Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14806

Semiclassical Gravity Efficiently Solves $\mathsf{NP}$-Complete Problems

Authors:

Matthew Fox↗Chaitanya Karamchedu↗Sotirios Mygdalas↗

arXiv:2606.14806v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Assuming the gravitational field is classical and that it couples to quantum fields via the semiclassical Einstein field equations, we show that the weak-field dynamics of a massive and non-relativistic qubit can in principle be used to solve an $\mathsf{NP}$-complete problem in polynomial time. We attribute this vast computational power to the non-linear dynamics afforded by the semiclassical Einstein field equations. Consequently, the above two assumptions entail a violation of the Physical Extended Church–Turing Thesis, which we regard as evidence for the quantization of gravity.

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02.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18 DOI: HASH:e28332585a44bcf1ec3b7868ab0755dd

A unified smoothing framework for protein domain bigram model

Authors:

Cui↗Iyer↗Durand↗

Biomolecular sequences can be represented as strings over an alphabet, an analogy that has motivated many applications of computational linguistic techniques to biological problems. However, such methods must be adapted to the characteristic scale and organization of biomolecular data. Here, we consider the problem of bigram smoothing for multidomain protein architectures, where domain bigram frequency data is extremely sparse and differs from textual data in alphabet size, string length distribution, the relationship between bigram and unigram frequencies, tandem repeat lengths, and the distribution of domain adjacencies. Moreover, some domain combinations are unobserved because they are biologically incompatible, others because the data are incomplete. A smoothing method that distinguishes these two cases is required. We propose a unified smoothing framework based on interpolation that can be tuned to accommodate different bigram data characteristics. Within this framework, we design specific model variants suited to protein domain bigram data: these assign low adjusted counts to pairs that are likely incompatible, while making appropriate adjustments for undersampled pairs. We demonstrate empirically that this approach distinguishes the two cases while preserving the characteristic signatures of multidomain data.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2506.18756

Semantic-Preserving Prompt Hijacking: A Black-Box Adversarial Attack on Auto-Prompt Optimization

Authors:

Chong Zhang↗Xiang Li↗Jia Wang↗Shan Liang↗Haochen Xue↗Xiaobo Jin↗

LLMs increasingly integrate auto-suggestion optimization modules, enabling them to rewrite and display user input before generating the final response. While this design aims to enhance transparency and trust, its process of autonomously selecting a single best result from multiple candidate solutions allows attackers to hijack this optimization process by inducing subtle, imperceptible semantic shifts. To address this, we propose a semantic preservation hijacking attack method based on black-box conditions: Adaptive Greedy Local Search. This method hierarchically decomposes the input text, masks key language units, and dynamically adjusts candidate replacement words at predefined semantic checkpoints. This maximizes the deviation between the model output and the original intent while strictly maintaining semantic similarity to the original text. Experimental results on commercial and open-source LLMs demonstrate that, under the same semantic similarity constraints, this method achieves a higher attack success rate than existing attack methods in over 2400 test cases. Code is available at: https://github.com/franz-chang/DOBS

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04.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14176

VeriGeo: Controllable Geometry Question Generation with Numerical and Analytical Verification

Authors:

Xiaoxian Duan↗Zequn Liu↗Yingce Xia↗

arXiv:2606.14176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Geometry problem generation is useful for AI-assisted education and multimodal mathematical reasoning, but reliable synthesis remains difficult because the problem statement, diagram, constraints, and solution should be mutually consistent. Existing methods often trade off controllability and reliability: seed-based rewriting is flexible but weakly verifiable, whereas diagram-first construction improves validity but is less suited to arbitrary user-specified constraints. We introduce VeriGeo, a controllable geometry generation framework grounded in executable reasoning traces. Given user constraints such as target concepts and difficulty, an Author agent generates a problem and diagram, and a Solver agent produces a proof-aligned solution. Both agents use a shared action sequence that connects natural language, diagrams, geometric constraints, and proof steps into a verifiable representation. A three-stage pipeline checks numerical consistency, analytical realizability, and global consistency, using verification-guided reflection to repair recoverable failures and reject unrecoverable ones. Across five LLM backbones, raw generations frequently fail these checks, while VeriGeo repairs a substantial fraction of the invalid attempts. Supervised fine-tuning on 8.7k examples generated by VeriGeo achieves the best reported GeoQA performance among end-to-end multimodal LLM-based solvers, and obtains strong results on PGPS9K and MathVista-GPS, demonstrating the effectiveness of verified synthetic data for improving multimodal geometry reasoning.

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05.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2605.17106

HyDRA: Hybrid Dynamic Routing Architecture for Heterogeneous LLM Pools

Authors:

Aashna Garg↗Siddharth Singha Roy↗Jinu Jang↗Federico Brancasi↗Shengyu Fu↗

Production LLM deployments increasingly maintain heterogeneous model pools spanning order-of-magnitude cost differences. Existing routers make binary strong-vs-weak decisions and couple learned parameters to specific model identities, requiring retraining whenever the catalog changes. We present HyDRA (Hybrid Dynamic Routing Architecture), a framework that predicts fine-grained, multi-dimensional capability requirements per query and matches them against configuration-defined model profiles via shortfall matching. A ModernBERT encoder with K=4 independent sigmoid heads scores each query along reasoning, code generation, debugging, and tool use; a shortfall-matching algorithm then selects the cheapest model whose capabilities meet the predicted requirements. The deployed predictor runs at 86 ms median CPU inference latency in production, and is fully decoupled from the model catalog – adding or removing models requires only a configuration change, with zero retraining. On SWE-Bench Verified (5-model pool: GPT-5.4-mini, Claude Haiku 4.5, GPT-5.3 Codex, Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.4), HyDRA's tunable shortfall threshold spans three regimes: peak-quality exceeds the always-strong Claude Sonnet 4.6 baseline (75.4% vs. 74.2% resolution) at 12.9% cost savings; iso-quality matches Sonnet at 54.1% cost savings, a 6x improvement over our prior in-house binary router at 9.1%; aggressive pushes savings to 72.5% for a 3.2-point quality trade. Results generalize across LiveCodeBench, BigCodeBench, and tau-bench. HyDRA is deployed to all users in GitHub Copilot's VS Code Chat auto-mode and – to our knowledge for the first time in the LLM routing literature – demonstrates language-invariant routing across CJK, European, and other script families.

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06.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18 DOI: HASH:c8520ef2438c8da5ab8b6f061fa7156b

Multicluster measles outbreak with a substantial proportion of modified cases in Tokyo, Japan, January-May 2026

Authors:

Nishikawa↗Kurita↗Sugawara↗Matsuda↗Morikawa↗Imokawa↗Iwamura↗Suzuki↗Kodaira↗Kikuchi↗Takahashi↗Nishizuka↗…

Tokyo experienced a measles outbreak (260 cases) in early 2026 despite elimination status. Adults aged 20-39 years were most affected, and 38% of cases were modified measles, increasing with prior vaccination. Although incidence rose until April, the effective reproduction number; R(t) fell below 1, consistent with outbreak control. Multiple clusters were identified, but many cases lacked epidemiological links, suggesting that modified measles is less likely to be considered in differential diagnosis. Intensive contact tracing and surveillance contributed to limiting transmission.

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07.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19379

How Linear Is a Transformer Feed-Forward Block? Per-Block Linear Recoverability Is Learned, Not Architectural

Authors:

Stuart Whipp↗

Transformer feed-forward networks (FFNs) are often treated as nonlinear stores of computation, yet how nonlinear a trained FFN block actually is has rarely been measured. We treat each FFN as a position-wise input-to-output map and split it into the exact least-squares linear approximation plus a residual. The held-out variance the closed-form linear map explains defines a block's linear recoverability (R^2_lin), an optimiser-free measure of its linearity. Across all twelve blocks of GPT-2, Pythia-160m, and llama-160m, R^2_lin is highly heterogeneous and non-monotone with depth, ranging from near-linear (>0.99) to strongly nonlinear (

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08.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11251

Mechanical Field Networks: Structured Neural Dynamics for Multivariate Systems

Authors:

Xingji Cui↗

arXiv:2606.11251v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many multivariate dynamical systems are observed only through trajectories, leaving the mechanisms governing their joint dynamics hidden. Existing approaches can impose interpretable dynamics or learn flexible state transitions, yet the resulting interaction structure is typically either specified in advance or left implicit within the learned dynamics. We introduce MF-Net, a recurrent dynamical model that represents all variables in a shared field state and updates this state through a learned relation law. Each variable carries a field component, and these components evolve jointly through a learnable mechanical transition. Here, mechanical refers to the relation-to-motion organization of the transition, where learned relations shape state-dependent flows, field responses, and motion tendencies that move the field state forward. The resulting structure is part of the rollout itself: learned relations influence how the field moves, and the same internal quantities support both forecasting and structural readout. Across known-law interaction systems, chaotic benchmarks, real neural recordings, and ecological time series, MF-Net achieves competitive short- and medium-horizon forecasting while retaining inspectable structural readout. On the 40-dimensional Lorenz–96 testbed, MF-Net achieves an eight-step $R^2$ of $0.798\pm0.018$; across five seeds, its learned relation matrix recovers the local coupling support with a local/nonlocal strength ratio of $19.80\pm1.00$ and Precision@$K$ of $1.000\pm0.000$. MF-Net provides a structure-readable dynamical modeling framework in which learned relations are trained through forward evolution and, on real data, interpreted as functional predictive couplings under appropriate observational limits.

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09.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16926

Functional Gradient Descent with Adaptive Representations

Authors:

Daniel Csillag↗Rodrigo Schuller↗Pedro Dall'Antonia↗Leonidas Guibas↗Luiz Velho↗Tiago Novello↗

arXiv:2606.16926v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Functional optimization problems are typically solved by optimizing the parameters of a fixed representation, such as a neural network, resulting in highly nonconvex losses that complicate both training and theoretical analysis. An interesting alternative is functional gradient descent (FGD), that is, gradient descent directly in function space, which benefits from strong convergence results and admits a clean theory. However, FGD is difficult to implement in practice because functional gradients are infinite-dimensional, and thus cannot be fully computed nor stored in memory. Existing implementations therefore rely on fixed approximations, which introduce approximation error. We propose a new, theoretically-grounded FGD algorithm that adapts the representation of the functional gradients over the course of optimization. By explicitly incorporating this approximation into the analysis, we establish convergence to a stationary point (for smooth losses) and to a global minimizer (under smoothness + a Polyak-Lojasiewicz-type condition) regardless of our approximations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first implementable FGD method with such guarantees in a general setting. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on regression, numerical solution of PDEs, and modern computer vision. Across settings, our method consistently outperforms both FGD with fixed approximations and neural network baselines in efficiency and accuracy.

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10.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2507.11688

Composing Linear Layers from Irreducibles

Authors:

Travis Pence↗Daisuke Yamada↗Vikas Singh↗

arXiv:2507.11688v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Contemporary large models often exhibit behaviors suggesting the presence of low-level primitives that compose into modules with richer functionality, but these fundamental building blocks remain poorly understood. We investigate this compositional structure in linear layers by asking: can we identify/synthesize linear transformations from a minimal set of geometric primitives? Using Clifford algebra, we show that linear layers can be expressed as compositions of bivectors – geometric objects encoding oriented planes – and introduce a differentiable algorithm that decomposes them into products of rotors. This construction uses only O(log^2 d) parameters, versus O(d^2) required by dense matrices. Applied to the key, query, and value projections in LLM attention layers, our rotor-based layers match the performance of strong baselines such as block-Hadamard and low-rank approximations. Our findings provide an algebraic perspective on how these geometric primitives can compose into higher-level functions within deep models.

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11.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2510.11709

Adversarial Attacks Leverage Interference Between Features in Superposition

Authors:

Edward Stevinson↗Lucas Prieto↗Melih Barsbey↗Tolga Birdal↗

Why do adversarial examples exist, and why do they transfer between models? Existing explanations appeal to high-dimensional geometry, non-robust patterns in the input, and decision boundary structure, but none provides a representation-level mechanism that explains why specific perturbations succeed and why attacks transfer between models. In this paper, we show that adversarial vulnerability can stem from efficient information encoding in neural networks. Specifically, vulnerability can arise from superposition - the phenomenon where networks represent more concepts than they have dimensions, forcing non-orthogonal representation and thus interference. This interference causes perturbations targeting one representation to affect others, creating vulnerabilities determined by interference patterns. In synthetic settings with precisely controlled superposition, we establish that superposition suffices to create adversarial vulnerability. The resulting attacks are predictable: PGD-discovered perturbations align with theoretically optimal perturbations derived from the interference geometry. Models trained on similar data develop similar interference patterns, explaining attack transferability. We then show that successful attacks on image classifiers exhibit the structure predicted by our proposed mechanism. These findings reveal that adversarial vulnerability can be a byproduct of networks' representational compression, complementing existing explanations based on data properties or architectural factors.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2510.05150

Chronological Thinking in Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Language Models

Authors:

Donghang Wu↗Haoyang Zhang↗Chen Chen↗Tianyu Zhang↗Fei Tian↗Xuerui Yang↗Gang Yu↗Hexin Liu↗Nana Hou↗Yuchen Hu↗Eng Siong Chng↗

Recent advances in spoken dialogue language models (SDLMs) reflect growing interest in shifting from turn-based to full-duplex systems, where the models continuously perceive user speech streams while generating responses. This simultaneous listening and speaking design enables real-time interaction and the agent can handle dynamic conversational behaviors like user barge-in. However, during the listening phase, existing systems keep the agent idle by repeatedly predicting the silence token, which departs from human behavior: we usually engage in lightweight thinking during conversation rather than remaining absent-minded. Inspired by this, we propose Chronological Thinking, an on-the-fly conversational thinking mechanism that aims to improve response quality in full-duplex SDLMs. Specifically, chronological thinking presents a paradigm shift from conventional LLM thinking approaches, such as Chain-of-Thought, purpose-built for streaming acoustic input. (1) Strictly causal: the agent reasons incrementally while listening, updating internal hypotheses only from past audio with no lookahead. (2) No additional latency: reasoning is amortized during the listening window; once the user stops speaking, the agent halts thinking and begins speaking without further delay. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of chronological thinking through both objective metrics and human evaluations show consistent improvements in response quality. Furthermore, chronological thinking robustly handles conversational dynamics and attains competitive performance on full-duplex interaction metrics.

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13.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15058

Machine Learning and the Random Walk Puzzle: Forecasting the CAD/USD Exchange Rate with Expanding Window Evaluation and SHAP Interpretability

Authors:

Louis Agyekum↗Edmund Fosu Agyemang↗Obu-Amoah Ampomah↗Kofi Acheampong↗Emmanuel Boadi↗Priscilla Yaa Amakye↗Fafa Shalom Tchorly↗Enock Adu Bonsu↗Eric Nyarko↗

arXiv:2606.15058v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study examines whether machine learning (ML) models can outperform the naive random walk benchmark in forecasting the monthly USD/CAD exchange rate. Using daily data from the Bank of Canada spanning January 2017 to May 2026, resampled into 113 monthly observations, five ML models are evaluated: linear regression, random forest, gradient boosting, XGBoost, and AdaBoost. These models are benchmarked against the naive random walk model and exponential smoothing with Holt-Winters seasonality (ETS). All models are evaluated using an expanding-window framework to maintain strict out-of-sample integrity, and forecast-accuracy differences are assessed using the Diebold-Mariano (DM) test. Structural break detection identifies four significant breakpoints in the series, corresponding to the escalation of the US-China trade war in 2018, the COVID-19 economic recovery in 2020, the peak of the Bank of Canada rate-hiking cycle in 2022, and the start of the Bank of Canada rate-cutting cycle in 2024. SHAP, or Shapley Additive Explanations, analysis is applied to interpret the drivers of the best-performing ML model. The results show that the naive random walk model remains a formidable benchmark. Linear regression is the only model that statistically outperforms the naive random walk model, with a DM statistic of 3.0585 and a p value of 0.0071, whereas the ML ensemble models show only marginal differences. Random Forest with an expanding-window framework achieves the lowest MAPE of 1.17 percent among all models except the random walk. SHAP analysis confirms that short-term lags, particularly lag1 and lag2, and recent rolling means dominate predictions, consistent with the near-random-walk behavior of exchange rates.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2601.01762

AlignDrive: Aligned Lateral-Longitudinal Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Authors:

Yanhao Wu↗Haoyang Zhang↗Fei He↗Rui Wu↗Yanhu Shan↗Congpei Qiu↗Liang Gao↗Wei Ke↗Tong Zhang↗

Practical autonomous driving requires models that generalize by reasoning through spatial-temporal possibilities to exclude unsafe outcomes. While state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods use parallel planning architectures, they fail to explicitly couple speed decisions with agent behavior along the driving path, leading to suboptimal coordination. To address this, we propose a cascaded framework that transforms longitudinal planning from an independent prediction task into a path-conditioned reasoning process. On the model side, we introduce an anchor-based regression design that conditions longitudinal prediction on the lateral drive path, and reformulate longitudinal planning as 1D displacement prediction along the path. This reduces geometric uncertainty and sharpens the model's focus on interaction-driven dynamics. On the data side, we introduce a planning-oriented data augmentation strategy that simulates rare safety-critical events by programmatically inserting agents and relabeling longitudinal targets to enforce collision avoidance. Evaluated on the challenging Bench2Drive benchmark, our method achieves SOTA performance with a driving score of 89.07 and a success rate of 73.18%, demonstrating significantly improved coordination and safety. Further evaluation on Fail2Drive confirms strong generalization to rare edge cases where parallel formulations typically fail. Project page:https://yanhaowu.github.io/AlignDrive/.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18510

Architectural Bias in Face Presentation Attack Detection: A Comparative Study of Vision Transformers and Convolutional Neural Networks

Authors:

Ngela Landon Ntung↗Floride Tuyisenge↗Jema David Ndibwile↗

Face Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) systems constitute a critical security layer in biometric authentication; however, existing approaches exhibit systematic performance disparities across demographic groups, disproportionately affecting individuals with darker skin tones. This paper presents a comparative empirical investigation of whether Vision Transformer architectures reduce demographic bias in face PAD systems relative to convolutional baselines. Experiments are conducted on the CASIA-SURF Cross-Ethnicity Face Anti-Spoofing (CeFA) dataset. Three architectures are evaluated: a Multimodal ViT-Tiny trained from scratch, a ResNet18 CNN baseline, and a pretrained DeiT-S fine-tuned on CeFA across African, East Asian, and zero-shot Central Asian demographic groups. DeiT-S achieves the highest overall accuracy of 97.27% and the lowest EER of 0.86%, outperforming ResNet18 at 90.15% accuracy. In terms of fairness, DeiT-S reduces the inter-ethnic ACER gap between African and East Asian subjects to 0.13%, compared to 0.75% reported in an LBP-based work [6], representing an 83% reduction. Most notably, while ResNet18 records a BPCER of 10.44% on zero-shot Central Asian subjects, DeiT-S maintains 2.89% on the same unseen group, demonstrating a 3.6x generalization advantage. These results suggest that pretrained Vision Transformers achieve superior PAD accuracy, produce smaller demographic performance gaps, and generalize more equitably across unseen demographic groups, indicating that cross-demographic fairness in PAD may partly be influenced by architectural design.

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16.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19 DOI: HASH:78bdb9a1ecf0c11a4313d2eb39ac299c

Simulation-based Bayesian deep learning enables uncertainty-aware tumor fraction estimation in cell-free DNA

Authors:

Volkov↗Raitses-Gurevich↗Grad↗Shlayem↗Danilevsky↗Rubinek↗Gorfine↗Shomron↗

Background: Estimating tumor fraction from whole-genome cell-free DNA sequencing is critical for liquid biopsy, but is hampered by weak signals and baseline noise at low tumor fractions. Existing computational methods often require matched controls or large labeled datasets for training and lack uncertainty quantification. To address these gaps, we developed purNPE, a Bayesian deep-learning framework trained without labeled cancer cell-free DNA samples. Specifically, purNPE leverages a two-part generative model: one component simulates diverse tumor copy-number profiles based on evolutionary genealogies, while a second, data-driven component learns and replicates realistic sequencing background patterns from cancer-free cell-free DNA. By training a Neural Posterior Estimator on synthetic tumor profiles augmented with learned noise, purNPE performs amortized inference in milliseconds without needing a reference sample set at inference. Results: In a real-world pan-cancer cohort, purNPE achieved comparable performance with existing methods against orthogonal mutant-allele-fraction validation (MAE = 0.066). In silico and semi-synthetic experiments suggested analytical sensitivity around 1% tumor fraction under the evaluated conditions and showed strong classification accuracy in low tumor fractions (AUC = 0.98 for TF [≤] 3% versus controls). Conclusions: This work provides a framework for using simulation-based inference to derive calibrated, uncertainty-aware TF estimates, offering a potential alternative to traditional data-dependent methods.

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17.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2603.28251

DiffAttn: Diffusion-Based Drivers' Visual Attention Prediction with LLM-Enhanced Semantic Reasoning

Authors:

Weimin Liu↗Qingkun Li↗Jiyuan Qiu↗Wenjun Wang↗Joshua H. Meng↗

Drivers' visual attention provides critical cues for anticipating latent hazards and directly shapes decision-making and control maneuvers, where its absence can compromise traffic safety. To emulate drivers' perception patterns and advance visual attention prediction for intelligent vehicles, we propose DiffAttn, a diffusion-based framework that formulates this task as a conditional diffusion-denoising process, enabling more accurate modeling of drivers' attention. To capture both local and global scene features, we adopt Swin Transformer as encoder and design a decoder that combines a Feature Fusion Pyramid for cross-layer interaction with dense, multi-scale conditional diffusion to jointly enhance denoising learning and model fine-grained local and global scene contexts. Additionally, a large language model (LLM) layer is incorporated to enhance top-down semantic reasoning and improve sensitivity to safety-critical cues. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that DiffAttn achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance, surpassing most video-based, top-down-feature-driven, and LLM-enhanced baselines. Our framework further supports interpretable driver-centric scene understanding and has the potential to improve in-cabin human-machine interaction, risk perception, and drivers' state measurement in intelligent vehicles.

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18.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.10642

PhysMetrics.Weather: An Evaluation Framework for Physical Consistency in ML Weather Models

Authors:

Emma Kasteleyn↗Timo Maier↗Axel Lauer↗Veronika Eyring↗Pierre Gentine↗Ana Lucic↗

arXiv:2606.10642v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine learning weather prediction (MLWP) models have achieved impressive forecasting performance at a small fraction of the computational costs required for traditional physics-based methods. However, they are primarily (1) data-driven and (2) evaluated using pixel-wide error metrics (e.g., RMSE), so there are no guarantees that their forecasts are consistent with known physical laws. We introduce PhysMetrics$.$Weather, an evaluation framework that assesses the physical realism of MLWP models across three types of metrics: conservation, spectral, and dynamical. By quantifying physical realism, this tool guides the development of physics-informed architectures and helps evaluate whether MLWP models are reliable for operational use. Our framework is available on Github at https://github.com/Emmakast/PhysMetrics.Weather.

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19.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.07027

StainFlow: Entity-Stain Tracking and Evidence Linking for Process Rewards in GUI Agents

Authors:

Haojie Hao↗Longkun Hao↗Yihang Lou↗Yan Bai↗Zhenyang Li↗Zhichao Yang↗Dongshuo Huang↗Hongyu Lin↗Lanqing Hong↗Jiakai Wang↗Xianglong Liu↗

arXiv:2606.07027v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a promising approach for improving GUI Agents in long-horizon, stochastic digital environments, but trajectory-level success feedback is too sparse to provide reliable credit assignment for intermediate exploration steps. To mitigate this issue, recent studies introduce Process Reward Models (PRMs), which provide finer-grained training feedback through global milestone verification or local step-level evaluation. However, these methods still suffer from two level-specific limitations: global milestone decomposition is subjective and singular, making it difficult to accommodate the multiple valid execution paths in real GUI tasks, while fixed local judging windows may miss long-range key evidence or dilute the decision signal with irrelevant frames. Inspired by stain-tracing mechanisms in network flow analysis, we propose StainFlow, an entity-stain-flow process reward model for GUI Agents. To reduce the subjectivity of global partitioning, we introduce the Global Entity Stain Tracking module, which extracts visually verifiable task entities and tracks how their stain concentrations and states evolve along the trajectory, allowing task phases to be objectively separated by changes in the entity evidence flow. To improve the accuracy of local verification, we introduce the Local Stain Evidence Linking module. Centered on the triggering entities of each candidate key node, it retrieves relevant steps based on their stain concentrations and state changes, and dynamically constructs high-density evidence windows for verifying true key nodes. Extensive experiments on AndroidWorld and OGRBench show that StainFlow relatively improves online RL success by 3.2% and trajectory completion judgment accuracy by 1.8%.

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20.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2404.09790

NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution (x4): Methods and Results

Authors:

Zheng Chen↗Zongwei Wu↗Eduard Zamfir↗Kai Zhang↗Yulun Zhang↗Radu Timofte↗Xiaokang Yang↗Hongyuan Yu↗Cheng Wan↗Yuxin Hong↗Zhijuan Huang↗Yajun Zou↗…

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 challenge on image super-resolution ($\times$4), highlighting the solutions proposed and the outcomes obtained. The challenge involves generating corresponding high-resolution (HR) images, magnified by a factor of four, from low-resolution (LR) inputs using prior information. The LR images originate from bicubic downsampling degradation. The aim of the challenge is to obtain designs/solutions with the most advanced SR performance, with no constraints on computational resources (e.g., model size and FLOPs) or training data. The track of this challenge assesses performance with the PSNR metric on the DIV2K testing dataset. The competition attracted 199 registrants, with 20 teams submitting valid entries. This collective endeavour not only pushes the boundaries of performance in single-image SR but also offers a comprehensive overview of current trends in this field.

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21.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2507.21164

OCSVM-Guided Representation Learning for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Authors:

Nicolas Pinon↗Robin Trombetta↗Carole Lartizien↗

arXiv:2507.21164v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) aims to detect anomalies without labeled data, a necessity in many machine learning applications where anomalous samples are rare or not available. Most state-of-the-art methods fall into two categories: reconstruction-based approaches, which often reconstruct anomalies too well, and decoupled representation learning with density estimators, which can suffer from suboptimal feature spaces. While some recent methods attempt to couple feature learning and anomaly detection, they often rely on surrogate objectives, restrict kernel choices, or introduce approximations that limit their expressiveness and robustness. To address this challenge, we propose a novel method that couples representation learning with an analytically solvable One-Class SVM (OCSVM), through a custom loss formulation that directly aligns latent features with the OCSVM decision boundary. The model is evaluated on two tasks: a \deleted{new} benchmark based on MNIST-C, and a challenging brain MRI \deleted{subtle} lesion detection task. Unlike most methods that focus on large, hyperintense lesions at the image level, our approach succeeds to target small, non-hyperintense lesions, while we evaluate voxel-wise metrics, addressing a more clinically relevant scenario. Both experiments evaluate a form of robustness to domain shifts, including corruption types in MNIST-C and texture or population age variations in MRI. Results demonstrate performance and robustness of our proposed model, highlighting its potential for general UAD and real-world medical imaging applications. The source code is available at https://github.com/Nicolas-Pinon/uad_ocsvm_guided_repr_learning.

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22.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13054

TWLA: Achieving Ternary Weights and Low-Bit Activations for LLMs via Post-Training Quantization

Authors:

Zhixiong Zhao↗Zukang Xu↗Zhixuan Chen↗Xing Hu↗Zhe Jiang↗Dawei Yang↗

arXiv:2606.13054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional general language processing capabilities, but their memory and compute costs hinder deployment. Ternarization has emerged as a promising compression technique, offering significant reductions in model size and inference complexity. However, existing methods struggle with heavy-tailed activation distributions and therefore keep activations in high precision, fundamentally limiting end-to-end inference acceleration. To overcome this limitation, we propose TWLA, a post-training quantization (PTQ) framework that achieves 1.58-bit weight compression and 4-bit activation quantization while maintaining high accuracy. TWLA comprises three components: (1) Euclidean-to-Manifold Asymmetric Ternary Quantizer (E2M-ATQ) minimizes layer-output error under weight ternarization via a two-stage optimization from Euclidean initialization to manifold relocation; (2) Kronecker Orthogonal Tri-Modal Shaping (KOTMS) applies a Kronecker-structured orthogonal rotation to reshape weights into ternary-friendly tri-modal distributions, while the shared rotation statistically suppresses activation outliers; and (3) Inter-Layer Aware Activation Mixed Precision (ILA-AMP) explicitly introduces adjacent-layer second-order interaction costs in bit allocation and jointly optimizes for the layer-wise disparity of activation quantization gains induced by the shared orthogonal transform, preventing cascades triggered by a few weak layers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TWLA maintains high accuracy under W1.58A4, while delivering significant inference acceleration. The code is available at .

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23.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2601.19792

LVLMs and Humans Ground Differently in Referential Communication

Authors:

Peter Zeng↗Weiling Li↗Amie Paige↗Zhengxiang Wang↗Panagiotis Kaliosis↗Dimitris Samaras↗Gregory Zelinsky↗Susan Brennan↗Owen Rambow↗

For generative AI agents to partner effectively with human users, the ability to accurately predict human intent is critical. But this ability to collaborate remains limited by a critical deficit: an inability to model common ground. We present a referential communication experiment with a factorial design involving director-matcher pairs (human-human, human-AI, AI-human, and AI-AI) that interact with multiple turns in repeated rounds to match pictures of objects not associated with any obvious lexicalized labels. We show that LVLMs cannot interactively generate and resolve referring expressions in a way that enables smooth communication, a crucial skill that underlies human language use. We release our corpus of 356 dialogues (89 pairs over 4 rounds each) along with the online pipeline for data collection and the tools for analyzing accuracy, efficiency, and lexical overlap.

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24.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13072

Fibonacci Steady-States and Persistent Oscillations in an Ordered Multimode Dicke Model

Authors:

Miriam J. Leonhardt↗Kai M\"uller↗Oliver Lunt↗Andrew J. Daley↗

arXiv:2606.13072v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ultracold atoms in multimode optical cavities provide a rich testbed for many-body phenomena enabled by light-mediated interactions. Recent experiments include realizations of spin glasses and associative memories, as described by multimode Dicke models with disordered couplings. However, the properties of multimode Dicke models with ordered coupling geometries remain largely unexplored. In this work, we investigate the stable steady-states of the multimode Dicke model with an ordered nearest-neighbor coupling geometry, where $n_c$ atomic clusters are coupled via $n_c-1$ cavity modes. We show that the number of mean-field stable steady-states in the superradiant phase exhibits Fibonacci scaling with the number of atomic clusters, and that a subset of these steady-states exhibit persistent oscillations. Using both the truncated Wigner approximation and the numerically-exact hierarchy of pure states, we further demonstrate that these features of the stable steady-state solutions persist for finite cluster sizes. Ordered multimode Dicke models, such as the nearest-neighbor coupling geometry considered here, are accessible with current experimental technologies and point toward a broader class of strongly interacting dissipative systems with similarly rich behavior.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.10683

UniDexTok: A Unified Dexterous Hand Tokenizer from Real Data

Authors:

Dong Fang↗Youjun Wu↗Yuanxin Zhong↗Rui Zhang↗Yunlong Wang↗Xiaosong Jia↗Yu-Gang Jiang↗

Dexterous hands are essential for fine-grained manipulation, but their hardware designs vary substantially across embodiments. Differences in kinematics, joint definitions, and degrees of freedom make it difficult to define a shared state representation compared with parallel grippers. As a result, dexterous-hand data remains fragmented and difficult to use for joint training. In this work, we propose the Unified Dexterous Hand Model (UDHM), which maps human and robot hand states into a shared 22-DoF semantic interface. Based on UDHM, we introduce UniDexTok, a retargeting-free state tokenizer that learns embodiment-conditioned discrete tokens from standardized real joint states. UniDexTok provides a unified representation for heterogeneous dexterous hands without relying on retargeting or simulation data. Compared with the recent baseline UniHM, UniDexTok reduces MPJAE from 15.63 degrees to 0.16 degrees and MPJPE from 18.51 mm to 0.18 mm, corresponding to error reductions of 98.98% and 99.03%, respectively. These results improve reconstruction from centimeter-scale to sub-millimeter accuracy. Experiments further show that data from other embodiments improves target-embodiment reconstruction accuracy, demonstrating the benefit of cross-embodiment tokenization. UniDexTok also shows strong zero-shot and few-shot reconstruction ability when new dexterous hands are introduced.

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