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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

HairPort: In-context 3D-aware Hair Import and Transfer for Images

Transferring hairstyles between images is an important but challenging task in computer graphics, computer vision, and visual effects. It enables users to explore new looks without physically altering their hair, with applications in virtual try-on systems, augmented reality, and entertainment. Most prior works operate best under small pose gaps, and they fall short under large viewpoint and scale differences, where missing hair content must be synthesized rather than transferred. We propose HairPort, a 3D-aware hairstyle transfer framework that attempts to solve these issues by explicitly separating hair removal from transfer and enforcing geometric consistency before synthesis. We introduce a Bald Converter, which produces realistic bald versions of faces through LoRA-based in-context adaptation of FLUX.1 Kontext. To train our Bald Converter, we introduce a new dataset, Baldy, containing 6,000 paired bald and original images across diverse identities and conditions. We also use a 3D-Aware Transfer Pipeline that reconstructs and re-renders the reference hairstyle from the target viewpoint before compositing it onto the source image. Being 3D aware, our method supports large pose and scale discrepancies between the source and target. Finally, a conditional flow-matching generator synthesizes the transferred result from the bald source and geometry-aligned reference guidance. Together, our method enables accurate, pose-consistent, and identity-preserving hairstyle transfer, outperforming existing methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

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

Cost-Optimal Decision Diagrams for Stochastic Boolean Function Evaluation

arXiv:2606.24672v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In many decision-making scenarios, acquiring information incurs different costs. We consider the problem of constructing a deterministic evaluation strategy that minimizes the expected cost of evaluating a propositional formula under variable costs and a probability distribution over truth assignments. We present a branch-and-bound algorithm with variable-selection heuristics, pruning, and caching. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first practical exact algorithm for this level of generality. Experiments on random instances demonstrate scalability and quantify the efficiency-quality trade-off of a greedy beam-search variant. We additionally evaluate a structured heart-disease diagnosis instance. Finally, we prove that the problem is $\#P$-hard and contained in $\mathrm{PSPACE}$.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Interpreting Neural Combinatorial Optimization via Evolving Programmatic Bottlenecks

arXiv:2606.19741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) achieves strong performance, yet its black-box nature remains a key roadblock to deployment and scientific diagnosis. Standard interpretability tools, such as Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), are ill-equipped for NCO, whose decisions are dynamic, state-dependent, and lack proper concept vocabulary definition. To close this gap, we introduce Evolving Programmatic Bottlenecks (EPB), to our knowledge, the first framework for interpreting NCO policies by distilling black-box NCO models into human-readable program portfolios. EPB employs an LLM to autonomously evolve a bank of programs, where each program's per-step action distribution serves as the bottleneck. EPB works through an iterative framework: Block I fixes program bank capacity and introduces a hybrid textual-numerical gradient descent scheme that couples numerical gradients for student router updates and textual gradients for LLM-based program revision; Block II dynamically adapts bank capacity via fault-targeted expansion and redundancy pruning. Extensive experiments demonstrate EPB's effectiveness and broad applicability, where the distilled program portfolios largely match original performance. EPB also reveals that NCO behavior shifts across optimization stages and can be approximated as a composition of classic heuristic variants. Our work advances interpretable NCO and establishes EPB as a promising tool for interpreting sequential decision-making models.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Crystalline Spectral Form Factors

arXiv:2512.11054v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate crystalline-like behavior of the spectral form factor in unitary quantum systems with extremely strong eigenvalue repulsion. Using a low-temperature Coulomb gas as a model of repulsive eigenvalues, we derive the Debye-Waller factor suppressing periodic oscillations of the spectral form factor and estimate the order of its singularities at multiples of the Heisenberg time. We also reproduce this crystalline-like behavior using perturbed permutation circuits and random matrix ensembles associated with Lax matrices. Our results lay a foundation for future studies of quantum systems that exhibit intermediate level statistics between standard random matrix ensembles and permutation circuits.

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

MamBOA: State-Space Architecture for Video Recognition

Fine-grained action recognition demands temporal reasoning that general-purpose architectures address through different cost-accuracy tradeoffs: 3D dense operators couple computation to the input volume, while difference-based methods approximate motion through rigid, hand-crafted subtraction of uncontextualized features - each reflecting a deliberate design choice with corresponding limitations in expressiveness or flexibility. We present MamBOA, a backbone-agnostic temporal framework built upon a novel interleaved scan structure that recasts the selective state-space recurrence (S6) as a native motion synthesizer. By interleaving consecutive feature representations extracted from a pretrained backbone into a single alternating sequence, the proposed scan structurally drives the recurrence to encode both temporal observations of each position within a shared hidden state, separated by only a single decay step - rendering the inter-frame transition an intrinsic component of the state dynamics rather than an externally computed quantity. A cascade of dedicated alignment and decoding operations then distills this joint encoding into an explicit motion representation, which a dual-path pooling mechanism adaptively aggregates by balancing attention-driven selection with uniform temporal coverage. The framework interfaces seamlessly with CNN, Transformer, and Mamba backbone families, adding only ~2.1 GFLOPs per feature pair. On Diving48, MamBOA achieves 85.02% Top-1 accuracy with an image-pretrained backbone and 86.24% with a video-pretrained backbone processing the entire video in a single forward pass - demonstrating that structurally induced state-space dynamics constitute a principled and general foundation for motion modeling.

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

Domain-Guided Prompting of the Segment Anything Model for Seismic Interpretation: The Role of Attributes, Visualization, and Hybrid Prompts

The advent of large pretrained foundation models for computer vision has significantly improved the efficiency of visual data interpretation. The Segment Anything Model (SAM), in particular, offers powerful zero shot segmentation capabilities through prompt based interaction, thus making it a promising tool for seismic interpretation. However, most existing applications of SAM rely on fine tuning for specific geological targets, which requires extensive labeled data, incurs high computational cost, and often compromises the model's generalization capability. In this study, we introduce a principled framework for zero shot adaptation of foundation models to seismic data. The framework is built on two key components: (1) aligning seismic attributes and visualization choices (e.g., colormaps) with the geological target of interest, and (2) employing a hybrid prompting strategy that combines sparse user defined point prompts with dense mask prompts derived from SAM's internal feature activations. We systematically evaluate this framework across multiple geological targets, datasets, prompt configurations, and seismic attribute representations. Our results demonstrate that geologic target aware selection of seismic attributes and colormaps, combined with hybrid prompting, enhances the separability of geological features and improves boundary delineation and segmentation accuracy relative to point based prompting alone. Our findings show that, when these components are jointly applied, SAM can achieve competitive segmentation performance in a fully zero shot setting, thereby eliminating the need to retrain SAM for each geologic feature. This work establishes a practical and scalable pathway to leverage foundation models in seismic interpretation, reducing reliance on labeled data while preserving model generality.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

IAPO: Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization for Tool Use in Small Multimodal Agents

arXiv:2606.11652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper investigates reinforcement learning (RL) methods for improving tool-calling capabilities in multimodal small language model (SLM) agents. While existing works have explored various reward designs to improve agentic tool-calling ability, these approaches face inherent limitations for SLM training, especially under multimodal scenarios. First, many existing methods evaluate tool use correctness through exact matching against certain ground-truth or predefined formats. However, this assumption is often unsuitable for multimodal tasks, where multiple tool use paths may be valid and annotated tool trajectories are typically unavailable. Second, such sparse and brittle binary rewards provide little guidance on how to improve the underlying decision process, making them particularly difficult for multimodal SLM to learn from. To address these issues, we propose Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization (IAPO), an RL algorithm for improving tool use in multimodal SLM by aligning the model's attribution across input components with that of a stronger teacher. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-3B show that the proposed method improves visual question answering accuracy by an average of 3% across six test sets compared with existing visual tool use work, by helping the model attend to the most relevant input evidence.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Online Realizable Regression and Applications for ReLU Networks

arXiv:2602.19172v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Realizable online regression can behave very differently from online classification. Even without any margin or stochastic assumptions, realizability may enforce horizon-free (finite) cumulative loss under metric-like losses, even when the analogous classification problem has an infinite mistake bound. We study realizable online regression in the adversarial model under losses that satisfy an approximate triangle inequality (approximate pseudo-metrics). Recent work of Attias et al. shows that the minimax realizable cumulative loss is characterized by the scaled Littlestone/online dimension $\mathbb{D}_{\mathrm{onl}}$, but this quantity can be difficult to analyze. Our main technical contribution is a generic potential method that upper bounds $\mathbb{D}_{\mathrm{onl}}$ by a concrete Dudley-type entropy integral that depends only on covering numbers of the hypothesis class under the induced sup pseudo-metric. We define an entropy potential $\Phi(\mathcal{H})=\int_{0}^{diam(\mathcal{H})} \log N(\mathcal{H},\varepsilon)\,d\varepsilon$, where $N(\mathcal{H},\varepsilon)$ is the $\varepsilon$-covering number of $\mathcal{H}$, and show that for every $c$-approximate pseudo-metric loss, $\mathbb{D}_{\mathrm{onl}}(\mathcal{H})\le O(c)\,\Phi(\mathcal{H})$. In particular, polynomial metric entropy implies $\Phi(\mathcal{H})d$, otherwise infinite), and for bounded-norm $k$-ReLU networks separate regression (finite loss, even $\widetilde O(k^2)$, and $O(1)$ for one ReLU) from classification (impossible already for $k=2,d=1$).

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

A Robust Strontium Tweezer Apparatus for Quantum Computing

arXiv:2601.16564v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Neutral atoms for quantum computing applications show promise in terms of scalability and connectivity. We demonstrate the realization of a versatile apparatus capable of stochastically loading a 5x5 array of optical tweezers with single $^{88}$Sr atoms featuring flexible magnetic field control and excellent optical access. A custom-designed oven, spin-flip Zeeman slower, and deflection stage produce a controlled flux of Sr directed to the science chamber. In the science chamber, featuring a vacuum pressure of $3 \times 10^{-11}$ mbar, the Sr is cooled using two laser cooling stages, resulting in $\sim 3 \times 10^5$ atoms at a temperature of 5(1) $\mu$K. The optical tweezers feature a $1/e^2$ waist of 0.81(2) $\mu$m, and loaded atoms can be imaged with a fidelity of $\sim 0.997$ and a survival probability of $0.99^{+0.01}_{-0.02}$. The atomic array presented here forms the core of a full-stack quantum computing processor targeted for quantum chemistry computational problems.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Subsystem Quantum Error Correction for Noisy Quantum Metrology

arXiv:2606.19628v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum error correction has been successfully applied to enhance the precision of parameter estimation in the presence of noise. Nonetheless, existing methods require a number of noiseless, controllable ancillae and lack efficient encoding and decoding procedures. In this Letter, we demonstrate that subsystem error correction provides a new direction that can substantially simplify the metrological protocol. We derive general conditions under which subsystem stabilizer codes achieve the Heisenberg limit and show that, for broad classes of noise, this can be realized by syndrome-free protocols using at most a single ancilla qubit. Furthermore, we extend this framework to dynamical error correction and show that Floquet codes can protect time-dependent metrological signals in reaching the Heisenberg limit.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Bandstructure of a coupled BEC-cavity system: effects of dissipation and geometry

arXiv:2504.17730v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present a theoretical model for a transversally driven Bose-Einstein condensate coupled to an optical cavity. We focus on the interplay between different coherent couplings, which can trigger a structural phase transition, known as the superradiant phase transition. Our approach, based on band structure theory and a mean-field description, enables a comprehensive analysis of the nature of the system's excited modes, precursing the phase transitions. By incorporating dissipative couplings, intrinsic to these systems, we find non-Hermitian phenomena such as the coalescence of crossing precursor modes and the emergence of exceptional points (EPs). The general formulation of our model allows us to explain the role of an angle between transverse pump and the cavity deviating from $90^\circ$. This offers us a unified perspective on the plethora of different implementations of such systems.

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

ThousandWorlds: A benchmark for climate emulation of potentially habitable exoplanets

arXiv:2606.18338v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The search for life beyond Earth will depend on detecting faint signatures in the atmospheres of potentially habitable exoplanets. Interpreting those signatures requires understanding the host planet's climate: the same molecule may signal life on one planet and abiotic chemistry on another. Global climate models (GCMs) provide this understanding, but individual runs can require up to millions of core-hours and substantial domain expert time. Machine-learning emulators could remove this bottleneck, but progress has been limited by the absence of a curated, multi-model exoclimate dataset. We introduce ThousandWorlds, an ML-ready benchmark for exoclimate emulation and for the broader regime of low-data, multi-simulator, parameter-to-field regression. The dataset contains approximately 1800 simulations from five GCMs, mapping eight planet parameters to 3D atmospheric fields including temperature, humidity, winds, clouds, and radiation. Three nested subsets define progressively harder challenges: single-simulator regression, multi-simulator regression with complete observations, and multi-simulator regression with structured missingness. We propose two evaluation protocols: one for ranking methods, and one that measures performance relative to the disagreement between GCMs themselves. We evaluate seven baselines spanning simple methods, deep learning, and Gaussian processes. GP-based methods perform best, suggesting that ThousandWorlds exposes a regime where off-the-shelf deep learning does not yet succeed. Data: https://doi.org/10.57967/hf/8695. Code: https://github.com/edstevenson/ThousandWorlds.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

TerraTransfer: Learning End-to-End Driving Policies Without Expert Demonstrations

End-to-end autonomous driving has achieved state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks and real-world deployments. Its standard training recipe, however, is expensive across all stages: collecting and labeling millions of driving frames is costly, and closed-loop RL on images is bottlenecked by the per-step cost of photorealistic rendering plus a forward pass through a large vision backbone. Self-play in vectorized simulators changes the economics: millions of rollout steps per second, and a state distribution naturally rich in collisions, near-misses, and recoveries that no driving log contains. Our approach exploits this asymmetry by decoupling learning to drive from learning to see. We pretrain a single policy by self-play, then align its latent space with a pretrained vision backbone, through the action KL divergence and a batch-relational low-rank structural loss. The action target comes from the self-play policy, so alignment never supervises against a logged trajectory: a paired dataset of (image, scene-state) frames suffices, with no need for the curated expert demonstrations that imitation pretraining is built on. On photorealistic 3D Gaussian splatting closed-loop scenarios, the resulting end-to-end policy matches or exceeds prior end-to-end methods.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Efficacy of a Gamified Digital Platform for Substance Use Education and Overdose Prevention Among College Students: a Pilot and Feasibility Study

Background: For US young adults aged 18-25 in the 2018-2024 period, fentanyl was involved in 78.2% of the 44,020 unintentional or undetermined-intent overdose deaths, most often co-involving stimulants and other non-opioid substances. While fatal overdose rates in this age group have fallen to their lowest recorded level, emergency medical services-attended non-fatal overdose events have reached record highs, shifting the decisive variable toward bystander recognition and response. College students report near-universal alcohol education but minimal education on the substances actually driving overdose mortality. Methods: We conducted a single-group pre-post evaluation of the DopaGE Portal, a gamified, mastery-based digital platform covering cocaine, MDMA, benzodiazepines, and opioid overdose response, deployed at a public university (UNL) and a multi-campus volunteer network (TACO). Paired pre/post surveys (N=42) measured self-efficacy (7 items; primary), behavioral intentions, risk perception, and knowledge/attitudes on 5-point scales, plus four factual knowledge questions. Paired t-tests, exact McNemar tests, and Benjamini-Hochberg correction across eight primary tests were applied. Institutional naloxone distribution at UNL was tracked as an ecological behavioral outcome. A mandated high-school cohort (N=94) provided supplementary acceptability data. Results: Self-efficacy increased from 2.82 to 4.46 (d=2.00, 95% CI 1.46-2.55; adjusted p

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Vine Codes: Low-Overhead Quantum LDPC Codes on a Planar Square Grid

arXiv:2606.20263v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The surface code is a promising route towards large-scale quantum computing, requiring only nearest-neighbour gates amenable to superconducting hardware. However, surface codes incur large qubit overheads. Novel quantum low-density parity check (qLDPC) codes promise to reduce overheads but require long-range connections that are difficult to achieve on superconducting platforms. Here, we introduce "Vine Codes" - qLDPC codes that are implementable on a planar square grid through nearest-neighbour, two-qubit gates native to superconducting platforms (iSWAP and CZ). Our approach generalises "Directional Codes" recently introduced by Gehér et. al. (2025) which are constrained to a torus. In contrast, vine codes have open boundary conditions constructed with the aid of routing qubits. We perform extensive numeric searches and find promising candidate vine codes, e.g. [[121,4,6]], [[221,6,7]], and [[234,9,6]] codes. We verify the circuit distances and show that data and measure qubits required can be reduced by up to ~28% relative to the surface code at a circuit distance of 7. Even including routing qubits, vine codes require fewer total qubits than the surface code (e.g. ~18% reduction at circuit distance 10) and benefits are expected to increase at higher distances. We perform circuit-level noise simulations to demonstrate that under a realistic noise model and at a near-term noise rate of $10^{-3}$, vine codes can perform better than the surface code while using fewer qubits. We give an exhaustive list of all unique vine codes up to stabiliser-weight 9. We additionally introduce "Flip-Vine Codes" which possess single-qubit transversal Clifford gates useful for fault-tolerant logic and magic state cultivation. We furthermore construct examples of generalised open boundaries for vine codes that go beyond the familiar X/Z boundaries of the surface and tile codes.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Validation of a Smartphone-Image-Based Computer-Vision Model for Lean Mass and Body Fat Estimation Against Dual-Energy X-ray Absorptiometry

Introduction Body composition, rather than body weight alone, is an increasingly important health metric, and preservation of lean mass has become a central concern in obesity treatment, aging, and chronic disease management. Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) provides accurate assessment of fat and lean tissue, but its cost and logistical requirements limit repeated measurement. Computer-vision approaches show promise for estimating adiposity from smartphone images, but lean-mass estimation remains less established. Methods We evaluated a computer-vision body composition model, applied to consumer-grade smartphone photographs, against DXA in a held-out validation sample of 195 adults from an ongoing cross-sectional study. Body fat percentage and total lean mass percentage were co-primary outcomes; for total lean mass percentage, an image-only configuration (no added covariates) was pre-specified as primary. Agreement was quantified using Lin's concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) as the lead statistic, with Pearson correlation, mean absolute error, root mean square error, mean bias, and Bland-Altman limits of agreement. In secondary analyses, appendicular lean mass and total lean mass percentage were each estimated with and without routine anthropometric and demographic inputs (body weight, height, age, and sex). Results Total lean mass percentage agreed with DXA from image features alone (CCC 0.916). Body fat percentage, estimated with routine inputs added, agreed at least as closely (CCC 0.930). Adding routine inputs barely changed agreement for total lean mass percentage but markedly improved it for appendicular lean mass, an absolute quantity that scales with body size. Conclusions A smartphone-image-based model estimated both body fat and lean mass with strong agreement to DXA, with lean mass percentage from image features alone. The approach needs no fixed equipment or ionizing radiation. Whether it can track change over time, including in incretin-based weight loss where lean mass preservation is a concern, was not assessed in this cross-sectional study.

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

Foundations of Practical Quantum Advantage in Quantum-Informed Machine Learning for Predicting Chaos

arXiv:2606.13422v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop theoretical foundations for a practical quantum-advantage mechanism in quantum-informed machine learning for chaotic dynamical systems. A family of k-indexed higher-order quantum statistical priors (Q-Priors) hosts the k-point marginal of the invariant measure on n_q = kq qubits, extending the single-site construction of prior work. We prove a two-stage advantage. In the representation stage, superposition and entanglement compactly store non-factorisable spatial correlations of the invariant measure on n_q qubits. In the extraction stage, joint Bell measurements on two copies estimate any post hoc Pauli functional with a copy-pair count independent of n_q, whereas any adaptive single-copy protocol for the corresponding full-Pauli read-out requires Omega(2^(n_q)) copies; this is a provable quantum-classical separation in copy-measurement complexity. The two-copy read-out is realised in simulation and on IQM superconducting processors. Two case studies instantiate the mechanism in workflows of independent scientific value: a turbulent channel-flow study in which the two-copy read-out yields a named non-diagonal correlator of the invariant measure (the velocity-direction coherence), and a medium-range weather forecasting workflow on the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts ERA5 reanalysis in which the diagonal k

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

Robust Instruction Compliance in Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2605.12655v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in real-world use cases may need to adapt to external natural language instructions that interrupt ongoing behavior and conflict with long-horizon objectives. However, conditioning rewards on instructions introduces a fundamental failure mode as Bellman updates couple value estimates across instruction contexts, leading to inconsistent values when instructions interrupt macro-actions. We propose Macro-Action Value Correction for Instruction Compliance (MAVIC), which corrects Bellman backups at instruction boundaries by correcting the incoming instruction objective and restoring the continuation value under the current objective. Unlike reward shaping, MAVIC modifies the bootstrapping target itself, enabling consistent value estimation under stochastic instruction switching within a unified policy. We provide theoretical analysis and an actor-critic implementation, and show that MAVIC achieves high instruction compliance while preserving base task performance in increasingly complex cooperative multi-agent environments.

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

Enabling Real-Time Point-of-Care Ultrasound Segmentation: A GPU-Free Deployment in Resource-Limited Settings

Authors:

Ultrasound imaging is the most widely adopted medical modality globally due to its low cost and portability, yet artificial intelligence (AI) deployment remains constrained by reliance on GPU-accelerated models, creating a structural paradox where the cost of "intelligence" exceeds that of the imaging device itself. Here, we present the systematic adaptation and extensive evaluation of UltraSeg, an ultra-lightweight architecture originally developed for colonoscopic polyp segmentation, now engineered for point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) across ten public datasets spanning six anatomical sites (breast, thyroid, kidney, carotid, fetal, and small-animal tumor). We systematically validate both variants in ultrasound domains: UltraSeg-130K (0.13M parameters) achieves 89.7 FPS on single-core CPUs and 34.8 FPS on a refurbished mobile device, while UltraSeg-500K (0.5M parameters) delivers 44.6 FPS on CPU and 16.1 FPS on mobile device. UltraSeg-500K matches or exceeds the Dice performance of the 31M-parameter UNet and approaches 105M-parameter TransUNet in average performance, with superior zero-shot cross-dataset generalization on external validation sets (UDIAT, DDTI). By enabling clinical-grade segmentation without GPU dependency, this work brings AI costs in line with ultrasound accessibility, making advanced diagnostics available in resource-limited settings.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Fast Human Attention Prediction for Fixation-guided Active Perception in Autonomous Navigation

Human visual attention relies on structured scanpaths to efficiently process scenes, yet instilling this behavior into robot autonomy is in its infancy and hindered by the high,computational costs of existing predictive models. To address this, we introduce GazeLNN, a computationally lightweight,scanpath prediction model that leverages Liquid Neural Networks as its recurrent engine and employs MobileNetV3 for feature extraction. Operating auto-regressively, the architecture predicts sequential fixation heatmaps conditioned on the current visual stimulus and fixation history. Despite requiring only 0.61 GFLOPs, GazeLNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MIT Low Resolution dataset achieving 0.47 ScanMatch score. It outperforms existing recurrent baselines across diverse evaluation metrics, while reducing computational costs by 99.40% and accelerating inference by up to six times. To investigate the role of human attention modeling in robot autonomy and demonstrate the practical utility of this highly efficient architecture, we integrate GazeLNN into an active camera-robot control policy trained via Reinforcement Learning. This integration enables human-fixation-guided perception during autonomous navigation, validated through successful real-world deployments on an aerial robot.

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

Dissociating Decodability and Causal Use in Bracket-Sequence Transformers

When trained on tasks requiring an understanding of hierarchical structure, transformers have been found to represent this hierarchy in distinct ways: in the geometry of the residual stream, and in stack-like attention patterns maintaining a last-in, first-out ordering. However, it remains unclear whether these representations are causally used or merely decodable. We examine this gap in transformers trained on the Dyck language (a formal language of balanced bracket sequences), where the hierarchical ground truth is explicit. By probing and intervening on the residual stream and attention patterns, we find that depth, distance, and top-of-stack signals are all decodable, yet their causal roles diverge. Specifically, masking attention to the true top-of-stack position causes a sharp drop in long-distance accuracy, while ablating low-dimensional residual stream subspaces has comparatively little effect. These results, which extend to a templated natural language setting, suggest that even in a controlled setting where the relevant hierarchical variables are known, decodability alone does not imply causal use.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Device assessed 24-hour movement behaviour and cardiovascular disease mortality amongst cancer survivors.

Background: Cancer survivors face elevated risks of mortality from cardiovascular disease (CVD). The potential importance of physical activity (PA) and other behaviours across the 24-hour day (e.g. sedentary behaviour (SB) and sleep) for CVD-mortality risk is not well understood in this at-risk population. Objectives: To assess the importance of 24-hour movement behaviour, using a compositional approach, for mitigating CVD-mortality amongst cancer survivors. Methods: Participants with a prior cancer diagnosis were drawn from the UK Biobank accelerometry sub-study (n=6,158). Accelerometer-derived movement (moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA), vigorous PA (VPA), moderate PA (MPA), light PA (LPA), SB, sleep) was examined in relation to CVD-mortality, identified from health record linkage data (using Fine-Gray Cox proportional-hazards models adjusted for demographic, health, lifestyle covariates). Results: Median follow-up was 8.0 years (Q1-Q3: 7.4-8.5), with n=500 (8.2%) deaths (CVD-deaths: n=118). Greater MVPA, in place of any other behaviour, was inversely associated with CVD-mortality with e.g. 10% lower hazard if MVPA theoretically replaced 7 minutes (mins)/day SB (Hazard ratio (HR): 0.91, (95% Confidence Interval: 0.86-0.95)), 9 mins/day LPA (HR: 0.90, 0.83-0.97), or 11 mins/day sleep (HR: 0.90, 0.83-0.97). The VPA component of MVPA proved critical, requiring only ~1-2 additional mins/day for equivalent hazard reduction. Sleep duration, was also inversely associated with CVD-mortality. A 10% lower hazard required replacing 29 mins/day of SB with sleep (HR: 0.90, 0.84-0.96); no other behavioural replacement amongst SB, sleep or LPA could provide an equivalent risk reduction. Conclusions: Among cancer survivors, the most potent reduction in CVD-mortality followed theoretically reallocating time to higher intensity movement.

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

LOCUS: Local Visual Cue Search for Enhancing Fine-Grained Perception in Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remain unreliable on fine-grained visual perception, even when high-resolution inputs preserve the necessary local details. We identify this limitation as visual context rot: decisive evidence may exist in the full image, yet fail to be reliably selected and used amid redundant visual context. We propose LOCUS (LOcal visual CUe Search), a training framework that teaches MLLMs to internalize local evidence search through a verifiable proxy task. During training, LOCUS provides a local crop as a visual cue and optimizes the model to recover its spatial support in the full image using an IoU-based reward. The visual cue is used only during training, leaving the standard image-question inference interface unchanged. Experiments across fine-grained perception, hallucination, general understanding, and reasoning benchmarks show that LOCUS improves localization-sensitive visual understanding while preserving broad capabilities. Attention analyses further indicate stronger focus on task-relevant evidence regions, suggesting that training-time visual cue search provides an effective route to internalized fine-grained evidence selection.

25.
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.