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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Stochastic epidemic model with varying infectivity and waning immunity: the law of large numbers with unbounded infectivity

Authors:
Rapha\"el Forien↗\'Etienne Pardoux↗

arXiv:2606.11845v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We revisit the large population limit of our epidemic model with infection age dependent infectivity and progressive immunity waning, under the assumption that the supremum in $t$ of the random infectivity function has a finite expectation, while the previous proofs assumed that this supremum admits a deterministic upper bound.

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

Exact Schur-Sylvester Dimensionality Reductions for Non-Smooth Stochastic Complexity and Manifold Sampling

Authors:
Trenton Lau↗Gary P. T. Choi↗

arXiv:2606.23867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The exact computation of the Normalized Maximum Likelihood (NML) codelength for regular non-smooth estimators (e.g., Lasso) has been historically limited by the cubic scaling walls of manifold-constrained projection and volume integration. At each step of the geometric Propose-and-Project Metropolis–Hastings (PPMH) sampler, evaluating the projection operator requires inverting an $(N+k) \times (N+k)$ generalized KKT matrix, while calculating the volume factor requires the determinant of an $(N-k) \times (N-k)$ Gram matrix. This paper presents an exact, mathematically equivalent formulation that bypasses both bottlenecks by utilizing the block Schur complement and Sylvester's determinant identity. We prove that the computational complexity of both operations collapses from $\mathcal{O}(N^3)$ to $\mathcal{O}(k^3 + N^2 k)$ per step. We generalize this reduction to Sparse Support Vector Machines (SVMs), Elastic Net, and Group Lasso. Finally, we provide a rigorous numerical stability analysis and evaluate the sampler's efficiency using the Effective Sample Size (ESS) per second. Our empirical benchmarks on high-dimensional datasets confirm a constant speedup exceeding $14{,}100\times$ while maintaining double-precision numerical equivalence, rendering exact non-smooth NML estimation highly tractable for large-scale statistical inference.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

SP$^3$: Spherical Priors for Plug-and-Play Restoration

Authors:
Sean Man↗Ron Raphaeli↗Matan Kleiner↗Or Ronai↗

In this paper, we introduce SP$^3$, a novel Plug-and-Play algorithm that accelerates maximum a posteriori image restoration by replacing denoisers with Spherical Encoders (SE) as generative priors. SP$^3$ approximates the intractable proximal prior step by utilizing the SE tightly structured latent space as a robust projection onto the natural image manifold. Alternating this projection with a closed-form data-consistency step, via Half-Quadratic Splitting, achieves stable convergence without requiring gradient computation during inference. This unique formulation unlocks "anytime" restoration capabilities, producing sharp, plausible images from the first iteration. Evaluations across a variety of image restoration tasks demonstrate that SP$^3$ achieves perceptual quality comparable to state-of-the-art zero-shot diffusion and flow methods while being $3$-$630\times$ faster.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Can Agents Read the Room? Benchmarking Visual Social Intelligence in Multimodal Simulation

Authors:
Shijun Wan↗Xuehai Wu↗Jiwen Zhang↗Siyuan Wang↗Zhongyu Wei↗

Social interaction depends on both language and visible social signals, such as facial expressions, posture, gaze, and emotional shifts. Yet existing social-agent benchmarks are largely text-based and rarely test whether multimodal agents can use visual cues to guide interaction. We introduce \textsc{\benchmarkname{}}, a benchmark evaluating visual social intelligence in multimodal social simulation. It contains 240 scenarios, 585 role instances, and 2,340 role-task instances, combining aligned textual-visual evidence, structured role profiles, and four role-level tasks: expression task, characteristic task, interaction regulation task, and interaction outcome task. Evaluating seven recent MLLMs under verbalized-vision and direct-vision reveals a clear gap between local role enactment and interaction management: role-specific expression and conflict handling are near saturation, whereas interaction regulation and visually grounded outcome achievement remain substantially more difficult. The code is released at https://github.com/JunsWan/AgentViSS, and the dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/JunsWan/AgentViSS.

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

Age of LLM: A Strategic 1v1 Benchmark for Reasoning, Diplomacy and Reliability of Large Language Models under Fog of War

Authors:
Arnaud Ricci↗

We introduce Age of LLM, a turn-based 1v1 benchmark in which two LLMs face off on a 13x7 grid to destroy the enemy base. Three stressors are deliberate: fog of war, full diplomacy (messages, ceasefires, ultimatums; uranium kept secret), and a reliability dimension where every turn must follow a strict JSON schema and an illegal action is silently discarded. The engine is private and each match uses a fresh random map seed and opponent, mitigating the data contamination that affects public benchmarks. Models receive a (near) rule-only prompt with no build-order advice (two tactical seed phrases were present during data collection; see Section 2.7). We benchmark 15 reasoning models across 54 matches and 5,258 actions. Findings: (1) the nuclear rush dominates (78% on the rules-coherent v0.11+ sub-corpus; 85% corpus-wide) with a sole-launcher signature that is largely mechanical under secret-simultaneous launch rules, not a cognitive deterrence failure; (2) military conquest is rare but faster (12.3 vs 18.9 turns); (3) diplomacy is prolific yet almost never consummated; (4) ~58% of illegal actions are fog/state errors, making the illegal-action rate a measure of belief-tracking; (5) – the least established, and the only one we label exploratory – a weak link associates reliability with winning. The corpus is small, unbalanced and not side-swapped, so the ranking is a preliminary descriptive view, not a contribution. Beyond ranking, the turn-by-turn traces of actions and messages make the corpus a lens on how LLMs reason under adversarial uncertainty – their belief-tracking, spontaneous deception, and per-model cognitive "personas" – which we frame as a future research direction. We release the replay format, an isometric viewer and all replays; engine source on request.

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06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Avidity of anti-pertussis toxin antibodies is associated with symptomatic Bordetella pertussis infection in a novel controlled human infection model

Authors:
Espinosa--Vinals↗Obeid↗Redden↗K. L↗ElSherif↗M. S↗Edwards↗K. M↗Halperin↗Abu-Raya↗

Background The association between functional antibody responses following Bordetella pertussis infection and symptomatic disease remains unclear. We characterized the maturation of anti-pertussis toxin (PT) IgG avidity after human challenge with B. pertussis and determined its association with symptomatic infection. Methods Healthy adults were intranasally inoculated with live B. pertussis organisms in a controlled human infection model and monitored for development of pertussis symptoms (NCT05136599). Serum samples were collected one day before inoculation and at 14, 28, 56, 180, and 365 days post challenge. Anti PT IgG avidity was tested using a titration of ammonium isothiocyanate (the bond breaking agent) to quantify a wide range of antibody avidities from low to very-high. Associations between covariates and avidity were examined using linear regression models, and high dimensional analyses were used to integrate all data. Findings Anti PT IgG avidity increased in both symptomatic (n=20) and asymptomatic (n=10) participants after the challenge, reached maximum levels at day 56, and then declined through day 365. Symptomatic participants developed significantly higher levels of high- and very high-avidity anti-PT antibodies at 28, 56, 180, and 365 days post-challenge compared with those who remained asymptomatic. In multivariate analyses, symptomatic infection was associated with higher levels of high and very high avidity anti-PT IgG at day180 and365 after challenge. Distinct avidity profiles in symptomatic vs asymptomatic participants emerged at day28 onwards, with the former group having higher levels of antibodies with higher avidities. However, levels of medium-high, high and very high avidity antibodies in symptomatic participants were lower at day 365 after challenge compared to their peak levels. Interpretation Anti-PT IgG avidity was associated with symptomatic B. pertussis infection and thus may serve as a surrogate of clinical disease outcome. These results highlight that antibody avidity provides an additional functional assay besides antibody quantitation to dissect immune responses to pertussis. Further investigation of anti PT IgG avidity should be pursued in natural pertussis outbreaks to determine whether it might be used to differentiate symptomatic from asymptomatic infections for epidemiologic purposes.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Are Neuro-Inspired Multi-Modal Vision-Language Models Resilient to Membership Inference Privacy Leakage?

Authors:
David Amebley↗Sayanton Dibbo↗

In the age of agentic AI, the growing deployment of multi-modal models (MMs) has introduced new attack vectors that can leak sensitive training data in MMs, causing privacy leakage. This paper investigates a black-box privacy attack, i.e., membership inference attack (MIA) on multi-modal vision-language models (VLMs). State-of-the-art research analyzes privacy attacks primarily to unimodal AI-ML systems, while recent studies indicate MMs can also be vulnerable to privacy attacks. While researchers have demonstrated that biologically inspired neural network representations can improve unimodal model resilience against adversarial attacks, it remains unexplored whether neuro-inspired MMs are resilient against privacy attacks. In this work, we introduce a systematic neuroscience-inspired topological regularization (tau) framework to analyze MM VLMs resilience against image-text-based inference privacy attacks. We examine this phenomenon using three VLMs: BLIP, PaliGemma 2, and ViT-GPT2, across three benchmark datasets: COCO, CC3M, and NoCaps. Our experiments compare the resilience of baseline and neuro VLMs (with topological regularization), where the tau > 0 configuration defines the NEURO variant of VLM. Our results on the BLIP model using the COCO dataset illustrate that MIA attack success in NEURO VLMs drops by 24% mean ROC-AUC, while achieving similar model utility (similarities between generated and reference captions) in terms of MPNet and ROUGE-2 metrics. This shows neuro VLMs are comparatively more resilient against privacy attacks, while not significantly compromising model utility. Our extensive evaluation with PaliGemma 2 and ViT-GPT2 models, on two additional datasets: CC3M and NoCaps, further validates the consistency of the findings. This work contributes to the growing understanding of privacy risks in MMs and provides evidence on neuro VLMs privacy threat resilience.

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

Revealing Artifacts via Noise Amplification: A Novel Perspective for AI-Generated Video Detection

Authors:
Renxi Cheng↗Jie Gui↗Hongsong Wang↗

With the rapid advancement of video generation models, distinguishing between AI-generated and authentic videos has emerged as a challenging endeavor. The majority of existing research endeavors concentrate on the development of detectors for identifying samples generated by generative adversarial networks. Nevertheless, the detection of AI-generated videos, particularly those produced by text-to-video models, still remains an uncharted territory. Although state-of-the-art text-to-video models can generate realistic visual content similar to real videos, they fall short of generating the details of the images and the changes in details within the videos. Inspired by this, we address AI-generated video detection from a novel perspective of bit-planes, which can effectively describe the details or noises in images or videos. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective approach called Noise Amplification. This approach first extracts noise signals based on bit-planes, then amplifies these noise signals, and finally feeds them into the discriminator networks for video fake classification. Noise amplification is comprehensively constructed by incorporating three aspects: pixel-level intensity enhancement, region-level spatial amplification, and frame-level temporal aggregation. To evaluate methods of AI-generated video detection in challenging scenarios, we also introduce a benchmark named HardGVD. Extensive experiments on both the large-scale dataset GenVidBench and HardGVD show that our simple approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

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09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Adiabatically-induced Kawaguchi geometry and jerk in quantum-classical systems

Authors:
Athanasios Chatzistavrakidis↗Larisa Jonke↗Ryan Requist↗

arXiv:2606.16037v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adiabatically eliminating the quantum degrees of freedom in a mixed quantum-classical system produces an effective force in the classical equation of motion. The elimination can be made to any order in the adiabatic parameter, generating a series of higher order forces. By applying a sequence of near-identity unitary transformations to the quantum state, we derive a hierarchy of increasingly accurate effective actions for the classical variables. The third order Euler-Lagrange equation is non-Newtonian as the force depends on the jerk, the third order time derivative of position. We find that the third order terms induce a special kind of Kawaguchi geometry on the space of classical variables. This geometry is characterized by an almost symplectic structure and a differential line element that depends on the acceleration in addition to the velocity. Our results can be used to efficiently capture higher order nonadiabatic effects in molecular dynamics simulations.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Surrogate Benchmarks for Model Merging Optimization

Authors:
Rio Akizuki↗Yuya Kudo↗Nozomu Yoshinari↗Yoichi Hirose↗Toshiyuki Nishimoto↗Kento Uchida↗Shinichi Shirakawa↗

arXiv:2509.02555v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Model merging techniques aim to integrate the abilities of multiple models into a single model. Most model merging techniques have hyperparameters, and their setting affects the performance of the merged model. Because several existing works show that tuning hyperparameters in model merging can enhance the merging outcome, developing hyperparameter optimization algorithms for model merging is a promising direction. However, its optimization process is computationally expensive, particularly in merging LLMs. In this work, we develop surrogate benchmarks for optimization of the merging hyperparameters to realize algorithm development and performance comparison at low cost. We define two search spaces and collect data samples to construct surrogate models to predict the performance of a merged model from a hyperparameter. We demonstrate that our benchmarks can predict the performance of merged models well and simulate optimization algorithm behaviors.

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11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Near-Optimal Learning of Local Lindbladians

Authors:
Itai Arad↗Zhili Chen↗Naixu Guo↗Patrick Rebentrost↗Zhan Yu↗

arXiv:2606.20535v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of learning local Lindbladians from black-box access to the physical evolution, and the goal is to estimate all Hamiltonian and dissipative coefficients. We give an algorithm built directly from finite-time channel probes, which runs the unknown evolution for short times, estimates the corresponding Pauli transfer matrices from classical shadows, and converts these estimates into Lindbladian coefficients by stable local Fourier inversions. For fixed locality and bounded dissipative site degree, the uses of the dynamical evolution and total evolution time scale as $\widetilde{O}(\Lambda^2/\varepsilon^2)$ and $\widetilde{O}(\Lambda/\varepsilon^2)$ respectively, in the local dynamical strength bound $\Lambda$ and target accuracy $\varepsilon$, with only logarithmic dependence on the number of qubits. The algorithm is non-adaptive, uses no ancillas, and uses only random product states as inputs followed by random Pauli measurements. The method does not require knowing the support of the Lindbladian in advance. We complement the algorithm with matching lower bounds, showing that the learning algorithm is near-optimal both in physical dynamics accesses and in total evolution time. We construct a single-qubit dephasing Lindbladian family that already requires $\Omega(\Lambda^2/\varepsilon^2)$ channel uses and $\Omega(\Lambda/\varepsilon^2)$ total evolution time, even for adaptive algorithms with arbitrary ancillas and measurements. In particular, the lower bounds imply that the Heisenberg-limited scaling achievable for Hamiltonian learning is information-theoretically impossible once dissipative coefficients must be estimated.

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

Carbon-Aware Governance Gates: An Architecture for Sustainable GenAI Development

Authors:
Mateen A. Abbasi↗Tommi J. Mikkonen↗Petri J. Ihantola↗Muhammad Waseem↗Pekka Abrahamsson↗Niko K. M\"akitalo↗

arXiv:2602.19718v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid adoption of Generative AI (GenAI) in the software development life cycle (SDLC) increases computational demand, which can raise the carbon footprint of development activities. At the same time, organizations are increasingly embedding governance mechanisms into GenAI-assisted development to support trust, transparency, and accountability. However, these governance mechanisms introduce additional computational workloads, including repeated inference, regeneration cycles, and expanded validation pipelines, increasing energy use and the carbon footprint of GenAI-assisted development. This paper proposes Carbon-Aware Governance Gates (CAGG), an architectural extension that embeds carbon budgets, energy provenance, and sustainability-aware validation orchestration into human-AI governance layers. CAGG comprises three components: (i) an Energy and Carbon Provenance Ledger, (ii) a Carbon Budget Manager, and (iii) a Green Validation Orchestrator, operationalized through governance policies and reusable design patterns.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

The Perils of Agency: How Developers Perceive, Prioritize, and Address Risks in Agentic AI Products

Authors:
Hao-Ping Lee↗Jessica He↗David Piorkowski↗Thomas Serban von Davier↗Jodi Forlizzi↗Sauvik Das↗

arXiv:2606.15485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems act autonomously, use tools, adapt to context, and operate in complex real-world environments. However, these same characteristics can create or exacerbate product risks. We studied how industry developers (n=35) perceive, prioritize, and address the risks in their agentic AI products. We found that developers' perceptions of risk were closely tied to the qualities that made the product agentic, such as autonomy, tool use, and usage in a real-world context. Developers prioritized product and business risks before considering downstream societal risks like job displacement and end-user privacy. This prioritization also impacted developers' ability and motivation to mitigate agentic risks. Finally, developers lacked mature controls for containing agentic risks, often relying on constraining the same characteristics that make agents useful: e.g., autonomy and goal complexity. These findings reveal a capability vs. risk control tension in agentic AI development: developers need to address risks that emerge from agentic capabilities, yet they currently have limited support for doing so without constraining agentic functionality.

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14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

FENNEC: Fine-Tuned Ensemble Neural Networks Accelerate Chemically Modified siRNA Design and Screening

Authors:
Larsen↗A. W↗Butnaru↗Braun↗Rotrattanadumrong↗Berninger↗Yonchev↗Gagneur↗Marsico↗

Small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) are a clinically validated therapeutic modality, yet designing potent chemically modified siRNAs remains a costly and iterative process, limited by scarce public data. Computational prediction of siRNA efficacy is therefore essential for rational design and accelerated preclinical development. However, despite the critical role of chemical modifications in therapeutic performance, current state-of-the-art machine learning methods either are not designed to model the chemical diversity of therapeutic siRNAs, or exhibit poor generalization performance. Here, we present FENNEC (Fine-Tuned Ensemble of Neural Networks for siRNA Efficiency Characterization), a machine-learning framework for predicting siRNA activity across chemically diverse design spaces. To support this effort, we curated the largest patent-derived dataset to date of chemically modified siRNAs from 42 patents using OCR-based table extraction and stringent filtering. FENNEC combines temporal convolutional networks with thermodynamic descriptors, experimental covariates, and embeddings from RNA foundation models to capture both local chemical determinants and broader target-context information. Importantly, we show that language-model-derived embeddings provide meaningful higher-order representations of target transcripts, particularly in data-scarce settings. FENNEC achieved robust predictive performance across both gene-level and scaffold-level validation settings, with additional experimental validation on a novel AHSA1-targeting dataset further supporting its generalizability across chemically modified siRNAs. In benchmarking, FENNEC outperformed classical machine-learning and state-of-the-art deep learning models, demonstrating generalization to unseen chemistry. Model interpretation recovered established design principles, including position-specific effects of glycol nucleic acid, 2'-fluoro modifications, and phosphorothioate backbones. Furthermore, in silico perturbation analyses suggest that FENNEC can serve not only as a predictive model, but also as an oracle for the design and optimization of chemically modified siRNAs. Together, our work addresses a key gap in the field by enabling chemically aware deep learning for siRNA design, supported by a large and diverse collection of chemically modified siRNA measurements.

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15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Individual Control Barrier Functions-Guided Diffusion Model for Safe Offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Qingyun Guo↗Junyi Shi↗Jianuo Huang↗Tianyu Shi↗

arXiv:2606.12640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning allows control policies to be learned directly from data without online interaction, making it suitable for safety-critical tasks. Recent studies have applied diffusion models to offline reinforcement learning to leverage their strong capacity for modeling complex data distributions. However, existing approaches primarily focus on single-agent settings, leaving the safety challenges in multi-agent environments largely unexplored. In this work, we propose a safe offline multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm that embeds neural individual control barrier functions into the diffusion model to enhance safety during trajectory generation, with control policies recovered through inverse dynamics. We evaluate our algorithm across diverse benchmarks, demonstrating substantial safety improvements while maintaining competitive rewards.

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

CPAM: Context-Preserving Adaptive Manipulation for Zero-Shot Real Image Editing

Authors:
Dinh-Khoi Vo↗Thanh-Toan Do↗Tam V. Nguyen↗Minh-Triet Tran↗Trung-Nghia Le↗

Editing natural images using textual descriptions in text-to-image diffusion models remains a significant challenge, particularly in achieving consistent generation and handling complex, non-rigid objects. Existing methods often struggle to preserve textures and identity, require extensive fine-tuning, and exhibit limitations in editing specific spatial regions or objects while retaining background details. This paper proposes Context-Preserving Adaptive Manipulation (CPAM), a novel zero-shot framework for complicated, non-rigid real image editing. Specifically, we propose a preservation adaptation module that adjusts self-attention mechanisms to preserve and independently control the object and background effectively. This ensures that the objects' shapes, textures, and identities are maintained while keeping the background undistorted during the editing process using the mask guidance technique. Additionally, we develop a localized extraction module to mitigate the interference with the non-desired modified regions during conditioning in cross-attention mechanisms. We also introduce various mask-guidance strategies to facilitate diverse image manipulation tasks in a simple manner. CPAM can be seamlessly integrated with multiple diffusion backbones, including SD1.5, SD2.1, and SDXL, demonstrating strong generalization across different model architectures. Extensive experiments on our newly constructed Image Manipulation BenchmArk (IMBA), a robust benchmark dataset specifically designed for real image editing, demonstrate that our proposed method is the preferred choice among human raters, outperforming existing state-of-the-art editing techniques. The source code and data will be publicly released at the project page: https://vdkhoi20.github.io/CPAM

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17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Re-feeding Is Not Replaying: Measuring Replay Noise in Counterfactual Token-Credit Estimation

Authors:
Nils Matteson↗

Per-token counterfactual credit estimation asks which token in a language-model rollout caused the final answer to be right or wrong: cut the transcript at a pivot, substitute an alternative token, replay continuations, and compare outcomes. Published methods re-feed the transcript prefix as a fresh prompt, assuming this reproduces the state the model passed through during generation. We measure what that assumption costs on a stock inference engine, with a three-pass design: continuations resumed from the verified decode-time KV state, an identical second exact pass (a replica noise floor), and a re-feed pass. Across six configurations and three models (including a GRPO-trained checkpoint), at low-margin decision tokens, re-feeding changes the credit estimate at rates 14-28 percentage points above the replica floor (7-21pp under a treatment-independent conditioning; problem-clustered t = 2.9-6.4). Most changes are zero-boundary crossings of the quantized estimator rather than polarity reversals, and the perturbation is consistent with mean-zero, so averaged quantities are largely safe; but selection is not: a critical-token set chosen by thresholding $|\hat{A}_t|$ under re-feed overlaps the exact-resume selection at Jaccard 0.34-0.90, versus a 0.63-0.96 replica ceiling. A causal confirmation closes the loop: under vLLM's batch-invariant kernels all three passes are identical on every measured channel, with both disagreement rates exactly zero. Replica passes themselves disagree on 9-23% of eligible estimates: single-sample credit measurements at decision tokens are unreliable under any replay. Settings were fixed in advance; exact-pass cache hits in the second campaign are instrumented (100% hit rate, 3,434 pivots); total compute was under 10 USD. We recommend that counterfactual credit studies resume decoder state or use batch-invariant kernels, and report a replica floor.

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18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Distributionally Robust Set Representation Learning Under Inference-Time Element Corruption

Authors:
Yankai Chen↗Hanrong Zhang↗Bowei He↗Philip S. Yu↗Xue Liu↗

arXiv:2605.30089v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard Set Representation Learning methods typically excel on curated data but often overlook the challenge of inference-time element corruption. This refers to scenarios where deployed models encounter element-level degradations, such as outliers or missing components, that may distort set representation and degrade performance. We propose SW-DRSO, a distributionally robust optimization framework tailored for sets. Rather than minimizing loss solely on observed training data, SW-DRSO optimizes a tractable surrogate of the worst-case expected loss over a family of plausible inference-time variations. We introduce a barycentric adversary that approximates the intractable search over corrupted sets by a differentiable training-time optimization over simplex weights. Extensive experiments across four tasks demonstrate that SW-DRSO effectively enhances robustness against corruption while maintaining high overall performance.

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19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

FinSTaR: Towards Financial Reasoning with Time Series Reasoning Models

Authors:
Seunghan Lee↗Jun Seo↗Jaehoon Lee↗Sungdong Yoo↗Minjae Kim↗Tae Yoon Lim↗Dongwan Kang↗Hwanil Choi↗Soonyoung Lee↗Wonbin Ahn↗

arXiv:2605.03460v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time series (TS) reasoning models (TSRMs) have shown promising capabilities in general domains, yet they consistently fail in the financial domain, which exhibits unique characteristics. We propose a general 2 x 2 capability taxonomy for TSRMs by crossing 1) single-entity vs. multi-entity analysis with 2) assessment of the current state vs. prediction of future behavior. We instantiate this taxonomy in the financial domain-where the distinction between deterministic assessment and stochastic prediction is particularly critical-as ten financial reasoning tasks, forming the FinTSR-Bench benchmark based on S&P stocks. To this end, we propose FinSTaR (Financial Time Series Thinking and Reasoning), trained on FinTSR-Bench with distinct chain-of-thought (CoT) strategies tailored to each category. For assessment, which is deterministic (i.e., computable from observable data), we employ Compute-in-CoT, a programmatic CoT that enables models to derive answers directly from raw prices. For prediction, which is inherently stochastic (i.e., subject to unobservable factors), we adopt Scenario-Aware CoT, which generates diverse scenarios before making a judgment, mirroring how financial analysts reason under uncertainty. The proposed method achieves 78.9% average accuracy on FinTSR-Bench, substantially outperforming LLM and TSRM baselines. Furthermore, we show that the four capability categories are complementary and mutually reinforcing through joint training, and that Scenario-Aware CoT consistently improves prediction accuracy over standard CoT. Code is available at https://github.com/seunghan96/FinSTaR.

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

Universal Guideline-Driven Image Clustering via a Hybrid LLM Agent

Authors:
Wenliang Zhong↗Rob Barton↗Lucas Goncalves↗Kushal Kumar↗Feng Jiang↗Hehuan Ma↗Yuzhi Guo↗Vidit Bansal↗Karim Bouyarmane↗Junzhou Huang↗

Unifying image clustering across different clustering scenarios remains challenging due to fundamental gaps among tasks. We introduce a Guideline-Driven Image Clustering Agent, the first universal framework that bridges these gaps through textual guidelines. To incorporate complex guidelines without task-specific training, we propose Generative Concept Proxy Modeling, which generates guideline-aware embeddings via concept proxy extraction. For scenarios requiring automatic cluster discovery, we introduce LLM Traversal based on Minimum Spanning Tree that selectively applies LLM reasoning for complex semantic judgments. Our method generalizes across diverse clustering scenarios spanning from general to fine-grained categorization, from global to local criteria, and from balanced to long-tail distributions. Our framework consistently outperforms specialized methods across diverse clustering tasks.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Select and Improve: Understanding the Mechanics of Post-Training for Reasoning

Authors:
Akshay Krishnamurthy↗Audrey Huang↗Nived Rajaraman↗

arXiv:2606.13125v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning has rapidly emerged as a key component in the training of reasoning and coding models, yet it remains poorly understood from a mechanistic perspective. We study how and through what underlying processes capabilities are acquired or enhanced via reinforcement learning post-training. Our analysis, based on controlled math reasoning experiments with Qwen-2.5-1.5B, reveals two core mechanisms: strategy selection and strategy improvement. Our results highlight the role of SFT data and reinforcement learning data in activating these mechanisms, in particular showing how supervising the model on diverse reasoning strategies can enable strategy selection and how increasing difficulty in reinforcement learning data can enable strategy improvement. Taken together, our results provide mechanistic insight into RL training and suggest practical interventions to continue scaling reasoning capabilities.

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23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Metabolic cost of information processing in Poisson variational autoencoders

Authors:
Hadi Vafaii↗Jacob L. Yates↗

arXiv:2602.13421v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Computation in biological systems is fundamentally energy-constrained, yet standard theories of computation treat energy as freely available. Here, we argue that variational free energy minimization under a Poisson assumption offers a principled path toward an energy-aware theory of computation. Our key observation is that the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence term in the Poisson free energy objective becomes proportional to the prior firing rates of model neurons, yielding an emergent metabolic cost term that penalizes high baseline activity. This structure couples an abstract information-theoretic quantity – the *coding rate* – to a concrete biophysical variable – the *firing rate* – which enables a trade-off between coding fidelity and energy expenditure. Such a coupling arises naturally in the Poisson variational autoencoder (P-VAE) – a brain-inspired generative model that encodes inputs as discrete spike counts and recovers a spiking form of *sparse coding* as a special case – but is absent from standard Gaussian VAEs. To demonstrate that this metabolic cost structure is unique to the Poisson formulation, we compare the P-VAE against Grelu-VAE, a Gaussian VAE with ReLU rectification applied to latent samples, which controls for the non-negativity constraint. Across a systematic sweep of the KL term weighting coefficient $\beta$ and latent dimensionality, we find that increasing $\beta$ monotonically increases sparsity and reduces average spiking activity in the P-VAE. In contrast, Grelu-VAE representations remain unchanged, confirming that the effect is specific to Poisson statistics rather than a byproduct of non-negative representations. These results establish Poisson variational inference as a promising foundation for a resource-constrained theory of computation.

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24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

HEPTv2: End-to-End Efficient Point Transformer for Charged Particle Reconstruction

Authors:
Siqi Miao↗Shitij Govil↗Jack P. Rodgers↗Mia Liu↗Javier Duarte↗Shih-Chieh Hsu↗Yuan-Tang Chou↗Pan Li↗

arXiv:2606.20437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Charged-particle tracking – reconstructing trajectories from sparse detector measurements – is a fundamental high-energy-physics inference problem and a canonical example of learning under extreme combinatorial ambiguity. At the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), tracking must remain accurate and efficient despite unprecedented collision densities. Graph neural networks perform strongly, but incur substantial costs from graph construction and processing, while transformer-based approaches rely on auxiliary stages that prevent end-to-end optimization. To address this, we present HEPTv2, an end-to-end point-transformer architecture that reconstructs tracks from detector hits in one trainable pipeline. HEPTv2 combines a locality-aware point encoder with a track decoder that predicts complete trajectories without graph-building, clustering, or filtering. The encoder uses locality-sensitive hashing in detector coordinate space to preserve tracking-relevant geometry while enabling efficient local attention. The decoder resolves ambiguities through sectorized decoding and direct hit-to-track prediction under joint encoder-decoder supervision, allowing the full pipeline to be optimized end-to-end. On TrackML, HEPTv2 achieves 98.6% double-majority tracking efficiency at a 0.8% fake rate, while requiring only $\sim$15~ms inference time and 0.4~GB peak memory per event on a NVIDIA A100 GPU. Latency and memory scale approximately linearly for events with up to $5\times10^5$ hits. HEPTv2 establishes a new state of the art in the accuracy-latency trade-off, improving efficiency by 4.5% over the strongest prior transformer and by 1.1–2.2% over optimized graph-based pipelines, while reducing latency by factors of 7 and 38–52, respectively. These results show end-to-end transformers can deliver the accuracy and efficiency required for real-time particle reconstruction at the HL-LHC.

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25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

Deciphering cross-omics complexity of tissues via diagonal integration of unpaired spatial multi-omics data

Authors:
Zhou↗Kangning↗Xiao↗Chen↗Zhang↗

Recent spatial multi-omics technologies enable the simultaneous in situ profiling of multiple omics modalities on the same tissue section; however, they face challenges in experimental complexity and high costs. This technical limitation can be circumvented by diagonal integration methods, which integrate omics data from different modalities. However, existing single-cell diagonal integration approaches overlook spatial information, causing unreliable anchoring across omics layers. Here, we introduce STAMO, a graph attention neural network model for spatially aware integration of unpaired spatial slices from different omics. Systematic benchmarking on spatial epigenome-transcriptome slices proves that STAMO outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in generating aligned embeddings and identifying consensus spatial domains across omics. We apply STAMO to integrate unpaired data from diverse spatial omics types (transcripts, epigenetics, DNA, and proteins), including slices from spatial RNA and four different epigenomic modalities, spatial ATAC and RNA slices across embryonic stages, spatial protein and RNA slices, and spatial DNA and RNA slices. In addition, the integration capability of STAMO can be further used to achieve cross-omics generation, offering a solution for exploring spatial region-specific gene regulatory mechanisms.

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