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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Objective Quality Assessment of Point Clouds Using Multi-scale Implicit Structural Similarity

The unstructured and irregular nature of points poses a significant challenge for accurate point cloud quality assessment (PCQA), particularly in establishing accurate perceptual feature correspondence. To tackle this, we propose the Multi-scale Implicit Structural Similarity Measurement (MS-ISSM). Unlike traditional point-to-point matching, MS-ISSM utilizes radial basis function (RBF) to represent local features continuously, transforming distortion measurement into a comparison of implicit function coefficients. This approach effectively circumvents matching errors inherent in irregular data. Additionally, we propose a ResGrouped-MLP quality assessment network, which robustly maps multi-scale feature differences to perceptual scores. The network architecture departs from traditional flat multi-layer perceptron (MLP) by adopting a grouped encoding strategy integrated with residual blocks and channel-wise attention mechanisms. This hierarchical design allows the model to preserve the distinct physical semantics of luma, chroma, and geometry while adaptively focusing on the most salient distortion features across High, Medium, and Low scales. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that MS-ISSM outperforms state-of-the-art metrics in both reliability and generalization. The source code is available at: https://github.com/ZhangChen2022/MS-ISSM.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Influence-solvability: a systematic theory of $(1+1)D$ solvability and its application to brickwork circuits

arXiv:2606.12538v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: `Solvable' circuits, such as dual unitaries and its generalisations, have arisen as paradigmatic examples of tractable chaotic non-equilibrium dynamics, both in classical and quantum systems. However, while increasingly more complicated sufficient conditions have been proposed, a systematic theory classifying and understanding general features of solvable circuits is missing. We develop such a theory by introducing influence-solvable circuits, a class of $(1+1)D$ circuits whose influence matrix, which represents the `bath' generated by its own evolution, is given by a uniform MPS with finite bond-dimension $\chi$. This property allows for efficient computation of subsystem dynamics and essentially contains all known examples of solvable circuits. We derive a set of necessary and sufficient local conditions by using a version of the fundamental theorem of MPS for open boundary conditions. Next we apply our theory to brickwork circuits with $\chi=1$ influence-solvability and perform a systematic classification of classical brickwork circuits with local dimension up to $d=3$ and quantum brickwork circuits with $d=2$. Our search reveals new solvable circuits that are not captured by known solvability conditions.

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

TRAP: Benchmark for Task-completion and Resistance to Active Privacy-extraction

arXiv:2606.18996v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agents are increasingly deployed in document-intensive workflows where sensitive private information is not an edge case but a routine input, e.g., an agent booking a flight needs passport numbers. In such settings, the agent must use private information to complete tasks accurately while never exposing it in its responses, because it cannot verify who is actually at the keyboard. These two obligations are in fundamental tension. A model capable enough to use private information for task completion can, by the same capability, be induced to reveal it. To evaluate the trade-off of task accuracy and privacy leakage, we introduce Task-completion and Resistance to Active Privacy-extraction (TRAP). Each scenario includes a document containing private information, a task query that requires the agent to invoke the correct tool using private fields, and an attack query that attempts to elicit the same information in natural language. Evaluating 22 models spanning frontier proprietary and open-source models at multiple scales, we find that all model families exhibit non-trivial leakage, and that instruction-following ability correlates with leakage rate. Existing prompt-based defenses reduce leakage but at significant cost to task accuracy. Prompt optimization fails to escape this trade-off. We demonstrate that this failure is not incidental. For any softmax-based model, no soft-constraint defense, e.g., prompt-based defenses, can jointly achieve high task success with zero leakage probability. Motivated by this impossibility result, we propose structural private field isolation, which replaces private fields with hash keys before they reach the model. This approach largely prevents leakage while keeping task accuracy.

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

A Survey of Reasoning and Agentic Systems in Time Series with Large Language Models

arXiv:2509.11575v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time series reasoning treats time as a first-class axis and incorporates intermediate evidence directly into the answer. This survey defines the problem and organizes the literature by reasoning topology with three families: direct reasoning in one step, linear chain reasoning with explicit intermediates, and branch-structured reasoning that explores, revises, and aggregates. The topology is crossed with the main objectives of the field, including traditional time series analysis, explanation and understanding, causal inference and decision making, and time series generation, while a compact tag set spans these axes and captures decomposition and verification, ensembling, tool use, knowledge access, multimodality, agent loops, and LLM alignment regimes. Methods and systems are reviewed across domains, showing what each topology enables and where it breaks down in faithfulness or robustness, along with curated datasets, benchmarks, and resources that support study and deployment (https://github.com/blacksnail789521/Time-Series-Reasoning-Survey). Evaluation practices that keep evidence visible and temporally aligned are highlighted, and guidance is distilled on matching topology to uncertainty, grounding with observable artifacts, planning for shift and streaming, and treating cost and latency as design budgets. We emphasize that reasoning structures must balance capacity for grounding and self-correction against computational cost and reproducibility, while future progress will likely depend on benchmarks that tie reasoning quality to utility and on closed-loop testbeds that trade off cost and risk under shift-aware, streaming, and long-horizon settings. Taken together, these directions mark a shift from narrow accuracy toward reliability at scale, enabling systems that not only analyze but also understand, explain, and act on dynamic worlds with traceable evidence and credible outcomes.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Diffusion Transformer World-Action Model for AV Scene Prediction

Action-conditioned world models let an autonomous vehicle predict future camera scenes from its own planned controls, enabling planning and simulation without real-world rollouts, but at compact, trainable scale the futures are ambiguous and the field's standard distortion metrics actively mislead: they reward a blurry regression mean over a realistic prediction. We confront this with a compact latent world model that, given the present front-camera latent and a sequence of ego-actions, predicts future scene latents a frozen decoder renders to $256 \times 256$ frames up to 8 seconds ahead, evaluated on 150 held-out nuScenes scenes. We first benchmark where to predict: across six frozen encoders spanning four representation families, V-JEPA2 with temporal context reduces steering RMSE by 40% over the best single-frame encoder. We then train a latent Diffusion Transformer (DiT) and, through a controlled diagnosis, identify the four ingredients it needs: spatial tokens, the $x_0$ objective, residual anchoring, and sampling matched to target uncertainty. In a Stable-Diffusion-VAE encode-predict-decode pipeline we expose the central tension: distortion metrics (cosine similarity, SSIM) favor the blurry mean, masking that the diffusion model is far closer to the real frame distribution. Inception-based FID and KID reveal a clean perception-distortion frontier: diffusion attains KID 0.078 versus 0.375 for regression ($4.8\times$ better), and a deployable train-derived calibration makes this practical without test-time ground truth. The model is genuinely action-controllable (steering drives scene displacement, Spearman $\rho = 0.81$, vs $-0.18$ for regression). We trace limited single-pass motion to a shared-present anchor and engineer a compact 1.7M-parameter "jump" model that recovers full ground-truth motion magnitude ($1.02\times$ GT), where single-pass models capture less than half.

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

Unlocking Diffusion Hierarchies: Adaptive Timestep Selection for Zero-Shot Segmentation

Zero-shot segmentation has recently shown notable improvement by leveraging the rich visual priors in large-scale text-to-image diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion. However, current diffusion-based methods often face limitations due to the trade-off between spatial resolution and contextual information, as well as their reliance on a single static timestep for feature extraction. To overcome these challenges, our work introduces two key advancements. First, our Contextual Similarity Maps fuse high-resolution attention maps with rich U-Net encoder features, providing both fine-grained and robust per-pixel representations. Second, we identify an emergent hierarchical semantic progression within the denoising process of various diffusion models: representations transition from part-level abstractions at earlier timesteps to object-level abstractions at later stages. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a mechanism to adaptively select the optimal timestep for each pixel. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing zero-shot segmentation baselines, validating the efficacy of combining contextual features with dynamic, hierarchical timestep selection.

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

Structure-Oriented Randomized Neural Networks for Poisson-Nernst-Planck and Poisson-Nernst-Planck-Navier-Stokes Systems

arXiv:2606.19912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a structure-oriented randomized neural network framework, termed SO-RaNN, for the Poisson-Nernst-Planck (PNP) system and the Poisson-Nernst-Planck-Navier-Stokes (PNP-NS) system. The decoupled linearized subproblems are solved iteratively by randomized neural networks in a space-time framework. For the concentration variables, a pointwise cut-off is used to enforce positivity at the value level, and discrete mass-scaling factors are computed at selected correction instants and interpolated in time, so as to ensure exact mass matching at those instants and to promote approximate mass preservation between them. To introduce an auxiliary discrete dissipation mechanism, we further employ an SAV-type post-processing correction, which yields monotonicity of the SAV auxiliary variable under the ideal SAV update. For the PNP-NS system, a structure-preserving randomized neural network (SP-RaNN) is used for the velocity field, so that the velocity approximation satisfies the incompressibility constraint pointwise by construction. On the theoretical side, we derive residual-based estimates for the raw, uncorrected RaNN solvers of the linearized subproblems, formulate a conditional local-in-time convergence result for the raw outer Picard iteration of the PNP system, and analyze the value-level positivity correction together with the mass-correction and SAV post-processing steps. For the PNP-NS system, we establish an approximation result for the SP-RaNN space and provide a conditional error statement for the corresponding linearized Oseen-type problem. Numerical experiments demonstrate approximation accuracy in the source-driven manufactured tests and illustrate the intended value-level positivity correction, selected-time mass matching, computed free-energy curves based on the final gauge-fixed potential, and divergence-free approximation in benchmark tests.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Anti-Platelet Factor 4 Antibody Clonal Heterogeneity and MGUS Status in HIT

Background Monoclonal gammopathy of thrombotic significance (MGTS) is a recently described chronic prothrombotic condition characterized by monoclonal anti-PF4 antibodies that are detected above the polyclonal antibody background in patient sera (i.e. present as monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance, MGUS). Due to conflicting data in the published literature on antibody clonality in heparin-induced thrombocytopenia (HIT), we evaluated clonality and abundance of anti-PF4 antibodies in HIT, including investigating whether an MGUS, if present in HIT, represents the causative anti-PF4 antibody. Methods Blood samples from 15 patients with HIT were subject to Platelet Factor 4-dependent antigen-based and functional tests. The unmanipulated serum antibody repertoire and isolated anti-PF4 antibodies were subjected to mass spectrometric evaluation. Results Two of the 15 HIT patients had an IgG MGUS. Notably, anti-PF4 antibodies were not synonymous with the MGUS antibody in either of the two patients. Eight of the 15 patients demonstrated monoclonal anti-PF4 antibodies, however, none of the anti-PF4 antibodies were detectable as an MGUS upon evaluation of the entire serum antibody repertoire, reflecting their low abundance. In the seven patients with multiple anti-PF4 antibodies, non-monoclonality was confirmed by analysis of deglycosylated antibody heavy chains. Conclusions Anti-PF4 HIT antibodies are monoclonal in approximately 50% of HIT patients, however, antibody abundance is low such that they are not detectable over the polyclonal IgG background (i.e. are MGUS-negative), differentiating HIT from MGTS. This observation helps explain the transient nature of HIT relative to the persistent prothrombotic state seen in MGTS.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus transmission: exploring perceptions of human-animal-tick interactions across six districts in Uganda

Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV) causes a viral zoonotic disease transmitted through tick bites and direct contact with infected blood or tissue of infected animals. Socio-ecological and behavioural risk factors for CCHFV exposure in Uganda remain poorly understood, which can lead to the omission of key risk factors in quantitative survey design and limit our wider understanding. In this study, we explored human-animal-tick interaction transmission risks in Uganda. We conducted 24 focus group discussions (FGDs) and 31 key-informant interviews (KIIs) across six environmentally and socio-ecologically diverse districts, between October 2023 and March 2024. Study sites were selected using K-prototype analysis, which combined environmental and socio-ecological variables to identify distinct clusters within Uganda. FGDs were conducted separately with groups of community leaders, men, women and teenagers with stratified purposive sampling. Medical doctors, veterinarians, traditional healers, district surveillance officers, and herdsmen were individually interviewed as key informants and purposively sampled. Data were transcribed and translated into English, and analysed thematically using iterative categorisation in NVivo 14. Most participants reported tick bites, some as frequently as every day. Close contact with animals was common, including sleeping next to them in the same building, largely due to concerns about animal theft. Less frequent but notable practices included slaughtering animals for consumption or sacrifice and interactions with wild animals during hunting. Slaughtering and butchering an animal which was sick or had died was reportedly performed by participants in most districts. Plucking and roasting engorged ticks was a practice described in the Kaabong and Arua districts of Northern Uganda. These practices and behaviours highlight potential key risks of CCHFV transmission and underscore the need for future studies to address specific behaviours, to quantify if, and to what extent, they present an exposure risk. Further work should include underlying reasons for the behaviours, which would help ensure that culturally appropriate interventions are targeted.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Maternal and fetal HLA heterozygosity in preeclampsia: Insights from a large multi-ancestry pregnancy cohort

Preeclampsia (PE) is a leading cause of maternal and neonatal morbidity, with immune dysregulation at the maternal-fetal interface central to its pathogenesis. The highly polymorphic human leukocyte antigen (HLA) region mediates maternal immune tolerance of the semi-allogeneic fetus, yet the contribution of HLA diversity to PE risk remains poorly defined. Whether the HLA heterozygote advantage observed in other immune disorders is relevant to PE has not been systematically evaluated. Using data from the multi-ancestry TOPMed Boston-Colombia Collaborative for Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes (n = 12,790; 4,770 PE, 8,020 controls; 10,808 maternal, 1,982 fetal, including 1,848 pairs), we evaluated associations between heterozygosity across eight classical HLA loci and PE and four sub-phenotypes, adjusting for genetic ancestry. HLA heterozygosity was common across most loci (>80%). No individual maternal HLA locus was associated with overall PE; however, heterozygosity across class I loci showed a protective effect in preterm PE (OR=0.82, 95%CI:0.69-0.97), with a similar pattern for HLA-A heterozygosity (OR=0.78, 95%CI:0.64-0.96). In contrast, fetal heterozygosity at HLA-DQB1 was nominally associated with increased risk of PE (OR=1.36, 95%CI:1.03-1.79) and preterm PE (OR=1.73, 95%CI:1.13-2.73). No individual maternal or fetal HLA alleles were associated with PE. Maternal-fetal mismatch analysis demonstrated locus-specific associations with preterm PE, including increased risk with HLA-DQA1 mismatch and reduced risk with HLA-C mismatch. These findings highlight distinct maternal and fetal immunogenetic contributions to PE risk and underscore the importance of considering HLA diversity-rather than individual alleles alone-in studies of PE etiology.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Towards More General Control of Diffusion Models Using Jeffrey Guidance

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

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

PermaVid: Consistent Video Generation Across Edits via Disentangled Context Memory

Consistent video generation under editing operations requires persistence: when edits modify scene appearance or layout, subsequent generations should remain coherent across time and viewpoints. However, existing memory designs struggle to maintain long-term consistency after such modifications, as stored contexts may become outdated or invalid. To address this, we propose PermaVid, a novel framework built upon a multi-modal context memory that disentangles spatial context into semantic appearance and geometric structure, together with an edit-aware memory update and retrieval strategy that keeps memory evolution aligned with subsequent observations. Specifically, we develop two complementary memory banks: an RGB context memory that captures appearance-aware observations while implicitly encoding geometry, and a depth context memory that preserves geometry-only structure disentangled from semantics. Building on this design, we introduce a memory-guided video generation model that performs multi-modal feature fusion under reference conditions drawn from mixed-modality memory contexts. Experiments demonstrate that our method maintains strong long-term semantic and structural consistency after edits, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Physical Atari: A Robust and Accessible Platform for Real-time Reinforcement Learning on Robots

arXiv:2606.19357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We built a robot called the Robotroller that actuates an Atari CX40+ controller and a device called the Atari Devbox that renders the game frame and the reward signal from the Arcade Learning Environment on a screen. The Robotroller and the Atari Devbox, together with an off-the-shelf camera and a desktop computer, constitute a system that can be used to study reinforcement learning algorithms in the physical world. We call the full system Physical Atari. In this paper, we detail the key decisions that make Physical Atari a robust and accessible platform. To make the system robust, we designed the Robotroller so that all movement is done through bearings, which reduces wear. Additionally, we wrote software that monitors the state of the servos at a high frequency and intervenes to limit stress. To make the system accessible, we used affordable off-the-shelf components and parts that can be manufactured using consumer 3D printers. Physical Atari can be built for under $1,000 and has been used for weeks of non-stop reinforcement learning experiments without any mechanical failures. We used it to validate that reinforcement learning algorithms can learn directly on robots and show that even small distribution shifts between learning and deployment can significantly degrade the performance of policies. Our results underscore the importance of on-device adaptation for strong performance on robots.

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

Ex-Omni: Enabling 3D Facial Animation Generation for Omni-modal Large Language Models

Omni-modal large language models (OLLMs) aim to unify multimodal understanding and generation, yet extending them to jointly produce speech and 3D facial animation remains largely unexplored despite its importance for natural human-computer interaction. A key challenge is the mismatch between the discrete semantic reasoning of LLMs and the dense temporal dynamics required for 3D facial motion. We propose Expressive Omni (Ex-Omni), an open-source model that augments OLLMs with native speech-accompanied 3D facial animation. Ex-Omni decouples semantic reasoning from temporal generation through a blendshape-aware speech unit generator and a blendshape decoder, where speech units provide temporal scaffolding and hidden speech representations carry facially relevant cues. We further introduce a unified token-as-query gated fusion (TQGF) mechanism for controlled semantic injection, as well as InstructS2SF-1200K, a dataset consisting of 1200K samples for pre-training. Extensive experiments show that Ex-Omni maintains competitive speech understanding and generation ability while achieving better audio-visual synchronization and lower face-generation latency than cascaded pipelines.

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

A Pfaffian quantum Hall state of ultracold bosons

arXiv:2606.12409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fractional quantum Hall states are a cornerstone of topological physics, hosting fractionally charged quasiparticles with exotic statistics that promise to enable topologically protected quantum information processing. Among these, the Pfaffian state introduced by Moore and Read implements a p-wave pairing structure that supports excitations with non-Abelian exchange statistics. Despite extensive study in electronic systems, direct access to its pairing structure has remained limited. Here we realize a three-particle bosonic Pfaffian state of ultracold $^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ atoms in an optical lattice subject to a Floquet-engineered synthetic magnetic field. Using a Bayesian-optimized adiabatic protocol, we prepare a state exhibiting Pfaffian pairing correlations. Site-resolved measurements of multi-point density correlations reveal a pronounced suppression of short-range three-body coincidences, reflecting the underlying pairing structure. We further probe the state's transport response through Hall drift measurements. Our results establish a bottom-up approach to engineering non-Abelian topological order and lay the groundwork for future explorations of anyonic braiding in synthetic matter.

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

RoSE: Round-robin Synthetic Data Evaluation for Selecting LLM Generators without Human Test Sets

LLMs are powerful generators of synthetic data, which are used for training smaller, specific models. This is especially valuable for low-resource languages, where human-labelled data is scarce but LLMs can still produce high-quality text. However, LLMs differ in how useful their outputs are for training. Selecting the best LLM as a generator is challenging because extrinsic evaluation requires costly human annotations (which are often unavailable for low-resource languages), while intrinsic metrics correlate poorly with downstream performance. We introduce Round robin Synthetic data Evaluation (RoSE), a proxy metric for selecting the best LLM generator without human test sets. RoSE trains a small model on the outputs of a candidate generator (LLM) and then evaluates it on generated synthetic examples from all other candidate LLMs. The final RoSE score is the mean performance of this small model. Across six LLMs, eleven languages, and three tasks (sentiment, topic, intent), RoSE identifies the optimal generator more often than any other intrinsic heuristics. RoSE outperforms intrinsic heuristics and comes within 0.76 percentage points of the optimal generator baseline. This result is measured in terms of downstream performance, obtained by training a small model on the chosen generator's outputs (optimal vs. proxy metric selected) and evaluating it on human-labelled test data. Additionally, RoSE is the only metric to achieve a positive correlation with performance on human test data.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum Otto engine powered by an anisotropic Heisenberg XYZ model under independent local magnetic fields

arXiv:2606.12877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a quantum Otto heat engine whose working substance is an anisotropic two-qubit Heisenberg XYZ model. Independent local magnetic fields are used to control each spin individually. The influence of the longitudinal coupling, anisotropy, transverse coupling, and local fields on the net work output and efficiency is systematically examined. Reducing the longitudinal coupling is found to markedly improve both the maximum work and the peak efficiency. The engine performance reaches an optimum at a particular value of the anisotropy parameter. A local work analysis clarifies how work is produced during the cycle. Because of the asymmetric local fields and the intrinsic spin-spin interaction, the two qubits play markedly different thermodynamic roles; the interaction term itself contributes crucially to the total work. We further analyze the variation of quantum entanglement, quantified by concurrence, along the cycle. The results indicate that a pronounced change in entanglement between the hot and cold isomagnetic strokes is closely correlated with the efficiency enhancement. This work offers new insight into the operating principles and control of quantum Otto heat engines.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantifying and detecting quantum-state texture

arXiv:2604.07257v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum-state texture is a recently proposed quantum resource that characterizes the inhomogeneity of a quantum state's matrix element distribution in the computational basis, enriching our understanding of quantum state structure. To expand its quantification toolkit and establish detection methods, in this article, we investigate the resource theory of texture from both quantitative and detection perspectives. First, we construct a texture measure $\mathcal{T}^{GR}_{\alpha,z}(\rho)$ based on the $\alpha$-$z$ Rényi relative entropy and present some of its inherent properties. Second, we analyze the mathematical relationships between several existing texture measures, revealing connections among different quantifiers. Finally, drawing on the witness concept from other resource theories, we systematically introduce texture witnesses into the texture theory and provide examples of texture witnesses with special properties.

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

ViCoStream: Streaming VideoLLMs Can Run Beyond 100 FPS with Stage-Wise Coordinated Inference

Streaming VideoLLMs must continuously process incoming video while maintaining low query latency, making both video-ingestion throughput and query-time responsiveness critical for real-time deployment. Existing methods largely focus on accelerating individual modules, such as visual encoding, token pruning, or KV-cache compression, but provide limited insight into whether the resulting system can sustain real-time streaming performance. We formulate streaming VideoLLM inference as a coordinated pipeline spanning visual preprocessing, visual encoding, token dropping, and LLM prefilling/decoding. Building on this formulation, we propose ViCoStream (Video Coordinated Streaming), a stage-wise coordinated streaming framework that combines chunk-wise execution, CUDA-stream overlap, visual token control, bounded visual attention, and query-side retrieval to bound per-chunk computation and memory costs. We further provide a systematic study of bottleneck migration, revealing how chunk size, token retention, attention locality, and retrieval scope shape the throughput-accuracy trade-off. Experiments with Qwen2.5-VL-3B/7B-Instruct across multiple streaming benchmarks show that ViCoStream achieves 134 FPS video throughput and less than 50 ms TTFT on a single A100 GPU while maintaining accuracy close to full-history baselines.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Utility-Constrained Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.14029v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Constrained MDPs (CMDPs) are a widely adopted framework for incorporating safety into RL agents; however, the framework does not support risk-sensitive constraints. This can be problematic: For example, CMDPs allow for optimal solutions that, in order to satisfy the risk-neutral constraints, mix infrequent catastrophic behaviors and frequent, overly conservative ones. Moreover, prior empirical results suggest that enforcing stricter, risk-sensitive constraints can improve performance even under risk-neutral evaluation. The natural framework to incorporate risk-sensitive constraints is utility-constrained MDPs (UCMDPs), but no practical solutions for this problem existed. In this work, we introduce a simple yet powerful methodology for UCMDPs and constrained RL. Besides allowing for risk-sensitive constraints, our framework does not require us to fix constraint limits in advance of training the agent, provided that a sensible range is known. This increases policy flexibility and, in practice, allows for adjustments to these limits at no extra training cost. Besides benefiting from the generality of the framework, our agent shows strong performance in practice, consistently matching or outperforming existing baselines in several Safety Gymnasium benchmark tasks.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

HULFSynth : An INR based Super-Resolution and Ultra Low-Field MRI Synthesis via Contrast factor estimation

We present an unsupervised single image bidirectional Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) synthesizer that synthesizes an Ultra-Low Field (ULF) like image from a High-Field (HF) magnitude image and vice-versa. Unlike existing MRI synthesis models, our approach is inspired by the physics that drives contrast changes between HF and ULF MRIs. Our forward model simulates a HF to ULF transformation by estimating the tissue-type Signal-to-Noise ratio (SNR) values based on target contrast values. For the Super-Resolution task, we used an Implicit Neural Representation (INR) network to synthesize HF image by simultaneously predicting tissue-type segmentations and image intensity without observed HF data. The proposed method is evaluated using synthetic ULF-like data from generated from standard 3T T$_1$-weighted images for qualitative assessments and paired 3T-64mT T$_1$-weighted images for validation experiments. WM-GM contrast improved by 52% in synthetic ULF-like images and 37% in 64mT images. Sensitivity experiments demonstrated the robustness of our forward model to variations in target contrast, noise and initial seeding.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Post Hoc Localization of Beam F3 Stimulation Targets: An MRI-Derived Geodesic Approach for Refined TMS E-Field Simulations

Background: Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) targeting the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is an established treatment option in major depressive disorder. One of the most common approaches for targeting the dlPFC is the Beam F3 method, which determines the stimulation site (F3Beam) as a function of external cranial measurements. Precise knowledge of the individual stimulation site is essential for imaging-based analyses of TMS effects. However, due to the method's reliance on individual anatomy, retrospective identification of F3Beam targets across cohorts is challenging, limiting the analysis of existing datasets. We developed a scalable method to reconstruct subject-specific F3Beam target locations for e-field simulations based on structural imaging. Methods: High-resolution three-dimensional (3D) T1-weighted MRI was used to generate individual scalp meshes via the ''Simulation of Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation'' (SimNIBS) software. Subject-specific anatomical distances and coordinates of interest were measured geodesically using a Python-based script to reconstruct the individual F3Beam targets. Validation included a retrospective comparison between digital geodesic measurements and manual cranial measurements in 20 patients and a prospective comparison with MR-visible scalp markers in 2 healthy controls. To assess the impact of our targeting algorithm on e-field simulations, volumetric e-field maps based on three potential targets (F3Beam, F3MNI, F3Geo) were generated in SimNIBS and compared using voxel-wise statistics in SPM12. Results: Retrospective analysis revealed a systematic bias towards higher in vivo measurements compared to digital geodesic measurements, though deviations in the final distances determining F3Beam (xBeam and yBeam) were minimal ({Delta}xBeam: 0.11 {+/-} 0.08 cm; {Delta}yBeam: 0.14 {+/-} 0.21 cm). Prospective validation demonstrated that F3Beam coordinates better matched in vivo coil positions than group-template-derived targets (F3MNI). Group-level analysis showed method-dependent clustering of coil positions with corresponding voxel-wise e-field differences. Conclusions: Individualized geodesic measurements may enable accurate, scalable and retrospective identification of Beam F3 targets and coil orientations. This approach may yield more accurate e-field simulations than group-template based targeting and provides a practical method for retrospective analysis of existing TMS treatment cohorts. This could be leveraged to identify response predictors or imaging-based biomarkers of treatment response.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Anatomically Conditioned Recurrent Refinement for Topology-Aware Circle of Willis Segmentation

Segmenting the Circle of Willis (CoW) from Magnetic Resonance Angiography (MRA) is challenging due to complex topology and thin vascular structures that are prone to fragmentation. Standard Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) often fail to capture these topological constraints, resulting in "broken vessel" artifacts. To address this, we propose the Anatomically Conditioned Recurrent Refinement U-Net (AC2RUNet). Our architecture decouples segmentation into two streams: a Static Stream that extracts invariant anatomical features and a lightweight Dynamic Stream that iteratively refines topological errors over time. We further introduce a dynamic curriculum learning strategy that transitions from high-recall geometric supervision to topology-aware constraints. Validated on the TopCoW dataset, AC2RUNet substantially reduces Hausdorff Distance (4.72 mm vs 9.17 mm) and Betti number errors (0.19 vs 0.40), improving topological connectivity over the nnU-Net baseline while maintaining comparable volumetric Dice.

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

EmoZone-Talker: Regional Semantic Control of Audio-Driven 3DGS Talking Heads via Facial Action Units

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown strong potential for high-fidelity talking head synthesis. However, enabling fine-grained, interpretable, and editable facial expression control remains fundamentally challenging due to intrinsic conflicts between speech-driven facial dynamics and explicit expression signals. Existing methods rely on implicit multimodal fusion, leading to spatial entanglement and temporal instability. We present EmoZone-Talker, a novel framework that reformulates audio-driven facial animation as a structured spatial-temporal coordination problem under cross-modal conflicts. Our approach introduces an explicit spatial disentanglement and temporal dynamics modeling of facial motion. Specifically, we propose Synergy Zones with Prioritized Attention Bias (SZ-PAB) to explicitly decouple modality contributions via region-wise constraints guided by anatomical priors, and a Channel-Independent Temporal AU Encoder (CIT-AE) to model temporally coherent AU dynamics. By integrating these representations into 3D Gaussian deformation, EmoZone-Talker enables precise and interpretable control over facial expressions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method improves expression controllability and realism, with notable gains in upper-face accuracy and temporal coherence, while preserving high rendering quality and accurate lip synchronization. Code will be publicly released to facilitate reproducibility and further research.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Beyond the Commitment Boundary: Probing Epiphenomenal Chain-of-Thought in Large Reasoning Models

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is the dominant paradigm for inference-time scaling in language models, yet the causal influence of individual steps on the final answer poorly understood. We estimate each step's causal importance via early exit and use this measure to study how answers form across the reasoning traces of several model families. Across diverse tasks, we find that reasoning typically crosses a commitment boundary – a sharp transition from transient intermediate guesses to a stable, high-confidence answer. This transition often happens in a single step, well before the model's reasoning block ends, and is followed by epiphenomenal CoT steps that leave the final answer probability unaltered. Using attention probes, we show that answer-formation stages can be linearly decoded from intermediate reasoning steps with high accuracy and generalize robustly to unseen reasoning tasks. We exploit this signal to early-exit reasoning blocks at the commitment boundary, reducing the length of CoTs up to 55\% on average with negligible impact on model performance.