Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11646

Tree-Structured Orthonormal Decomposition of the Aitchison Simplex

Authors:

Daisuke Yamada↗Qijun Zhang↗Travis Pence↗Barbara B. Bendlin↗Federico Rey↗Vikas Singh↗

arXiv:2606.11646v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compositional data – vectors encoding relative proportions – arise across scientific domains, including ecology, geochemistry, and genomics. The features in these data often come with known hierarchical structure (e.g., taxonomies, phylogenies, ontologies), yet existing methods either ignore this structure, discard the intrinsic Aitchison geometry, are designed for binary trees, or yield incomplete coordinate systems. We describe PolyILR, a canonical orthonormal decomposition of the Aitchison tangent space aligned with any tree topology. Our construction defines a weighted local geometry at each internal node capturing full branching structure, then lifts these to a global orthonormal basis where every coordinate corresponds to a specific tree location. On microbiome and single-cell benchmarks, PolyILR yields stable, interpretable features and enables inference at multiscale tree resolution. We also establish a novel theoretical connection to softmax classifiers, suggesting possible applications to probabilistic modeling.

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02.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16564

Elastic ODYN: Differentiable Optimization for Infeasible Control and Learning in Robotics

Authors:

Aristotelis Papatheodorou↗Jose Rojas↗Ioannis Havoutis↗Carlos Mastalli↗

arXiv:2606.16564v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic systems routinely encounter conflicting objectives, modeling errors, and degenerate contact conditions that render quadratic programs (QPs) infeasible. Yet most optimization solvers and differentiable QP layers assume feasibility, leading to numerical failures, unstable gradients, or solver breakdown when constraints cannot be simultaneously satisfied. We present Elastic ODYN, a primal–dual non-interior-point QP solver that handles infeasibility through smooth squared-$\ell_2$ elastic relaxations. The resulting formulation remains well posed under ill-conditioning and degeneracy, supports warm starting, and converges to closest-to-feasible solutions when no feasible point exists. A lightweight refinement stage recovers physically meaningful dual variables from the elastic solution. Building on this framework, we develop Elastic OdynLayer, a differentiable QP layer with stable gradients under infeasibility, and Elastic OdynSQP, an infeasibility-aware SQP method that resolves inconsistent subproblems and intrinsically infeasible optimal control tasks through selective constraint relaxation. We evaluate the framework on benchmark QPs, singular contact mechanics, differentiable parameter identification, and quadrupedal and humanoid trajectory optimization. Across all settings, Elastic ODYN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art elastic QP solvers in robustness, warm-start performance, and convergence reliability, enabling optimization, simulation, control, and learning beyond the feasibility assumptions of existing methods.

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03.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:a48ce293a7fd4e190e47329e4e2336b5

Differential DNA Methylation and Delirium After Anesthesia and Surgery

Authors:

Hogan↗Berger↗Kolstad↗Madrid↗Hsia↗Wright↗Devinney↗Smith↗Aisch↗

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

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04.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2510.18189

A Generalizable Light Transport 3D Embedding for Global Illumination

Authors:

Bing Xu↗Mukund Varma T↗Cheng Wang↗Tzu-Mao Li↗Lifan Wu↗Bartlomiej Wronski↗Ravi Ramamoorthi↗Marco Salvi↗

Global illumination (GI) is essential for realistic rendering but remains computationally expensive due to the complexity of simulating indirect light transport. Recent neural methods have mainly relied on per-scene optimization, sometimes extended to handle changes in camera or geometry. Efforts toward cross-scene generalization have largely stayed in 2D screen space, such as neural denoising or G-buffer based GI prediction, which often suffer from view inconsistency and limited spatial understanding. We propose a generalizable 3D light transport embedding that approximates global illumination directly from 3D scene configurations, without using rasterized or path-traced cues. Each scene is represented as a point cloud with geometric and material features. A scalable transformer models global point-to-point interactions to encode these features into neural primitives. At render time, each query point retrieves nearby primitives via nearest-neighbor search and aggregates their latent features through cross-attention to predict the desired rendering quantity. We demonstrate results on diffuse global illumination prediction across diverse indoor scenes with varying layouts, geometry, and materials. The embedding trained for irradiance estimation can be quickly adapted to new rendering tasks with limited fine-tuning. We also present preliminary results for spatial-directional radiance field estimation for glossy materials and show how the normalized field can accelerate unbiased path guiding. This approach highlights a path toward integrating learned priors into rendering pipelines without explicit ray-traced illumination cues.

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05.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19111

Leadership as Coordination Control: Behavioral Signatures and the Recovery-Advantage Boundary in Multi-Agent LLM Teams

Authors:

Haewoon Kwak↗

Team science holds that leadership is contingent: it helps only under specific conditions, and capable, autonomous teams may need none at all. We ask the analogous question for multi-agent LLM teams: under what measurable conditions does process-level coordination control add value, and do those conditions match what team science predicts? We use behavioral signatures (majority lock-in, exploration, recovery from an incorrect round-0 consensus) and per-action ablations, clean because each controller is an explicit action set, not a monolithic prompt. We operationalize three classical leadership styles (transactional, transformational, situational) as controllers over a shared action vocabulary (explore, revise, accept, synthesize). A matched controller with the same actions but an arbitrary rule recovers no better than majority voting, so the theory-derived rule, not the vocabulary, does the work. Across four task regimes and three open-weight model families, no controller dominates by accuracy, as the contingency view predicts: transactional control matches a shared round-0 vote on all 12 (model, regime) combinations to within 1.3pp, and gains appear only on the one combination where the round-0 majority is unreliable (llama-4-scout social; situational +8pp over flat). A recovery-advantage account, tested with four boundary probes, says a controller beats plain interaction only where the round-0 majority is unreliable, the task is recoverable, and undirected interaction does not already repair it. These regions map onto contingency theory (leadership substitutes, path-goal redundancy, the situational readiness gap), so a largely null accuracy result is what the theory predicts, not a failure of the controllers. We read process-level coordination control as a contingency to be measured and theory-mapped, not a leaderboard to be topped.

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06.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2403.13927

Noise-induced shallow circuits and absence of barren plateaus

Authors:

Antonio Anna Mele↗Armando Angrisani↗Soumik Ghosh↗Sumeet Khatri↗Jens Eisert↗Daniel Stilck Fran\c{c}a↗Yihui Quek↗

arXiv:2403.13927v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by realistic hardware considerations of the pre-fault-tolerant era, we comprehensively study the impact of uncorrected noise on quantum circuits. We first show that in the task of estimating observable expectation values any noise truncates most quantum circuits to effectively logarithmic depth. We then prove that quantum circuits under any non-unital noise do not exhibit barren plateaus for cost functions composed of local observables. However, by using the effective shallowness, we also design an efficient classical algorithm to estimate observable expectation values within any constant additive accuracy, with high probability over the choice of the circuit, in any circuit architecture. Taken together, our results establish that, unless we carefully engineer quantum circuits to take advantage of the noise, noisy quantum circuits are unlikely to offer an advantage over shallow ones for algorithms that output observable expectation value estimates, such as many variational quantum machine learning proposals.

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07.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2505.16077

Ensembling Sparse Autoencoders

Authors:

Soham Gadgil↗Chris Lin↗Su-In Lee↗

arXiv:2505.16077v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to decompose neural network activations into human-interpretable features. Typically, features learned by a single SAE are used for downstream applications. However, it has recently been shown that a single SAE captures only a limited subset of features that can be extracted from the activation space. Motivated by this limitation, we introduce and formalize SAE ensembles. Furthermore, we propose to ensemble multiple SAEs through naive bagging and boosting. In naive bagging, SAEs trained with different weight initializations are ensembled, whereas in boosting SAEs sequentially trained to minimize the residual error are ensembled. Theoretically, naive bagging and boosting are justified as approaches to reduce reconstruction error. Empirically, we evaluate our ensemble approaches with three settings of language models and SAE architectures. Our empirical results demonstrate that, compared to an expanded SAE that matches the number of features in the ensemble, ensembling SAEs improves the reconstruction of language model activations along with SAE stability. Additionally, on downstream tasks such as concept detection and spurious correlation removal, SAE ensembles achieve better performance, showing improved practical utility.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16448

Hierarchical Fine-Grained Aerial Object Detection

Authors:

Yan Zhang↗Fang Xu↗Wen Yang↗Gui-Song Xia↗

Fine-grained aerial object detection, driven by the intrinsic granularity of real-world object categories, is crucial for advanced scene understanding in remote sensing. Existing methods largely inherit the paradigm of coarse-grained object detection, relying solely on single-label supervision and thus struggling to distinguish model-level categories with subtle structural differences. However, for each specific model (e.g., Boeing 787), structured prior knowledge such as attributes and hierarchies offers discriminative semantics across multiple granularities. Motivated by this, we present ExpertDet, a scheme that incorporates expert-informed cues to enhance fine-grained aerial object detection. Specifically, we design Vision-aware Masked Attribute Modeling (VMAM), which aligns attribute semantics with visual structures by reconstructing randomly masked attributes from visual cues, enabling the detector to capture subtle structural distinctions. We further propose Hierarchical Visual Instance Promotion (HierVIP), which builds a visual prototype tree based on hierarchical relations and imposes taxonomy-aware constraints to preserve cross-level semantic continuity while enhancing category discrimination. Moreover, we curate a new fine-grained object detection benchmark for Precise recognition of model-specific Ships and Planes from aerial imagery, PSP, covering 106 ship classes and 30 airplane models, respectively, featuring the most extensive collection of model-specific categories among existing aerial object detection datasets to date. We benchmark state-of-the-art object detection algorithms on the PSP benchmark. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that ExpertDet consistently outperforms other fine-grained competitors across hierarchy levels. The dataset, benchmark, and code are available at https://nnnnerd.github.io/PSP-Benchmark/.

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09.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19247

A Taxonomy of Mental Health and Technology Needs for Alzheimer's and Dementia Caregivers

Authors:

Keran Wang↗Drishti Goel↗Jiayue Melissa Shi↗Violeta J. Rodriguez↗Daniel S. Brown↗Dong Whi Yoo↗Ravi Karkar↗Koustuv Saha↗

arXiv:2606.19247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Family members caring for individuals with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (AD/ADRD) provide the foundation of long-term care worldwide. In 2023, more than 11 million U.S. family and friends contributed 18 billion hours of unpaid care, often at the cost of their own physical and mental health. These informal caregivers – also referred as the "invisible second patients" – experience elevated rates of mental health problems. Yet research commonly reduces their complex psychosocial experiences to a single construct of caregiver burden, obscuring which specific needs are unmet or effectively supported. At the same time, digital and AI-enabled technologies are rapidly expanding, from smartphone apps and videoconferencing to sensor platforms and AI chatbots. However, the absence of shared frameworks across medicine, psychology, and technology research limits cumulative progress. This study introduces a Caregiver Mental Health and Technology Taxonomy that systematically links AD/ADRD caregiver needs with corresponding classes of technology-based interventions. Drawing from an interdisciplinary literature review and two qualitative studies with caregivers, the taxonomy identifies mismatches between caregiver priorities and existing technological support, highlights under-served domains such as relational strain and compassion fatigue, and proposes design directions for adaptive, responsive systems. The framework offers a shared vocabulary to guide clinicians, researchers, and technology designers in developing more person-centered and clinically grounded innovation in dementia care.

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10.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2503.13328

Model-independent upper bounds for the prices of Bermudan options with convex payoffs

Authors:

David Hobson↗Dominykas Norgilas↗

arXiv:2503.13328v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Suppose $\mu$ and $\nu$ are probability measures on $\mathbb{R}$ satisfying $\mu \leq_{cx} \nu$. Let $a$ and $b$ be convex functions on $\mathbb{R}$ with $a \geq b \geq 0$. We are interested in finding $$\sup_{\mathbf{M}} \sup_{\tau} \mathbb{E}^{\mathbf{M}} \left[ a(X) I_{ \{ \tau = 1 \} } + b(Y) I_{ \{ \tau = 2 \} } \right] $$ where the first supremum is taken over consistent models $\mathbf{M}$ (i.e., filtered probability spaces $(\Omega, \mathbf{F}, \mathbb{F}, \mathbb{P})$ such that $Z=(z,Z_1,Z_2)=(\int_{\mathbb{R}} x \mu(dx) = \int_{\mathbb{R}} y \nu(dy), X, Y)$ is a $(\mathbb{F},\mathbb{P})$ martingale, where $X$ has law $\mu$ and $Y$ has law $\nu$ under $\mathbb{P}$) and $\tau$ in the second supremum is a $(\mathbb{F},\mathbb{P})$-stopping time taking values in $\{1,2\}$. Our contributions are first to characterise and simplify the dual problem, and second to completely solve the problem under some structural assumptions on the measures $\mu$ and $\nu$ (namely that $\mu$ and $\nu$ are absolutely continuous probability measures that satisfy the Dispersion Assumption). A key finding is that the canonical set-up in which the filtration is that generated by $Z$ is not rich enough to define an optimal model and additional randomisation is required. This holds even though the marginal laws $\mu$ and $\nu$ are atom-free. The problem has an interpretation of finding the robust, or model-free, no-arbitrage bound on the price of a Bermudan option with two possible exercise dates, given the prices of co-maturing European options.

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11.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12018

MODF-SIR: A Multi-agent Omni-modal Distilled Framework for Social Intelligence Reasoning

Authors:

Shang Ma↗Jisheng Dang↗Wencan Zhang↗Yifan Zhang↗Bimei Wang↗Hong Peng↗Bin Hu↗Qi Tian↗Tat-Seng Chua↗

arXiv:2606.12018v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a multi-agent collaborative framework built upon a lightweight Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM), specifically designed for social intelligence reasoning. A key feature of our approach is that both the training and inference phases are augmented via knowledge distillation. Within this architecture, multi-modal data pertinent to social intelligence is precisely localized. Furthermore, relevant long-tail events are identified, extracted, and rendered as formatted, explicit text. This formatting strategy prevents critical long-tail information from being overshadowed by head events and environmental noise during the tokenization process. Specifically, we integrate Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) across the entire reasoning pipeline, encompassing the extraction and representation of long-tail events, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, and self-reflection. This TTA mechanism is also distillation-enhanced, utilizing Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune the foundation model exclusively for instance-level reasoning. Extensive evaluations against various open-source and proprietary AI models across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. With around 30% of training data from IntentTrain, we achieve state-of-the-art results. Codes are available at https://github.com/eeee-sys/MODF-SIR, demo is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/Harry-1234/MODF-SIR, LoRA is available at https://huggingface.co/Harry-1234/MODF-SIR and the dataset for training router is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Harry-1234/IntentRouterTrain.

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12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16944

A Causal Model of Theory of Mind in Conflict for Artificial Intelligence

Authors:

Nikolos Gurney↗

arXiv:2606.16944v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Theory of mind (ToM), the capacity to ascribe mental states to others and use those ascriptions for prediction and inference, is widely assumed to be essential for effective human-machine integration. Existing AI-ToM models address how to mentalize, but leave the question of when largely unaddressed. The central question is: under what situational and agent-level conditions is ToM engagement causally warranted in conflict? This paper presents a structural causal model formalized as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), treating ToM as a mechanism activated by situational and agent-level conditions rather than as an always-on capacity. The model specifies four exogenous variables capturing situational and agent-level conditions, five endogenous mediators, and a mechanistic ToM node producing engagement states through three distinct causal pathways: a tractability pathway, a reasoning-depth pathway, and an enabling-cause pathway. The primary outcome is epistemic accuracy, which decouples social reasoning from behavioral policy and generalizes across social phenomena beyond conflict. The framework gives AI systems a principled, resource-rational decision procedure for mentalizing, with implications for efficiency, trust, and the development of robust artificial social intelligence. Simulation validation, empirical human-machine teaming studies, and ethical considerations arising from conflict-optimized mentalizing are discussed.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17645

Beyond Domains: Reusing Web Skills via Transferable Interaction Patterns

Authors:

Shiqi He↗Yue Cui↗Feijie Wu↗Xinyu Ma↗Jiaheng Lu↗Yaliang Li↗Bolin Ding↗Mosharaf Chowdhury↗

Large language model (LLM) web agents are usually deployed as tool callers: each turn, the model reads a fresh page observation and emits one structured tool action. When every action is a low-level primitive, horizons grow quickly and so do policy-facing LLM completions, dominating latency and cost on benchmarks such as Mind2Web and WebArena. Recent systems therefore wrap repeated interaction fragments as web skills: callable tools built from successful trajectories or induced programs, so one call can replace several primitives. However, prior skill libraries are still triggered mainly by instruction similarity or coarse site metadata, which yields low skill reuse on held-out sites and leaves much of the potential step and token reduction on the table. We present SkillMigrator, an agent that learns reusable web skills and transfers them across sites by matching layout structure rather than specific element references. Each induced skill is stored as a transferable interaction pattern (TIP): the skill paired with a structural sketch of the snapshot at induction time. At test time, SkillMigrator retrieves TIPs by layout similarity and grounds their references on the live page. The rest of the stack is standard: accessibility-snapshot observations with stable references, and fixed tool calling over primitives plus skill invocations. Compared with the state-of-the-art approaches, SkillMigrator reduces the average LLM-action count on successful trajectories by 8-10% across both WebArena and Mind2Web at matched success rate.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2605.04221

Self-Prompting Small Language Models for Privacy-Sensitive Clinical Information Extraction

Authors:

Yao-Shun Chuang↗Tushti Mody↗Uday Pratap Singh↗Shirindokht Shiraz↗Chun-Teh Lee↗Ryan Brandon↗Muhammad F Walji↗Xiaoqian Jiang↗Bunmi Tokede↗

Clinical named entity recognition from dental progress notes is challenging because documentation is highly unstructured, domain-specific, and often privacy-sensitive. We developed a locally deployable framework that enables small language models to self-generate, verify, refine, and evaluate entity-specific prompts for extracting multiple clinical entities from dental notes. Using 1,200 annotated notes, we evaluated candidate open-weight models with multi-prompt ensemble inference and further adapted selected models using QLoRA-based supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization. Model performance varied substantially, highlighting the need for task-specific evaluation rather than reliance on generic benchmarks. Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct achieved the strongest baseline performance. After DPO, Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct achieved micro/macro F1 scores of 0.864/0.837 and 0.806/0.797, respectively. These findings suggest that automated prompt optimization combined with lightweight preference-based post-training can support scalable clinical information extraction using locally deployed small language models.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2502.07531

VidCRAFT3: Camera, Object, and Lighting Control for Image-to-Video Generation

Authors:

Sixiao Zheng↗Zimian Peng↗Yanpeng Zhou↗Yi Zhu↗Hang Xu↗Xiangru Huang↗Yanwei Fu↗

Controllable image-to-video (I2V) generation transforms a reference image into a coherent video guided by user-specified control signals. While precise control over camera motion, object motion, and lighting is essential for high-fidelity creation, existing methods often treat these factors independently. This overlooks the physical coupling among viewpoint, geometry, and illumination in dynamic scenes, leading to visual inconsistencies such as mismatched shadows and perspective drift under simultaneous changes. We present VidCRAFT3, a unified and flexible I2V framework that explicitly models cross-factor interactions among geometry, motion, and illumination, enabling both independent and joint control over camera motion, object motion, and lighting direction. Image2Cloud provides explicit 3D geometric priors for accurate camera motion control. ObjMotionNet encodes sparse object trajectories into multi-scale motion features to guide realistic object motion. A Spatial Triple-Attention Transformer integrates lighting direction through lighting cross-attention for consistent relighting. To address the scarcity of jointly annotated data, we construct the VideoLightingDirection (VLD) dataset with accurate per-frame lighting direction annotations, and introduce a three-stage progressive training strategy that enables robust learning without fully joint annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VidCRAFT3 achieves state-of-the-art performance in control precision and visual coherence across diverse scenarios.

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16.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15207

Controlled Dynamics Attractor Transformer

Authors:

Cheng Zhang↗Minnan Luo↗Zesheng Yang↗Ming Li↗Yong-Jin Liu↗Qinghua Zheng↗

arXiv:2606.15207v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer architectures have dramatically advanced representation learning and inference in deep models through self-attention mechanisms. In parallel,associative memory (AM) frameworks map representations onto energy landscapes, offering interpretable retrieval mechanisms. However, their continuous-time inference dynamics lack the biological plausibility of classical Continuous Attractor Neural Networks (CANNs). To bridge this gap, we propose Controlled Dynamics Attractor Transformer (CDAT), which couples a mixture von Mises-Fisher (Mo-vMF) attention energy with a Hopfield refinement energy, while augmenting energy descent with a CANN-inspired excitation-inhibition modulation. CDAT instantiates a topology-constrained dynamical system whose couplings encode relational structure among tokens, thereby linking attractor-style dynamics to modern energy-based attention. We further provide a constructive dissipation analysis to formally establish their controlled inference dynamics. Benefiting from these robust and structured dynamics, CDAT achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks in graph anomaly detection and graph classification.

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17.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17384

Improving and Evaluating Hand-Object Interaction Detection

Authors:

Ahmad Darkhalil↗Dima Damen↗David Fouhey↗

Understanding hands and the objects they interact with, both directly and through tools, is a key step for tasks ranging from action perception to 3D reconstruction and robotics. Our paper provides several contributions to the Hand-Object Interaction (HOI) understanding literature: (1) HOI-DETR, a new framework that introduces hand-object and object-object interactions to the Co-DETR architecture to produce a state-of-the-art method; (2) a comprehensive HOI evaluation suite of 4 diverse datasets, including a video benchmark derived from the HD-EPIC dataset and fresh annotations that improve the Hands23 benchmark and (3) a trained checkpoint that significantly improves the state of the art across Hands23, HOIST, FineBio, and HD-EPIC, including mAP gains of over 20 percentage points on Hands23 and FineBio. Our ablations confirm the contributions of each model component.

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18.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2509.01630

DiffCoord: Differentiable Coordination for Distributed Multi-Agent Trajectory Optimization

Authors:

Bingheng Wang↗Yichao Gao↗Tianchen Sun↗Shanker Ajay↗Lin Zhao↗

arXiv:2509.01630v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Integrating the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) with Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) provides a scalable framework for distributed multi-agent trajectory optimization. In practice, ADMM is typically truncated for computational efficiency, tightly coupling parameters that would otherwise separately govern coordination quality and task performance. In this paper, we propose Differentiable Coordination (DiffCoord), a unified framework that jointly meta-learns these coupled parameters for the truncated ADMM-DDP pipeline. These parameters are generated by agent-wise neural networks for task adaptation, and the same networks are shared among isomorphic agents to enable scalability to varying agent counts. We achieve efficient meta-learning by differentiating the ADMM-DDP pipeline end-to-end. Notably, this yields an auxiliary ADMM-LQR distributed gradient solver that computes and coordinates meta-gradients with respect to these parameters. This solver inherits the computational structure of the pipeline, enabling reuse of key computation results and efficient parallelization over agents and along trajectory horizons. We validate DiffCoord through numerical and physical experiments on a cooperative aerial transport system, where it reconfigures quadrotor formations for safe 6-DoF load manipulation in tight spaces. It adapts robustly to varying team sizes and load dynamics, while reducing per-agent gradient computation time by up to 70% compared with state-of-the-art trajectory-gradient methods.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17935

MoonSplat: Monocular Online Gaussian Splatting with Sim(3) Global Optimization

Authors:

Guo Pu↗Yixuan Han↗Haofeng Li↗Yao Zhang↗Hui Zhou↗Zhouhui Lian↗

Online 3D reconstruction from monocular image sequences is a challenging and ongoing research topic. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), leveraging its high-quality real-time rendering capability, empowers online 3D reconstruction to represent dense scenes with enhanced expressiveness, and thus holds great promise for a wide range of applications such as robotics and AR/VR. However, existing online 3DGS methods still suffer from some key challenges: fragile camera pose estimation due to the lack of global optimization, and low optimization efficiency in large-scale or long-sequence scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a robust and efficient online voxelized 3DGS reconstruction framework integrated with global $Sim(3)$ optimization, which enables reliable camera tracking and efficient global loop closure for both camera poses and voxelized 3DGS. To accelerate the convergence of the voxelized 3DGS, we further introduce a color residual learning strategy, which not only boosts optimization speed but also enhances rendering quality. Extensive experiments on diverse indoor and outdoor datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both camera pose estimation accuracy and rendering quality, while retaining real-time efficiency. Additionally, we develop and deploy a real-world UAV-based active reconstruction system grounded on our proposed method, validating its robustness and generalizability for practical online 3D reconstruction tasks. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/TrickyGo/MoonSplat.

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20.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19186

Learning to Annotate Delayed and False AEB Events: A Practical System for Extreme Class Imbalance and Asymmetric Label Noise

Authors:

Mengxiang Hao↗Xin Jiang↗Xinghao Huang↗Wenliang Su↗Zhiteng Wang↗Junjie Rao↗Xiaotian Yang↗Wei Liao↗Chengyu Han↗Gen Liang↗Yulun Song↗Zhitao Xu↗…

arXiv:2606.19186v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) optimization relies on accurately annotated real-world trigger events, particularly rare but critical delayed and false AEB triggers that expose system deficiencies. However, these minority samples comprise less than 5% of thousands of daily triggers, making manual annotation prohibitively expensive at scale. We present the first automated AEB annotation framework to address this problem. During development, we identified two fundamental challenges that severely impair delayed/false trigger annotation accuracy: (1) Extreme class imbalance where delayed/false triggers are overwhelmed by true triggers; (2) Asymmetric label noise where mislabeled majority samples (true triggers) suppress minority samples (delayed/false triggers) learning. To overcome these challenges, we propose two key innovations: (1) Specific data augmentation that synthesizes realistic samples by manipulating focal target attributes, transplanting ego-vehicle dynamics, and masking non-focal agents; (2) noise suppression using stable hardness estimation and probe-guided adaptive threshold to clean mislabeled true trigger samples. Crucially, we deploy our model as a practical annotation system with full-stack architecture, efficiently identifying critical delayed/false triggers from thousands of daily AEB events. Production results demonstrate 80% improvement in recall of delayed/false triggers and 50% reduction in manual workload. Beyond immediate gains, the system enables continuous self-improvement through accumulated high-quality annotations, establishing a necessary data foundation for on-vehicle AEB system optimization

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21.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15486

ST-DiffEye: Diffusion-based Continuous Gaze Generation via Joint Scanpath-Trajectory Modeling

Authors:

Brian Nlong Zhao↗Ozgur Kara↗Junho Kim↗James M. Rehg↗

We study the problem of human gaze modeling, which aims to generate the gaze patterns a viewer produces while observing a visual stimulus. Gaze is primarily captured through two modalities: continuous eye-tracking trajectories, which describe fine-grained motion dynamics, and discrete scanpaths, which describe high-level fixation structure. Because gaze varies substantially across viewers and trials, we treat this variability as a defining property rather than noise and model gaze as a stochastic generative process. Existing generative gaze models supervise on only one of these two representations in isolation. We hypothesize that trajectories and scanpaths describe gaze at complementary scales and are jointly informative during training, and test this hypothesis through ST-DiffEye, a joint trajectory-scanpath diffusion framework that couples both modalities by concatenating them as an additional raw input channel, requiring no architectural overhead beyond an input and output channel expansion. We further introduce a principled evaluation framework based on the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS), which generalizes any existing sequence similarity metric into a proper scoring rule that jointly assesses the accuracy and diversity of generated gaze. Experiments on task-driven visual search, covering both target-present and target-absent scenarios, and on free-viewing benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. These results, along with detailed ablations, confirm the benefit of joint modeling and the value of distribution-aware evaluation in capturing the intrinsic variability of human gaze. Project webpage: https://st-diffeye.github.io/

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22.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14517

From Shield to Target: Denial-of-Service Attacks on LLM-Based Agent Guardrails

Authors:

Yuguang Zhou↗Xunguang Wang↗Pingchuan Ma↗Zhantong Xue↗Zhaoyu Wang↗Shuai Wang↗

arXiv:2606.14517v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based guardrails have emerged as a highly effective defense against prompt injection and jailbreak attacks in autonomous agents. However, we reveal that the very reasoning and task-following capabilities enabling this protection introduce a novel vulnerability: attackers can inject crafted data to trap the guardrail in extended reasoning loops, effectuating a systematic denial-of-service (DoS) attack. To systematically expose this threat, we design a beam-search optimization framework that crafts natural-language payloads to maximize guardrail reasoning length, utilizing an LLM proposer guided by a strategy bank. Based on the observation of guardrail's schema-following nature, we also provide another attack framework driven by mechanism-aware structural mutations with less computational load. The attack efficacy is systematically evaluated in two parts. First, in standalone evaluations, the attack generalizes across diverse guardrail architectures, safety templates, and agent benchmarks. Payloads optimized on a single open-source surrogate successfully transfer to eight leading model backbones (e.g., Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Qwen), achieving a 13–63$\times$ token amplification. Second, in end-to-end real-world agent deployments (web, desktop, code, and multi-agent systems), the attack reveals up to a 148$\times$ latency amplification. We show that a single poisoned document can saturate shared guardrail infrastructures, effectively starving co-located agents and paralyzing the entire system. By uncovering this availability flaw, our work underscores the urgent need to develop cost-bounded, reasoning-robust guardrails.

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23.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20055

PaAno+: Multiscale Encoding and Cross-Variable Attention for Time Series Anomaly Detection

Authors:

Youji Zhu↗Hongbing Wang↗Wenchao Liu↗Xiaodong Liu↗Xiangguang Xiong↗

arXiv:2606.20055v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series anomaly detection has significant practical value for industrial and medical monitoring, as well as other critical domains. Current Transformer- and large-model-based detection approaches incur excessive computational overhead, while existing lightweight alternatives are constrained by insufficient feature extraction and inadequate modeling of dependencies across multivariate variables. To mitigate the above drawbacks, this study develops a lightweight, efficient anomaly detection model, dubbed PaAno, within the patch-oriented representation learning paradigm. In the encoder module, a multiscale feature-extraction backbone is constructed using convolutional kernels with differentiated receptive fields to capture hierarchical temporal characteristics; subsequent cross-scale adaptive attention aggregation, combined with residual connection optimization, further stabilizes feature representation learning. A cross-variable fusion attention module is embedded to explicitly characterize inter-variable correlations, empowering the model to identify anomalous patterns amid intricate operational conditions. Moreover, a novel pretext task based on temporal patch-window sorting is customized to uncover intrinsic structural properties of time series, and triplet loss is leveraged to optimize the patch embedding space for enhanced feature discrimination. Extensive experiments on the TSB-AD benchmark demonstrate that the proposed PaAno achieves state-of-the-art detection accuracy on both univariate and multivariate tasks, yielding significant performance gains across evaluation metrics, including VUS-PR, relative to the original PaAno. Leveraging a compact network design, the presented model achieves favorable computational efficiency, enabling deployment on resource-limited terminals for real-time anomaly inference.

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24.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18 DOI: HASH:76dc3d69018f138f993eb5f99626d866

Chest X-Ray as a critical screening tool for Household Contacts of TB: Lessons from Three Years of Programmatic Data in India

Authors:

Sodhi↗Das↗Khanna↗Dhawan↗Taralekar↗Dabas↗Mannan↗Singh↗

Introduction: Household contacts (HHCs) of pulmonary TB patients remain at high risk for TB infection and disease progression, yet many remain asymptomatic and are missed by symptom-screening pathways. While India expanded its TB preventative guidelines to include all HHCs in 2021, chest X-ray (CXR) screening continues to be used selectively, representing a missed opportunity in early case detection. Methods: The analysis uses programmatic data from Project JEET 2.0 (Joint Effort for Elimination of Tuberculosis), implemented by the William J. Clinton Foundation in India, between October 2021 and March 2024. Eligible HHCs (>=5 years) were offered CXR screening as part of TB preventive therapy (TPT) evaluation. Descriptive and multivariable analyses examined predictors of CXR uptake and TB yield. A two-stage logistic regression model estimated potential TB yield under universal CXR coverage. Model performance was evaluated using the area under the curve (AUC), and bootstrap simulations generated counterfactual estimates of missed TB cases. Results: Among 1,034,621 HHCs, 1.02% individuals were found positive for TB, which includes 7,786 HHCs who were on TB treatment already, while an additional 2,812 were identified during pre-TPT evaluation. Among eligible HHCs (n = 1,026,835), 70% were screened with CXR, of which 2.4% had suggestive TB findings. Of these, 79% went for further TB assessment. Symptomatic HHCs were more likely to be CXR screened (84% vs 69%) and assessed for TB, yet two-thirds of all detected TB cases were asymptomatic. It is estimated that universal CXR coverage and TB testing for suggestive cases can increase TB detection by at least 87%. Conclusion: The study provides a scalable approach to expand CXR coverage through public-private partnerships, enabling early TB detection among HHCs, especially among asymptomatic contacts. Future implementations will benefit from integrating AI-enabled reading, along with systematic follow up for those with suggestive findings.

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25.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:b985305732506e9d030554556de629a8

Specialty Choice Attitudes Among Medical Interns: Evidence from Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences

Authors:

Kashefi Sis↗Shendabadi↗Alimi↗Boushehri↗

Background: Choosing a medical specialty is a critical career decision that affects both physicians future professional lives and the composition of the healthcare workforce. Specialty preferences are shaped by multiple personal, educational, and socioeconomic factors, yet evidence from senior medical students in southern Iran remains limited. This study aimed to assess willingness to pursue specialty training among medical interns at Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences, identify their preferred specialties, and examine factors associated with their decisions. Methods: This descriptive-analytical cross-sectional study was conducted in 2023 among medical interns at Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences in Bandar Abbas, Iran. Using a convenience census approach, all eligible interns were invited to participate, and 83 students completed an online questionnaire. The instrument collected demographic, academic, and occupational data, as well as reasons for willingness or unwillingness to pursue specialty training and specialty preferences. Content and face validity were assessed by faculty members and students, and internal consistency reliability in the present study was acceptable (Cronbach alpha = 0.82). Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and logistic regression in SPSS version 27. Results: Of the 83 participants, 50 (60.2%) reported willingness to pursue specialty training, while 33 (39.8%) did not. Among students willing to continue, the most frequently cited reasons were achieving a better economic position, broader job opportunities, and higher social status. Among those unwilling to continue, the most common reasons were fatigue from prolonged studying, financial problems, and the desire to start working after graduation. Radiology was the most common first-choice specialty, followed by otorhinolaryngology, dermatology, and cardiology. In regression analyses, no demographic or academic variable remained independently associated with willingness to pursue specialty training in the final multivariable model. Conclusions: A majority of medical interns were interested in pursuing specialty training, with preferences concentrated in a limited number of specialties perceived as offering favorable financial prospects, prestige, and lifestyle. Economic concerns and educational fatigue were the dominant factors influencing willingness and unwillingness to continue specialty education. These findings highlight the need for structured career counseling, broader exposure to different specialties, and policy measures to address financial and structural barriers to residency training. Keywords: medical specialty choice; medical interns; residency training; medical education; Hormozgan university of medical sciences

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