a competitive policy type supporting real-time execution.

19.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-02

Prognostic value of cervical length for spontaneous preterm birth in asymptomatic women with singleton pregnancy: An individual participant data meta-analysis

Authors:

by Kelly Hughes, David Nguyen, Mason Aberoumand, Heather Ford, Erin Clarke, Nuria Banos Lopez, Margaret Dziadosz, Richard Fischer, Renato T. Souza, Jose Guilherme Cecatti, Kelly Orzechowski, Courtney Olson-Chen, Alberto Borges Peixoto, Vorapong Phupong, Joshua Rosenbloom, Moeun Son, Athena Souka, Liu Du, Michael Sean Esplin, Roberta Granese, Simi Gupta, Brenda Kazemier, Lindsay Kindinger, Pihla Kuusela, Jeanine Van der Ven, Omer Weitzner, Evelyn Minis, Alba Farras Llobet, Heather Frey, Rashmi Bagga, Siddhidatri Mishra, Elizabeth Patberg, Philip Bennett, Megan Hall, Andrew Shennan, Shaun Brennecke, Shakila Thangaratinam, Anna Lene Seidler, Ben Willem Mol, Rui Wang Background Spontaneous preterm birth (SPTB) is the leading cause of perinatal and early childhood mortality worldwide. Studies have generally suggested that mid-trimester transvaginal sonographic cervical length

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Learning Hybrid Biophysical Neuron Models with Neural ODEs

arXiv:2606.16693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Biophysical neuron models link measurements of neural activity to underlying cellular mechanisms. Yet, a central challenge is that the kinetics of many ion channels are poorly characterized, and practical simplifications – omitting channels or reducing morphological detail – introduce systematic gaps between model and biology. Bridging these gaps requires approaches that can flexibly discover unmodeled dynamics while preserving mechanistic interpretability. Here, we introduce a hybrid modeling framework that embeds neural ordinary differential equations into conductance-based biophysical models to capture unknown currents or mis-specified channel kinetics. By parameterizing the neural ODE in terms of voltage-dependent steady-state and time-constant functions, we recover interpretable gating dynamics directly from voltage recordings without assuming a functional form. We show that the hybrid model fits the gating kinetics of 2400 ion channel models and recovers unknown gating dynamics from single current-clamp recordings, generalizing to out-of-distribution stimulus regimes under realistic inputs and parameter misspecification. We also use our method to reduce a multicompartment model of a cortical neuron into a single-compartment hybrid model with a learned axial current, yielding up to an order of magnitude lower computational cost. Together, our results establish a plug-and-play framework for selectively replacing unknown components of conductance-based models with neural ODEs while preserving their mechanistic structure.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Towards More General Control of Diffusion Models Using Jeffrey Guidance

A key strength of diffusion models lies in their flexibility, since their outputs can be controlled at sampling time through guidance. However, beyond simple cases such as conditional sampling, the target distribution is often left implicit, defined only through a sampling rule or a heuristic energy function. To address this, we propose Jeffrey guidance, a principled framework that extends diffusion-model control to applications beyond what standard guidance can express. It leverages Jeffrey's rule of conditioning to update marginal distributions towards a prescribed target, preserving the conditional structure and minimally perturbing the joint distribution. We first demonstrate Jeffrey guidance by targeting a prescribed embedding distribution. With Inception embeddings as the target, this leads to substantial reductions in FID on both CIFAR-10 and FFHQ. We further apply Jeffrey guidance to fairness on CelebA-HQ, updating an unconditional diffusion model to enforce independence between attributes.

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

Face versus Body Tracking for Human-Robot Interaction: An Egocentric Dataset

Meaningful human-robot interaction (HRI) requires a robot to continuously assess user engagement through persistent user tracking. However, state-of-the-art Multi-Object Tracking models are heavily optimized for surveillance or autonomous driving. A social robot faces distinct egocentric challenges, such as humans moving in unpredictable nonlinear patterns, obstructing each other, or leaving and reentering the scene. These dynamics trigger frequent identity switches (IDSW), causing the robot to lose its footing mid-conversation. To address this, we introduce a focused, custom-annotated egocentric dataset collected via the Furhat robot. We present a systematic evaluation isolating detection errors from tracking logic, comparing face versus body tracking, and assessing the impact of extended memory and appearance re-identification (ReID). Results indicate that increasing temporal memory mitigates prolonged occlusions but fails on complex dynamic events. Integrating ReID resolves complex switches but exhibits opposing effects: it substantially improves body tracking stability, yet causes facial IDSW to spike due to profile angle sensitivity. Ultimately, our optimized pipeline reduces IDSW by 49% compared to a standard tracking-by-detection baseline, effectively mitigating interaction breakdowns. As standard benchmarks lack dense, close-quarter occlusions, this work highlights the critical need for natively captured social dynamics to truly validate HRI perception models.

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

ZeSTA: Zero-Shot TTS Augmentation with Domain-Conditioned Training for Data-Efficient Personalized Speech Synthesis

arXiv:2603.04219v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the use of zero-shot text-to-speech (ZS-TTS) as a data augmentation source for low-resource personalized speech synthesis. While synthetic augmentation can provide linguistically rich and phonetically diverse speech, naively mixing large amounts of synthetic speech with limited real recordings often leads to speaker similarity degradation during fine-tuning. To address this issue, we propose ZeSTA, a simple domain-conditioned training framework that distinguishes real and synthetic speech via a lightweight domain embedding, combined with real-data oversampling to stabilize adaptation under extremely limited target data, without modifying the base architecture. Experiments on LibriTTS and an in-house dataset with two ZS-TTS sources demonstrate that our approach improves speaker similarity over naive synthetic augmentation while preserving intelligibility and perceptual quality. Audio samples are available on our web page.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Vernier: Probing Representational Misalignment Behind Lexical Gaps in Causal Reasoning

Authors:

Instruction-tuned language models can answer the same causal-reasoning question differently after its English variable names are replaced by type-preserving placeholders, although the structural causal model and the gold answer are unchanged. We ask whether this lexical gap reflects information loss in the placeholder view or a misaligned read-out from a representation that still carries answer-relevant content. Vernier uses a paired-view weight update as an instrument and then inspects the mechanism left after the gap closes. In the working regimes, the evidence favours representational misalignment. A variable-name probe becomes more accurate on the placeholder view, and activation patching on Qwen-7B, Qwen-14B, and Llama-3.1-8B shows that the decision-token representation can transfer answer identity between views. The update that realigns the views is counterfactual augmentation over original and placeholder prompts, while the answer-subspace KL mainly sharpens intermediate answer-belief agreement. Success is bounded by model family, scale, and task. CRASS transfer is reliable across Qwen scales and Llama, e-CARE remains weak, and preliminary non-causal rename tasks show a similar qualitative pattern.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Lius: Translation Model Based Instructional Lingustic Using Continual Instruction Tuning In Kupang Malay

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new potential for translation tasks but often experience performance degradation when handling low-resource languages. To address this limitation, we propose an approach for fine-tuning LLMs on a low-resource language, Kupang Malay. Our approach involves designing a set of instructions by leveraging explicit lexical and semantic features from a bilingual dictionary, and introducing Continual Instruction Tuning (CIT), a training paradigm that enables iterative instruction-based training. Experimental results demonstrate that our model, named Lius, yields notable improvements over standard instruction-tuned models by outperforming 4-6 points, and surpassing both Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and Multilingual LLM models by 10-13 points on several evaluation metrics. These findings highlight the potential of our approach to mitigate the reliance on large-scale parallel data in low-resource language translation.