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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Indefinite Quantum Causality

Authors:
Fabio Costa↗Giulia Rubino↗Cyril Branciard↗\v{C}aslav Brukner↗Marco T\'ulio Quintino↗

arXiv:2606.19438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, operational approaches to quantum foundations have been developed as a means of understanding the core principles and distinctive features of quantum theory. Such approaches typically view physical processes as sequences of operations, with earlier operations serving as causes of later effects. However, a growing literature is emerging on the possibility of relaxing this assumption and allowing for quantum indefiniteness in the causal order. This development stems from a variety of motivations, both fundamental and applied, including exploring the role of causality in quantum theory, the interplay between quantum theory and general relativity, and higher-order quantum computing. A prominent offshoot of this development is the emergence of indefinite causal order as a feasible resource for quantum information processing. This review provides an overview of the current state of the art in the field, covering the methodology underlying indefinite quantum causality within the so-called "process matrix formalism", outlining key results and experimental implementations, and discussing recent advances.

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

Beyond LoRA: Is Sparsity-Induced Adaptation Better?

Authors:
Elijah Cadenhead↗Cristian McGee↗Xin Li↗El Houcine Bergou↗Aritra Dutta↗

arXiv:2606.13767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and its variants provide a memory- and compute-efficient alternative to full fine-tuning of pre-trained models. However, questions remain about the comparative generalizability of these approaches and how the structural restrictions on low-rank updates preserve effective adaptation performance. We present a historical framing, covering the past (full fine-tuning and original LoRA), the present (different variants of LoRA), and propose simpler, cheaper, parameter-efficient extensions by inducing sparsity within existing LoRA variants: Cheap LoRA (cLA), training a single low-rank factor with the other fixed (deterministically or, in its randomized variant, stochastically), and the chained circulant variant, ${c}^3$LA. We frame cLA as a structured instance of asymmetric LoRA, serving as a controlled column-subspace restriction of full fine-tuning. We derive information-theoretic generalization error bounds for these variants, marking one of the first endeavors in this area. Empirically, we evaluate 11 fine-tuning methods across 10 pre-trained models and 14 datasets, analyzing the fine-tuned models' performance and generalization using tools such as loss landscapes and spectral analysis. Despite the sensitivity of fine-tuned models to the pre-trained model, datasets, and other factors, our study suggests that restricting LoRA-based PEFT methods' adaptation to a sparse, structured column space remains competitive across tasks with their parameter-matched baselines while reducing up to 10% training time and peak GPU memory up to 15%, even with a naïve, non-optimized, sparse implementation. Our theoretical and empirical generalization measures provide a more consistent and principled approach to their cost-effective adaptation than commonly used analytical tools. Overview and code are available at: https://elicaden.github.io/Beyond_LoRA/.

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03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Open Materials Generation with Inference-Time Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Philipp Hoellmer↗Stefano Martiniani↗

arXiv:2602.00424v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Continuous-time generative models for crystalline materials enable inverse materials design by learning to predict stable crystal structures, but incorporating explicit target properties into the generative process remains challenging. Policy-gradient reinforcement learning (RL) provides a principled mechanism for aligning generative models with downstream objectives but typically requires access to the score, which has prevented its application to flow-based models that learn only velocity fields. We introduce Open Materials Generation with Inference-time Reinforcement Learning (OMatG-IRL), a policy-gradient RL framework that operates directly on the learned velocity fields and eliminates the need for the explicit computation of the score. OMatG-IRL leverages stochastic perturbations of the underlying generation dynamics preserving the baseline performance of the pretrained generative model while enabling exploration and policy-gradient estimation at inference time. Using OMatG-IRL, we present the first application of RL to crystal structure prediction (CSP). Our method enables effective reinforcement of an energy-based objective while preserving diversity through composition conditioning, and it achieves performance competitive with score-based RL approaches. Finally, we show that OMatG-IRL can learn time-dependent velocity-annealing schedules, enabling accurate CSP with order-of-magnitude improvements in sampling efficiency and, correspondingly, reduction in generation time. The OMatG-IRL code is included in a new release of the Open Materials Generation (OMatG) framework available at https://github.com/FERMat-ML/OMatG.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

MapAgent: An Industrial-Grade Agentic Framework for City-scale Lane-level Map Generation

Authors:
Deguo Xia↗Zihan Li↗Haochen Zhao↗Dong Xie↗Yuyao Kong↗Xiyan Liu↗Jizhou Huang↗Mengmeng Yang↗Diange Yang↗

arXiv:2606.04513v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Lane-level maps are critical infrastructure for autonomous driving and lane-level navigation, yet constructing and maintaining standardized lane networks for hundreds of cities remains highly labor-intensive. Recent end-to-end vectorized mapping methods can predict lane geometry and topology directly from sensor data, but they typically treat mapping specifications and traffic regulations as implicit, dataset-dependent supervision. Moreover, in complex scenes (e.g., worn or missing markings and occlusions), correct lane configurations are often under-determined by visual evidence alone, making specification violations a major source of human post-editing. We propose MapAgent, an industrial-grade agentic architecture that augments a vectorization backbone for specification-compliant lane-map production. Rather than merely adding an agent loop to map prediction, MapAgent couples backbone perception with explicit specification verification, constraint-aware reasoning, and deterministic map editing under a bounded, verification-driven Judge-Planner-Worker loop. A vision-language Judge diagnoses errors by jointly inspecting visual evidence and draft vectors, while a tool-calling Planner generates minimal corrective edits with post-edit re-validation. To remain scalable for city-scale production, MapAgent is selectively triggered only on tiles with low backbone confidence, adding modest overhead while preserving throughput. Experiments on real-world datasets show consistent gains over strong production baselines, especially in complex and long-tail scenarios. Additionally, MapAgent has been integrated into Baidu Maps, supporting lane-level map generation for over 360 cities nationwide and elevating the overall production automation to over 95%, demonstrating MapAgent's practicality and effectiveness for large-scale lane-level map generation.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Modality-Aware Out-of-Distribution Detection for Multi-Modal Action Recognition

Authors:
Lars Doorenbos↗Duc Manh Vu↗Serdar Ozsoy↗Juergen Gall↗

The incorporation of additional modalities into action recognition models increases their performance across a wide range of settings. However, how this additional information can contribute to making the models more robust remains underexplored, particularly for the case of multi-modal out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. While methods exist that regularize the multi-modal training process with OOD detection in mind, they still apply off-the-shelf OOD detectors designed for the uni-modal case during inference, discarding important information. Based on an interesting relationship we find between the multi-modal and uni-modal predictions, we propose to use this signal to build a post-hoc detector explicitly designed for the multi-modal scenario. We combine this new source of information with a feature-space score, which detects off-manifold samples in the multi-modal space, and normalize them by the multi-modal logits. In doing so, the proposed hybrid detector is compatible with existing training-time approaches and consistently improves performance. Experiments on a wide range of established datasets from the MultiOOD benchmark show that, on average, our approach outperforms the state of the art. Our results show the importance of explicitly considering the different modalities at inference time for multi-modal OOD detection.

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

Scaling LLM Reasoning from Minimal Labels: A Semi-Supervised Framework with a Lightweight Verifier

Authors:
Keizo Kato↗Chenhui Chu↗Yugo Murawaki↗Sado Kurohashi↗

For the development of Large language models (LLMs), recent approaches to generating pseudo intermediate reasoning have shown remarkable progress. But they typically rely on large numbers of correctly annotated answers to assess reasoning quality. This paper presents a semi-supervised framework that scales reasoning learning from minimal supervision, turning reasoning verification itself into a data creation mechanism. We train a lightweight reasoning-correctness classifier on only a few labeled samples, which judges whether intermediate reasoning traces generated by an LLM are valid. Furthermore, an entropy-based confidence threshold filters out unreliable samples, and the remaining high-confidence reasoning traces are used to fine-tune the model. Experiments on Verifiable Math Problems (Orca-Math subset) and Question Answering on Image Scene Graphs (GQA) with Visual Programming show that our method achieves accuracy comparable to using 10-15x more labeled data. Ablation analyses confirm that both the classifier and entropy filtering are essential for scalable and noise-resistant pseudo-labeling. By replacing expensive answer-level supervision with lightweight reasoning verification, our method provides a practical path toward constructing large-scale reasoning resources and paves the way for future autonomous reasoning systems that learn from minimal human input.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

FlowPipe: LLM-Enhanced Conditional Generative Flow Networks for Data Preparation Pipeline Construction

Authors:
Kunyu Ni↗Lei Cao↗Jie He↗Xiaotong Zhang↗Jianfeng Jin↗Junyu Dong↗Yanwei Yu↗

arXiv:2606.24679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data preparation pipelines improve data quality in machine learning by transforming raw tables into learning-ready data through sequential cleaning and feature transformation operators. However, automatically constructing such pipelines is computationally difficult because operator sequences are combinatorial and end-to-end evaluation is expensive. Existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) Multi-DQN methods still face three key limitations: decoupled value estimators weaken long-horizon credit assignment, dataset context is only weakly injected into the policy, and exploration is inefficient in a sparse search space with many invalid states. To address these issues, we propose FlowPipe, a unified framework that formulates pipeline synthesis as conditional probabilistic flow generation over a directed acyclic graph. FlowPipe uses Conditional Generative Flow Networks (C-GFlowNets) with a Trajectory Balance objective to connect terminal validation rewards with early pipeline decisions. It further introduces Deep Semantic Modulation through Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM), allowing LLM-derived logical priors to condition the policy's internal activations according to dataset semantics. In addition, FlowPipe incorporates failure awareness into the flow objective to avoid invalid states and concentrate search on high-potential regions. Experiments on two benchmark suites with 74 real-world datasets show that FlowPipe outperforms SOTA baselines, improving accuracy by 11.96% on average and achieving 12.5x faster training convergence. Source code is available at https://github.com/KunyuNi/FlowPipe.

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

ICA Lens: Interpreting Language Models Without Training Another Dictionary

Authors:
Sida Liu↗Feijiang Han↗

Finding interpretable directions in language-model representations is critical for understanding and controlling model behavior. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become the standard tool for this purpose, but using them as the default first lens often requires training, storing, and evaluating large overcomplete dictionaries. This bottleneck limits rapid exploration and raises a fundamental question: how much interpretable structure is already visible from activation geometry before training another neural dictionary? Our intuition is simple: many interpretable directions are selective on tokens, and these directions should look less Gaussian than random directions. We therefore revisit independent component analysis (ICA), a classical method for finding non-Gaussian directions, as a compact lens for language-model interpretability. We find that ICA has been underestimated for LLM interpretability, because prior uses often relied on off-the-shelf ICA implementations that are brittle on LLM activations and lacked systematic tools for inspecting and evaluating the recovered directions. To bridge these gaps, we introduce ICALens, the first practical workflow for stable, efficient, and auditable ICA analysis of LLM representations. It combines an optimized GPU-parallel FastICA pipeline with LLM-specific stability recipes and better fitting diagnostics, enabling efficient and reliable layer-wise analysis. Across GPT-2 Small, Gemma 2 2B, and Qwen 3.5 2B Base, ICALens efficiently recovers compact, human-interpretable directions without per-layer gradient-based dictionary training. On SAEBench, ICA is competitive with public SAEs in sparse probing and outperforms them in targeted probe perturbation under small-to-medium budgets. These results suggest that ICA should not be viewed as a weak baseline, but as an efficient and complementary first lens for exploring language-model representations.

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09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Nocturnal Respiratory Rate and Variability Predict Long-term Mortality in Stable Outpatients with Cardiovascular Disease

Authors:
Pedros-Valls↗Gupta↗K. S↗Harrington↗Yu↗J. D↗Orr↗Owens↗R. L↗Torres Barba↗King↗K. R↗…

Background: Respiratory rate (RR) predicts short-term mortality in acute care settings, yet its prognostic significance in clinically stable outpatients remains poorly defined. Objectives: To determine whether the median and variability of nocturnal respiratory rate (NRR) are independently associated with long-term cardiovascular and all-cause mortality in outpatients with cardiovascular disease. Methods: We analyzed overnight chest belt waveforms from elective polysomnography in 5,679 older adults with cardiovascular disease enrolled in the Sleep Heart Health Study (SHHS). NRR was quantified at 30-second resolution, and per-subject median NRR and within-night variability (standard deviation) were derived. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis and Cox proportional hazards models were used to evaluate associations with cardiovascular and all-cause mortality over 3-year and 15-year follow-up periods, adjusting for demographic characteristics, cardiopulmonary comorbidities, and sleep apnea severity. Results: Higher median NRR and greater NRR variability were each associated with increased cardiovascular and all-cause mortality. Combining these metrics identified a high-risk group characterized by elevated median and high variability of NRR, with approximately five-fold higher 3-year all-cause mortality compared with a low-risk group; this association remained significant in Cox models (unadjusted HR: 2.61; 95% CI: 1.65, 4.14; p

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Editorial Alignment: A Participatory Approach to Engaging Editorial Expertise in LLM-mediated Knowledge Dissemination

Authors:
Simon Aagaard Enni↗Malthe Stavning Erslev↗Karl-Emil Kj{\ae}r Bilstrup↗Kristoffer Laigaard Nielbo↗

arXiv:2606.20258v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The emergence of LLM-driven information services is reshaping the conditions under which public knowledge institutions operate, threatening to absorb the editorial function these institutions exist to exercise. While LLMs offer powerful new affordances for knowledge dissemination, editorial authority is challenged by pretrained LLMs that arrive already aligned with the values and dissemination strategies of their commercial developers. This paper investigates editor participation in re-aligning LLM interfaces to editorial standards through design workshops, in a case study where we design and implement an LLM-enabled encyclopedia interface with a Nordic public knowledge institution. We introduce editorial alignment as a design practice within Participatory AI, framing AI alignment as a design process and positioning the editorial standard as a design artefact that translates editorial practice and values into alignment objectives for technical implementation. Last, we discuss how editorial alignment can create space for ongoing participation and give editors agency in LLM-mediated knowledge dissemination.

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

Wild3R: Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting from Unconstrained Sparse Photo Collection

Authors:
Yuto Furutani↗Takashi Otonari↗Kaede Shiohara↗Toshihiko Yamasaki↗

Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) removes the need for time-consuming per-scene optimization required by traditional 3DGS. However, existing feed-forward approaches struggle with real-world photo collections that include diverse lighting conditions and transient objects. In this paper, we present Wild3R, a feed-forward approach for unconstrained sparse photo collections. The main bottleneck is the lack of training data that provides multiple viewpoints, a variety of illuminations, and transient variations necessary for learning robust scene representations. To address this, we introduce the WildCity dataset, which comprises 200 scenes, 170 lighting conditions, and transient objects, resulting in 337,500 images in total. By leveraging the dataset, our model learns appearance consistency across viewpoints conditioned on reference views, while removing transient content. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing feed-forward approaches and achieves results competitive with prior per-scene optimization-based methods.

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

Learning Patient-Specific Disease Dynamics with Latent Flow Matching for Longitudinal Imaging Generation

Authors:
Hao Chen↗Rui Yin↗Yifan Chen↗Qi Chen↗Chao Li↗

Understanding disease progression is a central clinical challenge with direct implications for early diagnosis and personalized treatment. While recent generative approaches have attempted to model progression, key mismatches remain: disease dynamics are inherently continuous and monotonic, yet latent representations are often scattered, lacking semantic structure, and diffusion-based models disrupt continuity with random denoising process. In this work, we propose to treat the disease dynamic as a velocity field and leverage Flow Matching (FM) to align the temporal evolution of patient data. Unlike prior methods, it captures the intrinsic dynamic of disease, making the progression more interpretable. However, a key challenge remains: in latent space, Auto-Encoders (AEs) do not guarantee alignment across patients or correlation with clinical-severity indicators (e.g., age and disease conditions). To address this, we propose to learn patient-specific latent alignment, which enforces patient trajectories to lie along a specific axis, with magnitude increasing monotonically with disease severity. This leads to a consistent and semantically meaningful latent space. Together, we present $\Delta$-LFM, a framework for modeling patient-specific latent progression with flow matching. Across three longitudinal MRI benchmarks, $\Delta$-LFM demonstrates strong empirical performance and, more importantly, offers a new framework for interpreting and visualizing disease dynamics.

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

A Training-Free Mixture-of-Agents Framework for Multi-Document Summarization using LLMs and Knowledge Graphs

Authors:
Cuong Vuong Tuan↗Trang Mai Xuan↗Tien-Cuong Nguyen↗Vu-Duc Ngo↗Thien Van Luong↗

Multi-Document Summarization (MDS) plays a critical role in distilling essential information from collections of textual data. Existing approaches often struggle to capture complex inter-document relationships, rely heavily on large amounts of labeled data for supervised training, or exhibit limited generalization across domains and languages. To address these limitations, we present a training-free mixture-of-agents framework for MDS that leverages the complementary strengths of large language models (LLMs) and knowledge graphs. Our approach decomposes summarization into specialized agent tasks: extractive selection, knowledge-aware abstraction, and iterative refinement, each operating without task-specific fine-tuning. We unify their outputs using a multi-perspective consistency mechanism guided by LLMs. Experiments across four datasets in English and Vietnamese demonstrate state-of-the-art or competitive performance, validating the effectiveness and adaptability of our modular design.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

MetaPlate: Counterfactual-Guided RAG-LLM Tool for Personalized Food Recommendation and Hyperglycemia Prevention

Authors:
Asiful Arefeen↗Carol Johnston↗Hassan Ghasemzadeh↗

arXiv:2606.10120v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Postprandial hyperglycemia is a key risk factor for metabolic disorders; however, existing dietary guidance is often static, impractical, and insufficiently personalized, providing recommendations that are difficult to follow or not impactful. While recent advances leverage continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) and machine learning to predict glycemic responses, these approaches are largely predictive and lack actionable guidance. Moreover, recommendation systems are often misaligned with user goals and require extensive input. We present MetaPlate, a counterfactual explanation (CF) guided, context-aware decision-support framework that generates personalized meal recommendations to mitigate postprandial glucose excursions in healthy adults. MetaPlate integrates multimodal data, including CGM readings, wearable-derived physiological signals, and user-provided meal inputs from $25$ individuals to model pre-meal context. A machine learning model predicts glucose response, while a CF optimization module adjusts meal composition modifying macronutrient amounts to maintain glucose levels within a target range ($\leq 140$ mg/dL). An LLM-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) layer enhances interpretability by producing human-readable recommendations using constrained search of the USDA food database. We evaluate MetaPlate via a structured expert-in-the-loop assessment with registered dietitians (RDs), comparing performance before and after prompt refinement. Results show improvements in meal realism, portion suitability, and recommendation likelihood, with expert feedback indicating a shift from clinically implausible outputs to actionable, contextually appropriate recommendations. Our findings emphasize the importance of domain knowledge and structured constraints in LLM-driven systems and highlight the potential of MetaPlate as a real-time personalized dietary decision-support tool.

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15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Proper and improper mixed states serve as different prior beliefs for quantum state retrodiction

Authors:
Mingxuan Liu↗Valerio Scarani↗Ge Bai↗

arXiv:2502.10030v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A mixed quantum state can be taken as capturing an unspecified form of ignorance; or as describing the lack of knowledge about the true pure state of the system ("proper mixture"); or as arising from entanglement with another system that has been disregarded ("improper mixture"). These different views yield identical density matrices and therefore identical predictions for future measurements. But when used as prior beliefs for inferring the past state from later observations ("retrodiction"), they lead to different updated beliefs. This is a purely quantum feature of Bayesian agency. Based on this observation, we establish a framework for retrodicting on any quantum belief and we prove a necessary and sufficient condition for the equivalence of beliefs. We also illustrate how these differences have operational consequences in quantum state recovery.

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

GeoRoPE: Ground-Aware Rotary Adaptation for Remote Sensing Foundation Models

Authors:
Yu Luo↗Kun Hu↗Mengwei He↗Xiaogang Zhu↗Shan Zeng↗Allen Benter↗Wei Xiang↗Patrick Filippi↗Thomas Francis Bishop↗Zhiyong Wang↗

Remote-sensing foundation models (RSFMs) benefit from pretraining on imagery from multiple sensors and ground sampling distances (GSDs), but such exposure alone does not resolve scale mismatch during downstream adaptation. A fixed token-grid offset can correspond to different ground distances across sensors, making grid-based positional priors physically inconsistent. Meanwhile, heterogeneous spatial granularity means that compact urban regions and homogeneous landscapes may require different positional sensitivities even under the same GSD. Therefore, we propose {GeoRoPE}, a ground-aware, RoPE-compatible, and parameter-efficient spatial adaptation method for RSFMs. GeoRoPE recalibrates token-level positional interactions from two complementary aspects. First, Geo-Coordinate Calibration (GCC) rescales raw token-grid offsets according to the ground distance represented by one token-grid step, producing geo-calibrated relative coordinates across GSDs. Second, Geo-Frequency Calibration (GFC) adjusts the native RoPE frequency with a relation-specific factor, enabling position sensitive adaptation to scene-dependent spatial granularity. GeoRoPE is injected into pretrained RSFMs through a lightweight adapter, preserving the frozen spatial prior while adding geo-aware positional corrections. Experiments across multiple RSFMs, sensors, resolutions, and downstream tasks demonstrate that GeoRoPE improves cross-resolution robustness and scale-sensitive representation learning.

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17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Gradient boosting for extremes: sampling theory and application to insurance

Authors:
St\'ephane Lhaut↗Olivier Lopez↗

arXiv:2606.14268v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a statistical learning theory for gradient boosting applied to the estimation of covariate-dependent Generalized Pareto (GP) distributions in the context of Peaks-over-Threshold modeling. After an orthogonal reparametrization of the GP likelihood that diagonalizes its Fisher information matrix, we cast the estimation problem within the Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) framework and derive non-asymptotic error bounds for the boosting estimator. Our analysis accounts for three distinct sources of error in the process: statistical fluctuations, the approximation bias inherent to the asymptotic nature of the GP model-controlled under second-order regular variation-and the approximation error associated with the finite number of boosting iterates, making explicit the resulting bias-variance trade-off. We illustrate the practical benefits of the reparametrization through simulations, showing that it significantly reduces gradient correlation during training and improves convergence stability. The methodology is applied to a medical malpractice insurance dataset from the Texas Department of Insurance, comprising over 18 000 closed claims. The gradient boosting approach yields a good fit for the tail of settlement cost distributions and reveals that the number of days to settlement is the dominant predictor of tail heaviness, consistent with earlier findings in the reserving literature.

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

HERO: Hindsight-Enhanced Reflection from Environment Observations for Agentic Self-Distillation

Authors:
Haoran Liu↗Yuwei Zhang↗Xiyao Li↗Bohan Lyu↗Jingbo Shang↗

arXiv:2606.11559v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning typically improves multi-turn agent capabilities through the terminal outcome of the trajectories, which makes it difficult to determine credit assignments for each intermediate turns. Recent on-policy self-distillation methods offer a promising alternative by converting privileged feedback into dense token-level supervision through a self-teacher. Our study is motivated by the unexpected performance degradation observed when naively extending this paradigm to multi-turn settings, which we attribute to a lack of alignment between privileged feedback, such as successful trajectories or terminal outcomes, and the student's current decision context. We introduce HERO, a hindsight-enhanced self-distillation framework that uses next environment observations as locally aligned feedback. After each rollout, HERO reflects on the completed interaction to convert each observation into a compact turn-level diagnosis, that captures actionable feedback about the original action such as its necessity, validity or failure cause. On TauBench and WebShop, HERO improves task success and reduces unnecessary turns over environment-feedback-only self-distillation and GRPO. It is especially effective under limited training turn budgets, where successful rollouts are rare and GRPO provides weak reward-contrast signals.

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19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

3D-CBM: A Framework for Concept-Based Interpretability in Generative 3D Modeling

Authors:
Ahmad Al-Kabbany↗

This research introduces a framework for incorporating Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) into 3D generative architectures to address the inherent 'semantic gap' in deep geometric learning. As deep models become central to 3D content creation, explainability shifts from a peripheral feature to a fundamental requirement for trust and accountability in safety-critical domains such as healthcare and manufacturing. CBMs provide an intrinsic interpretability solution by constraining latent representations to align with human-defined concepts, yet their application to unstructured 3D data remains largely unexplored. We design, implement, and validate a formal 3D-CBM architecture that maps raw geometric inputs, including point clouds and meshes, into a multi-tiered taxonomy of interpretable primitives and functional attributes. The framework further identifies strategic datasets, such as PartNet and ShapeNet, specialized for concept-based supervision. Experimental results from a 3D part-manipulation proof-of-concept experiment demonstrate the framework's efficacy, achieving a concept prediction accuracy of 88.8\% and a Chamfer Distance of 0.0115. Critically, the model enables precise test-time intervention, allowing for the interactive correction of structural errors. This work establishes a foundation for semantically-steerable 3D generation and invites further exploration into collaborative human-in-the-loop design systems.

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20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Grad Detect: Gradient-Based Hallucination Detection in LLMs

Authors:
Anand Kamat↗Daniel Blake↗Brent M. Werness↗

arXiv:2606.24790v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, yet they remain prone to generating hallucinations. Detecting these hallucinations is critical for deploying LLMs reliably in high-stakes applications. We present Grad Detect, a gradient-based approach for predicting hallucinations by analyzing layer-wise gradient patterns from a single forward-backward pass during inference. Our method shows that the internal gradient structure of a model carries rich information about the correctness of its output. This information is not accessible through output-level signals alone. We evaluate Grad Detect on several Q&A benchmarks across both hallucination detection and model abstention prediction, where it consistently outperforms confidence-based and sampling-based baselines. Through comprehensive layer ablation studies across all eleven models from four architectural families, we find that the final five layers concentrate over 97% of the discriminative gradient signal, enabling efficient deployment with minimal performance loss. Grad Detect provides a unified framework for predicting multiple dimensions of LLM reliability, offering strong predictive performance alongside interpretable insights into where and how model failures originate.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

TUNI: Unifying Pre-training and Fine-tuning with Modality-Aware Mutual Learning and Rectification for RGB-T Semantic Segmentation

Authors:
Xiaodong Guo↗Xianda Guo↗Tong Liu↗Zhihong Deng↗Yanlun Peng↗Xiang Li↗Wujie Zhou↗

RGB-thermal (RGB-T) semantic segmentation improves the environmental perception of autonomous platforms in challenging conditions. Prevailing RGB-T segmentation frameworks suffer from suboptimal multi-modal feature extraction and fusion, unbalanced modality dependency, and inadequate utilization of thermal information. To address these challenges, we propose TUNI, a unified pre-training and fine-tuning framework for efficient and real-time RGB-T semantic segmentation. It pre-trains an RGB-T encoder that incorporates an RGB-T local module that selectively emphasizes salient consistent and distinct local features across modalities, thereby integrating cross-modal feature extraction and fusion in a unified manner. To alleviate the modality bias issue during RGB-T pre-training, modality-inverted contrastive mutual learning is introduced to enable knowledge exchange between two RGB-dominated and thermal-dominated encoders. In the fine-tuning phase, modality rectification learning fully exploits residual thermal information by focusing on correct yet divergent prediction regions between two modality-specific decoders. We further develop three TUNI variants, covering lightweight, balanced, and high-performance requirements. Extensive experiments on five RGB-T semantic segmentation datasets demonstrate that TUNI achieves superior accuracy, generalization, and compactness compared with 15 state-of-the-art models. The code is available at https://github.com/xiaodonguo/TUNI-v2.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

WavSLM: Single-Stream Speech Language Modeling via WavLM Distillation

Authors:
Luca Della Libera↗Cem Subakan↗Mirco Ravanelli↗

Large language models show that simple autoregressive training can yield scalable and coherent generation, but extending this paradigm to speech remains challenging due to the entanglement of semantic and acoustic information. Most existing speech language models rely on text supervision, hierarchical token streams, or complex hybrid architectures, departing from the single-stream generative pretraining paradigm that has proven effective in text. In this work, we introduce WavSLM, a speech language model trained by quantizing and distilling self-supervised WavLM representations into a single codebook and optimizing an autoregressive next-chunk prediction objective. WavSLM jointly models semantic and acoustic information within a single token stream without text supervision or text pretraining. Despite its simplicity, it achieves competitive performance on consistency benchmarks and speech generation while using fewer parameters, less training data, and supporting streaming inference.

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23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

RoboPIN: Grounded Embodied Reasoning via Pinned Chain-of-Thought

Authors:
Yaoting Huang↗Yifu Yuan↗Linqi Han↗Chengwen Li↗Shuoheng Zhang↗Xianze Yao↗Hongyao Tang↗Yan Zheng↗Jianye Hao↗

arXiv:2606.15753v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied reasoning requires models to perceive task-relevant objects and spaces in physical environments and maintain consistent visual grounding throughout multi-step reasoning. However, current vision-language models rely on text-only or coordinate-augmented chain-of-thought, where entity references remain implicit and ambiguous. This may cause the reasoning process to decouple from visual evidence, entity references to drift across steps, and a causal disconnection between the reasoning trajectory and the final answer, with these problems further amplified in multi-view scenarios due to cross-view appearance changes. To address these issues, we propose Pinned Chain-of-Thought (\pincot{}), a structured reasoning paradigm that pins every reasoning step to visual evidence. \pincot{} introduces the concept of \reasoninganchor{}, which binds each task-relevant entity to a structured visual anchor with entity name, unique identity, view index, and spatial grounding, enabling consistent entity tracking across reasoning steps and views. We build a fully automated data generation pipeline to construct \dataset{}, a high-quality \pincot{}-formatted reasoning dataset. We then train \method{} through three-stage post-training that progressively injects embodied knowledge, structured reasoning ability, and process-supervised alignment, with rewards that directly constrain both anchor localization and identity consistency during reasoning. On 14 benchmarks covering embodied spatial reasoning, multi-view reasoning, and pointing, \method{} with only 4B parameters consistently outperforms 7B level open-source embodied models, achieving a 12\% average improvement over the strongest 7B baseline, Mimo-Embodied. Further analysis shows that \pincot{} improves grounding accuracy and cross-step identity consistency, validating the effectiveness of process supervision.

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24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Multi-domain AD risk burden and plasma biomarkers in cognitively unimpaired adults

Authors:
Li↗M. Y↗Tolosa-Tort↗Heston↗M. B↗Insel↗Andrews↗S. J↗

Introduction: Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology accumulates decades before symptom onset, yet how the cumulative effect of genetic, familial, and modifiable lifestyle risk burden jointly affects plasma biomarker levels and trajectories in cognitively unimpaired older adults remains unknown. Methods: We analyzed data from 261 participants in the PREVENT-AD cohort. A composite risk score integrating APOE e4 status, polygenic score, family history, and modifiable/lifestyle risk was examined against six plasma biomarkers using linear regression and linear mixed-effects models. Results: APOE e4 was the strongest predictor of plasma biomarker levels. Higher composite risk burden was associated with elevated ptau181, ptau217, ptau217/Ab42, and GFAP levels, and lower Ab42/40 levels. A higher risk burden was predictive of accelerated ptau181 accumulation. Discussion: Cumulative AD risk burden is broadly associated with plasma biomarker levels and specifically predicts accelerated ptau181 accumulation in cognitively unimpaired older adults, supporting structured composite risk profiling as a framework for AD risk stratification.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Hard or Just Unreached? Diagnosing the Sampling Blind Spot in Math-Reasoning Difficulty Estimation

Authors:
Luca Zhou↗Sajel Shah↗Emanuele Rodol\`a↗Roberto Dess\`i↗

arXiv:2606.19636v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Math and science reasoning benchmarks rely on pass@k, the fraction of sampled chains that reach gold, as the canonical per-example difficulty signal. The same signal drives RL with verifiable rewards, math data curation, synthetic curricula, and verifier training. We show this proxy has a persistent blind spot on its hardest stratum: on the eight free-form math cells we test (GSM8K and MATH across four open-weight models), 10.3-22.9% of the examples that no sampling seed solves in six tries are instead solved at matched compute by a six-chain deterministic regime. These are greedy decoding plus five cheap residual-stream perturbations applied via activation grafting, while greedy alone solves at most 6% on these math cells. Recovery scales with the additional budget, across perturbations whose mechanistic distinctness we verify across all twelve cells (cross-kind fix-set Jaccard

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